Wipro is experimenting with a new compensation programme for employees who receive stock options. It is looking at introducing performance-based stock vesting, where employee stock options vest based on performance. It has traditionally followed time-based options, where the stock vesting is based on a predefined time schedule. When a stock vests, the employee acquires full ownership of it. “We as an organization are focused on paying people for the short-term giving stock options that are time-vested and not performance vested. We are experimenting with performance-vested options now,” chief strategy officer and board member Rishad Premji said here. Automation, he said, is dramatically changing the nature of work. It has implications for the kind of people you need and how you can reskill them. “We traditionally sold to CIOs and that stakeholder has changed. It’s the digital offi cers, CMOs and CFOs (who are important now). We typically sold fixed-price contracts, and now it’s more and more outcome-based projects. An organization like ours has to transform and we can’t be paralyzed by fear. We have either to swim or sink,” he said. Indian IT services is at the cusp of transformation where the traditional business is increasingly getting commodi tized and newer tech like cloud, mobility and analytics is changing the landscape of the Indian IT sector. Asked if Wipro was slow to react to the market changes, he said the company is running a two-speed organization -one focused on running a business and the other focused on changing a business. “It’s a leadership challenge to accept that these two organizations will co-exist. The compensation structure will look very different…culture has to change dramatically…it’s for us to decide whether to make investments ahead of time even though there are short term implications on profitability,” he said.
