Best Company to Work For - RCom

Scale in any business, they teach you at business schools, is meaningless if it is not matched with productivity. Being in the hypergrowth telecom business, Reliance Communications, or RCom, has seen customer demand soar as at other phone firms. How it has dovetailed that growth with employee aspirations is what makes its story different.

RCom, which runs its business out of a 140-acre campus in Navi Mumbai, does so by offering ''scale and scope of opportunities to its employees to grow in their careers'' says Rajan Dutta, President, Corporate HR, at the company. Part of the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG), RCom is India's second-biggest mobile phone services firm with some 92 million customers.

Automation of HR processes at RCom, a company of 53,000 employees, helps reduce stress on the organisation and throws up far-reaching benefits. Every event in an employee's lifecycle is managed on the company's Intranet through its portal, MyWorld. It captures a potential's interest to work at RCom, does regular reviews, productivity tracking, training and even exit interviews.

Job rotations both at RCom and between it and ADAG, for instance, are driven by daily postings. Even in the middle to senior levels, managers have moved to ADAG's direct-tohome television, Big TV, and employees are encouraged to make such movements. Employee interest is kept high in the portal with ADAG Chairman Anil Ambani and other top executives blogging on it.

"With automation, the HR department is focussed on development of employees, how to create value for our employees and how to engage them better," says Arup Gupta, Vice President, Corporate HR. RCom was placed second alongside bigger rival Bharti Airtel in the telecom sector behind stateowned BSNL in this year's BT-Indicus-PeopleStrong survey.

RCom, which hired some 4,000 people in 2009, a year that saw industry peers shed flab, has programmes to help its people pursue courses at Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore and XLRI. "High performers are taken through various development programmes, which not only help them in their current role but also help them develop and prepare for future leadership roles," Gupta adds.

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Best Company to Work For - BSNL

You receive 3 lakh applications for some 2,500 junior officer positions you've advertised. What do you do? Run for cover or pat yourself on the back that thousands of candidates want to break down your door? If you are in charge of human resources at state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd., or BSNL, you do neither, choosing to stay quiescent.

''People want to work with BSNL because we give them a stable job,'' says Gopal Das, Director (HR), who runs the people function for BSNL's 3 lakh employees. ''We also offer compensation that is comparable to private and public sector salaries (at the entry level).'' For junior officers, to cite an instance, salaries on a cost-to-company basis are around Rs 4 lakh a year though annual hikes are tiny compared to private firms such as Bharti Airtel, which manages with about one-sixth the staff of BSNL.

There is then the growth opportunity in a business that has been exploding in the last four years. Mrinal Kanti Mandal, a 28-year-old electronics engineer, who joined BSNL in April 2009 from Hero Corporate Service, a financial services, ITES and consulting firm, was quickly spotted by his seniors and given additional responsibility of business planning apart from the existing IT-implementation role.

Mandal today is scoping new businesses for BSNL in its Karnataka circle. Pointing to his experience of working in different domains, he says: ''For learning purposes and enriching skills, BSNL is the best place for me.''

The company has 20 training centres across India, each the size of an engineering college. ''For every (pay) scale upgradation, an employee has to undergo mandatory training of two weeks. This is separate from the annual training of 2.5 days per employee,'' says Das.

There are BSNL-only avenues for employee progression. While filling up vacant executive ranks, for example, the company reserves half the positions for its own non-executive employees. ''Several among such employees, who account for 81 per cent of BSNL's workforce, are talented and ambitious,'' says Neeraj Verma, Deputy Director General (Training).

Still, the company knows it will have to bring in external talent to reverse its shrinking revenues. For some 210 mid-level managers it is likely to hire in near future, BSNL will for the first time, on this scale, make lateral hires from consumer care, durables, retail and IT companies, says Das. It may then have to deal with another deluge of applications.

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Best Company to Work For - IOC

The BT-Indicus-PeopleStrong survey reaffirms the attractiveness of the oil and natural gas majors. The respondents did not choose Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) for prestige, building careers, training or compensation. They were in it for stability and low stress two things that even money cannot buy in the private sector's rat races.

IOC, the country's only refining-toretailing petroleum major, is ranked 29th on overall basis. Specifically, for good job content, the respondents rated IOC 18th best for attributes such as job security and some other ingredients of work-life balance.

IOC's employees stick with it because of the way it nurtures them and their families. ''It's a caring company with a human touch,'' says Subhajit Sarkar, Senior Manager (operations) at its Panipat Refinery. Sarkar joined it 18 years ago as a fresh engineering graduate.

Most IOC employees start their careers at IOC and stay on till retirement, never trying another employer. Those who accept offers from private competitors, usually go because they are given more cash in hand. IOC's long list of perks includes free electricity and water, easy loans and annual maintenance allowances for any material possession conceivable from curtains and couches to personal computers and cars.

Sarkar admits he's not happy about the salary, but his family's preference for the IOC lifestyle and job security has held him back. There are others like him ensconced in the cocoon of largely same-for-all increments and promotions devoid of firings.

''One can always hop, skip and jump, but here my mistakes are not looked down upon,'' says Sarkar, who has turned down offers from Essar, Shell and Reliance. On the contrary, IOC wants to learn from its employees. For instance, it rewards those submitting suggestions and ideas, whether or not the ideas are found worth implementing.

The survey reaffirms what the HR team says about trying to ensure that the offices are transparent so that staff can work without pressure. What it hasn't captured yet is the technical work experience and training that the company says it offers.

''IOC is the only oil PSU where an all- rounded career in marketing as well as refining is possible,'' says HR Director V.C. Agarwal. ''There is tremendous learning opportunity and challenge for our employees,'' Agarwal adds.

If that is true, the real challenge for IOC is to break out of the PSU mould it has been typecast into.

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Best Company to Work For - NTPC

If you want to know why people love to work with NTPC, ask Sangeeta Kaushik. Deputy General Manager (Corporate Planning), NTPC, Kaushik joined NTPC in 1986 as a fresh engineering graduate. It was then National Thermal Power Corp Ltd, 11 years old, and had an installed capacity of around 4,000 MW. Today, it is India's largest power company with an installed capacity of 30,644 MW, and aims to enter other energy sectors (hence its decision to become simply NTPC Ltd).

As it grew, so did Kaushik, now 44. In 2004, NTPC gave her the option to upgrade her skills. ''Moving up the ranks, I started handling bigger projects in which I had to look into the financial aspects also. So, I did an executive management programme from MDI Gurgaon,'' she says. NTPC paid for the course around Rs 5 lakh.

There are many Kaushiks in NTPC's workforce of around 24,000. ''Our guiding principle has always been 'people before PLF (Plant Load Factor)','' says R.C. Shrivastav, HR Director. New talent is attracted by a combination of factors. ''Not only are the payscales at the freshers' level higher than comparable private and public sector companies, NTPC's brand reputation and word of mouth works like a real magnet,'' he says.

In addition to low attrition rates (0.27 per cent), NTPC boasts one of the highest average career tenures 23.5 years. ''The maximum attrition rate is at the fresher's level. A person who stays for one year stays forever,'' says Ashok Swarup, DGM (HR). A nearly-zero attrition rate can lead to stagnation at any organisation, but not at NTPC, though it hires around 1,000 executives as freshers each year.

NTPC employees also get unlimited healthcare at its empanelled hospitals and education facilities such as loans of up to Rs 15 lakh for studies abroad and Rs 10 lakh within India for a child's higher education.

Over 75 per cent of NTPC's employees stay in its townships that are equipped with schools, hospitals, clubs and recreation facilities. The company follows differential compensation system where people working in hilly or other hostile areas are paid 80-90 per cent more than other employees.

The HR team's main challenge is to bring down the average employee age (now 47 years) and the male to female ratio (18:1). The latter, especially, is a big challenge. ''Traditionally, women are reluctant to work in the far-flung areas where our plants are located,'' says Shrivastav.

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Best Company to Work For - BHEL

Quick! What is the full form of BHEL? Be Happy and Enjoy Life ...It's not, but that's how employees of Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd see their company. Don't get them wrong: BHEL is not the typical sarkari company (the government has a majority stake) with products that nobody wants and staff that does no work. It has been working three shifts to build equipment that every power utility wants. And it is minting money.

BHEL's business requires high technical skills. Sure, it cannot compete with the private sector on the compensation front. But it sure does a good job by retaining talent with constant training and creative outlets.

''We encourage experimentation and mistakes are not punished in the process of learning ...We tolerate failure, but of course, not at the cost of repetition,'' says B.P. Rao, Chairman and Managing Director, who has been with BHEL for over 31 years now. ''When employees are given freedom to innovate, they often give their best,'' he adds.

Most never leave for greener pastures (attrition is less than one per cent), and those who leave maintain their links. Last year, when BHEL opened its doors to former employees, several applied, and it took back in 46. BHEL has given around 30 CEOs to India Inc.

The secret: Rigorous training schedules and extensive mentoring. Its average annual training per employee (over 16 man days) is higher than comparable international benchmarks of around 12 days. Last year, 800 of the 45,000-odd employees were trained as mentors. ''This is not sporadic. It is the culture of the company,''; says Rao.

If work satisfaction is a major attraction for BHEL's employees, the quality of life is what keeps the wife and kids happy. Work-life does not need balancing. Benefits such as the comprehensive medical cover stretch beyond retirement, while soft loans and self-sufficient townships keep the families comfortable. Rao does agree that today's restless younger generation finds it difficult to appreciate this BHEL way of life. But last year's recession made the company stand out like a beacon for IIT and IIM alumni who would otherwise queue up for multinationals.

BHEL was among the first PSUs to have an HR director on its board and to publish a comprehensive HR manual, pioneering performance and open appraisal systems. No wonder, BHEL's employees have their own acronym for the company.

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Best Company to Work For - Grasim

Sunil Kulwal, a former executive president of the chemical division of Grasim Industries at Nagda in Madhya Pradesh, is in a different territory now. In another continent, Down Under. In fact, as chief executive officer of Aditya Birla Minerals, which handles the group's mining business in Australia.

ABM, which has extensive copper operatons in the Mt Gordon area and Nifty, is owned by another group company, Hindalco. Santrupt Misra, the head of global human resources at the group, says that the biggest attraction for Grasim employees is the integrated approach of the Aditya Birla Group, and talks about Kulwal as an example of what ''systematic talent management'' can do to a person's career. Kulwal, by the way, is neither a chemical engineer nor a miner: He is a chartered accountant by training.

''Our integrated value proposition takes care of personal development, career development and family development,'' Misra says. ''Our HR processes are always trying to find the best opportunities for an employee. Even within Grasim where we have four businesses, employees are provided a wide exposure,'' he adds.

Nagda is a location that has also seen a new effort to provide access to top doctors to the employees through telemedicine. However, Khor in the same state saw something more interesting.

Vikram Cement, which is still a part of the cement business of the company, has built a spanking new Young Managers Accommodation with a very modern design with new gadgetry at hand. The message is clearly that you need not give up the luxuries of city life if you work for Grasim in a remote location.

All this, Misra explains, is achieved by not focussing on innovation but rather on the needs. ''We find the needs of the employees first and then we meet them innovatively,'' he says.

Misra points out that the company did not cut jobs during the downturn. ''We see productivity as a continuous process. We never take short-term measures like cutting jobs. Instead, we decided that all directors of the group will stop flying business class.'

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Best Company to Work For - L & T

Ask Chief Financial Officer of Larsen and Toubro Ltd Y.M. Deosthalee what differentiates the engineering major on the human resources front, and he is quick to list five differentiators, not one. Deosthalee, who also oversees the HR function, says the first differentiator is that L and T is largely owned and managed by employees.

''Any one who is good and joins as a shopfloor engineer can aspire to reach the top and become a director someday,'' Deosthalee says. Not empty words: Of the eight executive directors on the L and T board including Chairman A.M. Naik, seven joined the company as engineers. The only one who is not an engineer is Deosthalee himself.

He says that is how it has always been in the company it was founded in Mumbai in 1938 by two Danish engineers, Henning Holck-Larsen and Soren Kristian Toubro, and has ever since been owned and managed by professionals. In fact, L and T is among the few large Indian companies that doesn't have a promoter (ITC Ltd is another) so the manager rules the company.

Deosthalee says extensive empowerment allows everyone to be innovative and creative. That's differentiator #2 at India's largest engineering and construction group. What are the other three? The wide range of businesses offer a lot of exposure; employees take a lot of pride in working for a company that claims to be building the country. Then, there are the training and development initiatives in conjunction with the Indian Institutes of Management and other top B-schools.

L and T is a happy poaching ground and the company has done a lot to retain its engineers. It started an infotech arm when the information technology industry started weaning away too many of its young engineers.

Deosthalee points out that the company has started many new businesses in the recent past finance, shipbuilding and power, among them. ''We have allowed our deserving employees to move to these businesses and shift to a faster track in their career,'' he says.

The L and T CFO also chose merit-based performance appraisal as the top factor from the six along with prestige and company reputation. In both these factors the company is ranked in the top 10 companies while its overall rank is 11.

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Best Company to Work For - Bajaj Capital

If Bajaj Capital had to put out a recruitment ad to woo potential employees, one of the slogans it could count on would be: ''Join Bajaj Capital and you could earn more than your seniors.''

That wouldn't be an empty boast. As Rajiv Deep Bajaj, Vice Chairman & amp; Managing Director, Bajaj Capital, explains: ''Write your own cheque is what we tell our employees. There is no upper ceiling that we impose on the bonuses that employees can get. So there have been cases when the financial planners have earned more than their seniors.''

One of the largest investment advisors in the country, Bajaj Capital shoots up the rankings as a preferred destination for employees entirely due to the culture of what the company calls ''entrepreneurial empowerment''.

While still family-owned (founder K.K Bajaj's sons, Rajiv and Sanjiv, are part of the management), the company has done its bit to professionalise. The testimony to that effort is Anil Chopra, Group CEO and Director, who has stayed on with the company for the past 25 years. The motto for 2010 is ''Think Big'' The company's mission statement is ''to make 1 crore people crorepatis'' A few of them could be employees, too.

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Best Company to Work For - ICICI Bank

One of K. Ramkumar's favourite films is Matrix, the 1999 sci-fi action flick that has Keanu Reeves as a secret hacker with the alias 'Neo'Neo, who is fast-forwarded in time to the year 2199 and who is prophesied to end humanity's war with intelligent machines, has a socket in the back of his skull that allows him to upload knowledge directly into his mind. That helps him pick up numerous martial arts disciplines and also fly a military helicopter by getting a helicopter programme uploaded into his brain instantly.

"Matrix was a great inspiration," recalls Ramkumar, Executive Director in charge of HR at ICICI Bank, the country's second-largest bank. "I believe Matrix-like skills can be uploaded into a human brain to get the desired results. We (ICICI Bank) have to take ownership to give that knowledge and skill. Employees, for their part, need to come with the right attitude," he says.

Ramkumar, 48, is the bank's first HR head to be elevated to a board-level position (it happened last February). An alumnus of Madras University, Ramkumar joined ICICI Bank as General Manager (HR) in 2001 after spending 16 years in manufacturing organisations. At the bank, Ramkumar also looks after the Operations and Credit and Treasury functions apart from the human resources.

"Every organisation recognises the role of a CFO who manages financial resources, but there is another equally important function of managing human resources," is how Chanda Kochhar, MD and CEO at the bank put it to BT, recently. It's people focus that has helped ICICI Bank emerge as numero uno in the banking sector in the BT-Indicus-PeopleStrong study of the Best Companies to Work For in India.

Ramkumar's entry into the bank in 2001 was strategic as it coincided with the mega-reverse merger with development financial institution ICICI Ltd. "It was a Herculean HR task as a bulk of the workforce had project finance skills," says a bank insider. Those days, the bank consciously decided not to acquire resources from the market. "We follow an HR policy of creating a learning organisation and not a recruiting or compensation management organisation," says Ramkumar.

That emphasis on learning has stayed with ICICI Bank. In 2006, it became the first bank to partner with NIIT for training freshers in financial services by launching the Institute of Finance, Banking and Insurance and awarding a diploma. Two years later, the bank set up ICICI Manipal Academy to offer specialised banking and insurance skills to train probationary officers. Almost 20,000 people applied when it started two years ago. "We selected about 1,000 people in our first batch," says Ramkumar. The first two batches of probationary officers numbering 2,000 have been absorbed by the bank.

In 2009, the bank also took another path-breaking initiative by launching an online executive MBA programme for probationary officers who have completed The post-graduate diploma in banking. These graduates are rated on a par with IIM grads, and absorbed as managers at the bank. There are also specific programmes and exercises for leadership development.

In 2005, all senior general managers who are potential directors were invited to attend board meetings. "The board encouraged us to participate in the deliberations," says Ramkumar, who was one of the senior general managers to have attended those board meetings. That experience would have played a part in Ramkumar getting his place on the board!

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Best Company to Work For - HDFC Bank

Neetu Mathur has worked with three banks in the past five years. But she's never had to resign even once. Here's how she managed this feat. The first bank Mathur, 30, worked with, Bank of Punjab, was acquired by Centurion Bank in October 2005. And, two-and-a-half years later, Centurion was amalgamated into HDFC Bank, India's second-largest private bank.

Mathur, who was a Branch Manager at Centurion Bank's New Friends Colony branch in New Delhi, first heard the news of the mega-merger on a news channel and dismissed it as a rumour. Once it was confirmed, however, Mathur did go through an initial phase of apprehension. ''But once the Reserve Bank approved the merger, the integration process started pretty fast and smoothly,'' says Mathur, who started her career with Standard Chartered.

Mathur is today a Branch Manager at HDFC Bank's Sunder Nagar branch in Delhi. What she likes most about her new employer is the clear job description and the culture of meritocracy that rewards high performers. ''I feel so much more secure now,'' she grins. Close to 6,500 employees of Centurion Bank have been absorbed into HDFC Bank in a huge integration exercise that started in the second half of 2008.

''That was the biggest HR task that kept us busy,'' points out Mandeep Maitra, Country Head (Human Resources, Infrastructure & amp; Administration), HDFC bank. Maitra knows a thing about post-merger integration: She herself came from Times Bank, which had merged into HDFC Bank in 2000.If HDFC Bank is ranked #10 in the BT-Indicus-PeopleStrong study of Best Companies to Work For in India, it's largely thanks to the bank's ability to master the art of integration, without any malice.

The assimilation with Centurion came at a time when the economy was in the throes of a downturn. Mercer Consulting was called in to ''do a scientific process of job evaluation,'' explains Maitra. The bank also did a comprehensive cultural audit to assess the views of all the employees of the merged entity.

HDFC Bank is one of the few banks that doled out increments, promotions and bonuses during the downturn. ''People were relocated out of businesses that had slowed down, but there were no retrenchments,'' avers Maitra. Training and development, too, were not compromised.

''I follow this old school of thought that people have a need to be heard,'' says Maitra, who travels extensively to remote corners of the country, right from Jammu to Visakhapatnam, to get employee feedback. ''You just cannot take away the enthusiasm of an employee who is there in the line of action,'' she says.

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Best Company to Work For - Bharti

Manoj Kohli is no Steve Jobs, but he knows a good idea when he sees one. At his corner CEO office in Gurgaon, visitors can't miss a steel plaque with Bharti Airtel's ambition of becoming the top brand in India by 2010 for customers and employees.

For employees? Kohli is clear: “People are our biggest asset. And, then the brand.”The employee-first focus is not new. At Apple, the philosophy has been made a fine art by Jobs and others such as Google and, closer home, HCL Technologies are at it, too. But it's Airtel whose efforts seem to be paying early. It is the only telecom operator in the top 10 of BT-Indicus-PeopleStrong's Best Companies to Work For listing. Potential employees are attracted to it by career growth opportunities and company prestige.

The head of a leading recruitment agency, who wants to stay anonymous, says Airtel's charm works three ways it's a market leader, has a system of rapid promotion, and ensures transparent assessment.

This, together with an entrepreneurial DNA, a go-getter sales force and respect for professionalism internally has helped Airtel top $8 billion, or Rs 36,445 crore, revenues with its about 17,000 employees (plus about double that working dedicatedly for it in outsourced jobs) in just 14 years. "Our secret sauce is our culture," insists Kohli. (Come April, Kohli, credited with much of that growth since he joined the Bharti group in 2002, himself will make way for deputy Sanjay Kapoor.)

Promotions, at Airtel, on average, are handed out every one-and-a-half or two years for the young after entering the company, and every two-and-a-half to three years for levels above that. Up to 80 per cent of new positions at the company are filled by internal movements. "Even when this internal talent is only 70 per cent ready, we prefer to fast-track their careers," says Krish Shankar, Airtel's Director of HR.

Higher up, Airtel has built a leadership pipeline of some 300 in the last 5-7 years to bring in stability at top levels to buffer it in a highly competitive market for talent. These 300, which Shankar claims can run any telecom firm in the world, are ring-fenced well. "We treat our top 300 leaders differently," says the HR head. On offer are sessions at INSEAD and Indian School of Business, external coaches for specific capability needs and leadership programmes with consultancy Monitor Group. With new competition and bruising call rates, Airtel will need all hands on deck.

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Best Company to Work For - SBI

Till not so long ago, the perception of a public sector banker was stereotypical: Laidback, inefficient and disgruntled. Over the recent past, many public sector banks have undertaken massive makeovers right from injecting technology to sprucing up the brand and at least on the efficiency front, many of them compare well with their private sector and foreign counterparts.

But a public sector banker as a happy employee? There hasn't been much evidence to suggest that. Until the results of the BT-Indicus-PeopleStrong study came along, which has State Bank of India (SBI) at #7 position, with high-profile private sector institutions like HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank lower down the list.

So, what's SBI doing right with its army of over 2 lakh employees? ''We started a humongous HR exercise some time in 2006, when we bluntly shared with our employees the state of affairs and what needs to be done to repair the situation,'' says Anup Banerji, Deputy MD and Group Executive (National Banking), SBI.

In July 2006, the country's largest and oldest bank (it dates back to 1806) kicked off ''Project Parivartan'' a massive mass communication programme that covered 130,000 employees in 100 days with 400 trainers. The brainchild of Chairman O.P. Bhatt, the project involves imparting communication skills to deal with customers to make SBI a customer-friendly organisation.

Three years later, SBI's top brass extended Project Parivartan with a new exercise called Project Citizen that was flagged off deep down south in Thiruvananthapuram. Since then, it has been taken nationwide. This project will run over two years by the end of which one can expect cultural and attitudinal changes across the organisation.

A crucial change at SBI is a willingness to experiment by moving beyond the traditional recruitment method of a common test and hire outside specialists like chartered accountants, law graduates, economists, statisticians and marketing professionals. One traditional initiative that holds SBI in good stead is its focus on skill development, with its four national level apex training colleges and 54 learning centres.

At the top, SBI has also begun focussing on creating a leadership pipeline. The bank has tie-ups with the Indian School of Business and the IIMs for training leaders. ''We also send top executives abroad for training and development,'' says Banerji.

The good news is that SBI has finally cracked the equation that happy employees translate into happy customers.

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Best Company to Work For - Wipro

Wipro is not the best paymaster among peers. It froze promotions and hikes in the last 12 months. It not just suspended campus hires, but also sacked over a thousand. Yet, the Bangalore company finds itself on the BT-Indicus-PeopleStrong's Best Companies to Work For listing. How? By virtue of being a brand that's seen stable by jobseekers, its emphasis on training and practice of rotating workers across businesses and functions.

When Chairman Azim Premji decided to enter the clean energy business in 2008, for instance, he chose managers from Wipro Technologies, the company's global software division, to run the new venture. Subhash Khare moved as Vice President (Process Excellence and Delivery) at Wipro Eco Energy from handling staffing and productivity at Wipro Technologies. Hari Hegde, the former Head of Operations at the tech division, now runs Wipro's water business.

As an employer, Wipro offers a stable brand built ''over decades and across businesses'' says Pratik Kumar, who heads the human resources (HR) function there. Its HR cues may be from the likes of General Electric, but Wipro has its bespoke solutions. Example: In consumer care, Wipro allows area managers near-autonomous control of regions to boost sales, a flexibility rare among MNCs. Wipro is zealous about training. Five days a year, Premji mentors senior managers.

They, in turn, spend 9-10 days in a year training and mentoring juniors a contribution HR experts reckon is double compared to other software companies. (Wipro stood #5 in the training and mentoring rankings in the BT survey ahead of Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard.) Wipro managers, then, are ready to take on complex tasks earlier than their peers in other firms. When Wipro wanted to extend its soap brand, Santoor, into handwashes, it leaned on a manager in her late-20s for everything from product formulation to perfume selection. ''We throw employees into the deep end when they are just 60-70 per cent ready and expect them to learn on the job,'' says Vineet Agrawal, President of Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting.

Junior Wiproites, still, complain that their salaries are at least 20 per cent less than those at global rivals. Stock options remain a draw but with overseas project assignments reducing to a trickle, hiring and retaining talent will be a challenge. ''Many tasks, which were earlier onsitefocussed, are now being delivered from India,''says a 25-year-old software analyst, requesting anonymity. She quit Wipro in mid-2009 to pursue studies.

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Best Company to Work For - Microsoft

When Microsoft India Chairman and Corporate Vice President Ravi Venkatesan met Bill Gates six-and-a-half years ago, just before he joined the company, the Chairman and Founder passionately told him how Microsoft was about changing the world. ''That was not an arrogant statement; it was his belief that in every field of human activity, progress is happening with the help of technology,'' Venkatesan recalls.

That's what attracted him and it's why people still want to come to Microsoft. Take for example Srinivasa V. Thirumalai Anandanpillai aka Thiru, 37, Principal Group Program Manager at Emerging Markets Labs (EMLabs), Microsoft India Development Center, Hyderabad. Over the past year, Thiru has been involved in two products Microsoft Phone Data Manager and Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool.

Before his stint at EMLabs, Thiru was with Microsoft's search team (Bing) in Redmond as a product planner. After his fiveand-a-half year stint at the company (at Microsoft headquarters and in India), Thiru says: ''I wanted to be part of the team that impacts a large number of people. Nothing can beat the excitement of working on a product that has the capability to impact millions.''

Technology companies are coveted employers for people across industries and functions, thanks to the opportunity they offer. Says Joylyn Largo-Afonso, Client Partner, IT/BPO for Korn/Ferry International India: ''This band of employees wants to contribute to an organisation that has a scalable global location and where India is a strategic country.'' Microsoft makes the grade on both counts.

''The company is about one thing innovation,'' says Venkatesan. He recalls a comment of Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, that the biggest competitor for Microsoft is its oldest product. ''Innovation is central to the existence of the company and people are central to innovation,'' he says. The company has 90,000 employees worldwide; and more than 5,000 in India. The manpower in India is a mix of R & amp;D and services and the median age of employees is 31. ''Youth doesn't know what can't be done,'' Venkatesan had told BT last year, when it was ranked as the #1 company to work for the second year running.

What makes a technology company the chosen one for people from other sectors? ''We look for talent. Full stop. We don't stick with one sector or not only to high technology,''says Joji Gill, Senior HR Director Microsoft India.

This has a lot to do with the fact that Microsoft is increasingly focussing on retail consumer segment, in addition to the big corporate customers. For that it needs to hire talent beyond technology. A case in point is Hemant Sachdev who came from Bharti Airtel's core team to head Microsoft's consumer and online operations in 2008.

''In future, this will intensify. We are not looking for skill sets, but we are looking at what the potential candidate's fundamental DNA is and how we can scale him. The question we ask: 'Is he a Microsoft hire'' says Gill. And what DNA is Gill looking for? People who have initiative and can work without too much of direction. And, yes, somebody hierarchical will not survive in Microsoft.

While attrition was least of any organisation's worries in 2009, retaining the right talent is one of the big challenges for the company. The biggest challenge is the half-life of knowledge. ''Wherever you are, computer science becomes obsolete in five years. So learning is important,'' says Venkatesan. To make it happen, the company allows crosspollination somebody who is working in services and may want to try his hand at product development is allowed to do so.

Last year, Microsoft India saw its first ever set of layoffs that were not driven by performance. While Venkatesan says it impacted less than one per cent of employees, he also admits that it wasn't easy. The biggest thing for Gill was whoever was impacted should be treated with respect and dignity. The company hired an outplacement agency to find right opportunities for its employees. Gill says now the company is hiring some people it had let go last year.

Letting go of employees, though, is not a no-no at Microsoft. ''While, some new talent comes through incremental headcount each year, there's also new talent that comes in form of replacing low performers,'' says Gill. Creating destruction has to be a part of any innovation factory.

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Best Employer to work for No.3

A lakh and twenty five thousand people (15,000 more if you count the subsidiaries) from 78 different nationalities in 50 different countries could be a nightmare for the human resources department of any company.

Or consider just TCS' largest software development centre, in Chennai, the workplace for 30,000 people; that is equal to the seating capacity of the Lords cricket ground in London.

That is one reason why the HR processes are highly digitised (a software tracks every employee, his training needs and development levels and alerts his supervisors on changes needed) at one of India's largest employers probably the largest if one leaves out public sector behemoths like the Railways or Coal India.

Ajoyendra Mukherjee, Head of Global Human Resources at TCS, says that without a digitised system, it would be impossible to manage the careers of so many people. Every individual career is carefully managed in the company, ensuring job rotation, exposure and development of skills. Says Mukherjee: ''At the junior level we rotate them between functions and then when they have gained some experience we allow them to specialise in some areas. We make sure that all employees are able to challenge themselves.'' The company has a very young workforce, with an average age of 28. The attrition rate is a modest 11.4 per cent, which is good for this industry, where the norm is 27 per cent.

But for how many years on an average does an individual work at TCS; and what are the opportunities for growth? Remember, in a difficult year (2008-09) the company had added 48,000 people (in the first six months of the current fiscal it hired another 8,000). Such aggressive hiring has to be resorted to not just to fuel the company's growth but also to replace those leaving (in 2008-09 some 16,000 employees had left).

While there is no ready answer to the question on how many years on an average an employee spends at the IT services major, Mukherjee loves to point to some notable names who have grown through the ranks. These include Vice Chairman S. Ramadorai, Managing Director N. Chandrasekharan and Mukherjee himself; all had joined the company as trainees.

Thirty-five-year-old Naveen Sodhiya, a group leader for TCS in the industry solutions team, would have similar aspirations. He has been with the company for 12 and a half years, and TCS was his first employer after he completed his masters degree from Delhi College of Engineering. ''I do not find a need to move anywhere as I see all my career goals can be met in this company'' he says. Sodhiya had a four-year stint in the US and was trained at Kolkata. Currently, he is posted at Mumbai. TCS has two guiding principles in developing its HR policy. One is to create joy for all the stakeholders and, hence, for employees too.

The second is respect for the individual which, Mukherjee stresses, sets TCS apart from other companies. This is also the principle that drives the company to train employees on cultural diversity. People are trained about different cultures not only when preparing for a foreign posting but even otherwise, as they have to work together with colleagues in foreign countries.

''For example, before employees start interacting with their Chinese counterparts in TCS China over phone, we train them on the cultural aspects of the interaction; what is acceptable in China and what must be avoided,'' he says. TCS has built software development centres, or delivery centres, in a big way in South America, apart from in India, Hungary and in China. The company is present in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Uruguay.

Interestingly, while Infosys has scored higher than TCS in the overall rankings, TCS comes out on top when the survey moves to only employees of the IT industry. This means that although Infosys looks a more inviting place to a layman, the IT industry pro would prefer to work for TCS. Mukherjee would settle for that.

Best Employer to Work for No.2

Just what is the secret of Google's sauce? There is no doubt that the Internet search engine has a terrific algorithm, a model that most efficiently relates value to advertising spends, and brute-sized server infrastructure to deliver search results in nano seconds.

But at the heart of Google's success lies an extremely motivated and smart workforce that has created an enterprise worth some $187 billion (Rs 8.6 lakh crore), in a little over a decade. To be sure, most of that action has happened at its Mountain View, California headquarters. That it is the envy of companies competing to grab smart engineers and increasingly marketers in India, too, is borne out by BT-Indicus-PeopleStrong's Best Companies to Work For survey. Google India is ranked #2, after Infosys Technologies, as the best workplace in India.

What makes Google a great place to work in? One answer comes from Manoj Varghese, Director, Human Resources, Google Asia-Pacific. ''We give our employees an immense amount of freedom that comes with great responsibility,'' he says, borrowing a line from Yoda, the venerable Jedi master in the Star Wars series. A responsibility to make sense of the biggest pile of information in the world the Internet.

The commitment to that responsibility starts at the top. In what Google calls ''Thank God It's Friday'' meetings, Googlers, as company insiders call themselves, log in from anywhere in the world to participate in a virtual session attended by at least two members of the executive board.

Occasionally, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin or Eric Schmidt, the company's CEO, attend. ''The guys who work here tend to be very well read and some of the interactions are really quite informative,'' Varghese says. India-specific meetings are led by top staffers such as Shailesh Rao and Vinay Goel, at times.

Such meetings come from Google's success in mastering the ''crowdsourcing'' philosophy, like no other company its size. Early in 2009, when Patrick Pichette, Google's Chief Financial Officer, wanted ideas to cut costs during the slowdown, for instance, he posted his query on Google Moderator, a service that ranks user-submitted questions by merit (decided through votes) in groups. Googlers chorused big and small ideas like cutting back on in-house canteen menu options that the firm claims saved it a few hundred million dollars.

When it comes to appraisals, Google again gravitates towards a Switzerland-style democracy. Not only do Googlers have to appraise their bosses, each employee has to nominate five peers to review his or her performance. Not just that, if an employee feels that a fellow-Googler has gone out of his or her way or as one put it, ''above and beyond the call of duty'', that person can be nominated for a special bonus.

Then, there is Google's famous 70/20/10 rule. This asks its people to spend 70 per cent of work-time on developing Google's core products, one-fifth of the time on products adjacent to the core product a process through which Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome and Android came about and the remaining 10 per cent on projects that might have nothing to do with Google.

In India, a product that allows typing in English to get Indian language text is among the top tools that came from an engineer's 20 per cent time. ''Innovation is a term everyone uses, but I feel we have codified it. Google's focus is on bottoms-up driven innovation,'' says Rahul Roy Chowdhury, a Bangalore based Google product manager who in 2007 seeded the idea of the Indic Transliteration tool, which can now be used for Arabic, Persian, Serbian, Greek and Russian text.

At the Gurgaon office of Google, there is another ''Google 20'' phenomenon in reference to recent recruits gaining up to 20 pounds, or about 8 kg, in the few months of joining. Blame it on catered lunches with frequent menu changes, freezers full of icecream that anyone can reach out for, cabinets brimming with cold and energy drinks, an in-house coffee outlet and even a person serving fresh coconut water.

The focus on smartly doing business, still, is never lost on all such indulgence. As one Googler says, ''When you have the best, you are (looked after) well. But it is the work that is fun above everything else.''