TCS explains how it’s remotely managing 400,000 employees during pandemic

TCS, India’s largest IT services company, has an employee base of 488,649 and it is managing them remotely during the coronavirus pandemic. The company had an attrition rate of 7.2 per cent, one of the lowest in the industry.

The company’s Annual Report for FY21 gives a glimpse of how the company is engaging with employees and getting new ones from campuses remotely.

The company retains talent by reskilling employees, incentivising them to stay on. The company has a programme called TCS Elevate that links learning and careers. Over 138,000 associates have been on-boarded to this program.

As all its centres closed due to pandemic and employees worked at home, the company had a net hire of 40,185. More than 368,000 students from over 3,100 colleges attended the TCS NQT. TCS conducted around 100,000 virtual interviews pivoted the TCS NQT platform to a complete virtual mode.

A digital online onboarding model helped TCS to integrate associates hired across the globe. Its workforce includes 154 nationalities across 46 countries.

Milind Lakkad, CHRO of TCS, said in the report said that the company’s sustained investments in talent development are paying off. “Our talent development infrastructure is helping us align our planning with emerging customer requirements. So we are fulfilling most of the open positions requiring new technology skills using inhouse groomed candidates, and don’t rely too much on lateral recruits,” he said.

Lakkad added that more important than acquiring new talent is retaining the existing talent that the company has invested in, and groomed over the years. “We continue to be the industry leader in talent retention, with our IT services attrition rate falling to an all-time low of 7.2 per cent this year,” he said in the report.

TCS while giving an industry review said that the global market for IT services continues to be a highly fragmented one, with even the largest provider having a mid-single digit market share. “TCS is among the largest IT services providers globally, with a market share of 1.6 per cent, and has significantly outperformed the market, growing at twice the rate of market growth over the last decade. This may be attributed to market share gains resulting from TCS’ customer-centric strategy and organization structure, focused investments in building superior capabilities, better execution resulting greater customer satisfaction, and steadily expanding participation in customers’ growth and transformation spends,” said the Annual Report.

The report also highlighted that the global technology spends declined 3.2 per cent to about $1.4 trillion in 2020. Within that, IT services spending declined more, down 3.9 per cent, while Business Process Management declined by 2.4%. While the spending showed a decline on a full year basis, technology was center-stage in enterprises’ response to the pandemic-related lockdowns and thereafter. After the initial contraction due to dislocations, the need for business continuity, operational resilience and the switch to digital transactions drove strong demand for IT services over the rest of the year.