South Asian Business news and information

Another computer giant, IBM, also laid off around 600 workers and other IT firms are about to follow the same path. Business Standard reports:

TCS’ move follows the cut that the company had effected on the portion of variable pay linked to the employees performance, reducing the salary by about 1.5 per cent for the January-March 2008 quarter.

Commenting on the staff-cut, a TCS spokesperson told Business Standard: “Our company has a biannual appraisal system — one between June and July, and the other in January-February — when we rate employees on a scale of 1-5 (5 being the highest). Those employees who score a low figure of 2, for instance, are asked to either repeat their training programme or are sent for counselling — depending on whether they are freshers or middle management executives. Those who cannot meet the performance requirements of our company are asked to look for another job.”

Last year too, around 500 people suffered a similar fate since they could not meet the performance rating numbers, the spokesperson pointed out.

In the third quarter ending December 31, 2007, TCS added 4,037 net staff taking its total headcount to 108,229, up from 83,500 a year ago. At the close of trade, TCS shares were down around 2.72 per cent at Rs 949 on the Bombay Stock Exchange.

The eternal dilemma of two Q’s (quantity, quality) has always baffled the business organizations. Different companies place themselves between these two spectrums. Maintaining high quality has always been a major problem. When it comes to service oriented companies like IT firms, finding adept, highly-motivated and qualified employees is the key factor behind success and failure. This news proves that finding well-qualified IT workers can be a major problem even in India which is known for its easily available large pool of IT workers. In the comment section of this news, a commentator criticized the poor hiring process of the Indian IT companies. The companies hire large number of students who are not very highly qualified. This is just a trick to boost up the salary. Instead of hiring randomly the companies should develop a proper procedure to find the right kind of people for the right kind of job.

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Business Standard