Mr Srinivas of Chittoor district, an employee of HCL Technologies in Bengaluru, was in a hurry to reach his office as he wanted to break the news of his impending marriage to his colleagues.
However, even before he could settle down on his chair, he was summoned by the human resources manager to either resign or face termination. Poor performance in work was cited as the reason.
As part of cost cutting, many IT companies are now giving pink slips to its employees without any prior notice.
Instead of sacking them straightaway, the companies are adopting new ways to ease them out of their jobs.
One strategy is to conduct tough performance tests. Those who don’t do well in the tests are forced to resign or face termination.
In the last one month, IT majors such as IBM, Wipro, Accenture, Virtusa, SumTotal Systems and HCL have made many employees resign through this method.
Around 20 techies working in the SAP division of the Bengaluru branch of HCL technologies were made to put in papers with five minutes notice. Majority of them were from Andhra. HCL did not even bother to go through performance tests. It is directly asking the employees to resign.
“As per rules, we should get two months notice,” said a techie who lost his job. “But, the HR people are forcing us either to resign or face termination. If our services are terminated, we won’t get experience certificate and relieving letter, which will affect our career. So we are resigning.”
However, Mr Murali Raghavan, global head of SAP practice in HCL, refused to comment on these developments as he was not “authorised” to speak. At the same time, Ms Meena Vaidyanathan, head of external communications at HCL Technologies, said employees were not being sacked. Another IT firm, SumTotal Systems, also took resignation letters from around 20 employees in Hyderabad branch this week after giving five minutes notice.
Courtesy: deccan
