The festival season this year is turning out to be a blessing for many employees who have lived with salary cuts since the Covid-19 outbreak.
As economic activities pick up, some companies have started restoring salaries in a graded manner to achieve pre-Covid-19 levels before November.
Among them are auto component makers Lumax Industries and Sandhar Technologies, edtech firms Upgrad and Toppr, construction equipment giant TIL, interior design and home decor company Livspace, engineering major Forbes Marshall and Deki Electronics.
While worker wages are being restored on priority, export companies are still in a wait-and-watch mode before reinstating salaries of their top management.
“Over the next few months we will increasingly see companies restoring salaries,” said Nitin Sethi, CEO, (Performance, Rewards and Organisation) at Aon India, adding that it is important that employees are “engaged, motivated and driven.”
About 12% of companies have already restored salaries and another 20% have announced or will announce it shortly, according to a survey by Aon India on HR practices of over 2,000 companies globally and 425 in India.
This comes as at least half-a-dozen economic indicators, including goods and services tax collections, e-way bills and rail freight loading for September show a recovery – either inching close to pre-Covid-19 levels or exceeding levels from a year earlier.
Many companies, across sectors, had implemented pay cuts ranging from 5% to 50% and some even retrenched staff during the nationwide lockdown in April to cut wage costs. Now, the situation has improved and while some companies want to boost the morale of their employees, others are hoping this will help boost consumption.
