The Great Place To Work Institute announced its second annual list of India’s Best Companies To Work For in IT & ITeS, 2016. Adobe Systems India, Google India, and Microsoft India are among the 50 Best IT & ITeS workplaces, which were identified based on comprehensive country-wide engagement survey of over 36,500 employees from 145 IT & ITeS companies. The top 50 were identified based on an assessment of employee perceptions gauged using the engagement survey and an audit of company practices.

The Top 50 companies are: (in Alphabetical order)

1. Admiral Technologies
2. Adobe Systems India Pvt Ltd
3. Aegis Ltd
4. Ajuba Solutions India Pvt Ltd
5. Aristocrat Technologies India Pvt Ltd
6. Aspire Systems (India) Pvt Ltd
7. BT Global Business Services (GBS)
8. Cadence Design Systems India
9. Cisco Systems India Pvt Ltd
10. Citius Tech Healthcare Technology Pvt Ltd
11. EMC India
12. Encore Capital Group (Midland Credit Management India Pvt Ltd)
13. ESDS Software Solution Pvt Ltd
14. Global Analytics India Pvt Ltd
15. Google India Pvt Ltd
16. Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt Ltd
17. Here Solutions India Pvt Ltd
18. Hitachi Consulting Software Services India Pvt Ltd
19. Hitachi Data Systems India Pvt Ltd
20. Impetus Infotech (I) Pvt Ltd
21. iNautix Technologies India Pvt Ltd
22. InfoBeans Technologies
23. Innominds Software Pvt Ltd
24. Intuit India Product Development Centre Pvt Ltd
25. John Deere Technology Centre
26. Kantars GDC
27. Kronos Incorporated
28. Microsoft Corporation India Pvt Ltd
29. NetApp India Pvt Ltd
30. Nuance Transcription Services India Pvt Ltd
31. OSSCube Solutions
32. PayPal India Pvt Ltd
33. Pitney Bowes Software India Pvt Ltd
34. QA InfoTech (P) Ltd
35. RMS Risk Management Solutions India Pvt Ltd
36. Sabre Travel Technologies Pvt Ltd
37. Salesforce.com
38. SAP India Pvt Ltd
39. SAP Labs India Pvt Ltd
40. SAS Institute (India) Pvt Ltd
41. SAS Research and Development Pvt Ltd
42. Shriram Value Services Ltd
43. Standard Chartered, Scope International Pvt Ltd
44. Talentica Software India Pvt Ltd
45. Teleperformance India
46. ThoughtWorks Technologies India Pvt Ltd
47. VMware Software India Pvt Ltd
48. Xoriant Solutions Pvt Ltd
49. YASH Technologies Pvt Ltd
50. Zifo RnD Solutions

Overall, unique benefits, work-life balance and fair pay were found to be the foundations for a superior employee experience, based on findings relating to what the best IT & ITeS workplaces are doing to accelerate employee performance and engagement. 

Prasenjit Bhattacharya, CEO, Great Place To Work® Institute India said, “As companies in this sector continue to evolve and adapt newer strategies, their success is directly proportional to their ability to attract, engage and retain talent. In our survey this year, the IT & ITeS sector accounted for nearly one-third of the companies we studied across the Indian industries. The industry’s clear focus on creating a great employee experience is therefore striking.”

Based on an analysis of factors that drive the perception of a great workplace, it was found that to meet the challenge of engaging and retaining ta lent in this sector, leaders should consciously work towards instilling a sense of pride in the workplace, providing ample opportunities for career growth, building team spirit, and demonstrating genuine care for employees. In addition, practising egalitarian treatment and giving employees adequate freedom to do their work were found to have strong correlation with employee intention to remain in the organization, thus having implications for retention.

Amit Phadnis, President, Engineering and India Site Leader at Cisco Systems, affirms that audits play a key role in streamlining expectations and execution making a great workplace. “The audits are a great way to get grounds up information on effectiveness of employee engagement initiatives across the organisations. This has certainly helped us in understanding the challenges in communications aspects of the initiatives and in some cases effectiveness of implementations. We look at it as a direct customer feedback and use the information to adapt our initiatives and their implementation accordingly.”

Indeed, MNCs like Cisco Systems dominated the Top 50, with 47% MNCs featuring among the Best in IT & ITeS companies compared to just 20% of non-MNCs making the list. Other key companies to be featured in the list include SAP India, Intel India and PayPal. Employees from MNCS express far more positive perceptions about the workplace, compared to those from non-MNCs. Unique benefits, work-life balance, and fair share of profits were the top 3 areas where MNCs fared better over Indian companies.

On similar lines, we find that the “start-ups” (less than 5 years of operation) studied offer a far superior experience in all areas covered in the survey compared to more established organizations, with the top 3 areas being celebrations at work, tolerance to mistakes, and accessibility of managers. Even though more than 80% of the companies studied had 5+ years of operations under their belt, these findings are compelling considering the significant number of jobs created by start-up – 80,000 in FY15, according to a NASSCOM study.

Sharon Andrew, Happiness Evangelist at Happiest Minds, one of the start-ups among the Top 50, vouched for the fact that that engagement is a conscious business strategy. “For a company with a mission statement of ‘Happiest People. Happiest Customers’, participating in the Great Place to Work assessment has helped us evaluate ourselves and initiate policies, processes and initiatives such as iAppreciate, Happiness Evangelism Index, the Mindful Manager program, to name a few. This structured and sustained endeavour has led us to being featured in the Top 50 in India’s Best Companies to Work for in IT & ITeS, 2016.” Other start-ups featured in the top 50 list include BT Global Business Services and Aristocrat Technologies India Pvt Ltd.

Dubbed India’s Silicon Valley, Bengaluru was unsurprisingly the most popular location for IT companies assessed. While the city accounts for the headquarters of nearly one-quarter (24%) of the best workplaces this year, including Happiest Minds, Intuit, Cisco, Salesforce and EMC India in this study; it is also the base for 21% of the companies in assessed this study. Bengaluru, Noida, Chennai, Mumbai, and Gurgaon alone account for 64% of the total study population, and more than three-fourths (76%) of the best companies in IT & ITeS.