Infosys distils 10 ideas from Sikka’s ‘murmuration’ drive

Murmuration, an initiative to crowd-source ideas from employees, which was introduced by Vishal Sikka soon after he took over as CEO of Infosys, is nearing completion.

A total of 2,650 ideas were generated by employees, of which 70 were shortlisted and whittled down to 10, through an employee rating system. The ideas were evaluated on desirability, feasibility, potential, clarity and viability.

The top 10 ideas mainly focused on quality of service delivery, training and learning, and adapting new-age technologies in business.

Employees who came up with the top 10 ideas are currently working on developing an action plan for their ideas assisted by business leaders who are domain experts.

“The author of each of the 10 ideas is working with a business or function head, who will create an action plan to implement the ideas. Four action plans are ready and the rest will be ready before Christmas. All of them will be an intrinsic part of the Infosys strategy blueprint,” said Srikantan Moorthy, Executive Vice-President and Head, Human Resources, Infosys.

Elaborating he said, a majority of the 10 ideas are business ideas that add value to clients’ businesses.

The rest are focused on how to change processes within Infosys and in the area of training and learning, to enable employees to re-skill themselves better.

Murmuration, along with several other employee-friendly initiatives such as free access to social networking sites, a separate budget for employee engagement activities, are all part of Sikka’s efforts to engage and connect with Infoscions to improve all-round performance.

Ultimately, the aim is to steer the company back to 15-18 per cent growth in the medium to long term.

Infosys has been grappling with attrition, which rose to 20.1 per cent in the second quarter ended September 30 from 17.3 per cent in the same quarter of the last fiscal year.

“The number of employees who left Infosys in Q2 has reduced since Q1 and we see it reducing further in Q3. This reduction does not reflect in the LTM (last 12 months) attrition rates that we put out,” said Moorthy.

Infosys is also looking to increase employee productivity from 75.2 per cent (including trainees) to 78 per cent.

Despite the attrition level and one of the toughest selection processes in the industry, Infosys says it continues to attract top talent from across the country.

The company received 456,180 job applications in the first half of FY 2015, of which 76,000 were interviewed and offers made to 31,705 applicants, of whom 20,000 are from the top 155 engineering colleges in India.

These employees will be absorbed into the company from June to December 2015.

In fiscal year 2014, Infosys said it received 911,220 job applications, interviewed 45,955 applicants and extended offers to 33,225 applicants.