Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) reported a fall of 6,333 in its total headcount to 608,985 as on September 30th as compared to 615,318 employees in the previous quarter. While the IT services major has lost more people in the second quarter than it had hired, its attrition on “last twelve month” (LTM) basis has come down to 14.9 per cent in Q2 from 17.8 per cent in Q1 of this fiscal. The attrition (LTM) in Q4FY23 was at 20.1 per cent.
TCS said that this reflected the company’s “focus on improving workforce utilization and productivity”.
Before this, TCS saw a net drop in its total headcount during the third quarter of FY23 when its total headcount declined by 2,197 employees. Its attrition rate was at 21.3 per cent during the period.
The firm said that the employee base continues to be very diverse, with 35.8 per cent women and 152 nationalities. “Year till date, TCSers have clocked 26.4 million learning hours, and acquired 2.6 million competencies including 350,000 high demand competences. IT services’ attrition was at 14.9 per cent for the last twelve months,” it said.
N Ganapathy Subramaniam, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Director, meanwhile, said, “We continue to make investments in our people and new technologies. We now have a 100,000-strong pool of Gen-AI Ready consultants and prompt-engineers who are engaged in hundreds of Gen-AI projects for our clients across segments.”
Milind Lakkad, Chief HR Officer, said, “Our strategy of proactively hiring bright freshers and investing in training them with the right skills is paying off. With that talent coming on stream and with reduced attrition, we were able to recalibrate our gross additions, keeping it below the departures during the quarter, driving up productivity and enhancing project outcomes.”
Samir Seksaria, Chief Financial Officer, said, “Our focus on improving employee utilization, while driving productivity improvement and cost efficiency across the organization, has helped us expand our operating margin to 24.3 per cent. We will continue to push the growth, efficiency and innovation levers to further improve our profitability.”
No work from home at TCS
TCS also announced that it has asked its 6.14 lakh-plus employees to work from offices, ending the practice of remote working that started due to the pandemic. The company has asked its workforce to return to offices because of the need to deepen the value systems and a belief in productivity gains coming from co-working, PTI reported Milind Lakkad saying.
“We strongly believe that they need to come to work so that the new workforce gets integrated with the larger workforce of TCS. And that is the only way they will learn and understand and internalise the TCS values and the TCS way. So yes, we are asking people to come all days in a week,” Miling Lakkad said.
The IT services major, on Wednesday, posted its fiscal second quarter profit at Rs 11,380 crore, up 8.7 per cent in comparison to Rs 10,465 crore during the same period last year. It posted revenue from operations at Rs 59,692 crore, up 7.9 per cent as against Rs 55,309 crore during the second quarter of FY23.