Small Companies Top Best Employers Survey

Relatively smaller companies were voted as best employers in the IT sector,
by 2897 respondents across 33 IT companies in India, reveals a forthcoming
Dataquest-IDC IT Best Emplo­yers Survey 2008. More than 10 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 number one position in 2007 to number six this year. In 2007
survey, iGate jumped 26 places to the number three position.

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

Movers and 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 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 number eight and number 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 number one 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 1,00,000 employee mark and
becoming the first Indian company to employ10,000 non-Indians, close to 9.2
percent 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. Sun Microsystems slid nine positions to
number 19, while Nagarro gained nine positions on the whole while improving its
HR ranking from 32 to six.

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 number one slot.

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, which was the number eight reason for leaving in 2006 and
2007, moved up for the first time this year to be one of the top five reasons to
change a job.

Attrition levels at 18%

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

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

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