Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT services company, is planning to reduce pay disparity in the company by up-skilling its employees and evaluating them at a high bar to double their salaries, according to a Moneycontrol report. The company employs more than 6 lakh employees globally.
The company finds this a better strategy than shelling out very high increments to new hires as the industry has started to come out of a pandemic-induced rally of high employee attrition and massive hikes of over 80-120 per cent.
“Those two years of instant gratification were definitely there. While we lost people because they were getting X per cent more somewhere, we also hired people, not with that kind of increase but there was some increase definitely. We also ensured that internally people get the opportunity to upgrade their compensation through various initiatives, to reduce disparity internally,” Milind Lakkad, chief human resources officer (CHRO) of TCS, told Moneycontrol.
To give a chance of doubling salary amid high attrition rates, the company is enrolling more employees in its existing programmes across levels of experience — even if the bar of people managing to clear these high-level programmes in the first attempt is only around 10 per cent a year.
TCS’ total workforce stood at 6,14,795 as on March 31, 2023. This is lower than the 6,16,171 employees recorded in the September 2022 quarter. The workforce continues to be diverse, comprising 150 nationalities and women making up 35.7 per cent of the base.
The company’s IT services attrition rate continues to trend downwards and was 20.1 per cent on an LTM (last-twelve-month) basis. In the previous quarter ended December 2022, the attrition rate had stood at 21.3 per cent, marginally lower than the 21.5 per cent during the quarter ended September 2022.
