Infosys promotes 2,100 employees after stellar Q3 numbers

Infosys has promoted 2,100 employees soon after reporting stellar December quarter numbers that comfortably overshadowed not only market expectations but also larger rival Tata Consultancy Services, which missed estimates for the quarter.

A spokeswoman of the country’s second largest software exporter confirmed the development and said the promotions would be effective January 1.

The latest round of promotions have been handed out to executives and employees across the company based on their performance as well as the maturity of their roles. Earlier in the month Infosys had lowered variable payouts to employees from 100 per cent to 75 per cent, despite a healthy third-quarter show.

The January promotions are marginally higher than the October round that saw 2,000 top-performing employees and senior managers get promoted, but is much lower than the number of promotions that were handed out during the last financial year shortly after former SAP products chief Vishal Sikka took over as CEO of Infosys.

In August 2014, shortly after taking over the reins of the company, Sikka sanctioned 5,000 promotions across the company as part of employee morale-boosting measures to curb attrition that was hovering around the 20 per cent mark at that time.

In the September quarter of 2014-15, Sikka approved another 4,000 promotions as part of a broader effort to retain key personnel in top customer accounts such as Bank of America and Procter & Gamble. Infosys currently is also experimenting with its incentive structure for employees and is expected to announce a new structure over the coming months and quarters. In an interview in November, COO Pravin Rao told ET that Infosys had started handing out special bonuses and incentives to top-performing employees and sales executives on top of their regular bonuses.

Sikka himself has stressed on the need to overhaul existing metrics to measure performance for employees, given the radical changes that are taking place across the technology landscape that is forcing traditional technology services firms to completely rethink existing business models.

In an interview with ET in September, top Infosys HR executive Richard Lobo had said that the company was doing away with its traditional bell curve metric for measuring employee performance and would instead base appraisals on open rankings.

ET had first reported on April 13 last year that Infosys was planning to put in place a new incentive structure to reward its sales superstars in a bid to retain key personnel amid a scramble to win large outsourcing deals and regain industry-level growth rates.