Wipro to begin quarterly appraisal system

India’s third-largest software exporter Wipro rolled out an ambitious pilot exercise where it ditched its traditional ‘bell curve’ appraisal system for a large majority of its 170,000-odd employees.

The trigger for this exercise was clear. Employees, mid-level executives and top managers needed to be more accountable for the company’s performance, which in recent years has lagged larger peers such as Infosys, TCS and Cognizant.

Wipro is now in the process of implementing a new evaluation system where feedback will be more frequent and quarterly, as opposed to a one-time annual process.

“Traditionally, we’ve looked at elements including bell curves, building differentiation, categorization, etc. We wanted to make the process of giving feedback more frequent and our performance management system to be an ongoing coaching-based process than just a one-time annual exercise,” said Saurabh Govil, chief human resources officer at Wipro, in an interview.