Tata Consultancy Services faced more attrition among women than men.
‘Unusual’ trend acknowledged
Acknowledging this trend, noting it is ‘unusual’, Tata Consultancy Services Chief Human Resources Officer Milind Lakkad cited that ending work from home could be one of the reasons behind the same.
Lakkad, in TCS annual report 2022-23 said – “Historically, women’s attrition at TCS has been similar or lower than men’s attrition, so this is unusual.
WFH among top reasons
There might be other reasons but intuitively, I would think working from home during the pandemic reset the domestic arrangements for some women, keeping them from returning to office even after everything normalized.”
He noted that higher attrition among women in FY 2023 was a setback to TCS’ efforts to promote gender diversity.
He said that the company is increasing its efforts and that focused leadership development programs like iExcel are driving tremendous change.
Among hiring
“Of all the leadership positions fulfilled with internal candidates in FY 2023, women made up 23% of the selected candidates, even though they account for only 14% of the applicant pool.
This speaks well of the quality of the women candidates in our leadership pool as well as the supportive attitudes of our business leaders in promoting diversity.
Likewise, in our external hiring, women make up 38.1% of our net hires this year, versus 35.7% in our workforce,” he added.
Organizational culture
He continued, “Work from home is definitely more convenient for everybody, but there were drawbacks… Workplace essentials like collaboration, mentorship and team building suffered a lot in these two years.
Then there is the matter of organizational culture.
Over half of our workforce, today was hired after March 2020.
New employees get acculturated through physical interactions with senior colleagues and leaders, by observing and following their behaviors and ways of thinking.
Without those interactions, employee engagement as well as acculturation got badly impacted.
All these factors led us to gradually bring back people to our offices during the year.”
Financials
According to its annual report for 2022-23, the company emphasised the new domain it will be investing in on a mid-term and short term basis.
Its shares traded higher on Wednesday and closed at Rs 3274.55 apiece, higher by Rs 42.25 (1.31 per cent).
