While rising salaries in the Indian tech industry is being attributed to factors like the rising rupee, growing attrition rates, and maturing market, there is one thing that is no longer related. Employee satisfaction isn’t always a derivative of higher salaries, says the Salary Survey 2007 by Cybermedia’s Dataquest and IDC India.
The IT industry salary in the country saw a growth of 11 percent in 2007. As a result, the average salary hike for Indian IT professionals this year amounted to 18.7 percent, which is 0.4 percent higher than that last year.
Surprisingly, there is less than 8 percent correlation between the salaries that employees draw and the satisfaction they derive from these salaries. So the IT companies will need to resort to keep employees happy at the cost of not making significant hikes in the wage bill.
The winners’ podium is occupied by R&D companies like Cadence, Sun Microsystems and Honeywell Tech, as are they ranked one, two, three in terms of the best paymasters. Established Indian tech players like TCS, Infosys and Wipro do not figure in the top 10 as far as paying higher salaries is concerned. These places are still occupied by the likes of IBM, CSC and Capgemini.
On the contrary, the satisfaction level of employees working in these companies is either very high or comparable to some of the top international IT service providers. For instance, Infosys, which ranks 12th in terms of salaries, is 28th in terms of satisfaction against IBM India where the satisfaction rank is just one up at 27.
Conducted in two phases, the survey was done across seven Indian cities of Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Pune. In the first phase, the HR departments of 31 software companies were surveyed while in the second one, 2806 employees the employees were asked to rate their satisfaction levels with respect to their salaries.
Taking a critical view of the situation, rising dissatisfaction may only worsen in times to come as the HR in many companies including multinationals plans to make the week longer by a day. Making it a six-day working week is one of the measures companies propose to take in order to offset impacts on profit margins as a result of the recent rupee appreciation.
However, all this is not a deviation from the global industry trends. According to Certification Magazine’s salary survey that spanned across 35, 573 IT professionals in 197 countries, 2006 saw average wages rising by 16.7 percent.
So, the industry will have to do a little balancing act in keeping their profits and staff happy to counter wage inflation and attrition rates as the talent crunch continues.
Indian IT Service Providers Rankings
|
Company
|
Salary |
Salary Satisfaction |
| GlobalLogic |
5 |
14 |
| IBM India |
6 |
27 |
| CSC India |
7 |
9 |
| Tech Mahindra |
9 |
25 |
| Capgemini |
10 |
6 |
| Infosys |
12 |
28 |
| Cognizant |
13 |
14 |
| TCS |
13 |
4 |
| Zensar |
17 |
20 |
| Ness Technologies |
18 |
13 |
Source: The DQ-IDC Best Employer Survey 2007
