Two sides to Layoff coin at Infosys

The first is the news of  "A Senior Infosys Employee Writes to Management"

Subject: Seeking your immediate intervention and kind attention to protect innocent employees against speculated layoffs, forced resignations, termination’s and force fitting into bottom performance grades.

Recently there have been a lot of disruptive news around speculated layoffs, forced resignations and terminations at Infosys. Many employees are being force fitted into bottom performance assessment grades as “Can do better/Needs Improvement” without any valid data points. This is done just to create grounds for their forced resignations/layoffs, terminations in the name of bottom performance. These are the employees who have spent years of their lives towards serving large corporates like Infosys and its big clients. They helped towards growth and revenue building of the organization.

Even the founder of Infosys respected N.R. Narayana Murthy is standing by the employees and condemned all such actions. He suggested ways on how to handle dynamic business situations, budget constraints, people reskilling and avoid brutal headcount reduction at any cost. While Infosys foundation is spending millions in social welfare activities it is hard to imagine that these loyal employees and their families are dragged into a distress situation for mere cost cutting.

As per the latest annual financial report of Infosys, people in senior leadership has got huge salary hikes (upto 70%) while junior staff and middle management have been at the receiving end with huge cuts in their variable salaries (performance bonuses) and denial towards basic annual increments. 

In terms of employee safety and security also this week there has been an unfortunate incident at Chennai where an employee (Ilayaraja) lost his life within Infosys campus. Early this year in Jan an innocent female employee Raseela Raju was inhumanly murdered at her workplace while she was called to do overtime for client work over a weekend.

All these situations create a hostile work environment wherein employees feel harassed and stressed with lot of negative anxiety, uncertainty of their lives and livelihood.

Infosys has come out strongly on the Layoff  issue. Ref: Infosys may hire 20,000 people this year

Infosys is likely to hire 20,000 people in 2017. Infosys’ Chief Operating Officer Pravin Rao assured IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad of creating more jobs during a meeting with him on Friday.

Talking to reporters after the meeting, he said, “I think all the news about job losses is overstated. Infosys itself last year recruited over 20,000 people and this year again, we are likely to repeat similar numbers.”

Rao also clarified that the ‘layoffs’ being reported in the media were nothing but “regular performance things” that Infosys does every year.
He said even that the number is only 300-400, which is consistent with what the IT major has done every year.

“We are creating more jobs, adding more people and letting go of only minuscule number of people, purely from a performance-related perspective,” said Rao, who met the minister for 30 minutes along with Infosys co-Chairman Ravi Venkatesan.

Of course, Infosys' Co-founder and self proclaimed socialist with capitalist mindset, Narayana Murthy continues to chime in "Narayana Murthy asks senior Infosys executives to take pay cuts, prevent IT freshers from losing jobs"

Even as major IT firms across the country seem to be rolling out layoffs for their young recruits, Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy presents a possible alternative to reverse the mass firing. Murthy recently suggested that th jobs of young recruits can be saved if senior executives take pay cuts.

The solution was put forth by Murthy in a recent TV interview with ET Now in which he said, “I have a feeling that it is possible for us to protect the jobs of youngsters if the senior management people were to make some minor adjustments – adjustment of taking salary cuts.”

The statement comes at a time when Narayana Murthy and the Infosys board have a tussle over the nearly 60 per cent pay hike for some senior most employees. Murthy had described the hike as “grossly unfair to the majority of the Infosys employees.” At the same time, Infosys fired hundreds of employees recently, stating that the employees did not live up to the company’s requirements as found in their bi-annual performance review.