Satyam, Tech Mahindra talk to staff, allay job loss fears

Employees of Mahindra Satyam and Tech Mahindra need not sweat. None of them would be laid off just because these two companies are merging, a top official told DNA.

In fact, senior managements of both companies have started investing a lot of time reaching out to every single staffer at every location, thus trying to allay any fears of retrenchment since the merger was rolled out, said L Ravichandran, Tech Mahindra president, IT services.

“There’s not going to be any layoff because of the merger,” assured Ravichandran after an event to mark an agreement between Tech Mahindra and Indian Statistical Institute on knowledge sharing in analytics for the telecom vertical. “This is not a new marriage. It was on the cards for the last two years. So, it’s not a surprise. We know utilisation of staff in both the places. Also, we have been jointly planning on campus recruitment and going to management institutions,” Ravichandran explained.

It’s the same reasoning both the companies are playing out before every staffer to make them stop worrying about their career after some speculative media reports started surfacing on threats of impending layoff. “We have started a large amount of communication. I personally did all-hands meeting in Pune, and addressed the staff in Kolkata (on Friday). Various leaders are also addressing other staff. One thing which we are giving comfort to them is that we (Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam) have been working together as joint go-to-market for the past two-and-a-half years. And we have been jointly working (on staff deployment): if I had excess people, then we used to do Mahindra Satyam projects.”

Both the companies, however, need to merge their human resource departments.

The challenge is not big though, as staff overlapping particularly on the operational side — a factor that always poses the biggest threat to merger disruption — is just about 1%.

“That is too good to be true, but it is true,” he added.

“From the IT staff point of view, we need to match because in every company in our IT industry there is no standard grade, nomenclature or title. Only when it reaches vice-president’s level, it is common. Below that somebody will be called a project manager while somebody might be called a team leader. There could be other differences like in the number of leaves that people in the two companies are entitled to. Those are the things we are working on. But since we were going out together at the campuses, we have already standardised the salary structure,” he said when asked about the HR issues that the merged entity need to address.

Post-merger, while the new company would be given a new name, Tech Mahindra would retain its strong brand identity in the telecom space created after serving the sector for the past 25 years. “We are looking at making Tech Mahindra a telecom vertical. Deep domain and customer knowledge is one of our biggest strengths gained from working on one vertical for 25 years. Who want to lose that? That focus will be there. In the combined entity (share of telecom) is 45%, so we want to keep our telecom supremacy,” he clarified.