Infosys Technologies, which announced its second quarter results on Friday, saw its employee headcount touch 1,05,453, up from 1,03,905 in the first quarter of fiscal 2010. In other words, a net addition of 1,548 compared to a decline of 945 in the previous quarter. In an interaction with Rachana Khanzode, Mohandas Pai, director, human resources, education and research and administration, explains why the company will watch its step going ahead and continue to focus on cutting costs.
What is the impact of the hike given to Infosys employees this quarter? What were the factors that worked in your favour so that you could take this step when your competitors are still looking at salary cuts?
We had initially said that we will look into appraisals at the end of the second quarter. Moreover, with the business environment stabilising and the fear factor reducing, we decided to take this step. This has had a positive impact in terms of boosting the morale of employees who remained with us during the tough times. The increase in spend is about $51 million and has a 2% impact on our revenues which has been factored in in our Q3 and Q4 results. We can afford it at this point in time.
Are you still looking at cost cutting measures? What was the impact of such measures on the margins in this quarter?
We continue to focus on cost cutting as we are still cautious about the environment. Things have not improved completely and we feel that a constant effort towards cutting costs is required. We saw a positive impact of 1-1.2% on our margins in this quarter.
How is the outlook on hiring at the moment?
The increase in the number of net additions this quarter was seen on the back of work coming from areas such as remote infrastructure management and enterprise solutions. We are looking at gross additions of 18,000-20,000 this year and the additional 2,000 would be laterals. Of the 18,000 campus offers, we have already honoured 9,500.
Do you continue to witness protectionist measures by the US government?
Getting an employee out there is still a challenge. There are talks about immigration reforms though things are not clear at the moment. We need to wait and watch the situation, though we are already looking at hiring locals. As long as industries are looking at cost cutting, they are going to focus on off-shoring. We have seen signs of improvement in the US while Europe is yet to come back on the growth trajectory. This is because we had seen US going into the recession first and Europe following it. It is going to be the same while coming out of the recession.