HR officials in software companies are a lot worried during June quarter every year as employees leave in large numbers to pursue higher studies. This year too, it was no exception as Cognizant, Infosys and Wipro witnessed high attrition rates.
However, Tata Consultancy Services bucked the trend.
IT companies continue to battle in containing employee attrition, which peaks in June quarter. For Infosys on a consolidated basis, employee attrition increased to 21 per cent in the June quarter — for every 100 employees 21 left the company — against 17.3 per cent in preceding quarter. It was a similar trend for both Cognizant and Wipro.
Krishnamurthy Shankar, Group Head, Human Resource Development, Infosys, discussing with analysts said in June quarter many people go out for higher education. So attrition always goes up in this quarter.
Infosys had put in a very specific talent management approach earlier this quarter. As a result, it was able to reduce the high performance attrition by 2 percentage point to 11.2 per cent from 13.2 per cent in previous quarter.
Saurabh Govil, Chief Human Resources Officer, Wipro, too said high attrition during June quarter was because lot of youngsters go for higher studies and there were people unhappy with the salary increase and appraisals.
TCS buck the trendHowever, TCS reduced attrition number during the quarter due to an attrition management in place.
N Chandrasekaran, CEO, TCS, told analysts that the company embarked on a process of increasing retention significantly and seeing the benefits of that already. For example in first of last year, the company had a gross addition of over 20,000 people and a net addition of about 5,500. This year same quarter, TCS had over 17,000 gross hires and almost 9,000 people net addition. “I think it is a very dramatic shift, which we are very proud about, happy about. That has implications on hiring as well as margins, both on the positive side. We are pretty happy about that,” he said. For Cognizant, annualised attrition of 17.1 per cent, including BPO and trainees, during the quarter against 14.6 per cent in the last quarter.
Attrition includes all departures, including BPO and employees, in its training programme.