HCL Tech's one-time Rs 700 cr bonus for staff on crossing $10 bn revenue

Applies to employees who have spent a year with HCL; a large number of visas unused due to Covid

HCL Technologies today announced a one-time special bonus to employees around the world as it crossed the $10 billion revenue mark. The bonus, amounting to approximately $90 million (around Rs 650 crore), will be paid to employees in February. It will include payroll taxes applicable in some countries amounting to $6-7 million.

Employees with one year or more of service will receive this bonus, the equivalent of ten days’ salary. By that norm around 120,000 employees at HCL Tech will receive this bonus.

“Our employees are our most valuable assets. Despite an unrelenting pandemic, each and every member of our HCL family has demonstrated immense commitment and passion, contributing to the growth of the organisation. With this gesture, we want to sincerely express our gratitude to our employees and their families for all their support,” said Apparao V V, Chief Human Resources Officer, HCL Technologies.

The company had crossed the $10 billion mark in calendar year 2020, delivering a year-on-year growth of 3.6 per cent. 

 

At present 90 per cent of HCL employees are working from home. This is lowest compared to the other IT players who still have 95-96 per cent of staff working from home. Apparao is also confident that over time, close to 30 per cent of its workforce will be able to WFH. “This also depends on the vaccination drive. But, the number of people coming to office is going up even as we speak. Our aim at present is to have at least employees come to office one day a week,” he added.

Apparao while thanking the employees also stated that the firm was ready well in time to deal with the scenario of employees working from home. “We realised in January itself that this will hit us anytime. We constituted the executive crisis management team that constitutes 40-45 people right from CXOs to business heads and had out first meeting as early as January 27,” said Apparao.

HCL Tech recently announced that it has won a five-year digital workforce services agreement with Airbus. With customers getting comfortable with a virtual work environment, Apparao shared that the mix of onshore and offshore is tilting towards the latter. “We have seen in some cases the demand for onsite workers coming down to 10 per cent. In terms of ramp ups too we are seeing a higher demand of it in India,” said Apparao.

 

With travel restrictions on due to Covid the company has not been able to utilize the visas it received. “We already have surplus visas. Whatever we had applied for last year we did not even use 20 per cent of the visas. Many of our employees who had received visa could not travel due to restrictions,” he added. HCL Tech has close to 20,000 employees in the US and of which 70 per cent are locals.

Giving credit to its employees on delivering on customer projects, Apparao shared that getting employees to work from home meant enabling them with all the support tools. This meant procuring laptops, extra batteries, high-speed data dongles and increased usage level of bandwidth. “When the lockdown was announced in March, 96 per cent of our employees were able to work from home,” said Apparao. He further added that enabling employees to work was just one part, the other element that needed to be taken care of was the wellbeing of these employees.