TCS best employer, Infosys dream company

While Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is the best employer, Nasdaq-listed Infosys remains the dream company to work for as well as the top company on brand equity, according to the Best Employer Survey 2006 conducted by IDC-DQ.

"TCS wins the race by outperforming the other 31 contenders, and Infosys remains unchallenged on brand equity and remains the company of dreams for the fifth year in continuation," the survey said.

The survey, however, sounded a warning note on one of the findings, which show that overall employee satisfaction is decreasing.

Shailendra Gupta, Manager (User Research) of IDC (India), said: "This decline in satisfaction and retention levels can be directly attributed to the steady increase in expectation levels of the employees and the inability of the employers in managing the same."

According to the survey, growth opportunities/career development emerges as the single-largest factor driving job satisfaction.

Only 70% out of India's top 20 IT conglomerates last year could retain their places in this year's rankings. While the biggies in the industry, TCS, Infosys and Wipro, are still there among the top 20, giving them stiff competition are smaller ones like Cadence, RMSI and Induslogic (considering employee size), the survey said.

The catch is - overall industry employee satisfaction index has dropped by about 11% as compared to last year (from 77.8 in 2005 to 69.2 this year). As a result, the attrition rate of the industry has also increased by 1% (from 14% last year to 15% this year).

Some of the other highlights of the survey are that the satisfaction index of male employees is found to be more than that for female employees in the industry - contrary to the trend prevailing a couple of years back.

Satisfaction index ratings are found to gradually increase with number of years of experience.

When comparing satisfaction across functions, software professionals are the least satisfied lot as compared to hardware professionals and marketing professionals, it said.

Work-life balance (and not just flexibility at the work place ) and organisation culture continues to be areas of concern for IT companies this year. These factors will continue to gain in importance in the future as the percentage of female employees in the industry is consistently on the rise (from 14.5% in 2004 to 23.6%in 2006), the survey observed.