TCS puts productivity bar on staff

As part of cost-cutting to tackle the current downturn, the country’s largest software exporter, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), has imposed “travel restrictions and put a productivity bar on its employees,” says Kesav V Nori, executive vice-president and executive director (TCS innovation lab — business systems).

“A lot of interchange has been made in our existing infrastructure. We have now increased the number of video conferences between people in India and web casts internally, to reduce the usage of wired lines, besides putting restrictions on travel,” Nori told Business Standard on the sidelines of a function to launch the company’s new computer-based functional literacy software in Urdu.

There was also a productivity bar to be met at various levels, he said. “Besides, there is a greater move of people from onsite to offshore,” he said, declining to give any numbers.

Nori, under whose supervision the Urdu software was developed, said software in Arabic, and Spanish and other European languages, were also being developed by TCS. “While the Arabic software will be ready in a month’s time, the Spanish software will take about three months. The idea is to provide a medium through local dialects for handling migration problems,” said Nori, who is retiring from TCS on March 31.

TCS joined the belt-tightening club of Wipro and Infosys last month, when it announced plans to review the variable component of its employees’ salaries every quarter. Variable pay accounts for 20-35 per cent of TCS employees’ gross salary. The company had cut the variable pay by around 1.5 per cent in February 2008.

Infosys has already started recalling about 25 per cent of its US-based sales teams since last year, while Wipro has announced that it has employed 30 cost-cutting measures, especially in operational efficiency, since the third quarter of this financial year.