24/7 Customer on a phased ramp down

After software companies, its now BPO companies who are on a slow down. 24/7 Customer one of India’s leading BPO firms have informed that they would carry out a phased ramp down of their offshore call center partnerships in India.

24/7 has planned to reduce 450 employees in Gurgaon and would also assist the employees to find employment opportunities outside their company. More than 70% of its employees are already on a lookout for other opportunities.

But as all companies say, the company also claims that it will increase its workforce from the existing 7,500 to 10,000 employees by May and it is already hiring in India, Guatemala and Manila. These claims have become common with most of the companies to cover their real skin.

President of New services and Global Chief of Risk and Infrastructure stated that they have taken all necessary steps to help employees pursue careers in other centres.

Industry analysts feel that the current slow down in the market can no longer help companies afford having employees in bench. They do have to ramp down employees in the name of performance review and cover their real cause with news about increasing work force.

The BPO has its head office based in California with its Indian call center operations in Chennai, Bangalore, Gurgaon and Hyderabad.

India’s 6th largest software exporter, Patni Computers has recently laid an estimated 600 employees. The company claims that this action is due to their non-performance issues. However, industry watchers have mentioned that it is largely due to insufficient projects.

Patni with its delivery centers in Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Noida and Hyderabad is one of the largest software exporters. During its recent yearly appraisal, the employees were shocked to receive a forced resignation letter instead of a appraisal letter. The company informed this to be an exercise to weed out non-performers.

Executive vice president and global head of Patni Human Resources stated,  “This was an absolutely regular appraisal that is important for any performance driven organization. It is something standard we do every year. Employees who have got a 0-1 rating on a scale of 5 typically form the basis for the first-level shortlist. These are performance based resignations; we’ve not issued any termination letters.”

An industry expert from Bangalore mentions, “IT companies have to concentrate on educating business developers. IT companies spend huge amounts on business developers. However, they tend to be inefficient and do not have much knowledge about the product they sell. They either quote too high prices for simple jobs or sign for less when it would actually cost more. Both ways the company either loses the project or ends up in additional expenditure”

Software companies are facing a crisis in recent years due to incapability of acquiring new projects. Laying off employees in the name of performance issues has become quite common among IT companies to cut costs.

Sunday Times, UK listed the top 100 companies to work with in an 2008 annual survey. The results were based on the following:

Leadership: How the employees felt about the head of the company and its senior managers

Wellbeing: How the staff feels about stress at work, work pressures and the balance between their work and their personal life and home duties

Belonging: Employees feelings about their company where he/she works for as opposed to the people the employee works with

Giving Back: How much Companies are thought by their staff/employees to put back into society in general and the local community in particular

Personal Growth: To what extent an employee feel they are stretched and challenged by their job.

The top 25 companies and their sectors are listed below:

The British Newspaper The Sunday Times had its annual survey to find out the best IT companies to work with in Britain. Ten companies were chosen out of the top 100 companies in UK.

The eligibility criterion to participate in the survery was that the company should be at least 7 years old and have at least 250 employees.

The top place was acquired by Microsoft with 1,595 ecstatic employees on Microsoft’s three sites in UK. The company also scored a impressive 93 percent for workforce treatment as Microsoft staffs felt proud working with the company as it makes a positive difference to the world.

Microsoft also topped the list for pre-tax profits to charity. A whooping £17.62 billion was spent on charity which is 9.58 percent of total UK profits.

Peoplesoft got its place in the fourth spot in the survey. Peoplesoft is the sixth largest software company in the world having around 257 employees in UK with 93 percent of its employees earning a salary of over £30,000.

The 9th place went to Electronic Arts, a popular computer and video games development company. EA has made some of the worlds most popular interactive games like FIFA, James Bond and Harry Potter.

CISCO attained 14th place and SAP in 17th place. SAP has over 23,000 employees in 50 countries worldwide.