Stepping away from the workstation? Cognizant says think again

About a month ago, the Nasdaq-listed firm, which is also eyeing a listing on Indian bourses, launched a course to familiarize managers with workforce management tools such as ProHance as part of selected projects, arguably becoming the latest company to double down on micro-monitoring of employee activities.

The course outlines the maximum interval within which employees should record mouse or keyboard activity, as well as the allowable amount of time they can remain inactive or away from their systems.

According to the course details accessed, an employee will be marked as “idle if no keyboard or mouse activity is detected for more than 300 seconds.” Mint.

The system will flag an employee as engaging in “activities away from the system” if their PC or laptop remains idle for 15 minutes.

The time period for both of these triggers is at the discretion of specific deployment teams.

Mint He was unable to independently determine the number of employees to whom the course was shared, whether the course included training on tools other than ProHance, or when it would be rolled out companywide.

But the good news is that the company does not plan to use these tools to evaluate employee performance for now.

“At customer request, we occasionally use various productivity measurement tools, a common industry practice, in certain business process management or intuitive operations and automation projects. The goal is to help better understand customer process steps and associated time measurements to evaluate process design inefficiencies,” a Cognizant spokesperson said.

Companies use workforce management tools like ProHance and Sapience to track employee activities, including time spent on system, hours devoted to critical project websites, and break times.

ProHance, for example, owns British retailer Tesco, India’s fourth-largest IT services company Wipro Ltd and its smaller rival Firstsource Solutions Ltd, and real estate investment firm Jones Lang LaSalle IP, Inc., according to its website. or used by JLL.

micromanagement

One analyst attributed Cognizant’s moves to “three converging pressures.”

“The first is customer demand for tighter controls and evidence of productivity in a hybrid delivery model. Second, the shift to artificial intelligence (AI) introduces process debt and idle time, so leaders want to establish a baseline before automating or redesigning the business. Third, margin protection,” said Phil Fersht, CEO of US-based IT research firm HFS Research.

“Due to pricing pressure and wage inflation, providers are using telemetry to reduce rework, increase schedule compliance, and defend SLAs (service level agreements),” he added.

The course includes at least eight other metrics to record the time employees spend on breaks and meetings, in “productive apps” and tools, and even time spent in the system to complete tasks: logged/idle/productive hours per day, time away from the system, and time spent per task, etc.

Although the company does not plan to use these tools to evaluate employee performance, a five-second slide in the course indicates that, according to account policy, these tools will be used to determine time efficiency, that is, actual production hours other than expected production hours.

The company also stated in its email that the tool (ProHance) would only be used after employee approval; however, some administrators claimed that the course was mandatory.

“We took a mandatory course that involved user onboarding. We had to click ‘I agree’ to complete the course,” an administrator said on condition of anonymity.

A second manager said on condition of anonymity that the system “automatically logs employees out” if they are away for more than a certain amount of time.

“However, despite the breaks, we were told to complete a fixed number of hours. The company has doubled this number since the last two months because both the client and the company want more productivity and more billing,” the manager added.

The introduction of such productivity measurement tools comes as IT services companies increase their focus on employee productivity and skills development in an environment of increasing automation.

Wipro made it mandatory for senior managers to take the English proficiency exam, and those who did not pass on the first try were included in the performance improvement plan. Mint It was reported on July 28.

Earlier, the country’s sixth largest IT firm LTIMindtree Ltd had instructed its managers to pass a qualification test as part of their evaluation. The exam, consisting of multiple-choice questions about coding and math, accounted for half the evaluation weight for project leaders, managers, and chief architects; the rest was based on project completion. Mint It was reported on February 28.

Of course, Cognizant is undergoing a transformation under the leadership of CEO S. Ravi Kumar, who took over in January 2023. One of his first actions after taking over was to announce plans to return around 45% of office space in the country over the next three years.

As of September, it had 349,800 employees, three-quarters of whom were in India, making it an IT services company of Indian origin.

Following the January-December fiscal year, the company finished the year 2023-24 with a revenue of $19.74 billion, an increase of 1.98% year-on-year. In the September quarter, the company targeted industry-leading annual growth of 6.6-6.9% for 2025, targeting revenue of $21.05-21.1 billion.

employee concerns

For now, some executives are surprised by Cognizant’s move.

“We’ve heard of projects where clients want to track employee productivity, but this kind of micromanagement is unheard of,” a third manager said on condition of anonymity.

Peter Bendor-Samuel, founder of Dallas-based IT research and consulting firm Everest Group, said that although there are privacy concerns, micro-productivity monitoring tools have become an industry standard, with many banks and major technology firms using them at the request of their customers.

“ProHance and systems like it are becoming common tools as companies try to understand how the systems they provide to their employees are used and where they can be improved. It’s a bit like ‘big brother,’ and some employees have concerns about privacy and micromanagement,” he said.

“Privacy is an issue, but micromanagement, if it occurs, is not common,” he added.