Mahindra Satyam may Layoff 5000

Chennai: Months after assuring that there would be no further lay offs, Mahindra Satyam may just lay off another 5000 benchers. Many employees on the Virtual Pool Program (VPP) of the company have been sent a formal notice of two months by e-mail.

According to the Times of India, the mail dated October 19, reads: "In our earlier communication dated June 11, 2009, you were placed on VPP for a period of six months and accordingly, your Virtual Pool Leave is due to end on December 18, 2009. It is rather unfortunate that due to the continued economic constraints and business outlook, we do not anticipate that we will have the ability to recall many of our valued associates within the VPP period."

On June 11, the company had announced the creation of the virtual pool, placing around 8,000 associates on the bench. "The surplus employees will be put in the VPP and paid basic salary, PF and medical insurance," Vineet Nayyar, CEO, Tech Mahindra, had said while ruling out any retrenchment.

However, with the six-month period of the VPP set to lapse in December, the company has served a two-month notice, as required by the employment contract, reportedly on over 5,000 employees. Sources said that the company did not have enough projects on hand and was not able to recall many associates.

A Mahindra Satyam spokesperson said that the company had absorbed about 1,500 associates from the virtual pool. The spokesperson also denied that the company was "laying off" people, even as the mail speaks of "separation of employment".

"We have given these employees an option of availing outplacement services. We will try to help them to the best of our abilities," he said.

Training Staff still on the agenda of Indian Companies

Indian IT majors may have tightened their belts in various areas to contain costs as a fallout of the global economic slowdown. However, most of them see continuing value when it comes to employee training, even though it skims crores of rupees off their top-lines.

Top tier IT firms — including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys Technologies, Wipro and HCL Technologies — have identified the need to train the brains they handpick annually from India’s top engineering colleges and technical institutes as a critical task, even as the industry is seeing a degree of upturn in client demand.

India’s largest IT services provider, TCS, for instance, spends 2 per cent of its revenue every year on training new entrants. Bangalore-headquartered Infosys recently announced the opening of a grand training facility at its Mysore campus. Infosys annually spends over Rs 800 crore on training alone. Wipro spends about 2 per cent of its net sales in providing training to employees.

While Infosys and TCS have, to a certain extent, tried to centralise their training resources, Wipro’s strategy has been of a federal nature to cater to local manpower requirements. Wipro has set up an archipelago of training centres in proximity to its competency centres all over India and overseas.

“Wipro believes in taking learning as close as possible to the learner. Hence, for fresh recruits, training is conducted at the development centres where the employee is to be placed. Training happens primarily at our Talent Transformation Centres in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata and Kochi,” says Sreekala Ramamurthy, GM (talent transformation), Wipro Technologies. Overseas recruits, she says, are either provided training at the company’s global centres like the Atlanta Development Centre or “...recruits are flown down to our India offices”.

HCL, too, has decentralised its training infrastructure across the globe because its employees are no longer confined to a particular geography or location. According to Anand Pillai, senior V-P and global head (quality, talent transformation & intrapreneurship development), HCL Technologies: “Since learners are spread across the globe, the entire training department is also spread across the world. Our programmes are standardised to cater to global learning challenges and simultaneously manage different cultural nuances and local sensitivities.”

TCS provides an Initial Learning Programme (ILP) at the company’s corporate learning centre in Thiruvananthapuram. “We invest heavily in world-class training for our employees. ILP training is primarily conducted at our corporate learning centre at Thiruvananthapuram for Indian and non-Indian trainees. We replicate our fresher training programme at Guwahati, Bhubaneswar, Coimbatore and Baroda, as well as overseas, to bring scalability to our training model,” says Ajoy Mukherjee, V-P & head (global HR), TCS.

TCS’ new facility, the Peepul Park, is spread over 12 acres of newly acquired land in Technopark. The 3.5-lakh square feet Peepul Park is snazzily designed and also houses a Leadership Development Institute. The ILP Learning Block can accommodate 1,000 employees at a time, a hostel block accommodates 500 people, with a recreation centre and library thrown in. The facility has a capacity of 1,500 people.

The ILP is replicated in overseas geographies for new hires from countries like Australia, China, India, Hungary, Uruguay, the UK and the US. TCS also ensures that it hires people with diverse educational backgrounds and across geographies.

Infosys recently expanded the company’s global training centre, located at its 337-acre Mysore campus, by setting up another dedicated facility (GEC-II) for training. However, Infosys also maintains training infrastructure at all its development centres. The company recently extended the training duration for new recruits (freshers).

“We consider training as an investment in the future. Our investments to enhance our training capabilities are in keeping with future requirements,” justifies S Gopalakrishnan, CEO and MD, Infosys Technologies.

TCS, Wipro, Patni, Satyam Layoff News

TCS planning more layoffs, Wipro sacks 1000, Satyam to axe 4,500… It seems the days of pink slips have come to haunt IT pros. Though all companies have termed these terminations performance-based, it is anyone’s guess that global slowdown has started hurting Indian IT cos. Late last year, the global IT giant IBM had reportedly laid off 700 entry-level trainee programmers (ELTPs) across its offices . Zensar too had reportedly given pink slips to 2 per cent of it staff, again the company claimed that it was on performance basis. The increments and salaries too have been a causality at most IT firms. Here’s looking into the companies who have taken the manpower call.

After delayed appraisals and cut in payouts, India’s fourth largest IT service provider, Satyam Computer is reported to downsize its workforce by a whopping 4,500 employees. This translates to a little less than 9 per cent of the 51,000 employees that the company employs. Company sources reveal that 1,500 employees have been put under the performance improvement plan (PIP), euphemism for employees put on watch list and asked to shape up or ship out. Apart from this, 3,000 others have not been given any increment in the last appraisal cycle, thereby indicating that their services are dispensable. Last Friday, company’s chief Ramalinga Raju had sent out an email to all employees warning them, especially the ones on the bench, to not bunk office and be in their best dress code, failing which they may face strict disciplinary action.

The company is reported to have handed pink slips to about 400 engineers and associates in Hyderabad, Pune and Visakhapatnam centers. The company management reportedly asked some of the employees to move out of its rolls to a contractual agreement or leave. Like its peers, Satyam too claims that the layoffs are a part of its appraisal system. Global head, human resources, SV Krishnan says, “Our experience has shown that around half of them exit the system either voluntarily or involuntarily. We have concluded our appraisal process some weeks back, and we believe we are witnessing similar trends like those in the past.”

According to a recent report Asia’s largest software exporter, Tata Consultancy Services is gearing up to another round of layoffs. The company also plans to discourage employees from staying on bench for more than two months on any of its centres. Incidentally, the company had also fired close to 500 employees, citing poor performance after its annual appraisal. It was also among the very first companies to announce a cut in the employee variable pay across the board.

The company which sees some project delays this quarter, but no cancellations, terms this as an employee utilisation exercise. The process will involve counselling employees and training them. Employees would be asked to undertake projects on which they have never worked on and will have to update their skills. Recently, TCS also retrenched 15 employees from its Australian subsidiary. Interestingly, last month too, the company had shown door to some 25 employees from its Kolkata and Bangalore for fudging CVs. By June-end, the total employee strength TCS stood at 116,300, across 64 countries. The company hired 8,982 employees in the first quarter.

The bad news has come from India’s third largest IT outsourcer, Wipro Technologies too. The company has already laid off 1,000 employees, and another 2,000 employees have been put on scanner. The company is reviewing the performance of 60,000 global IT services employees from the senior leadership team down to the person with one-year experience.

Terming it as a regular exercise, company’s corporate vice-president (human resources) Pratik Kumar said, “As the appraisal cycle gets over, a multi-layer review happens. Following that, people who have fallen in the lower quadrants of performance are put on watch. Some are asked to pull up and others are asked to move on.” He added that, “We took a closer look at our hiring and realised that we did not need to hire more, since there were people on the bench.” Many employees are being given counselling to improve their performance, others may be asked to leave.

At the end of the quarter ended June 2008, Wipro’s IT services employee base had fallen to 61,345 from 62,070 employees at the end of the previous quarter. TOP Indian Reality Shows

In July, Mumbai-based Patni Computer Systems too gave pink slips to 400 employees on grounds of non-performance. Terming it as a routine exercise and not a slowdown setback, country’s sixth-largest exporter said that it is an effort to weed out non-performers. Rajesh Padmanabhan, vice-president and head, global HR, Patni, said, “This is an absolutely regular appraisal that is important for any performance-driven organisation. It is something standard we do every year.

Employees who have got 0-1 rating on a scale of 5 typically form the basis for the first-level shortlist. These are performance-based resignations; we’ve not issued any termination letters.” However, industry sources reveal that the laid off employees included several project managers as well.

Incidentally, while in case of TCS, the retrenched number was about 0.5 per cent of the workforce, for Patni, it made for closer to 3 per cent of the 14,800-strong workforce. Narendra K Patni, Chairman and CEO, Patni Computer Systems said, “The overall market environment remains challenging with prevailing global uncertainties. We are cautious in our short-term outlook but remain positive on long-term prospects and are continuing our investments in identified areas”.