On the bench and living on the edge

Source: mydigitalfc.com
Dilnawaz Jilla, a 22-year engineering graduate from Mumbai, was ecstatic when she got an offer from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) during her third-year BE in 2007. But ever since she joined India’s largest software services exporter in November 2008 and underwent training for one-and-half months, she has been on the ‘bench’ just like 200 others them in one of its Mumbai offices. She “goes to office, signs the muster, kills some time doing nothing and gets back home”, and still gets her salary.

Bench refers to those employees who are on the rolls without any project to work on at present. TCS, on Saturday, announced that the company would be asking less than one per cent of its workforce to leave on the grounds of non-performance, which, according to a spokesperson, is a routine affair. TCS had 1,30,343 employees as on December 31, 2008. The reduction in staff by around 1,300 would be double the previous year’s figure of 500 employees.

This comes close on the heels of TCS CEO and managing director, S Ramadorai, making an announcement that the company would be changing its hiring strategy and no longer hiring students from pre-final years, but from the final year — just three months before they graduate.

The story of Raghavendra Rajaram is no different from Dilnawaz’s. The eagerness with which he joined one of Wipro’s Bangalore offices around two years ago didn’t last too long. With projects slowing down, he has been on Wipro’s bench for the last 3-4 months.

“I am undergoing many trainings. I keep giving tests. There is constant pressure of scoring high because I am scared that they may ask me to leave.” An e-mail sent to Wipro asking for the number of bench staff in the company went unanswered. Responding to similar e-mail sent to TCS, their spokesperson said, “We do not give out bench staff numbers. Our employee utilisation rates are around 75-76 per cent. But that does not mean that the remaining 25 per cent are on bench.”

According to Wipro, the company had 96,965 employees as of December 31, 2008, including 75,387 employees in IT business and 21,578 employees in their BPO business. As per Nasscom estimates, direct employment in Indian IT-BPO crossed the 2.2 million mark, an increase of about 2,26,000 professionals over FY08; indirect job creation is estimated at 8 million.

“There is a significant bench strength in small companies. These companies usually would have had smaller clients, which may have disappeared due to recession. Larger companies are taking longer to close deals as clients postpone their decisions. As a result, recruitments have stopped. When the going was good and order books were healthy, firms went on a hiring spree, outpacing growth. This has resulted in a substantial rise in bench staff. Most companies have also put a freeze on increments,” said Prashant Srivastava, country manager and managing partner of Gallup India, a human resource consultancy firm.

Srivastava believes that the people on the bench also include high performers. These workers were to be used for big projects that were to come in.
According to a recent survey by Gallup for Executives Recruiters Association, the Indian IT industry will see 74 per cent fall in senior managers requirement. “Most of the IT companies have a hiring freeze. The employee utilisation levels are around 75 per cent,” said Rohit Ramani, director, sales and marketing for EmmayHR, another HR consultancy firm.
(Names of the employees have been changed to protect their identity).