Cloud-enabling hub-and-spoke model helping create a stable workforce: HCL's Sanjay Gupta

The emergence of frontier technologies such as cloud computing is helping HCL Technologies create a hub-and-spoke model, which in turn is helping the company create a more stable workforce, a top executive of the IT services firm said.

"The rate of attrition has been generally very high in IT due to a variety of factors. However, with technologies such as cloud computing coming to the fore, we have been able to create a hub-and-spoke model that lets an employee work out of any location in the world and yet be connected to their team. This is helping us create a much more stable workforce," Sanjay Gupta, executive vice president and program director of HCL's initiative called New Vistas, told TechCircle.

New Vistas, which was started by the company in 2016, is an initiative that aims to provide training, skilling services to freshers and engineering graduates in the country so that they can join HCL's workforce.

Gupta said that HCL has been analyzing the attrition trends of the country in the IT sector and, based on the findings, has come up with the programme that will help to stem its own attrition rate. According to its last quarter results, the company's attrition rate stood at 17.70% compared to 17.80% in the quarter ended December. HCL Technologies' total employee count stood at 1.38 lakh as of March 31 against 1.32 lakh at the end of December quarter.  

Explaining further, Gupta said that the company had found out that there might be several reasons why an employee would want to stay back in his hometown or would want to go back home to work. "This is why we launched two programs called Comeback Home and Stay Rooted under which we looked at different geographic locations where we could open new offices or delivery centres given the condition that there was a lot of talent available," he said.

"We came up with locations such as Lucknow, Madurai and Nagpur. We are about to add our fourth location Vijayawada in the month of January," he explained, adding that there were a total of 8,000 employees under the New Vistas programme and the target was to take the number to 21,000 in the next year.

He also said that by the end of next five years, the company's target was to reach the target of 25% employees as part of the New Vistas category out of the total workforce; this presently stands close to 10%.

In order to increase the efficiency of the programme, Gupta said that the company was also targetting 10+2 candidates and had started their training since 2017. "In the last two years, we have trained 250 people each," he said, adding that the success in the last two years had urged the company to launch a mega recruitment drive for 3,000 people including a 1,000 10+2 candidates.

While the 1,000 candidates will undergo a 12-month training programme in HCL and get a stipend of Rs 10,000 per month post registering for a fee of around Rs 2 lakh, the graduate candidates will undergo a six-month training programme.

Gupta also said that the freshers or 10+2 candidates will also be part of the company's education programme in collaboration with BITS Pilani for a BSc degree in Design and Compute whose 50% fees will be borne by the company. He added that candidates who complete this programme will also be eligible for an M Tech degree later.

"All the 3,000 students will be hired by the company at the Noida Campus," Gupta further said, adding that the company will allow anyone to drop out of the training programme.

Other than the Noida positions, Gupta said that the company at is Lucknow centre has 400 openings for freshers and 500 openings for engineering graduates, "In Nagpur, we have around 200 openings for freshers and 300 openings for engineering graduates," he added.

The New Vistas programme, which has a dedicated staff of 250 people for training and skilling, has an attrition rate of 5%.

When asked about investment into building the four tier-II delivery centres, Gupta didn't give a total figure but said that the Lucknow facility, which is bigger than the company's Noida campus, will an investment of approximately Rs 1,500 crore in the next five years with Rs 500 crore already being invested.