Bangalore Sep 19, 2008:
Relatively smaller companies were voted as best employers in the information technology sector, by 2897 respondents across 33 IT companies in India, reveals  a forthcoming Dataquest-IDC IT Best Employers Survey 2008. More than ten Indian firms having an employee base less than 4,000 were in the top 20 list.

This follows the trend observed in the Dataquest Top 20, Dataquest’s annual survey of the Indian IT industry, wherein revenue of smaller IT companies grew better than that of large companies, beating forecasts that they will be negatively hit by the US slowdown than larger companies.

The winner of the Best Employers Survey 2008 was iGate, which displaced TCS, India’s largest IT firm by revenue from the No. 1 position in 2007 to No. 6 this year. In 2007 survey, iGate jumped 26 places to the No. 3 position.

The eighth annual Dataquest-IDC Best Employers Survey studied employees across 33 companies. It ranked the companies on employee satisfaction (80% weightage) and HR score (20% weightage). The HR score included quantitative parameters like size, growth, employee growth, retention and HR initiatives.

The Movers & Shakers

There were some significant changes in rankings of the top 20 players. Microsoft and Intel, which did not participate in 2007, entered the charts in 2008 at the 5th and 12th positions respectively.

iGate Global Solutions recorded the highest employee satisfaction closely followed by RMSI at number two. HCL Infosystems, Rolta India and Microsoft India were third, fourth, and fifth respectively in the employee satisfaction scores.

In pure HR score, TCS outscored all other companies, followed distantly by Rolta India. Smaller companies like Synechron, Tulip Telecom and Nagarro Software took the next three places.

Though companies like MphasiS EDS and Zensar were No.8 and No.12 in the HR ranking, they did not make it to the top 20 best employers indicating that employees do not always share the same perception with the company.

TCS ranked No. 1 in terms of opportunity to work overseas and company image. Not surprisingly, since it created history this year by becoming the largest private sector employer in India crossing the 100,000 employee mark and becoming the first Indian company to employ10,000 non-Indians, close to 9.2% of the total strength. However, employee perception on fairness of the appraisal systems, salary hikes and relevance of perks and benefits, seems to have pulled TCS down.

There were nine new entrants in the Top 20 list even as some of the large companies like Capgemini, Cognizant, CSC, IBM, Infosys and Wipro did not participate in the survey this year.

Some companies which continued to be a part of the best employers list include TCS, RMSI, and HCL Infosystems. Accel Frontline, Cybage, and Aricent could not make it to the list this time unlike last year when they were ranked 15, 17, and 19 respectively.

Sun Microsystems slid nine positions to number 19, while Nagarro gained nine positions on the whole while improving its HR ranking from 32 to 6.

Based on the survey results, companies were also ranked on eight broad parameters — company image, organization culture, job content, salary, appraisal, people, outsiders consider it a dream company, and internal employees consider it the most preferred employer. In the first six parameters, iGate occupied the No. 1 slot.

Microsoft: Dream company to work for
Microsoft was ranked the dream company to work for amongst all employees surveyed, followed by TCS at No 2, RMSI at No 3 and HCL Infosystems at No 4,  and iGate at No. 5.

RMSI took the No. 1 spot when it came to the employees considering their current company as the most preferred employer, followed by HCL Infosystems at No.2, Rolta India at No. 3, Microsoft at No 4 and IGate at No 5.

Why People Leave?

Half the respondents surveyed said that salary and compensation were the top reasons to leave the company. Other parameters included growth opportunity, overseas opportunity, location of the company and flexible office hours or work-life balance

Work-life balance, which was the No. 8 reason for leaving in the 2006 and 2007, moved up for the first time this year to be one of the top five reasons to change a job.

"Salary growth was pulled down by industry growth down last year...there were even concerns about job security. So it's interesting that work-life came up as one of the top five reasons for switching IT jobs in India," said Prasanto Kumar Roy, chief editor at CyberMedia, publishers of Dataquest. "This Indian IT professional is maturing."

Attrition levels inch up to 18%
The average attrition rate in the participating companies inched up to 18% in 2008, up from 17% in the previous year. However, the Top 20 Best Employers reported a lower 14% attrition rate.

Women continued to form 23% of the total IT workforce of the participating companies for the third year in a row.

The survey was carried out by IDC India for Dataquest in two phases. In the first phase, questionnaires were sent to around 200 IT companies seeking information on areas such as employee strength, salary structure, training days, tenure of top management, etc. In the first phase, 44 companies participated. Of these, 33 companies were then short listed for the second round, which was a face-to-face employee survey. A total of 2897 employees across 33 companies were interviewed.

The survey was conducted in seven cities Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Pune and Bangalore in June-July 2007.

About CyberMedia 
CyberMedia is South Asia's first and largest specialty media house, with 15 publications (including Dataquest, PCQuest, Voice&Data, BioSpectrum (India & Asia), Living Digital, Global Services, DQ Channels, DQ Week, Voice&Data Connect, Dare and Halsbury's Law Monthly) in the infotech, telecom, consumer electronics and Biotech areas, and is media value chain including the Internet (www.ciol.com), events and television.

The group's media services include market research (IDC India), content management, multi-media and media education. CyberMedia has recently tied up with MIT to launch conference and publication for Emerging Technologies in India.

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At CyberMedia: 
Shyamanuja Das 
Editor, Dataquest,
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Email: ‘shyamanujad at cybermedia dot co dot in’