Tech firms empty their bench in this season of layoffs

Back when he was at Mindtree, Ashok Soota banned the use of the word 'bench', preferring to call this period 'investment time'. This approach has carried over to the company he founded, Happiest Minds, where employees who are not working on a project are either being reskilled, involved in internal projects or are functioning as shadow resources for an existing team.“There will always be people between projects; it is incumbent on us to use the time to invest in the person and invest in our programmes,“ said Soota, executive chairman of Happiest Minds.

Mindtree, meanwhile, has brought in the concept of an 'uberised workforce' or an internal marketplace where employees can view open projects and apply to work on something outside their vertical. Ram C Mohan, head-automation, Mindtree, said: “As the organisational silos grow, you lose visibility of people who may be suitable for a role. This is very effective as employees can pick and choose opportunities based on what they want. While it is important to optimise costs as maintaining an extended bench can be financially taxing, it also has a negative effect on the people.“

As manpower costs rise and new projects slow down, IT companies are realising that it is no longer feasible to keep a large number of people idle on the bench, a term as old as the industry itself. Traditionally, IT firms have always hired more people than are needed at any given time based on growth projections so that work on new projects can be started right away.

While the exact numbers vary, most firms average a utilisation rate in the mid-70s, meaning that there are at least a few thousand people who are between projects at any given time. Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka recently likened the Infosys bench to Amazon Web Services and Uber.

“Zero Bench is a next-generation people initiative that aims to maximise the potential of our talent who are in between projects, i.e. on bench. We want to ensure that every employee is actively contributing towards organisation's goals by opening up opportunities for short duration work assignments. We do this through an open, disintermediated internal marketplace called “Accelerate“. This is a gamified platform for people to post modular work based on their project requirements and for anyone on bench in Infosys to sign up for the same,“ said Richard Lobo, head-HR, Infosys.

Over the past two years, 40,000-plus work packets were created, and Sikka said that 2,000 ideas had already been implemented by the firm. Similarly, Pune-headquartered Persistent Systems too has put in place a dedicated programme aimed at reskilling people who aren't on projects.

Mrityunjay Singh, president, Persistent Systems said: “In 2015, we did away with the concept of the bench -some of our employees are on projects paid for by customers and so aren't. These people work on shortterm proof of concepts to solve customer problems or create new things,“ he said. The company routinely holds hackathons for this set of employees to enable them to experiment with new ideas.

Cost pressures aside, automation is another big factor that is pushing companies towards better utilising the bench strength. As the number of people required carrying out traditional tasks shrinks, companies have no choice but to reskill their people.