Shibu Nambiar, COO Genpact Europe
- Tell us a few words about your company, the services provided, and the type of roles you accommodate.
Genpact (NYSE: G) is a global professional services firm that makes business transformation real. Led by our purpose — the relentless pursuit of a world that works better for people — we drive digital-led innovation and digitally-enabled intelligent operations for our clients, guided by our experience reinventing and running thousands of processes for hundreds of clients, many of them Global Fortune 500 companies. From New York to New Delhi and more than 30 countries in between, we connect every dot, reimagine every process, and reinvent the ways companies work – because transformation happens here.
In Romania, Genpact has offices in two cities, Bucharest and Cluj, and employs around 4,000 people. Our first site in Bucharest opened in 2005 and now has ~3000+ employees serving a customer base of consumer packaged goods, life sciences and healthcare, hi-tech and manufacturing, and banking and insurance services. Our employees help drive business at scale for Western and Eastern Europe with a specific focus on West European markets in domains such as finance and accounting, order to cash, source to pay, IT services, and customer services supporting twenty languages.
Our Cluj center opened in 2007 as a strategic decision due to the region’s academic, cultural, and commercial opportunities. Our 1,000+ employees help deliver and digitally transform processes in domains as diverse as finance and accounting, order to cash, and source to pay for our clients’ businesses ranging from aviation, energy, and hi-tech and manufacturing services. Currently, our employees in Cluj support global customers in eighteen delivery languages across Europe
- What makes your company a great place to work for?
At Genpact, we empower everyone to bring their authentic selves to work. The diversity of experiences, perspectives, and opinions our people bring to the table is the key to our success.
We’re inspired by differences. The stickiness in our organization comes from our culture of inclusion, by recognizing all our different kinds of people: multifaceted and spread across generations and geographies. We’re tackling some of the biggest challenges around the world, which demands fresh thinking and different perspectives – and that comes from our passion for giving everybody a voice and the space to share their ideas so we can all learn from each other.
We foster an inclusive and diverse culture to create equal opportunities for all, irrespective of gender, age, ethnicity, cultural background, race, or sexual orientation. We remain committed to:
- Maintaining gender diversity across all levels of the organization
- Recruiting, retaining and advancing talent from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds
- Creating and fostering an inclusive culture where our LGBTQ+ employees feel safe and empowered to contribute
Understanding each other’s uniqueness, recognizing our differences, respecting varied opinions, and accepting various point of views is at the heart of our culture.
Our culture
Our cultural framework outlines a set of behaviors that drive success for us and resonates with our strategy. It embodies curiosity, courage, incisiveness, and integrity. For us at Genpact, these common behavioral attributes enable us to work together, make better decisions, and identify the risks we can take. And most importantly, it connects all of us to opportunities and accelerates our growth.
Our purpose
They say the future belongs to those who create it, but we disagree. We think it belongs to everyone. We believe in technology that connects and creates opportunities for all. We believe in keeping people at the heart of everything we do and bring together our passions, expertise, and abilities around a shared promise. We’ve articulated our purpose in a clear, memorable manner. We’re on the “relentless pursuit of a world that works better for people.”
Let’s go back to when COVID-19 hit. The disrupter of all disrupters. While the world turned upside down in all possible areas, something truly magical happened… we realized how so many of our people were living a meaningful life that stood out even more in these unprecedented times. Our people came together in record numbers to keep each other safe by transporting desktop computers from our offices to employees’ homes. The work that our people do each day helps predict COVID hotspots so lifesaving equipment can reach there in time, ensure people have the food and supplies they need on supermarket shelves and enable small businesses to receive the funding they need to keep their doors open. Our people also empower local communities and do whatever they can to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.
We heard so many emotional and passionate stories about how our employees rose to the challenge. While we were adapting and rising, we also helped create a profound impact on our clients and their customers. We heard comment after comment about how the work we’ve been doing at Genpact was ultimately making a meaningful and positive impact on the world.
Our focus on learning
Our people across the world have a natural curiosity and a desire to understand the world and make it work better for everyone. It’s talking to each other, trying new things. It’s failing and trying again. It’s a work in progress. It doesn’t mean having all the answers; it’s about trying to find them together.
Our work
We’re known for our maniacal client centricity. And our people-first approach, our focus on our employees’ wellbeing is equally critical in everything we do. We’re surrounded by teams across Genpact that today are already showing us what the relentless pursuit of a world that works better for people looks like. Our banking teams getting cash into the hands of small business owners so they could stay open, our life sciences and health teams helping to get Personal Protection Equipment to places that needed it, and working with vaccine creators and governments to ensure safety, and our CPG and supply chain teams ensuring that critical supplies made it to grocery stores. Our experience teams helped build the mobile patient experience for COVID testing so that people can get their COVID test results quickly and effectively. Our retail and experience teams helped bring the in-store shopping experience online, while our learning and marketing teams came together to open up our internal upskilling platform to those that need it so they can find employment.
Our CSR initiatives and sustainability agenda define us
We believe it’s our responsibility to address some of society’s most urgent needs and to ensure balanced and inclusive growth in the communities where we operate. So, sustainability and community impact are integral parts of our strategy. Our CSR programs comprise four key components that help nurture a culture of giving: volunteering, payroll donations, NGO partnerships, and strong client engagement.
“Our commitment to the communities we operate in stems from our belief in being an active corporate citizen of the world.”
Tiger Tyagarajan
CEO, Genpact
At Genpact, we make decisions based on improving social, economic, and environmental outcomes for people and the planet. For our clients, that means pushing the boundaries of how digital technologies can create a better world for their customers, employees, and the environment.
Continuous employee engagement
Our CSR programs engage all our employees, including our senior leadership, who provide the vision and motivation that drives these initiatives. We believe this accounts for the success of our CSR endeavors. With our leaders’ backing, our employees have a true sense of ownership of the projects they undertake. We have CSR ambassadors across our global regions who crowdsource ideas on various CSR initiatives employees want to be a part of through regular two-way communication. So, while we have a global CSR strategy, it’s also customizable for regional nuances, allowing employees to contribute towards what they truly believe in.
- Give us more details about the company’s culture and working vibe/atmosphere.
Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” The last year-and-a-half has made it quite evident that culture can eat strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner! And let’s add meaning and purpose to culture in the equation as well.
For a global, diverse workforce like ours, our culture is the glue that binds us together. From a business standpoint or any other standpoint for that matter, life has accelerated by 10 years. It’s been clear that working from home comes with its own set of challenges for employees to feel engaged. This is where the criticality of meaning, culture, and purpose comes in. Our remote working policy, our focus on employee engagement and experience, reskilling, and finding the right people for the right job at the right time is how we’re giving meaning to them.
Our culture framework
Genpact’s culture framework is ‘Curious, Incisive, Courageous. On a bedrock of Integrity.’ We call it (CI)2, but our employees call it a game-changer. It encourages and supports Genpact employees to learn, think differently, embrace different skills, take bets, and fail fast. It inspires an insatiable thirst to continuously ask questions that lead to greater value for our clients. It’s innovation-in-action, the art of making it happen.
It allows every one of our employees to surpass expectations – theirs, Genpact’s, and our clients’. Not just in terms of who they are but who we collectively aspire to be. It’s a statement of who we are and what we want to be.
The new world of work will emphasize two significant developments: the co-relation between the employee experience and business results and establishing a mutual relationship of trust between employees and their company. Behaviors that emerge in this scenario will include humility and inclusiveness, speed to outcome, and the ability to deal with ambiguity.
While we continue to look for ways to drive meaningful connections, empower teams, and celebrate our culture, we also require a real-time pulse check on employees, especially in this remote-working environment. In fact, we believe that capturing employee sentiment has never been more crucial, and so we’re using real-time feedback and employee sentiment to shape our engagement strategies. We use an AI chatbot called Amber to reach out to employees to capture their immediate concerns and needs at specific times in the employee life cycle to enable us to support them better. We also realized that to drive a feeling of belonging and pride, we needed to create a virtual community where employees can share stories of hope, resilience, and pride on Genpact’s intranet page. This helped highlight positive sentiment, generate a sense of pride and community for the work we do at Genpact and celebrate our culture while also providing links to helpful material that empowers employees to work from anywhere, or even provide fun ways to keep up with remote teams. We also offer access to resources that help with parenting tips and mental wellbeing for our 90,000+ global employees.
- Do you ensure career paths for your employees?
For the last 20 years, we have continuously disrupted and reinvented ourselves to bring the best solutions to our clients. The one constant has been our focus on our people, ensuring we have the right people to deliver what we promise and give them the growth opportunities they deserve. Just like it takes a village to raise a child, a lot goes into creating a future-ready workforce.
To help our company become the partner of choice, our talent strategy encompasses three priorities to adapt, rise, and thrive in a virtual world of work:
- Reskilling and redeploying talent at scale
- Identifying, developing, and linking future-ready talent to value
- Reimagining the employee experience through a culture of self-learning and self-serve to change the way we work and enable talent.
TalentMatch is our talent transformation initiative to match our employees’ skills and job aspirations with existing and future job opportunities in the company. By enabling employees to prepare for future career aspirations by upskilling and reskilling through our internal learning platform called Genome, TalentMatch has allowed us to identify talent available for redeployment from one part of our business to another as the needs of our clients continue to change. It improves our employee utilization globally by providing the right talent at the right time for our client engagements. It allows our employees to take their careers in their desired direction, thus increasing employee satisfaction and bolstering our ability to scale the work-from-anywhere model.
TalentMatch has given us the right tools and views to make staffing decisions and find roles internally for our employees, enabling us to deliver on critical business parameters in the new normal and meet changing client and industry demands. In 2020, 10,700+ of our employees were redeployed globally. Our internal fulfillment rates were at 42% in 2020, up from 21% in 2019 in the same period. In 2021, we have already redeployed 650+ resources internally.
- What trainings do you offer?
Genome, our learning framework
With Genome, our radically different learning framework, we’re continuously preparing for the future world of work by enabling our employees to acquire new skills and evolve quickly as industries and technologies change.
Here are some details on Genome and its impact on our talent landscape:
Making our people ready for the “Future of You”
By combining the contemporary understanding of the science of learning with new operating models derived from the work being done at MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, Genpact has designed a scalable infrastructure and a new muscle that continuously curates, crystallizes, disseminates, and enhances knowledge. Genome enables our employees to learn skills that are highly relevant to their current roles and future aspirations.
Genome is designed to shape an adaptive workforce. We designed the learning strategy to “reskill at scale” and integrated it throughout the enterprise: it currently touches all our talent across more than 30 countries and allows them to learn 550 granular skills in 73 diverse domains.
We are driving adaptability in our organization with Genome, where every learner goes through four program pillars that we call BITS:
- Because is about individual skills assessments in the areas people want to learn
- Immerse refers to the self-learning that individuals undertake, based on the curated material
- Transform is all about the masters – or what we refer to as gurus – connecting their expertise to the employees who need it
- Solidify is learning through doing
We’re driven by our curiosity and the hands-on learning that comes from driving transformation every day. We share the collective intelligence from thousands of experts to train and upskill our people. And since 2020, we’ve opened parts of our internal education platform to the public, giving users access to persona-based learning paths forged in the real world to enhance professional success in a digital economy.
- You know how dynamic our industry is – so what is your strategy to keep your employees engaged, motivated and boost their creativity so they can innovate?
Enhanced employee experience
The new world of work will emphasize two significant developments: the co-relation between the employee experience and business results and establishing a mutual relationship of trust between employees and their company. Behaviors that emerge in this scenario will include humility and inclusiveness, speed to outcome, and the ability to deal with ambiguity.
The year 2020 was a challenging one for industries across the world. Companies found new ways of working, and employees adapted to the situation to ensure business continuity. Businesses need to create employee experiences rather than just using technology. The best and most updated technology does not necessarily equate to providing the best experience to your workforce. A deliberate and strategic vision aligned with user needs should be the defining factor when harnessing technology. Businesses must treat employees as customers by devoting similar effort, investment, and focus to the internal initiatives as they do to the external, to improve the overall employee experience. Doing so raises retention, enhances efficiency, and strengthens the bottom line.
Our Purpose:
Purpose-oriented companies have 40% higher retention than their competitors.
Companies that only think of their impact on clients instead of the world around them don’t survive. The companies that go the distance are those that have articulated a deeper purpose, one that serves as the beacon of light, informing their decisions and uniting their people on a shared mission while creating a measurable impact for its employees, clients, partners, communities, and the entire planet.
While we’re living it today, we knew that we had to articulate this to add meaning to the work we’re doing too. Our purpose needed to be authentic and ring true to who we represent, our skills and expertise, and our passion. And so, in linking our hearts to our company’s mission, we defined our purpose: “The relentless pursuit of a world that works better for people.” This ties in to our ability and desire to lift people. Uniting our passions, expertise, and abilities around a shared promise to create a world that works better for people.
Our Culture:
Genpact’s culture framework is ‘Curious, Incisive, Courageous. On a bedrock of Integrity.’ We call it (CI)2, but our employees call it a game-changer. It encourages and supports Genpacters to learn, think differently, embrace different skills, take bets, and fail fast. It inspires an insatiable thirst to continuously ask questions that lead to greater value for our clients. It’s innovation-in-action, the art of making it happen. It allows every one of our employees to surpass expectations – theirs, Genpact’s, and their clients’. It’s a statement of who we are, but also what we want to be.
All employee surveys
We know that building a great place to work is directly related to employee engagement. So, we conduct yearly employee engagement surveys to gain feedback from all Genpacters on the micro-culture, macro-culture, and inter-team collaboration within the organization. In the micro-culture questions, we look at if they have clarity on their goals, if they see value in their contributions, how dynamics work within their team – especially their relationship with their manager – and if they feel they have opportunities to grow their talent and potential. The macro-culture questions help reveal how they perceive our organization’s leadership strength, culture, and other enabling factors.
Rewards and Recognition
We run an online reward and recognition program named ‘Cheers.’ Much like a hospitality rewards program works, we engage, reward, and motivate employees through redeemable Cheers points. The program acknowledges consistent performers for customer-centricity, excellent displays of process knowledge, a high degree of functional competence, surpassing set goals, and contributions that have a significant business impact in a slightly different way. Managers use their budget to recognize their own employees and members of cross-functional teams with points.
- We’re all unique, so how do you succeed in answering different needs that your employees might have?
The rise of the digital economy has led to a new appreciation of the impact of experience. Experience is now defined as more than just end-consumer experience and includes other critical business stakeholders, including employees.
Amber, our AI-powered culture assistant, is an intelligent bot that reaches out to all Genpacters regularly to understand and empathize with them. Its design makes it an intelligent survey master. Unlike our annual employee engagement surveys – and those other professional services firms use – Amber asks focused questions on a real-time basis to gather information about each employee. Since she is technologically equipped to comprehend and handle sentiment, employees can open their hearts to her in a judgment-free zone and have meaningful conversations about their own unique journey at Genpact. Amber’s questions are customized to the particular life-stage of every employee, so we can gain meaningful feedback. While this enables us to predict rockstar performers, it also helps identify unhappy employees, so we can jump in and fix the problem. This has a massive impact on our retention and attrition rates, as well as empowering us to build a robust leadership pipeline and a highly engaged workforce.
- Tell us more about your diversity and inclusion strategy.
At Genpact, we empower everyone to bring their authentic selves to work. Celebrating what makes each of us unique, accepting our differences, and embracing diverse opinions lie at the heart of our culture and are key to our success.
We promise equal opportunity for all, irrespective of gender, age, ethnicity, cultural background, race, or sexual orientation. We remain committed to”
- Maintaining gender diversity across all levels of the organization
- Recruiting, retaining, and advancing talent from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds
- Creating and fostering an inclusive culture where our LGBTQ+ colleagues feel safe and empowered
Meaning at work is heavily driven through a company’s CSR activity and the ways and means it can create an impact to move the needle on diversity, equality, and inclusion. This is even more relevant for millennials looking to align their core values to those of the companies they work for. At Genpact, Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, and driving community impact are key agendas. We believe it’s our responsibility to address some of society’s most urgent needs and to ensure balanced and inclusive growth in the communities where we operate. In the last 10 months bringing communities together, albeit remotely, has been critical to driving meaning at work. From racial issues in the US to fostering a feeling of oneness during the pandemic, this was a huge focus for us, and we believe it will continue to be critical over the next few years.
We are committed to creating a diverse, equitable, inclusive world. And our mission to create not just a workplace that meets these ideals and the kind of world we’re trying to build is translated into real action at many levels. Our CEO Tiger Tyagarajan and our CHRO Piyush Mehta own our diversity and inclusion agenda. Our CEO chairs Genpact’s diversity, equity and inclusion council, while our CHRO regularly updates our Board about our progress and metrics. We also have four women on our Board of Directors and six on our Leadership Council, in addition to 23% of our SVP level employees and 22% at the VP level. We’re also proud to have reached a diversity figure of 41% women across our global workforce, getting us ever closer to our 50% goal. Talent, or as we like to say, our people are a critical agenda for our Governing Board and are actively sponsored by our C-suite. HR has a seat at the table when it comes to any decisions that involve the participation, productivity, and engagement of any section of our global employee base.
- Our industry is well known for the employee’s benefits. Tell us more about the ones that you are offering (maybe something rare or unique).
The level of benefits varies across all our locations in accordance with the country specifics and employee performance. However for all employees we offer private health benefits on top of the regular life insurance. Preserving our employees’ health & wellbeing has always been at the core of our business strategy but last period showed us more than ever the importance of paying a special attention to our employees physical, emotional and mental health and of keeping them engaged. Thus we have created a wellbeing framework containing interventions such as live webinars on physical & mental health, sports, yoga, parenting, taking care of the elderly. Since 2020 we provide access to Headspace, the most science-backed meditation application in the world which contributes to a happier, healthier, and more compassionate world for our employees and their coworkers as well as their community, friends and family by offering meditation and mindfulness techniques.
- What did your employees appreciate in your offices, and how do you think the working (from the office) environment will change post-pandemic? What are the new top features?
The ‘office’ trend is likely to have multiple manifestations, and the ‘work from anywhere’ culture is here to stay.
The office as we know it has changed forever. Only a tiny amount of the corporate work done in-person in December 2019 will come back onsite, with most of that work shifting permanently to a remote environment. However, some jobs, like those centered in fulfillment centers, will remain on site. In-person corporate work is expected to go virtual. Using intelligent automation, Genpact is already helping clients leverage bots to finish month-end close while their finance and accounting teams are busy fulfilling surges in demand. We have helped more than 100 companies close their books entirely virtually.
The once-popular trend toward open office “hoteling” will end. People will want their own space and will not wish to share seats and desks with others. While the open office concept will likely not go away completely, personal cubicles and assigned seating will have a renaissance. Multiple shifts will be used to maintain social distance. Such a restructuring could be a boon for architects, industrial designers, and construction companies. Long term, these changes will significantly impact corporate real estate needs as the model of a large, physical corporate headquarters evolves. Genpact understands this model. The company’s earliest iteration included virtual corporate headquarters, and more companies will come to embrace this.
The 9-to-6 workday is gone forever. With business increasingly becoming global, the 9-to-6 paradigm had become a fiction, as companies already worked 24×7. But now, the shift will happen within regions. Businesses have realized what matters most is that the work gets done and that people remain accessible, wherever they are.
- Some employees appreciate WFH and the flexibility it comes to when choosing their location and program. Besides that, it’s a huge opportunity for companies to access new talent pools. Did your company consider working from anywhere? This includes anywhere in Romania or also abroad?
We’ve experienced a massive shift from the traditional office-centric model to hybrid, remote delivery models. Employee expectations have also shifted. People now value flexibility, experience, and career movement more than ever. As ‘work from anywhere’ becomes a reality and talent becomes geography agnostic, we can now acquire the best talent in the world without being constrained to geographical delivery centers.
By creating and fostering a diverse, inclusive, and equitable culture while pioneering the work from anywhere model within the European countries we operate in, we enable our employees’ wellbeing while expanding our talent pool across Romania and the rest of Europe. Our office spaces will allow co-creation and social interaction instead of merely being places for transactional work. And as we test our Work from Anywhere model, we’re also ensuring our people have opportunities to reskill, advance their careers, and be ready for the ’future of you’.
- Do you intend to have specific benefits for the ones that choose one way of working or another?
Currently we do not have a plan to differentiate the benefits based on the type of workmodel. Nevertheless, we keep ourself up to date with the market trends and with the feedback from our colleagues, aiming to provide the most relevant benefits everyone.
- Is there a channel/web page where people can learn more about your company and career opportunities?
Find out more about Genpact careers at https://www.genpact.com/careers. Get to know us at Genpact.com and on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.