Wipro becomes the first Indian IT company to totally overhaul its appraisal system

It was only last year that Wipro, country’s third largest software exporter, had rolled out an ambitious pilot exercise across the company. Under the program, the company had ditched the traditional "bell-curve" appraisal system for a majority of its employees.

Now, Wipro is implementing a new evaluation system which would stress more on frequent, quarterly feedbacks, which were earlier a one-time process that happened annually.

"Traditionally, we've looked at elements including bell curves, building differentiation, categorization, etc. We wanted to make the process of giving feedback more frequent and our performance management system to be an ongoing coaching based process rather than just a one-time annual exercise," said Saurabh Govil, chief HRO at Wipro.

The IT industry of the country is valued at $160-billion as of now, and is undergoing the biggest transitional period in its history.

Wipro’s rivals, Infosys and HCL, are undergoing the process of ditching the "bell curve" appraisal, but Wipro has become the first IT services company which has had a full appraisal cycle without applying the bell curve.

"Last year, we rolled out a pilot of our revised performance appraisal system. In the first phase of the pilot we did away with the bell curve for 80 per cent of the workforce," said Govil.

As part of the new appraisal system, Wipro will allocate performance-linked compensation budgets to its managers. This would empower managers to take individual decisions related to employee appraisals. In the previous system, however, managers had to be conventional with the bell-curve bandwidth.

"We felt that managers are taking much more ownership, and being more accountable in the revised performance managed system. We found them saying - it's my decision and it is not something that is being prescribed to me. And this exercise has also ushered in more transparency as it is based on a rating based on their goals and objectives for the year," said Govil.

In the second phase of the pilot program, Wipro is thinking of rolling out this exercise for most managerial-level employees, and would cover the remaining 20% of employees.