“At Capgemini, we define our values under seven important pillars – Honesty, Boldness, Trust, Team Spirit, Freedom, Modesty and Fun. We believe in creating the workplace of the future through regular learning and development initiatives.” Read on to know more about Capgemini’s culture and what Anil Jalali, CHRO of Capgemini has to say about upskilling for the future.
What are the steps you take as a leader to embrace innovative disruption?
Innovative disruption is creating a pressing need for businesses around the world to evolve. We see disruption as a way to emerge in the market and evolve in terms of business models, talent development, improved performance standards and excellence in services we deliver to our customers.
Capgemini in India plays a vital role as a center for innovation for the Group. With the focus to become increasingly competitive, agile, responsive and customer-centric as we move forward, we have launched the Applied Innovation Exchange (AIE) which enables a globally curated ecosystem to proactively plan for shifts in technology. The facility serves as a gateway between clients and the global ecosystem. Clients are provided access to our unique curated ecosystem of startups, accelerators, incubators, strategic technology and business partners, internal experts to infuse innovation into everyday business. As an organization we have embraced innovative disruption and will continue to accelerate at an exciting and alarming pace.
We involve our employees also to drive innovation into the delivery on an on-going basis and thus this allows them to re-invent themselves, add value to what they are offering to the customer and bring value to the organization. For instance, we recently conducted a first of its kind HR hackathon initiative, wherein our HR team members came together to innovate & improvise people process leveraging digital technologies.
In a nutshell, we see disruption as a positive change and this helps us to achieve our goal.
What are the strategies you employ to upskill your workforce?
Given that the digital disruption is creating a pressing need for businesses around the world to evolve, there is a need of upskilling workforce with latest technologies to stay ahead of the curve. Capgemini in India is today the delivery backbone of the Group with our 50 percent of the workforce. As an organization, we are focusing on three key areas from a training perspective:
- New and emerging technologies: for building a future ready organization centered around the new and emerging technologies of digital, cloud, DevOps, cybersecurity and big data
- Upskilling: proactive and ongoing career development and skills building (includes other technologies)
- Need based training: project specific skill requirements
Along with the Businesses and Service lines, we have identified a set of 122 courses that help employees build skills quickly (40 hrs. of training). These topics are the ones which are in demand by the projects. Each of these programs have rich content, assignments, projects and assessments – which help an employee gain hands-on skills in a quick and efficient manner.
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How do you win at talent management?
As the delivery engine of the group, Capgemini in India play a pivotal role in global delivery and this creates the need for India to move very fast and leverage the opportunities arising out of innovation and digital technologies. At Capgemini, people are the backbone of the company and our aim is to continuously reinforce our People Strategy in India.
Some of the talent initiatives include:
- Accelerated Career Progression: We believe in providing accelerated career opportunities to our internal talent before we look externally. This is managed through more frequent rotations and promotion opportunities throughout the year facilitated by HR and business teams as well as through an open internal job posting program. We also have specific career and talent programs targeted at different talent segments such as IGNITE for high potential talent at the lower end of the pyramid, Career Acceleration Program for mid managers. These programs offer accelerated growth journey through upskilling, mentoring, on the job experiences, among others.
- Investments in New-age, Emerging Skills: We are further enhancing opportunities for our colleagues to work on cutting-edge technologies by investment in future skills, such as Digital, AI, Cloud, Machine Learning, Robotics, and IoT and strengthen our capability. This year we are increasing the trainings and certifications programs by 30% compared to last year.
- Fostering Diversity: We believe a diverse workforce is key to organizational success. Therefore, enhancing talent diversity is one of our core ongoing objectives and there are several initiatives to achieve that. One of them is Powerahead that is aimed at identifying potential, developing and growing senior women leaders in the organization.
- We take Fun, seriously! – Lastly, we take Fun seriously and that is the one of our core values of Capgemini. We have a dedicated fun team who drive various programs that enable a culture of fun and celebration while at work. To highlight, we have our own band called Rubber Band that plays every Monday under the program TGIM: Thank God It’s Monday. We have completed 550 continuous Mondays (without a break) of performance by the band.
What role do you think culture plays in increasing efficiency at work?
It is essential to understand the culture and vision of the company as it defines and offers direction to an employee in terms of how they can work towards their personal goals aspirations and align their goals with that of the company.
At Capgemini, we define our values under seven important pillars – Honesty, Boldness, Trust, Team Spirit, Freedom, Modesty and Fun. We believe in creating the workplace of the future through regular learning and development initiatives, opportunities to innovate and continuous transformation. We encourage our employees to invest their time in upskilling themselves in the latest technologies to stay ahead of the curve. We also encourage our employees to bring in the right blend of fun into work and live the Capgemini experience of an engaging and lively workplace.
What role do you think technology plays in talent management? How can technology bring about a change in the talent management lifecycle?
Technology plays an important role in managing and transforming talent. It has taken HR and recruiting from a desk- and paper-based activity to a faster, wider business process through social, mobile, analytics and AI based technologies. At Capgemini, we leverage technology in all facets of HR.
- Learning & Development: Capgemini has completely adopted Digital Age Learning, through well-defined programs based on flipped and gamified learning.
- Yammer: The age of technology has only served to reinforce the preference to communicate digitally. The stimuli for social media savviness are all in place. Yammer enables social media usage in the context of workplace and helps drive, sharing, ideation, collaboration. From posting links to various media, microblogging, visualizing, groups, discussions and event pages, polling, thanking and praising someone or something as simple as giving an update, Yammer is all-encompassing.
- Predictive analytics: We have deployed predictive analytics enabled talent retention actions that are more objective and have high reliability. We are also using advanced tools to simulate and derive talent insights.
- Recruiting Tech: Our Recruiting teams are rapidly embracing automation, AI based sourcing platforms, and social recruiting that is transforming speed and depth of hiring.
