Winning the Battle Against Attrition
Genpact nurtures a global workforce with smart HR practices and career development programs.
by Tara Swords, May 2008
Genpact, a global business process outsourcing (BPO) company, provides a broad range of business and technology services to companies worldwide. Clients in many industries turn to Genpact for services that include finance and accounting (F&A), insurance, supply chain, customer service, enterprise application, and IT infrastructure. To operate profitably in a highly competitive market, Genpact must manage its immense workforce, which involves developing and retaining a diverse pool of skilled employees. Learn how Genpact relies on Oracle to help manage staff and trains employees to provide specialized client services.
As a rapidly growing BPO company, Genpact faces a tough reality: competition for skilled employees is tight. Acquiring and keeping good customers depends, in large part, on Genpact’s ability to acquire and keep the best employees. That’s why the company works to ensure that its employees are not only happy with the prospect of a long-term career at Genpact but also prepared to shine on the job.
That idea might sound straightforward. But with 32,700 employees in more than 30 operations centers in nine countries, managing the workforce is anything but simple. The company can afford to take little for granted—even the simplest companywide missive would need to be translated into approximately 20 languages. Attrition is a constant concern among technology companies in India, where rapid economic growth has led to a wealth of opportunities for skilled workers. All the while, analysts have begun to speculate on a looming shortage of skilled knowledge workers in India, where 70 percent of Genpact’s work takes place.
Despite the availability of hundreds of thousands of job-ready college graduates each year, Manish Soman, senior vice president of software solutions at Genpact, calls attrition a disease that India needs to eradicate.
“The talent crunch is coming from the internal growth of the country,” Soman says. “The internal growth is so high that talent is now actually being spread across everything that is happening in the country. It’s a very serious concern.”
FAO Research, a finance and accounting outsourcing (FAO) market research company, estimates the average attrition rate in the FAO market worldwide at between 10 and 20 percent. FAO Research also predicts that number may rise to match attrition rates in general BPO companies—estimated between 25 and 40 percent—as the FAO market matures and labor shortages set in. An FAO report foretells the potential fallout: Disruptions to customer service, and concern about companies’ ability to transfer knowledge and protect data.
Two prongs of Genpact’s attrition-fighting strategy include workforce management through good HR practices and comprehensive workforce training. For both initiatives, Genpact turned to Oracle.
Oracle Human Resources Helps Genpact Manage Diverse Workforce
A key part of Genpact’s philosophy is that it’s important to go where customers are. The result is a highly distributed workforce with its inherent communication and cultural barriers.
“Imagine somebody in Japan trying to talk to somebody in India,” Soman says. “It’s just not going to work well. So we need to have that local presence, to manage cultural issues, as well as some physical work in those regions.”
Given the company’s distributed and multilingual nature, fundamental tasks such as job sourcing became increasingly complicated.
“You map all the skills that are available, by person, by industry, by horizontals,” Soman says. “It’s a little bit more than just getting the right person [in] the right place.”
Oracle’s HR solution helps Genpact ensure that employees use a self-service system to update their own information and skills and be matched to the projects that will interest them and take advantage of their talents. And, because the system supports multiple languages, staff can work in the languages they’re most comfortable with.
Gretchen Alarcon, vice president of human capital management strategy at Oracle, says job sourcing is key to lowering attrition.
“Employees are looking for the best opportunities for their career,” Alarcon says. “When you have a market where conditions are changing quickly, people are realizing their skills are valuable, and employees are very willing to take their skills to a new company if there is a better opportunity.”
“Attrition only happens for three reasons; this is my belief,” Soman says. “It happens if you’re not working right with your supervisors, you don’t believe you’re adding value to the enterprise, or the enterprise doesn’t value what you do. There are ways to measure that; there are ways to manage that.” Genpact’s integrated Oracle HR system links 30 to 40 different touchpoints to collect employee data, from performance to availability to early warning signs that an employee might be at risk.
Oracle Learning Management Prepares Employees for New Challenges
At Genpact, the hiring operation is mind-bogglingly large.
“Last I heard from our hiring manager, and I was just flabbergasted by the number, on a monthly basis they’re looking at a quarter of a million resumes,” Soman says. “That’s just insane. Out of a quarter million, we hire about a thousand people a month.”
While many of those new hires are highly educated, they likely lack specific knowledge about the industries and companies they will serve. Soman says about 40 percent of Genpact’s work is in F&A, and the company needs highly educated accountants who are conversant in international tax law, as well as local tax law and statutory requirements of nearly 150 countries.
That’s where training comes in.
“Training is absolutely critical,” says Rachael Stormonth, vice president of BPO analyst firm NelsonHall. “Training about the industry that you’re serving—so if you’re serving an insurance company, actually getting to know about the insurance company and getting localization training. If you’re serving the U.K., getting to understand U.K. references.”
Genpact uses Oracle Learning Management to manage and deliver online and classroom-based training programs—ensuring consistent education that employees can complete at their own tempo. The company offers training in multiple areas: business processes, products, industry knowledge, as well as personal development and leadership development.
“Genpact has put a significant amount of investment in learning process in terms of what happens when new employees come onboard, making sure they come up to speed as quickly as possible and making sure they don’t have to lose time and productivity and wonder if they made the right choice,” Oracle’s Alarcon says.
Most of Genpact’s contracts are not six-month or one-year contracts—they’re multiyear contracts. Customer trust is critical, and attention to training has helped the company build that trust.
“[Employees] stop associating themselves as Genpact,” Soman says. “They really associate themselves as an extension of the client.”
Creative Approach Goes Beyond Software
In addition to using Oracle software to fight attrition, Genpact is taking the war to the front lines.
“The cities can only offer so much at this point in India,” Soman says. “Talent exists deep in the interiors of the country.”
That’s why Genpact has set up storefronts in shopping areas around the country where people can come in and sign up to work. The result is a truly modern, out-of-the-box approach to finding the right employees who will thrive in a competitive but nurturing environment.
“On one side you have McDonald’s, and then there’ll be a Genpact shop,” Soman says. “We want the crowd who goes into McDonald’s to come into the Genpact shop. We’re going proactively and attracting talent.”
Tara Swords is a freelance writer based in Washington DC
