Narayan AmmachchiGlobal IT consulting firm Cognizant has told some of its employees in India and the Philippines that it would pay them an extra 25% of base salary in recognition of their service amid travel restrictions.
More than half of Cognizant’s global workforce work out of India. These days, a vast majority of them are working from their home with the help of encrypting desktops and virtual private networks (VPN).
Both India and the Philippines have placed themselves on a country-wide lockdown to stop coronavirus from spreading.
Cognizant employees on the higher rungs of the official ladder will not get the extra pay, but those extra working hours will be benefited.
The extra pay will be processed with the April paycheck, reported Reuters, citing an email from the company’s CEO Brian Humphries to his staff.
“I appreciate that many of you are working extremely long days, weekends included. Some of you have given over virtually all of your personal time to helping clients and colleagues,” Humphries said.
“We are all dealing with a crisis that brings new challenges every day. Even with all of the preparation and foresight … it’s hard to imagine that we or anyone could have developed a playbook to anticipate the full impact of COVID-19.”
The move comes a month barely after reports emerged that the Teaneck, New Jersey-based provider would hire 25,000 freshly-graduated engineers in India after removing nearly 12,000 mid- to senior-level staff as part of a ‘restructuring’ plan.
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