Recently I read an article in the business section of our newspaper and began smiling which is unusual when I read this particular section.
There was an article on how one of the largest software services company in India was now going make *certain additions* to the contract which they make their engineers sign the day they join. These additions in short prohibited the engineers to join any company on whose projects they might work during their employment with this COMPANY and also prohibited them from joining certain companies that this COMPANY defined as competitors. This was one of the efforts made by the company to stem employees jumping jobs. Other larger software firms are believed to be following the same.
Ok so this is a REAL BAD SIGN as even one of the largest software firms in India has not been able to control its attrition rate even though it doles out the some of the most expensive employee retention & benefit schemes in India.
My smile was due to the fact, that it was some these very same large companies that have caused this employee retention problem and employees jumping jobs. In their quest of employing 1000s of engineers to match their expansion plans, they broke all possible ethical rules of engagement. From encouraging engineers to leave their current companies without giving notice periods to remunerating them for the breaking contracts with previous employers.
Of course one would say all is fair and it is the survival of the fittest. Little did they realize, the devastation they left in their wake with their recruitment drives. Smaller companies missed deadlines, lost clients and even had to shut down as they had just lost entire teams to these large companies.
No, I am not trying to say that you cannot target employees from other companies. I just feel all should adhere to certain basic ethical rules of engagement, the simplest being insist that the engineers must fulfill/honor their previous contract & commitments and then move to the new job.
I still recall going to a NASSCOM meeting where this very issue of was being discussed and I remember very distinctively that several small and medium scale companies were trying to get these large scale companies to understand that employee retention FOR ALL is based largely on big companies not poaching or snatching employees from smaller companies without certain rules of engagement and representatives of these large companies didnt even think it was worth a discussion. It was survival of the fittest as far as they were concerned.
Well now they in turn are facing the same problem, their operations now getting affected due to problem they were a cause of years ago.
They seem to have forgotten "What goes around. Comes around!”
