Life in the slow lane

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: the morale of the employees high.

“Organisations need to proactively address employee concerns and reassure, engage and motivate a global workforce in a volatile business environment,” says Ajoy Mukherjee, head, global HR, TCS.

It is the Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani who sums up best the realistic scenario: “There is an overall slowdown, which is understandable given the crisis.” His rationale is that it was not possible for the IT sector to live up to the high growth rates of the last four to five years. Interestingly, Infosys had earlier scaled down its dollar guidance by about 3% for the full year. The company is planning to offer some of its employees a one-year sabbatical with 50% salary, say unconfirmed reports.

Echoing similar sentiments, a senior Wipro executive laments: “The IT companies have deferred the recruitment of new entrants;including those coming out from the first-grade engineering colleges. We can’t estimate how long this will continue. After the new year, when we will understand how much expenditure cut companies have decided to make, we may start man power planning.” If Romit Dasgupta, director–technology, Globsyn group is to be believed then the IT sector, especially in the small and mid segment, may witness a series of mergers, acquisitions and alliances at the complementary services level. “Industry may see less recruitment after the acquisition process is over, but companies may not go for lay-offs as they would always want productive people to stay so that restructuring could be efficient,” he adds.

On the flip-side though, there is strong belief that the lower wage rate will not lead to a higher attrition rate. In the last six months of the current fiscal, the attrition rate was down by 6-7% and that substantially benefited the Indian IT companies. Broad contours of these findings by Nasscom point to forces that would largely contribute to keep IT export services growth rate above 20% in the current fiscal.

Nasscom president Som Mittal says that it was too early to speak about depression in the IT sector. “There would be some impact, but right now, we can’t say how intense it would be. We still think the export projection for the current fiscal will be on track.”