It seems like only yesterday that IT services companies went from being a fearful child, reluctant to undergo this transformation to survive, to being an enterprise that finally embraces it.
In the end, as difficult as it was to give up the lifestyle of application development and infrastructure maintenance, the bread and butter of computing for decades, the big names in uters seem to have understood that the cloud and digital are their future.
Companies all seem to have finally started to devote more and more attention and resources to digital solution architecture, as well as design consulting activities.
Attrition rate
The pandemic has simply added fuel to this trend. As people hunkered down at home, ordering necessities and overdosing on zooms, digital addiction has skyrocketed, and the related need for nimble and flexible solutions has become more urgent.
Businesses rushed to try to improve and innovate their online presence to meet this sudden burst of customer activity, and IT companies began to do the same, with their staff at home, to keep their lights on.
Yet just as the existential crisis of abandoning an old profit-making model and migrating to an ambiguous new model has subsided, another far more serious crisis has arisen from the ashes of the pandemic: attrition .
Attrition rates for IT companies with their back-end in India – that is, most countries in the world, regardless of country of origin – are between 20% and 30% %, which means you’re theoretically replacing your entire workforce, as the journal points out mintapproximately every three and a half years.
A war of attrition
Infosys, for example, saw its churn rate drop from 10.9% in the quarter ending March last year to 27.7% at the end of March this year. Similarly, TCS has gone from an attrition rate of 7.2% last March to 17.4% this year.
The situation has deteriorated so badly that Infosys has notably insisted on a non-competition clause which prevents employees from moving to a competitor or a customer for a period of six months and one year respectively.
How did things come to this? The thing is, even before the pandemic, it was increasingly difficult to find qualified tech talent, especially in the new digital fields that are changing and growing rapidly.
The pandemic-induced explosion of digital solutions has only made matters worse. It has also made many people realize the overly historical significance of a desk-centric existence and the promise of a more balanced and healthier life.
For most of this time, numerous surveys show that employees hardly slackened – in fact, they worked harder than ever – and paradoxically, their productivity and job satisfaction rates were never higher. . The possibility of working from home and taking care of one’s family seemed to indicate a radical new way of conceiving work and, above all, living. But can we really make it a model for the future of work? And is it really beneficial for everyone?
Talent shortage
In this new post-pandemic era, returning to the office full-time is a horrifying prospect for a large portion of workers looking to change jobs or re-enter the workforce. Negotiating a maximum number of work-from-home days per week has become a rule.
Since most businesses today are fueled by technology in increasingly significant ways, from digital storefronts to supply chain infrastructure and more, they could see a significant internal impact.
For the big names in IT, this could be catastrophic, given that a major talent war was already underway in the tech sector before the pandemic hit. In addition, new technological frontiers, such as virtual reality applications or the Web3, whose backbone is blockchain technology, constitute poles of attraction for qualified engineers looking for new challenges and ready to jump ship. for them.
As pointed out ForbesMicrosoft couldn’t do anything to stop its augmented reality team from taking off to work on Meta’s metaverse.
What does this mean for talent and employers? Right now, given the shortage of talent across all industries, tech workers are in the driver’s seat and could get some major concessions. But it could turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory.
The threats of automation
Ultimately, as industry expert Phil Fersht, founder of research organization HFS, points out, talent looking to maximize their work-from-home privileges can continue to make leaps and bounds until they are satisfied.
However, there will come a time when many of these features can be replaced by increasingly sophisticated automation, which will also reduce costs for employees. Which means it will take constant sophistication to stay relevant.
Home-based workers will also find it more difficult to constantly and organically learn from and share with their colleagues in the office. These are elements that prove crucial when it comes to finding relentlessly innovative design solutions, as well as team-oriented execution that becomes a sine qua non for winning valuable contracts. and the associated high-margin consulting business.
Zoom meetings may never be able to replace the benefits of physically meeting in a room to imagine or develop solutions, or of going to offices to brainstorm ideas.
In the short term, however, the pressure is on IT majors to convince employers to return to the office. As Phil Fersht pointed out, it’s simply impossible to serve international customers if a third of the workforce is constantly changing jobs. This reality should also unsettle today’s and tomorrow’s tech worker who has grown accustomed to the comforts of the home office.
Source: ZDNet.com