A Couple of Days Off?

India heads the list when it

comes to giving employees time off. Apart from weekends, the country has around

23 other holidays anually. All told, that’s a quarter of every year off!

Laser Soft to

recruit 200 professionals



Chennai-based Laser

Soft Infosystems (LSIL) will recruit 200 software professionals in the

next six months. At present, it has 450 employees at its nine development

centers in India and Muscat. "We will utilize local talent to make

Indian products match international standards and focus on long term gains

for the country," said B Suresh Kamath, chairman and managing

director of LSIL in a press release issued recently.

Deutsche Bank to cut 9% of its global workforce



Deutsche Bank AG said it would

fire as many as 130 operations and information technology support staff in

Asia, as Europe’s biggest bank tries to rein in costs. "The

downsizing will be executed in the next few weeks across 13 countries in

the Asia Pacific region," said Karen Bell, Deutsche Bank’s Asia

Pacific chief information officer for global technology and operations.

"As part of Deutsche Bank’s global cost reduction programme, the

decision has been made to reduce staff numbers by approximately 130 in our

technology and operations support organization," Singapore-based Bell

said. The Deutsche Bank is eliminating 9,200 jobs, or 9% of its global

workforce.

Change in compensation structure



How do you use compensation as a

human resource management (HRM) technique to attract, retain and develop

premium talent? How should HR professionals sharpen their strategic and

negotiation skills to obtain a favorable ‘buy in’ for compensation

strategies from the ‘cost-sensitive finance functions of the company’?

How can compensation address some of the cultural issues of lifestyle and

social expectations of professionals of corporate India? A demonstrative

workshop was hosted by the LR Management Education Institute in Mumbai to

address these contemporary issues that HR professionals confront in

developing compensation systems in an organization. Commenting on the

emerging trends in calculating compensation, Pranesh Sarangi, manager-HR

at IBM India said, "Compensation systems today are moving from a

system of determining salary-scales on complex hierarchies and layers to a

system of broadbanding. This means, right from the entry level to

leadership, there are fewer layers as hierarchies with the difference in

salary scales vary substantially from one band to

another."

India tops the holiday chart



When it comes to granting

holidays to its employees, Indian companies are the best. India has an

average of 23.8 holidays every year, apart from the weekly off on Sunday.

The Americans get an average of 9.2 holidays over and above the weekend

every year, the United Kingdom has 7.8 days, and Japan 14.8. Just in case

you thought Indians actually put in less work, here’s the balancing

factor- most Indian companies follow the six-day working week, where the

norm is five days in most other countries. This data emerged from a

detailed study carried out by financialcalendar.com, a database of holiday

and trading hour data, which drew a comparison of holidays in 130

countries.