Infosys will pay its employees for mining accounts through innovation, revamps its ‘zero distance’ programme

Infosys wants to send across a message to its clients that they are not just vendors but partners. In a bid to encourage its employees to provide innovation and enhanced quality to its clients, it is pushing its ‘zero distance’ programme again.

Under this zero distance programme, which was started by CEO Vishal Sikka when he had joined the company in 2014, the main idea is to mine different accounts.

Now, that the programme will be effected for all of the company's 9,500 projects as Infosys is looking at monetising the programme.

"They are creating an incentive mechanism so that every project manager can mine accounts, create a Zero Distance template and turn that into a project. It's a way to boost mining accounts because now, it is not just a sales team selling but every project manager can up-sell and cross-sell," an executive told ET.


While client mining, Infosys is hoping to get more business from its existing clients.

Infosys said its top 10 customers spend almost $1billion on IT, it gets only $250 million of revenue from them.

Through ‘zero distance’, Infosys will earn revenue even from the employees who are sitting on the bench, through its Zero Bench initiative.
“When they were building the proof of concept, it was not being billed. But if the ideas turn into projects, then you have turned your bench into a productive resource that will actually boost margins," the person told ET.

An executive at Infosys, requesting anonymity, told ET there were monetisation plans in the works for Zero Distance, but incentives for project managers had not yet been firmed up.