Intel’s rolls out new global rewards policy for 1.2 lakh employees

Leading chipmaker Intel Corporation has come up with a quarterly rewards and recognition (R&R) program for its 1,20,000 global employees. Intel’s new practice comes at a time when the tech sector is striving to attract and retain employees with better benefits and work experience in a post Covid world.

“You’ve got to reward people for the work that they do. And you also get to reward people in terms of an outcome and people like to see tangible feeling kind of a thing,” said Vijay Colaco, HR director for Intel India.

The quarterly R&R covering all Intel employees was rolled out six months ago and they are over and above the annual appraisal cycle. . The quarterly reviews could also lead to monetary/non-monetary benefits. “So, it could be either through a money or higher education or could be various ways you could use multiple levels to actually recognize and reward your employees,” Colaco told Mint.

Intel’s new policy comes on the back of record attrition faced in a tech sector where firms are grappling with strategies to retain employees.

Infosys, Wipro, Tata consultancy Services (TCS) and HCL posted record high attrition in the March end quarter compared to same period last year. Infosys had an attrition rate of 27.7% while TCS‘ was 17.4%. Rival Wipro clocked an attrition of 23.8% while that of HCL technologies was 21.9% in the January-March quarter. 

“Employee engagements have to become more often than an annual discussion during appraisal. More IT and ITes companies are coming up with quarterly R&R programs. Going ahead annual cycles will only be used for corrections and inflation adjusted hikes,” said Guruprasad Srinivasan, group chief executive of recruitment firm Quess Corp.

Srinivasan pointed out that it was the BFSI, Retail sectors which had monthly and quarterly incentives and R&R programs for its sales teams. Now,the concept is getting adopted across profiles and sectors.

Recruiters have told Mint that after a two year work from home policy, as companies ask employees to get back to office, budgetary allocations towards R&R have to increase as employees need more incentives.

Besides tech services companies mentioned above, product firms and other tech companies are also facing the brunt of hiring frenzy taking place after a two-year lull. Colaco said that Intel’s attrition was “below the average semiconductor, IT sector”.

The India HR head said that the latest form of R&R is not a top down approach. “I think that’s certainly working because in the past would be like tops down. Manager tells you to do these 10 things and people say ...I’ve delivered now what next and I don’t want to do this anymore. I’ll go do something else,” said Colaco.

But this whole co-created approach is something that’s very unique to Intel today and added to that we run a quarterly engagement activity between the manager and the employee where you do discussions.

According to Colaco, the employee needs to know how his work is impacting at a broader organisation level and is he “touching the big picture”.

“We have gotten managers to start focusing working on the individuals to start understand the purpose, the vision, and the impact of their work...when you bring in a co-created methodology between a manager and employee, the sense of purpose and the sense of gratification also starts coming in and you see that quickly on quarter-on-quarter basis.‘ said the HR director.