To fight attrition, Tata Consultancy Services has decided to relook at their notice period for its Indian employees. From March 2016, the company has decided to extend the notice period to three months from the current 30 days. At the end of the third quarter, the company had reported an attrition rate of 15.9% higher than what it had two years ago with 12-13%. TCS used to have a three-month notice period till 2007 but they had it changed to one month in that year. 

On social media, this move has been criticized immensely. Few called it a ‘chill-out period for the outgoing employees for 3 months’, few even wrote, ‘asking someone to stay for 90 days who has already decided to move on is a bad way to sustain employability’.  Many are of the opinion that why keep an already demotivated employee in the payroll?

But there is also another set of argument which said, for business continuity (since most are project based), it is required to have a 3-month notice period as transition will be smoother. A month-long notice period is too less a time to close a project on which that particular person was working on. 

Indian IT sector is struggling with attrition since with new technologies there are fewer employees who are rightly skilled to pursue those works. 

As per Economic Times, Ajoyendra Mukherjee, Executive Vice President and Global Head of HR at TCS said in a post on the company’s internal site, "The company has reviewed the Notice Period policy and based on employee feedback and prevailing practices decided to revert to the earlier notice period of 90 days served with effect from March 1, 2016. This will be applicable to India-based employees.” Mukherjee added that the notice period was three months until October 2007, when the company decided to change it. A TCS spokesperson confirmed the change but declined to comment to ET.

TCS has well over 300,000 employees, the overwhelming majority of whom are in India.