While success doesn’t always equate to happiness, happy employees consistently outperform their unhappy peers. This 2019 Research by Oxford University’s Saïd Business School has found that happiness and productivity are related. It says that happy employees are 13% more productive at work. The researchers found that happy workers do not work more hours than their discontented colleagues – they are simply more productive during their time at work.
Genpact takes huge pride in creating a happy place for its employees. Its employee-first approach focuses on how people work every day, how they are treated, and how they are heard and engaged in the business. In this insightful conversation with Ritu Bhatia, Global Hiring Leader, Genpact, we explore why fostering a joyful workplace is essential and how employee happiness can drive business success.
What are the key programs or platforms utilised to facilitate continuous learning and development among employees?
As we progress as an AI-first company, learning the agility of our talent is one of the most vital attributes. We continue to invest in and integrate AI to reskill our employees, help them harness their curiosity, build their careers, and drive value for our clients.
We use our AI-assisted scalable learning platform, Genome to upskill our employees at scale. It offers over 90 skills, with more than 600 subject matter experts curating relevant content and courses in line with evolving industry trends. To scale it further, we also rolled out a generative AI-powered bot, AI Guru, as a digital twin of all the master gurus collectively, available around the clock as a learning assistant, providing personalised learning recommendations and nano-learning bytes in the flow of work.
- In 2023, nearly 55,000 people were actively learning on Genome each month, spending an average of 7 to 8 hours.
- Our global workforce completed approximately 10 million training hours on Genome this year, consecutively for the fourth year.
- Our internal Generative AI Playground with over 60,000 users. Here, our employees can test and learn how generative AI can be utilised to solve client problems and unlock value.
We are also collaborating with best-of-breed external partners for deep skilling in advanced digital and tech skills to complement the contextualized learning delivered by in-house experts.
We’re seeing a trend of incoming GenZ and Millennial talent prioritising gender diversity at workplace a lot more. What are some of Genpact’s initiatives in this direction and any strategic goals moving forward?
Driving diversity has always been a big priority for us. At Genpact, we recognize the strong connection between diversity, inclusion, and innovation. We firmly believe in the notion that different backgrounds and diverse perspectives lead to breakthroughs.
Our focus on gender diversity has led to women comprising 42 percent of our full-time employees globally and 50% of our board. But for us, a very important milestone would be getting to a 50/50 gender split, across all levels of the organization.
We have several key initiatives in place, including a Women’s Leadership Program created in collaboration with Korn Ferry to build a pipeline of future women leaders; a cross-company mentorship program in association with the 30% Club; a Women in Genpact network to serve as an employee resource group; and a Pay-it-Forward initiative to encourage leaders to sponsor women protégés and provide support during their professional journey.
We aim to create a supportive ecosystem for women in India and the Philippines (operating centers with a 24×7 working environment) returning to work from maternity leave, for which we created the Returning Moms Program.
In 2023, 87% of women in India and 92% in the Philippines returned to roles at Genpact after their maternity leave.
Additionally, we’ve set targets for gender diversity in executive hiring and are working to increase female representation at the hiring funnel stage. We aim to evaluate at least 50% women candidates and are strengthening the sourcing of diverse talent through various initiatives, including partnering with vendors specialising in hiring diverse candidates.
Why do employees love working at Genpact? In your opinion, what are the key attributes that make Genpact a great employer? Also, share how Genpact ensures employee satisfaction.
With the accelerated pace of change, the way we work, and employee expectations continue to evolve. But what remains a key differentiator for businesses, which will make them emerge as best employers, is the pivot towards an employee-first culture that focuses on how people work every day, how they are treated, and how they are heard and engaged in the business.
In my view, there are 4 core fundamentals why people go to work and choose to stay there – Great company, Great leaders, Great rewards, and Great career. This essentially means that the way people perceive their employers’ culture, leaders & leadership style, rewards and career growth opportunity is mission-critical in driving employee satisfaction and retention.
Genpact’s purpose is designed to be simple – the relentless pursuit of a world that works better for people and translates wonderfully into local geographies and communities we support. We’re also big believers in leading with empathy, focusing on employee health and wellness, and providing competitive compensation and recognition programs, as well as meaningful opportunities for learning and development to drive superior employee engagement and keep our people happy and encouraged. We believe the opportunity to learn new skills and solutions and work on digital, generative AI, and other new technologies in many of our client engagements is a big talent attractor and is also driving retention for us.
Could you provide insights into how Genpact nurtures its talent? Please share some employee journeys here.
As a global professional services firm, we are as good as the talent we have. Our employees are front and center of what we do and are efficiently enabled to deliver flawlessly on evolving client priorities. To nurture our talent, we’re invested in building a culture of continuous learning and development, where our employees can learn new skills, move into new roles, and subsequently grow their careers, within the company, in the direction they aspire to.
- We use Talent Match as our talent transformation initiative to match the skills and job aspirations of our employees with existing and future job opportunities at Genpact.
- We’re preparing employees for future career aspirations by upskilling and reskilling through Genome (our learning platform) and using Talent Match to make staffing decisions and find roles internally for our employees.
- This helps provide our employees the opportunity to take their careers in their desired direction, thus increasing employee satisfaction, and bolstering our ability to scale the work from anywhere model.
Learning and growing is a key part of our employee value proposition and our dedication to employee growth is reflected in the numerous success stories of our executive leadership and many more employees who’ve learnt, grown and been succeeding across various roles to build fulfilling, decades long career at Genpact, while we continue to attract external talent with our robust culture and investment in continuous learning of individuals.
Genome has been helping us meet our talent needs internally by filling 21% of roles above entry level through internal promotions. While through Talent Match, over 26000 employees found a career of their choice last year. Additionally, about 30% of internal fulfillment (26600) was done through upskilling resources.
In one of our recent polls on Naukri’s App, 65% of job seekers indicated they would accept a salary offer slightly lower than their expectations from a solid brand. This percentage of jobseekers ready to be associated with a great brand underscores the power of a good employer brand. Could you elaborate on how Genpact strategically builds and maintains its strong brand reputation?”
We’re seeing that employees today want to work for a company that is driving a sense of shared purpose that extends beyond profit and keeps people moving towards a collective goal of creating a diverse, more inclusive, and sustainable world. People care about brand value/equity and the impact that their job has on people, society, and their communities.
At Genpact, fostering a purpose-driven culture is core to our talent strategy and positive brand reputation. We continue to work towards creating a strong ecosystem of change, centered around a solid company culture, that can help shape an enduring future for us all.
Our unique culture framework also allows us to build trust, empathy, and engage 125,000+ employees in over 30 Genpact operational countries. It encourages our people to lead change by being curious, incisive, and courageous while championing integrity and inclusivity.
This deep passion and focus on giving our people an opportunity to be better, be fearless, take bets, innovate and continuously learn and grow is a big talent attractor for us and driving retention for us, thereby helping build and maintain our strong employer brand.
Ritu Bhatia is an experienced Human Resource professional with over 2 decades of experience in the Information Technology and Services Industry (ITES). She has extensive breadth and depth in executive search, recruitment, policies, strategic HR partnerships, and implementing enterprise-level HR transformation projects. She has a proven record of working in a global environment and building strong teams with a core focus on providing strategic partnerships to stakeholders.
