Company sends mail promising jobs safe, yet staff wonder

Switch off your TV and don’t read the newspapers, stop believing rumours,” says one of the mails from top officials of Satyam Computer Services that the employees found in their inbox on Thursday.

An IT company is rarely known to guarantee employees’ jobs, but Satyam has been doing just that in its e-mails to employees. “No lay-offs, retrenchments,” - was the management’s assurance in an e-mail, an employee said.

Even as assurance mails from Satyam officials along with support mails from many clients like Oracle, ICICI Prudential and IBM are flooding the inbox of Satyam employees in the city, many are yet to come to terms with the reality: that their lives will never be the same any more. The company has three facilities in the city and around 2,000 hands.

Yet, 23-year-old Adarsh, who has been with the firm for only nine months, believes his company will bounce back. “I have full faith in company officials and they have assured me in a mail that 40 senior associates with the company won’t quit the firm,” he said.

Spend a little time at a small open teashop near the Dhole Patil centre that employs around 300 to understand what the employees really feel. The mood is not as upbeat as the company strives to make with all those pep talks.

“We are neither in nor out of the office,” says Avinash, software engineer who has been with Satyam for four years now and was getting calls regularly from the headhunters till three days before the cat was out of the bag. “I am looking for other jobs. I have a family to support,” says Aaron, 32, who joined three years ago.

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