They
don’t talk of Domino’s pizza on the campus, Coffee Day outlets, golf-links
or bowling alleys. They barely mention company-sponsored family meetings. At
Wipro, they have a no-nonsense approach to HR. "We offer basic honesty and
100% professionalism. On compensation we have a stated policy that we will
remain in the 75th percentile. And since 1995, we have a very individualized
rating and appraisal system that takes into account, among other things, the
market value of the employee and the criticality of his job," says Dileep
Ranjekar, corporate executive vice president, Wipro.
Despite the obviously cut-and-dried approach, not very much in fashion these
days, Wipro is rated among the best five employers in the country today. The
reason? A surprisingly philosophical one: Freedom. Ask any Wipro-ite, and he’ll
tell you what he likes most about the company is the freedom to take decisions,
the freedom to speak up and most importantly, the freedom to make mistakes.
This leads directly to two things: a strong sense of loyalty and a steep
learning curve. "Even today, 80% of our top management consists of people
who joined us during campus recruitment, right from 1975 onwards." Ranjekar
himself was a campus recruit: "the first HR professional to join the
company. And I joined at the very bottom rung of the ladder".
This is not to say Wipro hasn’t had its share of employee migrations. The
first wave was in the early 1990s and the last in 1999 when the start-up fever
was high. "We don’t have a trainee-ship concept here. A person comes in
and directly takes on responsibilities. We believe learning on the job is a good
thing. As a result, our people are good in processes. So whenever a new company
is set up or people in the IT sector want to recruit, Wipro is their first
hunting ground," says Ranjekar. It shows. In a recent informal survey done
by the company a couple of months ago they found that at least 70 top people
leading the Indian IT revolution today are former Wipro-ites.
"Professional satisfaction is to have a job that is exciting, that
provides you with a lot of responsibility and intellectual challenge, allows you
to work for world class customers in an environment that provides good peers,
good resources, good induction and training. We provide all of that."
Sometimes, though, that can work the other way round. Everyone today, for
instance, wants to work on leading edge technologies and the inability to do so
is a major source of employee attrition in the IT sector. Wipro deals with this
through a system called Wings. Within where job opportunities in the company,
both domestic and offshore, are announced. Whoever is interested applies and the
internal placement happens after an evaluation of skill set matching.
Internal job rotation, in fact, is an important concept at Wipro. "If
for a project we have a choice between a 100% prepared person who has to be
hired from outside and a person from within the company who is only 60% ready–we
pick the Wipro-ite. This is very important to us. As I said, we believe in
learning on the job," says Ranjekar.
In addition to all of this is of course–money. Starting from a limited ESOP
base of 2—3%, Wipro has enlarged it to about 75%. And recently, Wipro took an
internal decision to create a certain number of millionaires by the year 2003, a
number it is understandably reluctant to divulge. It also one of the few
companies in the country doing an EVA exercise and is currently in the process
of implementing the people capability maturity model (PCMM).
"One sentence which explains our HR philosophy? We have an internal
policy that says: F for Freedom. R for Rewards. E for Excitement. A for Ambition
and K for Knowledge," says Ranjekar. "In two words: FREAKing
Out."
SR