Tata Consultancy Services, the largest India-based provider of IT and outsourcing services, reported its lowest ever IT employee churn numbers even as the world grappled with economic uncertainties caused by a pandemic.
For the year ended March, the company lost just 7.2% of its employees.
Typically, IT companies see attrition levels of nearly double that. Last year, for example, TCS lost 12.1% of its IT workers, mainly because employees sought better prospects elsewhere.
However, given the widespread uncertainty in the market due to the COVID-19 pandemic, employees seemed to have decided to be less adventurous this year.
Tens of millions of people in India have lost their jobs over the last twelve months as COVID-19 brought many business activities to a grinding halt, particularly in sectors that require considerable human interaction, such as tourism and retail.
HEADCOUNT GROWTH
On the other hand, TCS’s employee addition numbers were stronger this time than in recent years.
Against 24,179 employees added to its rolls during the previous financial year, TCS’s employee strength increased by a whopping 40,185 — one the biggest ever yearly additions in the company’s history.
As of March 31, the total number of employees on the company’s rolls stood at 4.89 lakh — making TCS one of the top employers in the world. Moreover, the number excludes many associates and employees of contractors.
The final three months of the year (Jan-Mar) was particularly robust in terms of employee additions.
Quarter 4 saw TCS’ employee strength increase by 19,388 — a record in terms of the number of employees to join the company in a single quarter.
Female participation continued to be robust at 36.5% of the workforce.
VALUE ADDITION
As the pandemic raged and workers worried for their jobs, a record number of TCS employees signed up for in-house value addition courses.
No less than 379,000 employees were trained by TCS during the year on new technologies, while over 457,000 were trained on “agile methods”.
Agile refers to the need to be nimble and fleet-footed in the way products are conceived and developed and stresses adaptive planning, self-organization, and short delivery times.
In fact IT companies like Infosys and TCS have been the most agile in adapting to the new work-from-home approach necessitated in the context of the viral COVID-19 pandemic, with TCS leading from the front.
The company, where close to 96% of the workforce logs in from their homes, even went to the extent of predicting that it sees 75% of its workers adopting a remote-working mode even after the pandemic by year 2025.
PANDEMIC BOOST
Meanwhile, the disruptions of the year gone by have in fact helped many change-management companies like TCS and Infosys.
Traditional companies have sought help from outsourcing and IT consultants as they scrambled to change their operations to a more distributed, work-from-home based approach, helping generate more work for these consultants.
As a result, the pandemic has had almost zero negative impact on TCS’s growth. TCS’ total revenue for the the year ended March 2021 was down just 0.8% (in constant currency terms).
In fact, when converted into rupees, the company’s revenue actually increased by 4.6% due to a fall of over 5% in the value of the rupee over the year.
In fact, the company’s growth has been picking up of late. During the last three months of the year, the company reported a constant currency revenue growth of 5.9% compared to Jan-Mar 2020.
Meanwhile, the company’s order book swelled to $31.6 billion, up 17% over the comparable number for last year.
It won new business worth a whopping $9.2 bln in the final three months of the financial year — it’s highest for any quarter ever.