Infy asks 3,500 ’bench’ staff to shift to its BPO

India’s second largest information technology (IT) services provider, Infosys, has urged its 3,500-odd employees currently ‘on the bench’ (without any project to work on) to move to its business process outsourcing (BPO) arm, while remaining on the parent company’s rolls.

The action is primarily targeted at BSc graduates in its IT services and is “purely voluntary”. The company says there will be no change in salaries and remuneration of these employees. It believes this will give its employees an opportunity to be productive, rather than do nothing.

“Infosys has a common pool of people and asks everyone to work, regardless of their being in the BPO or IT services divisions,” said Mohandas Pai, head of human resources.

Incidentally, Infosys had made job offers to 20,000 students for the 2010 fiscal. Of these, 16,000 will join once their seven-month training is over.

Infosys has also launched an intranet portal — winify.com — for its employees. The portal will have all job openings within the company and all those benched can directly apply through this portal. “We are asking employees to get onto projects and look for opportunities, rather than sit idle,” said a senior official.

Analysts say this is a fair move. “Considering you are already paying salaries to these people, it makes sense for the company to make use of its internal resources rather than hire afresh,” said an analyst from a brokerage firm.

In December last year, Wipro had made a similar move. It had offered jobs in the BPO business to around 2,000 campus recruits from various engineering colleges in Orissa, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, till they could be absorbed in the company’s IT business. However, the experiment of putting engineering graduates into BPO work appears to have met with limited success; the company found many of them unsuitable.

Analysts said Wipro’s experiment of putting engineering graduates into BPO work was driven by the company’s aggressive quest to make manpower multi-skilled, as the company signs more integrated deals.

Of about 1,000 people, who had accepted the offers to join BPO jobs, Wipro found only about 300 suitable, after initial screening. Close to 450 of those who failed to qualify the initial screening are undergoing training now and will be asked to take the test again, according to Wipro’s Head of HR, Pratik Kumar, in an earlier interview to Business Standard.

“If today we are looking for engineers for BPO works, it’s not because we have engineers who are sitting idle. But because we found the nature of the job is such that we require engineers as well. It is not an utilisation issue. It’s an issue of the integrated nature of the work, which is throwing opportunities,” said Kumar.