Episode 167: How to Create Personalised Employee Experiences (Interview with Piyush Mehta)
As HR and People Analytics Leaders, we know that personalised employee experiences have a profound impact on organisational success. It’s the secret ingredient that unlocks the unique needs, aspirations, and journeys of your workforce – enhancing employee engagement, loyalty and productivity. So in the latest episode of the Digital HR Leaders Podcast, we're diving deep into how Genpact, the global professional powerhouse organisation, are achieving just that.
Joining David Green on this quest, is Piyush Mehta, the Chief Human Resources Officer at Genpact, to unravel the strategies and innovations that have shaped and personalised the employee experiences across Genpact’s vast global footprint.
In this episode, topics covered include:
The transformative power of personalised employee experiences in achieving organisational success
Insights into Genpact's innovative strategies for tailoring employee journeys
The role of data-driven tools and technology in shaping employee experiences
The impact of HR on business growth and client satisfaction
The potential of generative AI in HR and its real-world applications
Inspiring ideas on how HR can shape the future of work and the world
Don't miss this opportunity to gain exclusive insights that will propel your employee experience to new heights. This episode was brought to you in partnership with eQ8, a strategic workforce management tool. Explore eQ8's cutting-edge solutions at eQ8.ai/Insight222.
[0:00:03] David Green: As we all know, the current talent marketplace is a whirlwind of change and uncertainty. Companies are grappling with layoffs, recruitment surges, and what has been dubbed in the press as the Great Resignation. Today, I'm thrilled to bring you a truly exceptional guest who has been leading the charge in this domain. Joining us is Piyush Mehta, Chief Human Resources Officer at Genpact, a global professional services firm renowned for its expertise in digital transformation. Piyush is a true advocate for enhancing the employee experience, and he has spearheaded remarkable strategies at Genpact to ensure their workforce thrives in the face of market volatility.
In our conversation today, we will explore the importance of employee experience in this candidate-driven market. Piyush will share his insights on how organisations can attract, and more importantly retain, the best talent by creating a workplace that goes beyond the ordinary. We'll also explore Genpact's unique employee listening strategy, which is centred around its groundbreaking platform, Amber. Piyush will explain how Amber works, how it captures valuable employee sentiment, and how that data is utilised to drive meaningful change within the organisation. We'll also uncover how Genpact has translated employee feedback into actionable policies and operational improvements, resulting in a workplace where employees feel heard, valued, and motivated.
I'm excited to delve into the role of people analytics and technology in shaping the employee experience at Genpact. So without further ado, let's get started, where Piyush kicks off the conversation with a brief introduction to himself and his role at Genpact.
[0:02:00] Piyush Mehta: I work for Genpact. We are a professional business services company, roughly about 120,000 people at last count across 30-plus countries. I'm based out of India, which is where a large part of our employee group is, and the balance of the leadership team of Genpact is a virtual leadership team, which is pretty much across the world, where our clients are really close to them.
In terms of my background, I have been CHRO at Genpact for the last, I want to say it's, you know, I'm gulping now, it's 17 years of being in the same role and I've been 21 years with this company. I joined them when we were much, much smaller and a part of the General Electric Company. I've been a career HR person, nobody else wants me, so I've been in HR for a really long time! I started my career with Unilever and then went to work for PepsiCo, so had an opportunity to work across different kinds of businesses and in different geographies. Still, I decided that I wanted to come back to India because this is where the action is, that's where the growth is and that's where the maximum opportunity to support the business from a talent perspective will be. And I have to say that I really benefited from that decision.
[0:03:30] David Green: That's good and I'm sure plenty of other people would want you, Piyush. It's fascinating that you've obviously been 17 years there at Genpact as a CHRO. I'd love to hear just your thoughts really on how the role of the CHRO has changed maybe over that time, because it does seem to have been a significant change if we look globally around at that. And also, during that time, Genpact has scaled considerably, hasn't it, since it was spun out of GE Capital. So, I'd love to hear your thoughts about how the CHRO has changed full stop, but also how it's changed at Genpact, I guess, as you've grown as an organisation.
[0:04:08] Piyush Mehta: So, David, I'll tell you, this is my fundamental thesis as well, based on my learning at Genpact and in the HR function. I actually don't think the role of the CHRO has changed fundamentally ever since I started my career in HR. I think the needs are pretty much the same, which is, you know, make sure that the organisation has top-quality talent at the right place and at the right time, and then find a way to enable that talent to be able to stay on in the company and continue to build that talent engine. I don't think that has changed ever since I started working.
What has changed, to the point that you are making, is the context in which a lot of us do our work. What has changed is the influence that data and technology has had. The tools available to us as HR professionals and as business professionals to fulfil the talent needs of the organisation have become more and more sophisticated, if you will. The pace of that change has become faster, if you will, but the fundamental needs remain the same.
So, if I step back and think about, what are fundamentally people looking for; what do they come to work in an enterprise for; what do they come to work at Genpact for? It is, in my view, four reasonably simple things. Number one, what is the company they're going to work for; what's the purpose of that company; what's the culture of the company, etc? Number two, what is the quality of leaders and what is the quality of manager that an individual works with? The third is, what are the rewards which that individual will get? Then that rewards can manifest themselves in financial rewards but other rewards as well. And then the fourth one is, what is my career going to be like, which includes the quality of work that I do, the kind of people I interact with, what's the learning and development that I get, all of those things.
Now, these four fundamental reasons why people come to work, in my view, have not changed. The context however of this has changed based on what I talked about earlier, advances in technology, pandemic, so on and so forth. And some of the implications of that are the half-life of skills now is possibly three to four years, so the pace at which skills are becoming irrelevant and relevant and therefore, you know, that has changed. The hybrid-plus-remote environment has created, I think, a lesser level of anchor, which organisations have to employees or employees have to organisations, you know, the swipe left, I reject, swipe right, I accept kind of environment has happened. Employee experience has become hugely critical, and wellbeing has become very important.
In all of these changes, technology has dramatically enhanced the way in which we can better fulfil those fundamental needs of employees. So, that's kind of a long answer, but it's my fundamental thesis that HR needs of organisations are not very complicated. And it's very easy to get lost in all the concepts that come out which are flavour of the week, flavour of the month, if you will. And I think to stay anchored in, this is what we will promise to our employees, or this is what we will endeavour to provide to our employees, and using that as the North Star to navigate for the function, becomes hugely important. Otherwise, what happens is HR functions run the risk of becoming an end in themselves, and if I were to step back and say, "At what point of time do I see HR organisations with the highest credibility with business?", it's when they're able to create a very simple North Star which helps satisfy business needs and not complicate things to flavour of the month.
[0:08:34] David Green: That's a really good point, Piyush, and I think it sets up the conversation nicely, because we're going to dive into some of the great work that you've been doing at Genpact around enhancing employee experience. What are your views on how employees can attract and then retain the best talent, and provide a great employee experience, I guess?
[0:08:56] Piyush Mehta: Now as we think about employee experience, of leading from the purpose to our ways of working, I'll start with Amber, you referred to it briefly. Amber is our engagement tool, it measures employee engagement. In addition to that, it's also providing us a more nuanced view on, if an employee is highly engaged, why is she highly engaged? If an employee is not highly engaged, why is she not highly engaged? And therefore, it's a call to action for us to make sure that we act on what Amber brings us back.
Now, the way it provides that nuance is based on initial responses. Amber then asks questions to the employee which are customised to that employee's early responses, and that's where the AI part of it comes in. The machine learns constantly and get smarter and smarter as we do more and more of these engagement interactions. Now interestingly, David, this is so important to us that the top 150 people of the company, their bonus plans are driven by two financial metrics and one engagement metric, which is the Amber score. So, the bonus pool for our CEO, myself, and 150 other top leaders of Genpact has three metrics that determine the outcome of our bonus. One of those is our Amber score, which is a multiplier of the engagement score and the response rate. That's how critical it is for us, that it's been in place for the last three years. So, that's about Amber.
The second part of it is Genome. Four years back, we took a decision to go entirely virtual in all the learning that we provide. We have 10 million hours of learning that has happened on that platform. We have 40,000 active users every month on Genome. And in my view, it has become the new way of working in Genpact in terms of the way we think about learning and development. So, that's on Genome. The third one is our internal marketplace, TalentMatch, which takes the people who are upskilled by Genome and marries them to open jobs. More than, as we speak, 17,000 people have been able this year to find roles through what we call our TalentMatch, which is our internal marketplace. So, the ability to match skills with jobs, again, is where technology and analytics comes in.
Then finally, a really interesting tool called the Watercooler, the virtual watercooler. This is designed in partnership with Microsoft. Fundamentally, what happened during COVID and the pandemic was that people weren't hanging around and having corridor conversations, because people weren't hanging around together. And what that did, what it told us was that there are certain people with which all of us have strong ties at work. These are the people I will maintain my connect with in any case, whether I am working remote or not. But there are those weak ties, people I interacted with at the watercooler, people I interacted with just walking the corridor, that didn't happen anymore. And there is a very important need to be able to ensure that those weak ties are "strengthened".
The virtual watercooler basically again looked at metadata of email traffic and came back and said that, "Piyush used to interact with David once in two months. By virtue of working remote, that interaction is not happening". And therefore, the virtual watercooler will get into our calendars and will schedule a 15-minute shoot-the-breeze conversation between David and Piyush. So, these were the four specific things that I wanted to talk to you about to give you an example of how we've been able to focus on experience at this time of transition. And again, the important thing is, we didn't try to do 200 things. We probably tried to do six things, we failed in two and we stayed with four.
[0:13:46] David Green: Well, when you think of the initiatives around Amber, around Genome, around TalentMatch and even the virtual watercooler, how have these initiatives and the data that you get from it, how's that helped to drive some of the performance of Genpact itself, the organisational performance?
[0:15:12] Piyush Mehta: Sure. So, first is it impacts the money we make personally. I talked about our bonus programme and engagement metrics determining that. But more importantly, David, think about an organisation of 120,000 people; the moments of truth in our organisation where employees are interacting with customers and end customers of our clients are very, very high. And while my reference to bonus was partly serious and partly facetious, at the end of the day, the growth of the company totally and entirely depends on the engagement and the skill levels of those 120,000 people. And in a competitive world like we have today, our clients will take their business elsewhere if they're not happy, just like our employees will take their services elsewhere if they're not happy.
Therefore, our view to performance actually is hugely fundamental in saying that there is a direct transfer function between engaged and capable employees and the existence of our company, whether you look at revenue, margin, EPS, whatever metric you want to take, client satisfaction, we have no doubt that there is very direct correlation. And the fact that we've been able to grow to be 120,000 employees, or to the $8.5 billion market cap, is pretty much completely driven by that. So, I don't think we have any doubts in our mind.
Now, that's on the macro goals or the bigger goals if you will. But at the end of the day, the biggest piece on this is, and this is again, I started talking a little bit about my own philosophy on this. Business growth is the most important thing for people growth. If your business is growing, everything else will take care of itself, and the transfer function from people engagement to that is, in my view, very, very powerful.
[0:17:24] David Green: Yeah, and what would you say, Piyush, because we see companies that are making the link between engagement and talent outcomes, such as retention and mobility and everything else, but what you've done obviously is you've taken it a step further. You've actually connected it to business outcomes, such as growth and profit margins, and all the other financial metrics but also customer outcomes as well. What would you say to companies that are maybe struggling to make that final step?
[0:17:53] Piyush Mehta: Like I said, it started with, we benefited from being a part of an organisation which at one point of time had great people processes. Okay, it's not fashionable to say that any more, but I will tell you some of the tools and processes that existed in the GE system, and we grew out of that system, were huge. Look, I'd love to say the business loves us because we are a great HR team, but I don't think that's the driver. I think the business loves us because they know how important the talent agenda is. They own it as much as we own it, and we are enablers for the business and the business are enablers for us.
Now, that kind of culture, David, is not established overnight. I mean, I don't have a simple recipe for suggesting that that gets done. In our case, I think we were fortunate that, in some ways, many things came together and that happened. I could have spent nine months in figuring out what are going to be the most important skills four years from now, I could have done competency research, I could have done all kinds of stuff. Jenny and I just sat down and used common sense and said, "Let's spend our time and effort in executing this damn well, rather than trying to make a perfect design". And business likes that, they like the fact that we respond fast, they like the fact that we are iterative in the way we think, they like the fact that we don't want to be defensive and say our model is perfect. So, all of that thinking, I think becomes important.
I would say have a purpose, that's very important for an organisation. I'd say focus on the basics. In my view, those four basics are super-critical, okay, and I'll talk to them again just to make sure: the purpose of the organisation; the quality of leaders and manager; the rewards; and the career. Focus on those and leverage everything to be able to do that well. I tell people in my team, every year you have a scorecard, but in that scorecard do what you need to do to take care of the scorecard, but do one thing so well that it is your legacy for that year, people remember you for that. Don't try and do 25 things, because we'll not be able to scale them.
[0:20:17] David Green: Obviously, there's a lot of press around HR technology, there's a lot of investment in the area, there's new names emerging all the time, some of the big players have got a huge market cap on them. What are your views on how many tools, doesn't need to be a number, but how many tools an HR function should use to support their function? And then, the little addition there, in terms of generative AI, how do you think that's going to impact ways of working perhaps, but also the ways we deliver HR to our employees; and also, how are you thinking of using -- what are your early thoughts around how you're thinking of using it at Genpact? Obviously you've been using AI for a long time in HR, which many organisations haven't, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on that area.
[0:21:57] Piyush Mehta: So, to your point, this is not new for us, we've been down this path before. Again, if you were to pick up what's being said in the broader ecosystem, even when AI came out people said jobs are going to go away. The reality I'll give you, going back to our example of Amber, our engagement tool, yeah sure, the number of people running the engagement tool came down, but the number of people we needed to act on the insights which came out from Amber actually increased, and therefore we got huge benefit from it.
Think about genome, the 10 million hours of learning or the 40,000 learners every month. Yeah, sure, instructional design went out of the window, classroom training went out of the window, but the number of people who are helping us with analytics and insights and gurus and master gurus in that learning process has just multiplied by ten times. I think the impact of technology is actually very profound. It is, as has been said famously, overstated in the short run and understated in the long run. I would say the same thing for generative AI. We are very excited about the opportunities it holds for us, both as a business and within the HR function as well.
I think there are going to be some very profound implications of a very different scale than what happened when people went down the RPA path. I think this is very different, lots of things to be discovered, lots of people talking about potential downfalls as well, but that's true of any development in technology. We see massive, massive application. I'll give you two or three examples that we are working on as we speak. 15,000 frontline supervisors; today, if they have a challenge in managing their team, they either go to Genome or they go to their supervisor and say, "I have X person in my team". Tomorrow, you can have a simple one-on-one supervisory effectiveness Q&A built into a generative AI model; very powerful. Think about entire curricula built around channels.
So, I talked to you about, as an example, take AI or take conflict management as one or two skill areas of those 50 skill areas that I talked about. Curating and building that material for a guru would take anywhere between, I'd say, 40 to 50 hours and then you build quizzes around it, another 10 hours. Generative AI can do it in 2 hours based on a demo I saw yesterday. Very powerful implications of what you can do with that.
[0:24:55] David Green: I think in HR, when I speak to a lot of your peers and in other organisations, there is definitely this fear of failure, and you've got a very different approach, like you did with Genome; the two of you were in the room, you were picking 50 skills, you said you got 80% right, 20% wrong, and obviously you can change those. It was about getting something out there that people could use a bit quickly. How do you breed that mindset into people, not just in HR but across the business, because I'm guessing that's something that's a part of the culture at Genpact?
[0:25:30] Piyush Mehta: Great catch, David. So, it's actually one of the -- if I were to pick our statement of culture, which is built around the concept called CI Squared. It's one of the key tenets of CI Squared, which is fail fast. Now, what we're trying to say here is, it's okay to take risks, it's important to take risks to learn. But it's important to not continue to build on something just because there is ego behind it and because we picked it once. Because the world around us is changing too fast, sometimes these are not within our control. And therefore, our CEO talks about this often. It is folklore in Genpact to say the term, "fail fast", is pretty much understood by most people in the company. What we don't like is to not do anything for fear of trying or fear of failure. But what we also don't want is for people to continue to push an agenda because of the fear of failure.
In today's interconnected world, where everything is interdependent, the reasons for failure may not lie internally and therefore it's fine to do that. And to your point therefore, I say that's a great catch because it is a fundamental part of our culture and we are totally okay with that.
[0:26:49] David Green: I think it's really good, and I think for people listening to this, it's such an important element of HR, and particularly if we bring in more analytics and technology. It's science, at the end of the day, if we think back to when we did science at school, you do experiments, some of them work, some of them don't, and in the way you said, "If they don't work, learn from it and move on". I think that's the key thing; don't just keep trying to do it if it's not going to work, whatever programme it is you're trying to create from it.
[0:27:20] Piyush Mehta: Yeah, if this company was -- sorry to speak over you, but if this company wasn't open to fail fast, I would have been fired a long time back!
[0:27:29] David Green: Well, there's a good lesson for people and as from the start, Piyush has been CHRO at Genpact for 17 years. So, Piyush, I can't believe we've already got to the end of our conversation, but this is the final question. So, this is the question we're asking everyone on this series, and I think you've talked to this a little bit, so you might want to summarise here at the end. What is the role of HR in helping companies plan effectively for the future of work? So, I guess we've been about workforce planning here a little bit, but I guess I'm going to be quiet and let you talk.
[0:28:02] Piyush Mehta: Actually, David, to me it's a bit broader than that. The way I would respond to that is, and I talked to it earlier as well in some ways, I think what the people agenda does is just so fundamental to delivering the company's short-term and long-term objectives. It's beyond just planning the future of work, it's delivering to the future of business. That's why sometimes it's too important to leave just to the HR function, and I see it as partnership with business and the function. I don't see my function as owning the people agenda in a power equation over business. I see both of us as enablers to each other, and I think that becomes really important.
What do we need to deliver on? We need to deliver on talent management, we need to deliver on change management in the organisation, we need to deliver on employee experience in the organisation, we need to deliver on diversity and inclusion, DEI in the broader sense of the word, not just ticking off numbers, but diversity of thought, diversity of action. Those are the agendas which we need to go on with the business. And in all of this is embedded engagement; in all of this is engagement culture; in all of this is embedded skilling and upskilling, which is going to become so important; in all of this is embedded purpose. So, it kind of all comes together in the future of business.
[0:29:42] David Green: Piyush, thank you very much, a great way to finish our conversation. You and the team at Genpact are doing some incredible work and thank you for sharing some of the insights about Amber, about Genome, about TalentMatch, and all the other things that you're doing there. But I think more importantly, actually the approach that you take to HR and people management at Genpact, I think listeners are going to learn a lot from this episode. So, thank you very much for being on the show. Can you let listeners know how they can keep in touch with you on social media and find out more about your work at Genpact?
[0:30:19] Piyush Mehta: Yes, absolutely. So, David, first of all, thank you so much for allowing us to share our learning and our journey, really appreciate that. On social media, I'm on Twitter @piyushmehta322, LinkedIn @piyushmehta, and as a company, you can get to know us at genpact.com and our LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook channels.
[0:30:51] David Green: Perfect. Well, thank you very much, Piyush. I'm hoping I'll be in India again soon, and hopefully we'll meet in person one day and certainly looking forward to connecting with Praful again as well. So, thank you very much for being a guest on the show.
[0:31:05] Piyush Mehta: We'd love to have you over. Look forward to hosting you, David.