If this writer were Rajiv Mody, he would be afraid, very very afraid. He would be happy too-the company that Mody founded, Bangalore-based Sasken Communication Technologies, has emerged the best company to work for in India-but that emotion would be overshadowed by anxiety over the future. You see, as someone who has been closely associated with the four editions of this survey (the name and this magazine's partners for this year's one are new; the three previous surveys were called Best Employers In India, and the reason for the change in both is dealt with elsewhere in this magazine; see How We Did It on page 70), he knows something Mody doesn't: there's a price to be paid for being a great company to work for, one that, strangely enough, affects the company's future standing as a great company....

Hema Ravichandar knows how it feels to be on the hero-to-zero roller coaster. For two years running, 2001 and 2002, the company where she heads the hr function, Infosys Technologies was the best company to work for in India. Then, in 2003, it dropped off the map. Reason? Its growing army of code jocks believed the company could do better by them in terms of pay, growth options, and just about anything else. At the core of all workplace surveys-since 2001, when this magazine pioneered the first such, three more have been launched-is a module related to employee satisfaction; in most surveys, this is assigned a weightage that is significant enough to make or break a company's chances at being one of the best companies to work for in the country. Circa 2003, Infosys discovered this the hard way.

The paradoxical thing about employee satisfaction surveys is this: it is mathematically impossible to express a company's attrition rate as a function of its e-sat (that's how the term is abbreviated in hr lingo) scores. For instance, in The Best Companies To Work For In India, 2004, Infosys' score on the employee perception parameter is 72 (on a maximum of 100), but its attrition rate is 7 per cent; Sasken's score is 85 and its attrition rate, 15 per cent. In an ideal world (filled with ideal employers and ideal employees), e-sat scores alone would be adequate to assess a company's standing as a great place to work. The typical code jock is far from being an ideal employee. "Software pros are like shrimp," the CEO of a tech hot shop once remarked to this writer. "The price of shrimp is practically the same all over the world; and there is a near universal demand for it." The hot shop in question (singled out, in one of the previous editions of the survey for its distinctive hr practices) lives, although it has tweaked its business model some, and the CEO has since been eased out by investors, but the shrimp-analogy retains its aptness.

A workplace survey based on e-sat scores alone or one that assigns the parameter too much weightage runs the risk, especially in the case of fast-growth sectors such as technology, of reflecting the immaturity, irrationality and selfishness of employees. In 2002, when it became evident that the recession in the us would curb tech-spending in that country, and, consequently, hurt the business of offshoring-centred Indian software firms, the CEOs of some such companies secretly rejoiced. "This will make our employees more mature, and their demands, more rational," was a popular refrain of the day. Alas, that has not happened.

The Best Companies To Work For In India survey has tried to compensate for this by assigning employee perception a weightage of 40 per cent (it still remains the single-most important parameter), and spreading the remaining 60 per cent among hr processes and practices (30 per cent), hr metrics (15 per cent), attrition (5 per cent), and stakeholder perception (10 per cent). However, a relatively low e-sat score still carries enough weight to hurt; that is the only reason why Infosys is #2 in the survey, not #1.

The average amount of time an employee spends at Sasken is just a little under four years. That would mean a sizable proportion of the workforce that was present at the September 2001 open house when Mody announced an across-the-board 20 per cent cut in pay, still works for the company. As the company grows, this number (expressed as a proportion of total employees) will shrink; the new hires will know only the good times; worse, those people Sasken hires after November 8, 2004, the day this issue of Business Today hits the stands, will expect the world from the best company to work for in India.

The funny thing is, companies in sectors such as software where growth is largely a function of intelligent warm bodies, have no option but to strive to be great employers. Companies in other sectors can get away with ordinary hr practices (their growth is not a function of staff-strength; then, there are not too many places unhappy employees can go to). Which is why, if this writer were Rajiv Mody, he would be afraid.