“The scale of skilling cannot be driven by constraints of real estate,” said Piyush Mehta, CHRO, Genpact, in his keynote address at TechHR 2020. Piyush shed light on how Genpact is leveraging data, digital, and design to increase productivity, engagement, and client impact.

The COVID-19 pandemic has completely changed the speed at which the world was going to adapt to virtualization. That journey has accelerated by three to four years. And while there a lot of downsides, the impact on resilience and becoming more ‘intelligent’ has been very powerful. As we think about creating a future-ready workforce, it takes multiple avenues and channels to build one. And data, design, and digital play a hugely important role.

So how is Genpact building its talent strategy based on this approach? 

Shedding light on the three important components of this, Piyush revealed they are reskilling at scale called Genome, the second component is about identifying and deploying the future-ready talent, and the third component is reimagining employee experience. This strategy is an ongoing journey and the idea is to fail fast, be agile, and adapt quickly.

Reskilling with Genome

Sometime around 2019, Genpact started thinking about how it is going to reskill its 100,000 employees at scale on an ongoing basis. Given that half-life of most skills is three to four years at best, the ability to reskill and unlearn is a huge competitive advantage. The firm wanted to build an initiative that encapsulated this thought and had to be at scale. And it could not  be driven by constraints of real estate or classroom. Hence it had to be done virtually. The key was to contextualize the information available to the need of the firm and enable collective learning.

To do this, the firm reached out to a few 1,000 employees to come back with a few skills they thought were important. This was then further extended to the other 95,000 for self-assessment on proficiency levels-from beginner to expert-on 50 skillsets necessary for the future. The firm then identified the goto experts in the company on these skill sets and made them responsible for driving these skill sets in the company. The firm then partnered with Edcast for information and the gurus were responsible for contextualizing relevant materials for the firm. That’s how the 50 skill sets were relayed to 100,000 employees in over 25 countries. And now have become 300 skill sets. 

Deployment with Talentmatch

Once you have reskilled the talent, the next step is how you deploy the talent and ensure that the future-ready talent is able to do roles that are relevant for them.  So the firm created an internal marketplace Talentmatch, in which every individual puts down his/her career aspirations. Once they get reskilled with Genome, the Talentmatch engine picks up availability and profile fit for roles that come up in the company. 

Hence Genome for reskilling and Talentmatch for redeployment-this is where data, technology, and the internal marketplace have come together to build a competitive advantage for the firm. This has enabled the firm to deploy over 5,000 people since the program’s inception. 

The firm has also restructured its employee value proposition for reaching out to talent and built a digital value proposition for attracting them. It was built on the thought process of ‘Dream in digital, dare in reality’.  What it meant was taking unique aspects of the culture and finding a way to encapsulate that in its offerings to the broader talent out there to help them solve real client challenges.

Reimagining Employee Experience

Genpact deployed an AI-driven chatbot, Amber, in order to bring in something that is far more agile, current, and ongoing. The chatbot reaches out on an ongoing basis to employee cohorts and asks intelligent questions. Based on the responses, it then customizes the questions it asks. This has enabled the firm to get massive amounts of intelligence, data, and insights into how employees are engaged. Ultimately, allowing it to stay current with the way employees are feeling.  

Finally, Piyush shared all these initiatives rest on the bedrock of culture.

“We have redefined the culture statement of the company to be about curiosity, humility, and learning.” 

And curiosity embodies all of the above. It has been redefined to include incisiveness and courageousness to act on that. This Piyush believes is ultimately helping set the right foundation for the workforce of the future.