Poor office attendance? Forget performance bonus, TCS tells employees

Employees with less than 60% attendance at office, or those who have attended office for less than three out of five days a week, will not receive any performance bonus, according to an internal memo issued by Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) to its employees in the early hours of 18 April. Mint has seen a copy of the memo.

In a move aimed at cracking down at those who have been irregular or reluctant to work from office, TCS has linked its work-from-office policies to its quarterly variable pay or annual bonus.

The internal memo also stated that employees consistently neglecting the ‘85% and above’ office attendance requirements may face “disciplinary action.”

Queries emailed to TCS remained unanswered until press time.

Stating that seat availability at TCS’ physical locations will be taken into account while considering the performance bonus payable to employees, the company memo added that valid exceptions to the said directives must be recorded and approvals for the same must be taken through the company’s internal portal for employee-related functions, Ultimatix.

Employees who come to office on four or more days in a week will receive 100% of the performance bonus decided by the company management for the period whereas those between 75% and 85% attendance will receive 75% of the performance bonus.

Employees between 60% and less than 75% office attendance will receive half the performance bonus.

In addition, the software services company has made it compulsory for its employees to attend office for 45 hours a week, or nine hours a day.

“There is a quarterly variable pay which is never paid in full and to top that off, the company has linked it to return-to-office norms,” said an employee on condition of anonymity.

A variable pay is given to employees on the basis of their performance over and above their base salary on a quarterly and/or an annual basis. The amount of variable pay varies from period to period and is decided by the company.

Mint had reported on 18 April that TCS has used office attendance as a metric while rolling out salary hikes. Now, the software services company has used these metrics to determine variable pay.

This development, which will make TCS the only Indian IT company to link variable payouts to its return-to-office mandate, follows TCS’s attempts to bring its employees back to office.

In February last year, TCS had first asked employees to turn up in office at least thrice a week. In January this year, employees were told to work from the office five days a week.

Earlier this year, the Mumbai-based IT company had warned its employees of consequences if they did not return to office by March.

TCS warned its employees in an internal memo that failure to work from office by March would impact their appraisals and performance reports, Mint had reported on 9 February.

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Published: 22 Apr 2024, 08:39 PM IST