Cognizant has been actively working on cost cutting measures for some time now. In recent months, the company has announced a series of measures to contain its finances and streamline its business. Earlier in October 2019, while announcing the company’s financial results – Brian Humphries, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) said, “Over the past few months, we’ve sharpened Cognizant’s strategic posture and begun executing plans aimed at improving our competitive positioning.”
It is learnt, that in one of the steps being taken in this direction, the company has reduced the maximum bench time for employees to 35 days, from 60 days. This move may lead to more employee exits in coming months.
Bench time is the time in which the employees have to find projects within their business units or across other related operations. The terminology is applicable mostly in IT services, outsourcing and consulting industry and refers to manpower that’s non-revenue generating and is not engaged on any live client projects.
With reduced bench time at Cognizant, in case there are no project related expansion or new contracts – it may be a challenge for the employees on bench to get themselves assigned to new projects. This creates a clear path for their exit as at the end of the bench time, they would be asked to leave. Some employees, who may have location related challenges and may be unable to move to a new location or get transferred to a new function or domain may also be on the exit route.
Last month, Cognizant in its post-earnings conference call had announced that the company would see job cuts to the tune of 10,000-12,000 employees. While the company plans to work on reskilling and redeployment of about 5000 employees, the gross reduction would be around 5000-7000. The company had also planned to exit the content moderation business, which in itself was going to account for around 6000 job losses. The company had said that over the next two years, they will focus on optimizing their core portfolio and invest to build on and extent its capabilities in identified four areas – Data, Digital Engineering, Cloud, and IoT.
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