Work-life balance and fair pay - that's what IT employees are going for

MUMBAI, INDIA: Practising egalitarian treatment and giving employees adequate freedom to do their work were found to have strong correlation with employee intention to remain in the organization, thus having implications for retention, a new study points out.

Adobe Systems India, Google India, and Microsoft India are among the 50 Best IT & ITeS workplaces and MNCs as well as start-ups seem to have an edge over others when it comes to getting the employee pulse right.

The Great Place To Work Institute announced its second annual list of India’s Best Companies To Work For in IT & ITeS, 2016. , which were identified based on comprehensive country-wide engagement survey of over 36,500 employees from 145 IT & ITeS companies.

The top 50 were identified based on an assessment of employee perceptions gauged using the engagement survey and an audit of company practices.

Overall, unique benefits, work-life balance and fair pay were found to be the foundations for a superior employee experience, based on findings relating to what the best IT & ITeS workplaces are doing to accelerate employee performance and engagement.

Based on an analysis of factors that drive the perception of a great workplace, it was found that to meet the challenge of engaging and retaining talent in this sector, leaders should consciously work towards instilling a sense of pride in the workplace, providing ample opportunities for career growth, building team spirit, and demonstrating genuine care for employees.

Amit Phadnis, President, Engineering and India Site Leader at Cisco Systems, affirms that audits play a key role in streamlining expectations and execution making a great workplace. “The audits are a great way to get grounds up information on effectiveness of employee engagement initiatives across the organisations. We look at it as a direct customer feedback and use the information to adapt our initiatives and their implementation accordingly.”

Incidentally, MNCs like Cisco Systems dominated the Top 50, with 47 per cent MNCs featuring among the Best in IT & ITeS companies compared to just 20 per cent of non-MNCs making the list. Other key companies to be featured in the list include SAP India, Intel India and PayPal. Employees from MNCs express far more positive perceptions about the workplace, compared to those from non-MNCs. Unique benefits, work-life balance, and fair share of profits were the top three areas where MNCs fared better over Indian companies.

On similar lines, the study finds that the 'start-ups' (less than five years of operation) studied offer a far superior experience in all areas covered in the survey compared to more established organizations, with the top three areas being celebrations at work, tolerance to mistakes, and accessibility of managers. Even though more than 80 per cent of the companies studied had over five years of operations under their belt, these findings are compelling considering the significant number of jobs created by start-up – 80,000 in FY15, according to a NASSCOM study.

Remarking on the study this year, Prasenjit Bhattacharya, CEO, Great Place To Work Institute India said, “As companies in this sector continue to evolve and adapt newer strategies, their success is directly proportional to their ability to attract, engage and retain talent. In our survey this year, the IT & ITeS sector accounted for nearly one-third of the companies we studied across the Indian industries. The industry’s clear focus on creating a great employee experience is therefore striking.”

Dubbed India’s Silicon Valley, Bengaluru was unsurprisingly the most popular location for IT companies assessed. While the city accounts for the headquarters of nearly one-quarter (24 per cent) of the best workplaces this year, including Happiest Minds, Intuit, Cisco, Salesforce and EMC India in this study; it is also the base for 21 per cent of the companies in assessed this study. Bengaluru, Noida, Chennai, Mumbai, and Gurgaon alone account for 64 per cent of the total study population, and more than three-fourths (76 per cent) of the best companies in IT & ITeS.