WFH: New HR issues haunt IT
image for illustrative purpose
Bengaluru: Indian IT services companies are now facing many new issues concerning to HR (human resources) functions as remote working has become the norm in the last two years amid the pandemic.
According to the sources in the know, HR managers are now worried that the employees hired from remote locations, especially from tier-II & tier-III cities, may not join them in case of resumption of work from physical offices.
"When the demand was at peak this year, many employees have been hired from remote locations in tier II &III cities. The whole process was completed virtually. Now, when there is a possibility of resuming work from offices, HR managers are not sure that these employees will leave their cities to join them," said a HR consultant with the knowledge of the matter.
During the pandemic, IT industry has shown its resilience by shifting its complete workload to remote locations without any disruption in workflow and productivity. While this quick adoption has led to more offshoring, working remotely has also created its own set of problems. Rising attrition is also one of the issues that has aggravated due to remote operating model.
For the quarter ended September, many IT firms have witnessed more than 20 per cent attrition rate.
Infosys saw its attrition rising by 620 basis points over the first quarter to 20.1 per cent. Similarly, Wipro's attrition rate reached 20.5 per cent in Q2 of FY22, up from 15.5 per cent in Q1. For HCL Technologies, attrition rate touched an all-time high rate of 15.7 per cent, up from 11.8 per cent reported in the first quarter.
Apart from reluctance of employees to join offices in metro cities, the IT sector is also facing issues like impersonation by candidates during job interviews, moonlighting (doing multiple jobs) and lack of connect in teams among others.
Against this backdrop, HR managers are keen to bring back employees to offices in tranches for overcoming these issues. However, the spread of the new variant has forced companies to be in a 'wait and watch' mode.
"There is no clarity now whether IT firms will bring back their employees from January onwards. Though senior management is working from offices with many mid-level employees operating in hybrid model, companies want to have clarity over the spread before the resuming work from offices. So, the new HR issues are not going to go away soon," said an analyst.
