Every company wants the best rating from their employees. But not every employee is willing to give the best rating to the employers.
While L&T and Mindtree go about their moves in the hostile takeover, what do their employees think? From an employee perspective, that could perhaps be the most authentic rating of the companies – L&T Infotech, L&T Technology Services and Mindtree. The anonymous responses and rating for a company by its current and former employees gives away a lot of information which may otherwise not be available in the public domain.
A quick comparison of the three companies throws up some interesting trend.
Mindtree trumps the L&T companies by a comfortable margin in being recommended to friends. This is the strongest indicator of what its current and past employees think about their company and its values.
The approval of its CEO on Glassdoor also has a higher rating compared to the other two, though the margin is lesser. Again, with a lesser margin, the business outlook for Mindtree is also better. These ratings show that Mindtree employees think highly of their company.
On other counts like culture and values as well as work-life balance, the rating for Mindtree is better. It is the same in the matter of career opportunities—an important thing in the IT services space where work straddles different time zones. Mindtree scores over career opportunities that are emerging for technology leaders of tomorrow though the L&T companies make more revenue. Growth rate higher than the industry average is what make for better career opportunities at Mindtree.
It is worth taking a look at another platform, Indeed.com, for evaluating the companies on various parameters. Mindtree’s culture and work-life balance, as an organisation, has more people giving thumbs-up to it while it loses out on how employees perceive the management to L&T Technology Services.
According to the scores on Indeed, Glassdoor’s rival, the career opportunities at L&T Technology Services is as good as Mindtree. But L&T Infotech is a laggard on that count.
Why these ratings matter
In the case of L&T and Mindtree, L&T will find it difficult to justify spending well over $1 billion if it is unable convince employees of Mindtree about its point of view. Since this is a people’s business, the onus of convincing is with the acquiring company.
Glassdoor and Indeed are platforms which professionals use to study a company before applying to it for jobs. Inputs by industry colleagues help them decide whether they should consider working for a particular company. These websites are tracked by HR departments, too.
In the Indian context, Glassdoor is considered more popular than Indeed and has a lot more followers across sectors. Since the perception among potential hires about them matters a lot, companies factor in ratings on these platforms while tweaking their HR policies.
Views are personal.
The author is founder consultant, Carre4re Consulting.
