To Retain Talent, IT Giant Infosys Increases Promotions By 3.5 Times & Doubles ESOPs

Infosys has increased its internal promotions by 3.5 times compared to last year and doubled the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) coverage over the last two years to retain talent, as per an ET report.

Amid the alarming rates of attrition over the past few quarters, the Indian IT industry has been doubling down on reskilling and retaining talent through various monetary and non-monetary compensations. High attrition rates have been a cause of worry for IT giants such as TCS, HCL, Infosys and Wipro.

Infosys had reported an unprecedented attrition rate of 27.7% in the quarter ending March 31, 2022.

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For the uninitiated, an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) is an employee benefit plan that gives employees ownership of the company, in the form of company stocks.

Krish Shankar, group head of human resource development at Infosys reportedly told ET ¡°Most employees are leaving due to external market demand according to our analysis. It is also due to other personal reasons such as location preference and flexibility (in work) post-pandemic.¡±

Besides the internal promotions and ESOPs, Infosys has also strengthened its ¡°Bridge¡± programme in the last 12 months, which helps a mid-career software engineer become a consultant, power programmer or digital specialist after training for three months once they clear an initial test for selection.

¡°The candidates move across streams and also get higher compensation after reskilling,¡± Infosys¡¯ Shankar added.

The huge upswing in the Covid-19 pandemic-led digitisation spends also spurred a massive demand for talent over the last few quarters, as per the ET report.

While India's largest software services firm by revenue, TCS had reported an attrition rate of 17.4%, for HCL it was 21.9% and 23.8% for Wipro in the January-March 2022 quarter, the report stated.

Tech Mahindra¡¯s numbers reportedly remained flat at 24%.

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Also Read: Crypto-assets Can Increase Financial Inclusion, Says Infosys' Nandan Nilekani

Praising The Freshers

Infosys¡¯ Shankar also downplayed concerns over delivery getting impacted due to the deployment of freshers in projects.

¡°In digital transformation projects, the college freshers are much better at execution than an experienced employee who passed out five years back. They are also faster in terms of learning and skilling themselves with newer technologies,¡± he said.

Infosys has also awarded premium compensations for specific skills and aligned pay on par with market trends in areas such as cloud-related, big data analytics and specializations such as SAP, Salesforce capabilities ¨C areas that faced high attrition, as per ET.

The company is also opening offices in four tier-II locations ¨C Coimbatore, Vizag, Kolkata and Noida - in a bid to be closer to the available talent pool and attract those employees who are leaving metro locations to stay closer to home, ET reported earlier this week.

Also Read: IT Giant HCL Reportedly Asked Resigning Employees To 'Return' Their Bonuses

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