Talent – Now and the Way Forward

Talent is the binding word between the aspiring participants of an Executive MBA programme and the industry, for while the participants aspire to be perceived as talent, the industry too is keen to interact with such aspiring talent towards fulfilling their talent requirements. On such a backdrop, the participants of MDI’s Executive MBA were pleased to host Anjali Singh, VP-HR & Training, Genpact on May 15, 2013.

Anjali Singh’s career transition left the participants spellbound to an extent as here was a industry veteran before us who after successfully manning critical roles across the financial domain, was now a Global Leader in Genpact spearheading key responsibilities spanning the HR vertical.  In spite of the fact that all participants had more than 5 years of experience, the knowledge of various HR initiatives dedicated towards employees of an organization was translucent to us.

Anjali Singh started with a brief introduction of Genpact as an organization and the various functional domains Genpact works on. She mentioned that Genpact was planning on horizontal expansion of line of services and subsequent addition of clientele in coming years. In order to perform well consistently in the IT/ITeS space, she emphasized the importance of skilled workforce of the company and the initiatives incorporated within Genpact Human Resources practice to cater to the same. She explained unlike other industries, performance of IT/ITeS companies depends directly on commitment of employees towards organizational objectives, and the financial targets are achieved with the help of hard work and performance of employees. Genpact has a transparent policy of allocation of employees into different functional domains, she said, which has a twofold benefit : creation of an opportunity for an employee to work on a specific domain of interest and automatic value-addition to the company in terms of creating employees with diverse functional knowledge.

Some of the HR initiatives taken by Genpact in order to promote competition, satisfaction within employees are redemption of credit points awarded for performance, goal-setting and tracking methodology for each employee, imparting periodic training to create a knowledge capital, opportunity to pursue higher education etc. "Talent Management" might not be the most catchy word when it comes to an industry as such, but it is the sole function that encircles the entire workforce and keeps them updated through learning plans. Talent Management involves tracking of achievements, birthday, date of joining of each employee, emphasizing on work-life balance, rewards and recognitions etc. These initiatives work cumulatively towards motivation of employees and later turn out to be an important instrument for employee retention. The idea of Talent Management is to develop a congenial workplace for all employees with an amount of motivation attached to each and every piece of work. Anjali Singh said that Genpact has been following an employee-first approach in order to be customer-first.

The lecture was followed by a Q&A session where questions were asked mainly on how HR functions adapt to resource allocations due to constant technological innovations and the future of IT/ITeS industry in India. Anjali Singh was then felicitated by MDI through a vote of thanks.

It was an enriching experience for all participants, specially for those who didn't have a prior work experience in an IT/ITeS MNC, where "Talent Management" is practised extensively in all levels of hierarchy. It was a perfect start to the Guest Lecture series in MDI's Executive Program 2013-14.