Genpact: Being Future Ready – A View to Disruption & Growth

Synopsis

What started as a unit of 20 employees within General Electric in 1997, to an NYSE Listed, independent professional services organization 23 years later, was something the then CEO Pramod Bhasin would have surely envisioned. Genpact was the brainchild of a visionary who bore the seed of being ‘future-ready’ within the company’s DNA. With 87,000 employees and revenues of US$ 3 billion (2018), Genpact CEO Tiger Tyagarajan still supports the growing movement to build a nationwide, future-oriented workforce founded on sustainable careers. The practices and thought leadership that is being passed down, automatically guide the leaders and employees to be future-ready.

Being Future Ready – A View to Disruption & Growth

As a new decade dawns on mankind with unprecedented occurrences and sizable leaps in technology, Genpact is all poised to enter the decade, future-ready and armed with an arsenal that shall take on the anticipated transformations, head-on.

Disruption in every industry is causing massive shifts to business models, client needs, organizational constructs, talent demand and supply, and even the very definition of work as we know it. Professional service firms like Genpact see this as an opportunity to:

• Redesign their organization and delivery model that can cater to client expectations with agility and speed.
• Adopt and embrace AI, Machine Learning and other advanced technologies in their own operations, as well as into the ones they design and run for their clients.
• Equip employees with skills they need to be future-ready.

As Tiger Tyagarajan, CEO of Genpact, quoted in The New York Times “If You’re Curious, You Hold the Keys”

To Listen is to understand

Genpact’s main key to identifying future trends is to ‘Listen’ to all the stakeholders. They uphold the practice through several methods like:

• For customers, Genpact takes a holistic view of their clients and businesses through NPS and NPS+ In NPS surveys, they ask clients about business transformation impact and process health across hiring, training, people management, IT and tech, contracting and billing. NPS+ surveys introduce relationship measurements across multiple dimensions, generate accurate, specific and rich insights into individual relationships and give a clear view of at-risk accounts. Growth recognition is tied to intrinsically listening to clients.
• For employees, Genpact conducts a yearly employment survey with all Genpacters on micro, macro and inter-team collaboration culture. The microculture survey reveals an employee’s clarity on goals if they see value in their contribution and how dynamics work in their team. The macro culture survey reveals how they perceive the organization’s leadership strength, culture, and other enabling factors.
• The Ombudsperson process lets employees discuss grievances with the correct authority without any fear of retaliation, which includes possible harassment or discrimination cases. Employees can drop written notes in any of the Ombudsperson boxes located on every floor or raise their concerns via a special email. The process provides a safe way to bring concerns to light and ensures to the employee that complaints are seriously reviewed and resolved as quickly as possible.
• Amber, an AI-powered culture assistant is an intelligent bot that reaches out to all Genpacters at regular intervals by asking focused questions on a real-time basis. It gathers information about the employee’s sentiments and allows employees to open their hearts in a judgment-free zone. The reports generated allow HR managers to understand and empathize while having more in-tune, effective and valuable discussions with employees.
• Alert tools present empower all team leaders to proactively raise, manage and mitigate risks in a fast and simple manner.
• Risk Culture Surveys project the views of the senior and mid-management leadership on how risks are perceived across the organization and provide recommendations for enhancing from the current state.

Survive and thrive in the age of disruption

As Genpact gets ready for the future, its goals are clear: strengthen the ability to win, drive large scale end-to-end transformation for clients, and be a key source of value creation through:

Acquisitions

The global industry has been disrupted as well as dominated by ‘all things digital’ in the last 5 to 7 years. Genpact’s business has surely been disrupted, but its ability to continually evolve to meet client demand has borne fruit. Significantly, investments in digital technologies through several wells thought acquisitions like Rage Technologies, Endeavour, T7, and Rightpoint have enabled them not only to survive but thrive during these waves of disruption.

Talent Strategies

Focusing on attracting, recruiting and retaining high-quality talent, including a gig economy workforce. Continuously refreshing the leadership perspective through the “Leadership Direct Program”. Building a digital talent pipeline through partnerships with relevant academic institutes and using them to re-skill identified groups such as Sales, Consulting and Delivery, in digital areas and enable a culture of continuous, pull-based self-learning.

The Leadership Direct Program

Generally, leadership talent is viewed through the lens of skills and experience, gauging people who can fit into an organization and lead. Genpact begs to differ. We realized that when it comes to collaboration, learnability, and leadership, experience has nothing to do with it. So, we decided to hire the smartest people who had a cutting edge in learnability and collaboration, agnostic of their experience.

The Women Leadership Development Program

Genpact’s aims to comprise 50% of their mid and senior leaders to be women. They strongly believe that a gender-balanced workforce brings in a new perspective – a different way of looking at solutions to the same problem. This is key in achieving further success for a company. The program is designed to help women employees develop the mindset and skillsets needed to be successful leaders of the future. Leaders, who have a high learning quotient, embrace change and always look for opportunities to improve and enhance. Such leaders can then help institutionalize these traits in their teams, thus driving a culture of curiosity and innovation.

The Executive Hiring Campus Program

The Executive Hiring Campus Program was an initiative implemented in 2012 where talent from top global B Schools was placed in Assistant Vice President and above roles with direct, client-facing responsibilities in sales and consulting groups. This greatly helped in building our employer brand globally and was part of our organization-wide strategy for next-generation leadership infusion.