Wipro, the country’s third largest software services exporter, has shifted focus from hiring in large numbers to re-skilling and training employees. In the third quarter, Wipro managed to sustain attrition rates for the sixth quarter in a row. In an interview with BusinessLine , Saurabh Govil, Senior Vice-President & Global HR Head, Wipro, shared his aspiration to bring down attrition to 14 per cent, improve utilisation and keep employee perception scores high. Edited excerpts:

Your net employee addition is a low 2,268 in Q3 compared to TCS’ 9,071 and Infosys’ 5,407. How do you rationalise these low numbers?

Earlier, IT service companies focused largely on hiring, today the focus for most companies, including Wipro, has shifted to training and re-skilling to match client requirements in a highly changing and dynamic environment. This is reflected in our low net employee addition this quarter.

We plan to put 5,000 experienced and tenured employees in the middle management B3 band through the Newton’s Cradle re-skilling programme, introduced last year. These are employees with 7-8 years of experience who are team leads or project leads.

We have identified over 2,500 such employees who are going through the re-skilling programme, after which they will be put into relevant projects, giving them the opportunity to continuously learn and grow; while they are replaced with fresh blood who will get opportunities to take on higher responsibilities.

Why has employee utilisation dropped by 4.3 percentage points to 78 per cent this quarter, which is way below TCS’ 84.9 per cent and Infosys’ 80.6?

We have huge headspace to improve employee utilisation, which has dipped by 4.3 per cent in Q3.

But, this dip was accounted for, and is because of our plan to train around 10,000 employees in digital technologies during the year.

Moreover, our Next-Gen Delivery roll-out across 93 large accounts during this fiscal helped to release over 4,300 employees who are now being trained and redeployed into newer technologies.

All this, combined with employees going on annual leave in Q3 has brought down utilisation rates this quarter, which we plan to improve over the next few.

Spiralling attrition rates which plagued Wipro for long have been successfully stabilised through the last six quarters. Have you reached your sweet spot?

Thankfully attrition is no longer a question that is put to us by the media, analysts or the business. This is because, we have successfully stabilised attrition in the 16 per cent band in the last six quarters.

In Q3, attrition dropped by 50 bps to 16.3 per cent from 16.8 per cent in Q2 and we will push for this every quarter until we reach the 14 per cent band. While the 16 per cent band is our new normal, ideally we want to hit the 14 per cent band.

As per our biennial Employee Perception Survey conducted in 2015, our employee engagement scores went up by 1 per cent and employee participation scores went up by 4 per cent. We are introducing a new framework for employee engagement and participation, which is currently work in progress and will be announced by our CEO-designate, Abidali Neemuchwala very soon.

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