Cognizant delays salary hikes and promotion by 3 months
IT major, Cognizant has decided to delay salary hikes and promotions for employees for 3 months due to rising business costs and visa curbs, as per media report. The new salary scale and promotions will be effective from October 1, as reported by Business Standard.
Looking at the grim situation of the IT sector, employees were not even expecting promotions from the company but the email Chief People Officer, Jim Lennox surprised them.
As reported by ET, the email stated that employees up to the level of manager will get percentage rise to their base salary, employees who fall in the bracket of senior manager and above, apart from the performance-based bonus, they will receive lump sum payout in relation to increasing salary every month.
With regard to promotions the letter stated that promotions of senior VP and higher will be announced separately and the news of promotion of those up to the level of VP will be shared soon and would be effective from October 1st.
This letter of communication comes at a time when recently employees were condemning company for unreasonable forced resignation. This also led CTS President Rajeev Mehta to email employees last month that they are not laying off staff.
Off late, cognizant was in news for controversial reasons, where People Matters reported that eight individuals had petitioned the Labour Department, with complaints against Cognizant, for forcing them to resign after a performance-based HR review. Cognizant, on their part, have claimed that they have not undertaken any such coerced layoffs.
Following meetings with the representatives of the Forum for IT Employees (FITE) and Cognizant, the Chennai labour commissioner has directed the affected employees to officially raise an industrial dispute under Section 2A of the Industrial Disputes Act, according to a Financial Express report.
The news of promotions and salary even though delayed by three months still is a good news as cognizant, reported earlier , had announced major layoff of more than 6000 employees, after it concluded its performance appraisal process. Up till December last year, Cognizant employed around 260,000 employees globally, with a majority of them (75 percent) working in India. In 2016, they fired around two per cent of their employees, and approximately one percent of their employees were sacked in 2015.