Infosys opts for more HR innovation

After removing Bell Curve model, company plans to do more periodic review of staff goals for facilitating continuous feedback

Infosys Technologies, the country’s second largest software services company, has said it would periodically review the goals set for employees, not only once or twice a year.

For, it says, the nature of goals change with that in a staffer’s profile or a change in project definitions. The idea is continuous feedback from employees, helping the company in planning for specifics of career development, says Pravin Rao, chief operating officer.

This comes after the company, headquartered in this city, said it would be no longer using the Bell Curve model of employee evaluation.

“Earlier, we had a standard set of goals, irrespective of the nature of projects. Now, we are going for a lot more flexibility within project teams, to customise and tailor the goals’ relevance,” said Rao.

“Also, earlier, the goal setting used to happen once in every quarter or every six months or sometimes once a year, depending on the employee. Now, we have said if the kind of work the employee is doing changes after two months, you can evaluate against the old goal and the context and then set new goals for the new work he/she is doing. So, goal setting evaluation becomes a very continuous cycle, so that there is continuous feedback.”  

After Vishal Sikka, former technology head of German software company SAP, took over the helms at Infosys last year as the managing director and chief executive officer, the company has taken a series of employee-friendly measures. Some of this was to check the high staff attrition rate and some to make them more productive.

One of the things done was to set up a ‘SWAT team,’ with members from different functions and practices, whose job was to look at ways to improve processes and policy on staffers. Since the team came into place almost a year before, the company has implemented 150 changes, based on its feedback.

One of these was to allow employees to wear casual dress on all working days in a week. Also, to be allowed to use social media in office.

The Bell Curve model of evaluation is based on a forced ranking, with evaluators to keep a certain relative number of employees in each grade.

“It (removal of the Bell Curve model) gives a lot more flexibility in the system and reduces the angst during performance evaluation. In the long run, it will make people much more comfortable and would reinforce the belief that it is a fair organisation, there’s a lot of opportunities on career development and so on,” added Rao.