SHRM PRACTICES AT INFOSYS

AND ITS SHORT COMINGS

Submitted to: Prof. Samir Pingle, visiting faculty, SPM PDPU

ISHITA TOLIA 20135022 MRUGANDA SHAH 20135038

HR practices at Infosys
Company profile:
Infosys Limited formally Infosys Technologies is an Indian global technology services
company headquartered in Bangalore. Infosys is ranked 27 in the list of top companies of
India in Fortune India 500 list in 2011. It has offices in 29 countries and development centers
in many countries. Infosys had 145,088 employees of 85 nationalities as on December 31,
2011.Infosys provides business consulting, technology, engineering and outsourcing services
to help clients in over 30 countries.

Vision:
To be a globally respected corporation that provides best-of-breed business solutions,
leveraging technology, delivered by best-in-class people

Mission:
To achieve our objectives in an environment of fairness,honesty, and courtesy towards our
clients, employees, vendors and society at large."
Values:

Customer Delight: To surpass customer expectations consistently

Leadership by Example: To set standards & be an exemplar for the industry &
ourselves

Integrity and Transparency: To be ethical, sincere and open in all our transactions

Fairness: To be objective and transaction-oriented, and there by earn trust and respect

Pursuit of Excellence: To strive relentlessly, constantly improve ourselves, our teams,

our services and products to become the best

HR practices and short comings

Infosys is currently facing many challenges both internally and externally. On external front,
markets have been in downturn since last year and slowly markets are rebounding. Clients
have drastically reduced IT budgets and have become price conscious at the same time,
competition has intensified because of adoption of Global delivery model by other companies
and consolidation within industry (HP-EDS-Mphasis combine), Dell Perot Systems combine
etc. One the other hand, employees have been not given salary increases for last two years,
morale had come down, and staff reductions were done last year for the first time in history of
Infosys. Among the major HR challenges, Attrition has remained as a major challenge for
Infosys and its peers in the IT industry in India. Attrition level has hovered around 10- 14%
during last wave of IT expansion.

Attrition is one of performance measures of delivery heads. A high attrition is frowned upon.
Managing attrition has been a major challenge. Although because of recession, the attrition
rate has come down but it can go up anytime. In fact it has shot up to 13.4% in last Quarter
ending 31st Mar 2010. Attrition happens because of various reasons. For few of the causes,
company cannot have any control but for some it can tighten its belt to handle them better. For
e.g. manager subordinate relationship is major driver in employees satisfaction and his/her
association with the company. Most of Infosys Project managers have technical background
with less background in Business or HR aspects.

This gap is primarily filled by experiential learning and training programs but in many cases
mangers are found to be ill-equipped to handle employee relations, line management
functions and soft aspects of HR. The attrition is also propounded by mismatch of building
expectations. Employees performances have unfortunately built on wrong expectations such
as Onsite Travel, Relocation etc. In many cases it has been found that such expectations are
wrongly built without any alignment with business requirements.

Since expectations are built in thin air, they dont translate into fulfillment of expectations and
hence this leads to employee dissatisfaction and ultimately into unfortunate attrition. Despite
being one the best work culture, learning environment, challenging assignments, employees
leaving organization has been primarily driven my mismanagement of expectations and lack of
HR capabilities of project managers. In order to keep employee satisfied, managers dangle
carrot of Onsite opportunity to employees which is case for usage of wrong motivation. If
employee is looking to switch jobs, wants a location change, wants a technology, project, unit,
domain change or has got low performance appraisal ratings, and as manager you dont want
them to leave, just promise them an onsite opportunity and things gets settled.

This practice has been used for years and organization has suffered great deal on this
account. It has led to employees using it as a bargaining tool and not focusing on real
motivators such as work satisfaction, learning, challenging work environment. Organization
bleeds because one doesnt aspire to create new software or deliver fewer defects but aspire
to a get EURO or Dollar paying salary. Business unit heads push this even hard by running
tracking list ensuring people get chance in visa lottery without even considering impact of such
meaningless immigration push on employees of other nationalities of more than 75+ countries.

Among the challenges, career progression has come to bite to bite HR managers. In last 4-5
years, Infosys has added 25000+ people on a yearly basis. Since so many people have joined
at the same time, they get experienced and eligible to perform roles at next level or become
eligible for promotions.

However, the positions for higher level reduce significantly as we climb up the hierarchy
ladder. How do we solve this challenge of providing career progression to large number of
employees at the same time without causing any confrontation among employees at the same
level? With employee population whose average age is 26 years, lot of employees have found
their life partner within Infosys. Also there are many employees whose spouses have taken
transfer from other companies and joined the organization.

Infosys has been very generous in facilitating location preference of these couples and
managers try best to find assignment for couples in same location. The issue arises when
managers put customer requirements and other employees career chance etc at stake and
push hard in maintaining the couple at same location, same client location etc. HR role
especially BP_HR (Business partner HR role) is very important. Each IBU (Integrated
Business unit) has a delivery unit consisting of 250-300 people.

On an average a BP_HR, business partner HR is appointed to take care of business needs of

the unit. Typically these employees are MBA HR from premier B-Schools. These HR people
have got such a limited canvass to operate that they end up organizing events and doing
secretarial jobs. The HR people dont have strategic orientation and end up doing non value
add work; instead of adopting a proactively solving HR issues, they relegate themselves to
mundane things in unit and end up wasting their time and resources.

Among the strategic decisions that Infosys took last year Infosys was removal of 2100
employees from its rolls across ranks. The decision came as a surprise to employees as no
information was shared and nobody had any inkling of occurrence of such a thing. The way
people were handled shook everyones imagery of Infosys.

A company which is known for best HR policies in the country has taken such an extreme
step. The whole affair was handled in a secretive manner that it tattered all the transparency
standards upheld by the company. There is lot to learn from how not do such workforce
reductions and the way reductions have been done would have long lasting impact of infosys
brand image as most employee friendly organization.

Some Solutions from Strategic HR perspective. The Current role of BP_HR has become more
of admin role limiting the scope of potential of the role and people performing that role can
have on the organization. The more mundane and generic role can be redesigned so that
people performing that role become much more effective and delivery the HR promise. The
BP_HR role can be transformed from Admin kind of role to Employee champion. This would
mean shifting focus from Systems and Operations to People and Operations.

This translates into BP_HR role becoming independent of influence of Line management and
can focus on employee development activities and stretching the scope work and execution.
The BP_HR role plays an important role in shaping HR activities at the unit level. The
proposed shift means that BP HR has to play a more of knowledge intensive, people oriented
role. They should be directly responsible in executing the HR strategy at the unit level.

They should showcase personal credibility in delivering programs and policies effectively and
efficiently. Strategic Focus Strategic Partner Change Agent Systems People Admin Expert
Employee Champion Current Proposed Operational Focus In order to evolve Infosys from this
transition state (economy recovering, various HR challenges listed above) to a stable state,
HR needs perform proactive roles for both strategic and operational reasons for driving the
workforce to meet the challenges and come out as winners.

Reactive Proactive Strategic Need to function here Operational Need to function here
Collaboration Commitment High Unique ness Compliance Productivity Low Low Strategic
Value High Lepak and Snell Model Infosys gets more worried when attrition becomes high in
Quadrant1 as Knowledge base employment leads to employees with High strategic value and
uniqueness and hence there should be clear distinction in terms that what kind of employment
is good or bad for the organization.

Focus should be to protect attrition of people with whose strategic value is high. Roles which
are nearer to low uniqueness and low strategic value can be contracted, this would lead to
non-inclusion of such attrition in Infosys count and hence focus would get shifted to manage
the attrition that needs to be managed. This would obviously mean better training and
orientation of Line managers. BP_HR will play a crucial role in achieving this as they could
play an instrumental role in guiding and managing managers training programs and building
interpersonal skills.

The career progression into a managerial role should be based on persons capability to
perform the role and equal focus should be on technical as well as people skills. These skills
should be continually nurtured and manager should be objectively evaluated on how they are
performing on People skills. This exercise should be a separate activity apart from routine
performance appraisals.

Also, qualitative data on subordinates feedback of their managers can be collected periodically
and can also be structured to make it part of performance appraisal. These measures would
bring seriousness to the whole exercise which will enable right people becoming managers
and continuous capability building in terms of handling people. Designing Employee motivation
tools in alignment with customer requirements is very important issue which needs to be
solved. There has to be clear and consistent alignment in employee satisfaction and employee
engagement. The motivation tools should be built keeping consistency of customer
requirements in mind.

There should not be any conflict in what customer wants and what employees want. Hence, all
the motivation tools including Onsite Opportunity needs to be reviewed to bring the
alignment. Also, clear communication within organization needs to be there which can spread
the message among managers and employees on goals and objectives of such tools and their
alignment with respect to customer requirements. Coming to career progression, Infosys had
undertaken huge exercise to redefine the career and role architecture by completing iRace
exercise.

The objectives were manifold and one of the objectives was to provide a solution to the flat
hierarchy. The proposed solution is to expand the levels from 7 to 10+. This has given scope
to increase the number of promotion opportunities. Also, provision for certain number of years
in a position has been made mandatory. For e.g. in order to become a project manager, one
has to perform in technical roles for at least 8 years. These measures have partially solved the
problem but unless organization grow rapidly or employees are in sync with steady growth and
its related consequences, the problems of employee demotivation leading to attrition continue
to plague HR department.

Hence, it is important that redesigning of work systems should be done leading to

strengthening of core job dimensions such as skill variety, task identity, task significance,
autonomy and feedback. Also key Psychological states such as meaningfulness of work,
experienced responsibility for outcomes of work and knowledge of actual results of work is
very important. This necessitates requirement of HR to move from a traditional HR role to
Strategic role. HR should be treated as investment centre investing in People and knowledge.

Since Infosys has grown to a huge company, it is important that broad, flexible role is
designed rather than creating silos. This might sound that everyone does everything
rather the idea is that employees are groomed to take a position that is somewhere in
middle of vertical and horizontal specialization.