The Proletariat

A tech support provider with around 800 employees, Knoah made it to the top
10 this year with good scores in perks, benefits, and salary parameters.

An important reason for employee satisfaction, according to Kiranmai Dutt,
VP, Learning, is the concept of parity which it introduced to ensure that all
the employees get equal salary. There is no discrimination between employees
working on large clients and those working on small ones. Despite the fact that
several of its customers do offer various incentives for some projects, the
company pools in the incentives and redistributes it to employees, to ensure
that there is no discrimination.

Few other initiatives that drew attention included peer learning sessions by
operational and functional managers as well as skip level and focus group
meetings conducted by senior managers. Expectedly, most employees expressed
their satisfaction with the companys work culture and the career opportunities
it offers.

On the flip side, factors that afflicted employees (leading to higher level
of attrition) included working graveyard shifts as well as less than
satisfactory pay packets. This, notwithstanding the fact that every six months
employees of Knoah got a months salary extra. And like in most BPOs, many were
on the lookout for switching over to IT-related and software functions.

Appraisal proved to be another sore spot with many employees; most felt that
the process was not transparent and did not properly recognize employee efforts.
Dutt believes this perception has largely been due to the introduction of a new
appraisal mechanism during the last financial year, which did away with rating
of employees on a scale of 1 to 5. Instead, it introduced a system based on
qualitative parameters, which classifies the performance based on below,
meeting, above and far above ratings. Through this mechanism the company
wants to ensure that at least 40% employees meet quality standard.