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From Infy to Mindtree, Indian IT crowdsources ideas, projects from workforce to retain talent – ETtech.com


From Infy to Mindtree, Indian IT crowdsources ideas, projects from workforce to retain talent

About a year ago, mid-size technology firm Hexaware began allowing its business units to post complex problems, which they were struggling to solve, on its tech-sharing platform Brainbox. The objective was simple: if a particular team could not fix an issue, use the collective minds of the organisation to find an answer.

Till now about 4,500 ideas have been posted on Brainbox, of which 3,000 got implemented, leading to savings of around USD75 million for Hexaware customers.

Chief People Officer Amberin Menon says this was a bottom-up approach to innovate and capture ideas at the programmer level.

“Anyone can ideate, assess, and give suggestions. These ideas don’t stay on paper, but go to the development and deployment stages. We take concurrence from the customers as to how this has helped, whether in terms of time or money saved,” she tells ET.

Wipro has a similar platform, TopGear, under which live projects from across the globe are posted. Employees can take up work from there.

“There is a small monetary reward for people whose ideas are selected, but the main thing is letting people work on new technology even though they may be working on legacy technology otherwise,” says Anurag Seth, head, talent transformation at Wipro. Launched a little over a year ago, Seth says TopGear has worked as a huge motivator with about 8,000 employees suggesting ideas and winning the prize money.

“We work in a bi-polar market with legacy and new-age technology, and there is a need to engage with employees at a much larger scale than before,” he adds. Technology companies are increasingly realising that providing financial incentives and plain vanilla human-resource goodies are no longer enough to retain a workforce that is being constantly wooed not only by other tech firms but also startups.

Retain talent
In the last few years, the attrition rate in the technology space has hit 20%, with walkouts being among the highest in recent times. This forces companies to look for newer ways to engage with their people, in a way that also helps them add more value to the business.

“Everyone in the technology business is struggling as there aren’t enough trained people. So, they are trying various things to attract and retain people, beyond just setting up gyms on campus,” says Sanjay Lakhotia, co-founder, Noble House Consulting, an HR talent marketplace. Most of the initiatives are going beyond simple reward and recognition programmes and focusing on letting employees work across projects and technologies.

Bengaluru-based Mindtree has introduced a series of initiatives, including hackathons and build-a-thons, to generate more ideas from employees beyond their regular projects. At the core is Digital Pumpkin, where employees can work on turning business ideas into workable solutions, collaborate, and experiment with new technologies.

Anish Philip, vice-president, people function, Mindtree says, “Digital Pumpkin has seen a healthy rate of conversion of 10% of ideas into realizable solutions/product offerings.”

This helped find a quick solution for a customer who was into payment processing and struggling with high merchant onboarding time. The solution involved a mix of process and technology innovations.

Crowdsourcing ideas and projects within the company ecosystem was a brainchild of Vishal Sikka, the former Infosys CEO. Sikka started Zero Bench, an initiative that allowed people on the bench to take up projects and solve customer problems. At its peak, around 40,000 ideas were generated on the platform.

After Sikka left following a tussle with the founders, the company started the ‘Be the Navigator’ programme. This promotes grassroot innovation in cutting-edge technologies in a bid to find solutions to client problems.

Kamal Karanth, co-founder, Xpheno, a specialist talent-solutions firm, says while compensation is an important issue in fixing attrition, most firms have changed their policies, clearly linking increments to meeting targets. “All these programmes like skill upgradation are linked with creating a technologist’s mindset in the engineers and repositioning them. This helps in keeping him engaged as well as when bidding for high-margin digital contracts,” he says.

“All our assets walk out of the door at the end of the day, and we need to make sure they come back the next day, and are excited to be there,” says Sudhir Chaturvedi, president-sales, Larsen & Toubro Infotech. About three years ago, when the company was putting together its strategy document, a key tenet was that the company would be the best place to learn and grow, he says, adding, “We are conscious of the shift in the market to digital technologies and the millennials joining the workforce.” The company has launched Mission Ubuntu, which is a set of initiatives aimed at accomplishing more as a team and an individual. Ubuntu, a Zulu word which means ‘I am because we are’, is helping break down silos between teams and getting people to work together on new opportunities.

The engagement quotient
The human-resources departments have been trying various things to keep pace with the changing times. When Harshvendra Soin took charge as the chief people officer at Tech Mahindra last year, one of the first things he did was conduct an employee survey to understand their biggest daily pain points. Having to carry an id card on them all day followed by not knowing what jobs were opening up across the company topped the list of grievances. “We introduced a facial recognition-based attendance system across all our locations. This also works as a mood-o-meter, capturing five emotions and giving us a sense of the mood of the centre,” Soin tells ET. Within a month of adopting this system, the happiness score was up by 3%. Now, Tech Mahindra has started offering this as a solution to customers as well. “People remain the only sustainable differentiator between companies. You can compete only so much on pricing, so you need to hire and attract the right people and make them stay with you for longer,” he says.

Last year it launched Talex, an artificial intelligence-driven talent marketplace with all employees and their skills mapped onto it. If a job opens up anywhere in the world, the system would automatically identify employees with matching skills and sends alerts to the recruiter as well as the employee, who, if interested, can apply for it. Meanwhile, employees who may be interested in a position but don’t have the required skillset can still bid for it using points earned through reward and recognition programmes, with the top bid getting a wild-card entry to the interview round.

Apart from this, companies are also tailoring programmes for different segments at the workforce. In order to engage with the freshers even before they join the company, Wipro last year provided them access to an online-training platform, which would also help bridge the gap between what they have learnt and what would be required of them. While most failed to complete all 250 hours worth of exercises, they were given an additional four weeks to do this after joining. Based on the learnings, the company this year has introduced an additional four-week extension in the form of a business-oriented project, which is like a live project giving them hands-on experience. “The deployability of freshers on actual projects after they go through this process has gone up,” says Seth.

Hexaware, too, introduced a programme last year with a group of 100 managers which let them focus on one of the three areas – speaking, listening, and caring – and asked them to come up with specific initiatives around these. In turn, this has led to higher engagement within their teams, with initiatives like Mother’s Shift, which allows new moms to fix their own shift timings and off days.

People quit managers, not companies – goes the saying. Establishing a strong human connect seems to be the best way for companies if they want to stop their employees from walking out of the revolving door.





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