Why Infosys and Wipro have dropped in Top Employers list

Two software services exporters showed significant drops in Business Today's 13th Best Company to Work For survey - Infosys and Wipro.

Infosys, India's third-largest IT company, has dropped to the seventh position this year from fourth last year. Wipro did worse, dropping to the 16th place this year from the ninth rank last year.

In the top-10 sectoral ranking for Software/Hardware and IT, Infosys is at the sixth position while Wipro is at number 10 - both did not feature in the list last year.

What went wrong in these companies?

The Infosys drop is easy to comprehend. The company has been going through turbulent times with many management changes. Seven members of the company's 16-member executive council, now abolished, have quit while one is on a sabbatical.

The company's overall attrition rate has hit a new high of 19.5 per cent in the April-June 2014, up from 16.9 per cent in the year-ago quarter. New policies around measuring productivity of engineers didn't go down well either.

The situation, however, may stabilise under new CEO Vishal Sikka, who takes over from S.D. Shibulal.

Wipro's sharp fall reflects employee dissatisfaction with its business performance. Although the company has gained a bit of revenue momentum in recent quarters, Wipro lagged all its three top-tier rivals in revenue growth last year. While Wipro's dollar revenue in 2013/2014 increased 6.4 per cent, TCS grew at 16 per cent, Cognizant 20 per cent and Infosys 11.5 per cent.

A few employees Business Today spoke to said they were unhappy with the salary hikes doled out last year. The company raised salaries in the range of 6 to 8 per cent in June 2013. This is significantly lower than what TCS offered - a hike of 12-14 per cent for offshore employees.

The Best Company to Work For survey is done in partnership with PeopleStrong HR Services. This survey was carried out in collaboration with Naukri.com; the jobs portal mined its database of four million people and over 500 employers to poll 13,364 adults across India.