Lengthy Notice Period Creating Anxiety Among IT Employees

Employees of IT companies in a survey by Hush, an Employee focused HR tech platform, reveals that 83 percent of them said the government should stipulate the notice period to a month. Harrowed over the misuse of the notice period, employees also pointed towards that the three month notice period is used as a mere retention tool by employers and creates anxiety for the employee on notice period.

The survey findings of ‘India Employee Survey’ by Hush was compiled with inputs from 2800 employees of IT companies such as TCS, Wipro, and Accenture across Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Chennai.

With millennials entering the IT workforce, currently, there is a lack of clarity on legalities governing notice period policies in India which is an important employee concern. This leads to many big MNCs exploiting it in the form of a coercive tool. Another interesting finding is that 8 out every 10 play a part with an employee being relieved earlier than their stipulated notice period. Depending upon one’s affinity with their immediate manager/boss and the business criticality, the relieving time also gets shortened.

Knowledge transfer is another debated issue in this sector, as 91 percent of employees are of the opinion that efficient knowledge transfer is not a valid explanation that warrants a prolonged notice period. If knowledge transfer requires more than 45 days, it means that there is over-dependency on a single person in a particular project, which is not the ideal situation to have in a collaborative team environment. 

A majority of these employees (93 percent) said that they were inconvenienced by a 3 month notice period and were forced to miss out on better opportunities. Therefore, around 83 percent feel that 1-month is the ideal length of a notice period that IT companies should enforce. 

Ashutosh Dabral, Co-founder & CEO, Hush said, “Committed to understanding the issues faced by millennials today at their workplaces, the objective of our surveys is to highlight these conversations with employers and the regulators, wherever necessary. Our anonymous platform, therefore, provides them with the space to interact with each other and vent out their thoughts without any prior inhibitions.”

With IT employees feeling the maximum pressure here, this is ideally an important conversation that IT companies need to start within the system. On a macro level, the larger policy goal to be taken up with the Ministry should be to cap the maximum limit of notice periods to a much shorter.

Rajguru Tandon

BW Reporters The author is a correspondent with BW Businessworld with keen interest in HR and employee welfare.