Pankaj Khanna
EVP, Head Revenue Assurance and Head HR, Coforge BPS, reveals how the company has set about creating a workplace that engages and delights
In the current post pandemic scenario, workplaces from across the world are witnessing a shift from a static workplace to a more dynamic, flexible working model. COVID-19 has reset employee expectations to include flexible working conditions and maintain work-life balance. Technological advancements like Cloud, AI, ML, automation, etc. also played a key role in reshaping the way people work, rapidly.
It has therefore become crucial for organizations to realign their strategies and focus on what both employees and businesses want. Coforge further sharpened its focus to update to the optimal mix of technology, culture, and humans to focus on employee experience, productivity, and business growth.
In the backdrop of the ongoing pandemic and the resultant VUCA business environment, maintaining the right workforce while ensuring low attrition has become a tough task for IT services companies, globally.
Organizations and employees alike are affected with collective burnout, and exhaustion arising from prolonged emotional and mental stress and constantly dealing with conflicts, leading to increasing number of resignations across organisations. During this time of ‘e Great Resignation’, we at Coforge had an attrition rate amongst the lowest in the industry. Here are some of the areas that we as an organization have focused on, to create an engaging and preferred work environment for our employees.
Employee First Approach
We at Coforge are a very diverse organization, with people from approximately 45 nationalities working for us, of which over 27% are women. During FY22, we also acquired erstwhile SLK Global with 7,000 employees who became an integral part of Coforge, performing admirably as the rechristened Coforge BPS (Business Process Solutions) business unit. Our belief is that integration was efficient & effectively merged the best of HR policies in both organizations to support the BPS growth momentum ahead. We are focused towards prioritizing the needs of every employee and providing the best employee experience possible.
We are trend-setters in people practices, catering to different life stages of an individual. We provide our employees with an opportunity to earn lucrative incentives through our ‘Each One Get One’ scheme for helping the company source the right set of culturally aligned candidates against our open positions. To enable women participation in our workforce, we have launched initiatives like ‘Reach for the Sky’, ‘Breakthrough for Career Resilience’, ‘A Fine Balance’, and ‘MoMentoring’. Besides crèche accessibility for each location in India, offers a holistic development environment for kids. We oer a Child Care Leave (CCL) through which new mothers and fathers can opt for a unique working arrangement. We oer a holiday for the employee’s birthday, allowance for weddings, company investment in children’s accounts at birth, anniversary allowance, annual break with reimbursement, and so on. Our 25 acres Greater Noida Campus also has an outdoor swimming pool, sports facilities, an auditorium, and gym among many other facilities that employees can use at their leisure.
We also have an employee engagement survey in place, called ‘My Voice’. is survey is a very good platform to help the organisation understand the employee and get insights for better policy conception, to gather true employee pulse, plan critical actions and remain dynamic in order to be at par with the industry and retain key talent. Another such initiative is ‘I engage’, which is our intranet accessible across the organisation. e ‘I Engage’ platform gives employees access to all policies and the latest updates on organisational developments as well as enabling employee self-service for various requests and workflows, within the organisation bringing a lot of agility to the system.
Upskilling the Workforce
With growing competition and constant tech evolution, it is imperative to upskill/reskill the employees on a time-to-time basis. Providing training through development programs also helps in bringing fresh ideas and makes the employees feel relevant and secure, having acquired new, emerging, and future-proof skill sets.
In the past 40 years, we have mastered the art of skilling our workforce on emerging technologies. As an employee joins our organisation, the first step is the integration exercise, where the new employee must go through a three-day senior leader assimilation program. Under the program, our senior leadership from across the business level comes and talks to the new joiners, meet up with them, and understands their priorities, to help develop a level of transparency in the system. is followed by a six-month intense training program covering a wide span of technologies, including RPA, AI, machine learning, customer experience, workflow, and orchestration.
We have an innovation first culture here at Coforge and focus on attracting talent to work on emerging latest technologies for our customers. We have created design studios for our employees in many of our delivery centres globally. Furthermore, we organise enterprise level hackathons, FinTech conferences, technology innovation workshops, etc. in these facilities.
Hybrid Workforce
In this post pandemic era, ‘Work From Home’ has now evolved into ‘Work From Anywhere’, and companies are building capabilities around making it feasible for all employees to work from quite literally anywhere – home, traffic, airport, and so forth. Flexibility around how, where, and when people work is no longer a discriminator. As offices have opened, we like many other organisations have adapted a hybrid workplace model.
Being a legacy light organisation with presence across the globe, we have always invested in emerging technologies, new ideas, and new ways of working. With the modern technologies accessible to us, we have not only been able to smoothly transition into the hybrid model, but have also supported many of our clients in doing the same. With minimum business disruption, we were able to retain productivity even while working from remote locations, ensure security, deliver an equitable experience, and enable collaboration.
Most of us would agree that in this new world, the concept of a remote or hybrid workplace regime is here to stay. ese business transformations can enable better collaboration within and between organizations and create additional personalized ways of customer engagement, higher employee modernization, and productivity.
Positive Atmosphere
At Coforge, we try to establish a positive work environment while building a company culture that helps boost employee morale to stay productive and engaged. Planning social, cultural, athletic activities, recognition and reward programs for employees periodically and on time, allowing time off work to balance their personal lives, etc., are some of the ways by which we keep our employees motivated. We encourage a cheerful, light-hearted, and fun atmosphere in the workplace. We also oer paid leaves and allowances for certain personal occasions, like weddings etc. to enable our employees to create happy memories.
Prioritize Employee Wellness
The pandemic has changed the way businesses operate and look at the mental and physical wellness of our employees. We introduced a slew of measures from collaborating with hospitals during covid, setting up a Micro Hospital inclusive of ICU beds in our Noida campus to covering the cost of COVID-19 treatment for all our employees and external support teams. We also conducted vaccine drives and ensured 24*7 support to provide ambulance and transportation for hospital admissions. Likewise, we also ensured continuous communication with employees through mailers and phone to check on their mental and emotional health.
It has become critical for every organization to take a human-centric approach to the employee experience. To check the status of employee wellbeing and take corrective measures according to the situation. Organisations like ourselves are also leveraging cutting-edge AI, people analytics, and automation solutions to deliver actionable insights, to help give each employee a personalized experience to optimize performance.
