ICICI Infotech conducts an employee satisfaction survey (ESS) twice a year. At Mphasis, the strike rate is the same. Indeed, in IT and other New Age companies across the country, ESS is all the rage. And if you look at any Best Employers survey, these are the very companies that make it to the top.

?It?s just so much bull,? complains the HR head of a Mumbai-based public sector undertaking. ?It?s like practising for an exam everyday. When the final test ? the external survey ? comes, you know exactly what to do. After all, the higher up your company is on the Best Employers ladder, the more the brownie points you gain in the job market. It is in your interest to rig the results.?

?What utter nonsense,? counters the HR head of one of the companies that feature at the top. ?If we conduct internal surveys, it?s because we want happy employees. We see the problems that are cropping up and address them.?

Nobody has come out in the open as yet. But in informal HR fora and through somewhat acrimonious e-mails, a debate is growing. The argument is simple. IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) jobs are high pressure. There is much less job security than in traditional sectors.

Yes, PSU jobs may be boring. But the people who joined are probably the type who like a more sedentary existence. They should be happy.?

Adding to the confusion is the huge differences between different surveys of employee satisfaction. The line-up of companies is totally different. Half the names on one list don?t figure on the other.

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1. Federal Express India 2. Texas Instruments 3. NTPC 4. Computer Sciences Corporation(CSC) 5. Mindtree Consulting 6. Sasken Communication 7. Godrej Consumer Products 8. Intel Technologies India 9. Sapient Corporation 10. Honeywell Technology Source: BusinessWorld

Even within the IT/ITeS (IT-enabled services) industry, there are differences galore. Consider two news items barely a month old. The first is about a Dataquest-IDC survey which finds that Hewlett-Packard India is the top paymaster among Indian IT companies. ?The survey also found that despite emerging as the highest paymaster, HP scored low on employee satisfaction,? says the report.

?Money is not the main motivator any more.? ?Money is a huge motivator in BPO,? reads the other report, based on a Dataquest-IDC survey of the BPO industry.

Employee satisfaction means different things to different people,? says Mumbai-based HR consultant D. Singh. ?That?s true even in related industries. How then can you throw all companies into one basket and make a comparison?

The bottomline, perhaps, is that employee surveys are big business for external consultants. Internationally, there are more than a hundred firms making good money. Even in India, there are outfits like Market Probe very active in this area. The Best Employers studies drum up public excitement and awareness. It means more business in the long run.

So should one dismiss such surveys out of hand? No. But each company has to design a survey keeping its own circumstances in mind. Ideally, surveys should be done internally. But if a research house has to be brought in, the one-size-fits-all approach should be rejected.

According to human resources consulting firm Mercer: ?In a study of 75 multinational companies, 78 per cent of HR directors reported that they surveyed employees to help guide firmwide change, but many said they were dissatisfied with the value of the process. That?s because traditional surveys often look at employee satisfaction on elements such as pay, benefits, job security, and working conditions ? the ?me? issues ? but overlook the ?we? issues that drive business performance.?

Not everybody agrees. ?Sure, employees would like their company to do well,? says the PSU HR boss quoted earlier. ?But, at the end of the day, it?s his bonus that makes him happy.?.