Infosys boss fights US HR fires
By Techgirl

CyberMedia is the largest specialty media house in South Asia and amongst India's top five magazine publishers.  Its stable includes such respected magazines like Dataquest, PCQuest and DQ Week.  The group has 12 websites led by Ciol.com. Needless to say CyberMedia is one of the most powerful voices in tech India. 

On Jan 20, 2010, I had reported on an article published by CyberMedia titled ‘Is Infosys a good place only for freshers?’  The article resulted in a storm of anti Infosys comments left at the CyberMedia website.

Infosys HR boss, Mr. Mohandas Pai, who is working his way up to step into the spot left by Nandan Nilekani, decided that someone in the tech company needed to counter the angry comments left at CyberMedia.  He asked his hand picked trusted offsider and Senior Vice President and Group Head, HR, Nandita Gurjar, to give an interview to CyberMedia explaining their side of the story.

To this end, the Infosys Senior VP, HR, Nandita Gurjar, gave a detailed interview to CyberMedia on February 3, 2010 saying all is well at Infosys. Many of the new round of comments disagreed with her.

Now a tipster tells us that all may not be well at Infosys USA.  Nandita has flown to the Infosys offices in Charlotte, USA to conduct a Townhall meeting this week to listen to the employees and try to understand the reasons for the high attrition.  Our tipster tells us that that Charlotte office is the biggest Infosys Center outside India with employee strength of around 1000. 

One reason for the high attrition at this Infosys office could be lower salaries as compared to other American tech companies. 

(Thanks for the tip! Could you let us know in detail how the Townhall went?)

(Techgoss had published the following article on Jan 20, 2010)

Media giant questions Infosys working hours
By Techgirl

CyberMedia is the largest specialty media house in South Asia and amongst India's top five magazine publishers.  Its stable includes such respected magazines like Dataquest, PCQuest and DQ Week.  The group has 12 websites led by Ciol.com. Needless to say CyberMedia is one of the most powerful voices in tech India. 

Managers get huge promotions and salary increases based on one positive article in Ciol’s flagship magazine Dataquest.

Infosys HR boss Mr. Mohandas Pai rose quickly in the organization based on his managerial skills, ability to crunch numbers and the blessings of tech icon and company co-founder Mr. Murthy.  Mr. Paid is one of the hard men of Infosys and few dare stand up to him. The highly regarded CFO Mr V. Balakrishnan has won great respect within Infosys for standing up to Mr. Pai. 

Mr. Pai is positioning himself to step into the vacancy created by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani who left to head the Govt of India’s UID Project.

So, what happens when the powerful CIOL Group wants to do an article titled ‘Is Infosys a good place only for freshers?’ They interview Infosys strong man and HR boss Mr Pai to get the company’s side of the story.

According to CIOL ‘Some of the major concerns are new roles introduced in the Infosys hierarchy, extended work timings and lower salaries than industry standards’. Many Infosys employees, on condition of anonymity, told CIOL that top performers are expected to work 12-15 hours a day and that their official working house were increased to 9.15 during the recent global recession.

Infosys HR boss told CIOL: “We recently promoted about 23,000 employees. And if any employee feels injustice, can directly reach to the top management through emails. The rules of mandatory attendance of 9.15 working hours have been around since 1994, and not as a response to the cost-cutting measure, so there shall not be any changes in these timings."

The CIOL article disagreed with Mr. Paid and mentioned: “This, interestingly, contradicts the information shared by the employees. As told to CIOL, by a Bangalore-based employee, who has been with the company for more than three years, the mandatory timings were 8.8 hrs until March 2008. He also said about another employee who sends letter of complaint to top management and has to face the ire of his superiors, who get offended by the negative words in the letters.”

How can anyone get simple facts of working hours wrong?  And the public would be thrilled to know more facts on how an Indian tech firm has ‘promoted’ 23 thousand employees.

Techgoss note:  Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog http://techgirltalk.blogspot.com