Despite innovative human resource (HR) practices and wage hikes, the attrition bug continues to bite the IT industry, with most of the companies seeing a constant rise in the number of outgoing employees. TCS, the biggest Indian IT company in terms of revenue, has seen attrition rate rising by almost one percentage point within a year. The company’s attrition rate was lowest in the industry at about 10.6% in the second quarter last year. However, in the first quarter of financial year 2007-08, it went up to 11.5% and remained the same in the second quarter as well.
IT bellwether Infosys also could not succeed in retaining more employees as the attrition in the organisation jumped from 12.9% in the quarter ended September last fiscal to 13.7% in the April-June quarter of the current financial year and 14.2% in Q2. High attrition rates not only shoot up training and recruiting costs for IT companies, but also translate into increased chances of customer service complaints. Indian IT firms typically give wage hike between 3% and 15% to keep a tab on attrition. But this year increments remained slightly moderate due to a sharp rise in rupee against dollar. Wipro, which has the highest attrition rates among the top five IT firms, saw a slight rise in its attrition from 17.5% in July-September period last fiscal to 17.9% in the same period in the current fiscal. It, however, succeeded in bringing down attrition from 20.1% in the first quarter of this fiscal. Similarly, HCL Technologies saw its attrition declining marginally from 17.2% in April-June quarter to 16.5% the July-September period. On year-on-year basis, however, it increased significantly by over three percentage points to 13.1% in Q2 of FY07.
