TCS, HCL Infosys, iGate are Indian IT's Best Employers: Dataquest-IDC survey

TCS was followed in the latest annual IT Best Employer Survey by HCL Infosystems, iGate Global Solutions, Roltas India and Infinite.

One in eight software professionals put Google at the top of the aspirational league, well ahead of other global software giants like Oracle, Accenture, Microsoft and IBM.

While Google has repeatedly topped the list of the Fortune 50 best employers globally because of its innovative HR policies and culture, its topping the Indian techies' aspirational list is a surprise, and all the more so that just one out of twelve professionals named Indian software giants TCS and Infosys (which together employ nearly a quarter million software professionals) as their dream company.

Capgemini, L&T Infotech, SAS Institute India, Tulip Telecom and Synechron took the next five slots among Indian companies.

The next 10 slots in the top 20 went to: Tavant Technologies, Sify Technologies, Mindtree, Datacraft India, Virtusa, Patni Computer Systems, Sybase, Pitney Bowes, Citrix and Unisys India.

A press release issued by Dataquest-IDC said the economic slowdown of the last 18 months had perceptibly changed the attributes of an ideal company, with three out of four respondents treating job security and stability at par with growth opportunities and career development.

According to the survey, factors like work-life balance and flexible working hours (60%), positive work environment (52%) and strong employer company image (50%) were among the top five attributes of an ideal company.

In all, 3160 professionals from 36 IT companies participated in this two stage survey conducted between June and August 2010.

"Over the years, we have seen ‘work-life balance’ move up in priority for India's IT professionals. While that indicates growing maturity, it calls for a fundamental shift in the HR policies of employers in an industry that employs nearly 3 million professionals," Mr Ibrahim Ahmed, Group Editor of Dataquest, the flagship journal of CyberMedia, said.

The glamour of overseas posting among software professionals lost its shine, with just two out of five professionals considering a posting abroad as an important factor in ranking their employer high as an ideal workplace. The glamour of overseas posting has come down sharply: it's now the 6th most important attribute, down from number 2 in the 2009 survey.

The employee attrition rate for the top 20 companies improved to 13%, from 15% recorded last year.

According to the release, in a year when job cuts had become the norm, especially in the first half of 2009, a high percentage of employees expressed satisfaction at being paid adequately. However, there was a growing discontentment over salaries not being at par with industry standards.

After a year of salary freezes and pay cuts, employees welcomed salary hikes and bigger paycheques. With Indian IT services companies offering better salary packages, the Indian outfits of MNCs no longer hold the fancy that they used to a few years ago.

The survey corroborates this fact as the top four employers are Indian entities—TCS, HCL Infosystems, iGate Global and Rolta India. The top four best paying companies are again Indian companies and not MNCs.

According to the release, the survey, designed and carried out in two phases, had 60 companies participating in phase one. Out of these, 37 companies were shortlisted for the second round, based on the phase one (HR) survey. The phase one HR survey was based on several parameters including total employee strength in India, average tenure of senior management, total average training, retention rate, average salary hike (in percentage):

The first shortlist of companies was based on thee parameters, assigned weightage based on their relative importance.

In the second phase, a large-scale survey was conducted by IDC India among 3,160 employees of the 36 companies (one company opted out).

This questionnaire included 73 statements under parameters like composite satisfaction, company culture, job content/growth, training, salary and compensation, appraisal systems, people, gender inclusivity, and managing the slowdown.

Employees were asked to rate each of the statements on a ten-point agreement scale. The respondents filled-in their opinions on the questionnaire in the presence of IDC’s trained interviewers and supervisors.

The employees were also asked about their salary structure, preferred company in the industry. The employee satisfaction survey covered Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Pune and Bengaluru.

Scores from the HR survey and the Employee Satisfaction survey, calculated separately, were combined to arrive at a composite score. Companies were then given ranks based on the composite scores.

The HR and employee satisfaction score was weighed and indexed on a hundred point score to arrive at DQ-IDC BES score, 2010. Dataquest and IDC India decided the weights for all parameters in consultation with HR experts from the Industry, and these were used in the survey analysis. The weights were finalized before the survey, to ensure complete unbiased ranking, the release added.

NNN