A Circle Sealed Thus ; a Victim of High Employee Expectations in 2003, Infosys Is Back As India's Premier Employer of Choice.

Summary

---

When hurricane Rita tore across vast stretches of the United States, Infosys Technologies, a very Indian company, found itself in a position where it had to arrive at a snap decision to evacuate some 80 employees at its Houston Development Centre. "The decision to move these people was taken in just 15 minutes during which time it was decided to move these people to safe ground. People are our main assets and we decided in a short time to charter an aircraft and get them to safety," says Bikramjit Maitra, Head (hr), Infosys Technologies.

Implicit in Infosys' decision to do something for an employee group as small as 80 is the desire to retain the culture of a small company that has served it well through its 25 years of existence. Despite having nearly 50,000 employees on its rolls across the globe, the company tries to keep the same small-company atmosphere as it grows into a multinational with a rich Indian heritage. A company that began life 25 years ago in Chairman N.R. Narayana Murthy's flat in Pune is today spread across nine locations in India and half a dozen overseas. The company is no longer just a software services outfit; its BPO subsidiary Progeon has nearly 3,500 seats and the company has made significant investments in its consulting foray too. Despite expanding so rapidly, "we like to maintain a smaller company touch and we have split the overall business into several smaller independent units of around 4,000 people each. Every unit is almost fully autonomous and even has its own hr arm", says Maitra. Splitting the company this way works both ways, according to Mohandas Pai, Infosys' CFO and Director (hr). "We have created these 15 business units to try and foster a small company culture at Infosys and at the same time give each division the support of being part of a large, financially safe organisation," he explains. While Infosys has split the company into many smaller mini-Infosyses, it has also evolved distinct hr policies for software services, BPO and consulting. "The people we hire in each segment are different, so each have to be governed by its own set of independent practices," says Pai.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

A Circle Sealed Thus ; a Victim of High Employee Expectations in 2003, Infosys Is Back As India's Premier Employer of Choice.

Managing an increasingly heterogeneous group of employees doesn't just involve complexity at the level of business units or subsidiaries. As Infosys continues to expand globally, it involves complexity at the level of cultures and geographies. "In the us, there's a lot of focus on shorter workdays and upward mobility," says Pai. "In Europe, on the other hand, personal time is treasured and yearly family vacations are taken seriously." The main challenge for Infosys, according to him, is to ...

See the full content of this document

---