Established in 2004 as a Global Business Services (GBS) hub for Tesco PLC, Tesco Business Solutions (TBS) in Bangalore had grown impressively to more than 2600 employees by April 2023. Spearheaded by Sumit Mitra, CEO of TBS, and supported by Somnath Baishya, Chief People Officer (CPO), TBS has transitioned from a shared service provider to a provider of advanced solutions, including finance, property management, supply chain, product, promotion, pricing, and more. Mitra and Baishya's innovative HR strategies, which emphasized hyper-personalization of employee experiences, had earned accolades for exceptional people practices in India as well as in global business service centers. The comprehensive initiatives implemented at TBS significantly increased its employee value proposition (EVP) and positioned the company as a top employer for highly skilled knowledge workers. While TBS's innovative HR strategies allowed the company to effectively compete for talent in a fiercely competitive labor market, they also increased the need for substantial organizational resources to sustain hyper-personalized employee experiences. Managing diverse individual needs remained a constant challenge for Baishya and his team, requiring careful curation, delivery, and expectation management strategies. The case provides frameworks for control, scalability, and manageability. It also addresses the challenges of hyper-personalization of employee experiences. As a result, HR personnel can multiply the value of employees and emerge as true value creators in organizations.
Based on their extensive consulting and advisory experience in large-scale consulting transformations for various large enterprises, Ramesh Srinivas and his colleagues at Worxogo Solutions Pvt. Ltd. (Worxogo) in Bengaluru, India, had launched an artificial intelligence (AI)-based nudge platform called Nudge Coach in 2017 to change employees' behaviour positively and voluntarily so as to bolster team performance. The platform's self-learning AI engine had been designed based on insights from behavioural sciences and popular motivation theories. It featured deep-learning algorithms that understood individual motivations and provided personalized coaching tips, appropriate challenges, and rewards. The platform was presented as a coach that could help employees manage their performance. By 2023, Worxogo had garnered numerous clients and accolades for its platform's novelty and efficacy in improving employee performance and organizational outcomes. However, Worxogo had implemented its platform predominantly for a limited set of functions, such as sales and data-centre operations, characterized by well-defined lead and lag performance metrics. Clients, buoyed by the platform's success, began encouraging the Worxogo team to extend the nudge-based performance-improvement system to other functions and domains. Thus, Srinivas, Worxogo's chief executive officer, faced a dilemma in August 2023of whether to continue to focus on Nudge Coach's limited existing functions or to explore appropriate nudge-based outcomes for tasks without clear lead and lag performance indicators. His other challenge was to determine how organizations and individuals could measure the effectiveness of nudges in improving performance without clear short-term outcomes. Which approach would Srinivas take to respond to these challenges?
Based on their extensive consulting and advisory experience in large-scale consulting transformations for various large enterprises, Ramesh Srinivas and his colleagues at Worxogo Solutions Pvt. Ltd. (Worxogo) in Bengaluru, India, had launched an artificial intelligence (AI)–based nudge platform called Nudge Coach in 2017 to change employees’ behaviour positively and voluntarily so as to bolster team performance. The platform’s self-learning AI engine had been designed based on insights from behavioural sciences and popular motivation theories. It featured deep-learning algorithms that understood individual motivations and provided personalized coaching tips, appropriate challenges, and rewards. The platform was presented as a coach that could help employees manage their performance.<br><br>By 2023, Worxogo had garnered numerous clients and accolades for its platform’s novelty and efficacy in improving employee performance and organizational outcomes. However, Worxogo had implemented its platform predominantly for a limited set of functions, such as sales and data-centre operations, characterized by well-defined lead and lag performance metrics. Clients, buoyed by the platform’s success, began encouraging the Worxogo team to extend the nudge-based performance-improvement system to other functions and domains.<br><br>Thus, Srinivas, Worxogo’s chief executive officer, faced a dilemma in August 2023of whether to continue to focus on Nudge Coach’s limited existing functions or to explore appropriate nudge-based outcomes for tasks without clear lead and lag performance indicators. His other challenge was to determine how organizations and individuals could measure the effectiveness of nudges in improving performance without clear short-term outcomes. Which approach would Srinivas take to respond to these challenges?
Thoughtworks, a global software consulting organization, had received tremendous success and appreciation for its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) culture, policies, and enabling practices. While the progressive DEI policies had increased gender representation, the percentage of women in technology continued to be skewed and not be representative of the larger gender composition in society. To address this gap, Thoughtworks initiated a comprehensive program to help support women returning to work after a career break. Titled "Vapasi", the program was initiated in 2014 and included identifying suitable women and selecting and inducting them for structured technology skills and holistic training. Training over 16 batches across multiple cities, covering 3,500+ registrations, and with less than 4.5% dropout, the program was seen as a progressive and successful step in helping build and sustain women in their careers. The HR and marketing teams of Thoughtworks helped identify potential candidates for the program through multiple sources, before screening and selecting the final cohort. The trainers for the technology skills were mostly volunteer employees from Thoughtworks, while soft skills, mentoring, and psychological support building were offered by external experts. Women who successfully completed the training could apply for appropriate jobs within Thoughtworks or anywhere else in the industry. Thoughtworks had recruited 130 such women from the Vapasi program. The investments in the program did not yield a significantly large number of women joining Thoughtworks. Despite all the support, progressive policies, and best-in-class inclusive environment, there appeared to be multiple barriers hindering women from returning to work. The case presents eclectic perspectives and challenges that learners need to understand as they engage with diversity and inclusion
ELGi transformed from a small family-run manufacturer of compressors and pumps to a global player through multiple initiatives based on improving the quality of their product and the productivity of their workforce over two decades. They adopted an innovative approach to improve their blue-collar workforce's lifestyle and income levels, linked to worker upskilling, increasing job autonomy, and a radical approach to wage agreement. Previously, wage negotiations for ELGi workers were unpredictable and without a clear structure. The process took time and was ad hoc. Dr. Jay, the promoter family member, did not subscribe to the traditional approach of keeping labor wages low and benefiting from the wage arbitrage followed by global subsidiaries in India and other Indian manufacturing companies. He wanted Indian workers to earn competitive wages, almost equal to what blue-collar workers in the West make and become globally competitive. Hence, a "basket of goods" approach to wage fixing was introduced in 1996 to ensure a good lifestyle for workers and their families. This approach linked consumption to compensation and was determined based on the needs of a family of four. Moreover, the company acknowledged the importance of enhancing worker motivation in order to remain competitive on a global scale. By defining a basket of goods as "must have" and "good to have", which was collaboratively developed between the workers, their families, and the management, they periodically expanded the basket items over multiple years. Additionally, with organization-based profit-sharing schemes, suggestion schemes, and career progression mechanisms, ELGi built a dedicated, motivated, and engaged workforce. Furthermore, the practice of keeping workers as contingent workers for long periods was changed to offer permanency for workers completing over three years based on their performance feedback.
redBus, the world's largest online bus ticket provider, required all employees across various data engineering and product teams to interact with each other daily for Agile product development. The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the development of a quick and interesting mechanism to deliver new-hire induction that would reduce the time-to-productivity of new hires. To address this need, Prabhanjan Kulkarni, the CHRO of redBus, and Srijeet Sarkar, Director of the Learning & Development (L&D) team, developed an immersive web-based online induction, which they extended to a partially immersive meta-based virtual reality platform sans an interactive avatar. The platform delivered an engaging experience and reduced time-to-productivity, while also releasing leadership bandwidth otherwise required for repetitive onboarding activities and providing a ready knowledge repository for all employees. It yielded additional benefits but also presented some challenges. The millennial and centennial new hires were overwhelmed by this technology's experience and use, which was enhancing the employer brand of redBus. However, older-generation employees found the experience uncomfortable and preferred the conventional physical induction process. The success of meta-learning initiated the development of an in-house mobile and web-based learning management system (LMS). Replete with assessments mapped to individual role levels and competencies for the various departments and teams, the e-learning modules provided learning guides for free online learning, before and after score tracking, and enabled employees to own their learning and development journey. The customized assessment framework also enabled redBus to map the trainee engineers to appropriate teams based on their skill capabilities, ensuring the high productivity of the young engineers.
Allegis Services (India) Pvt. Ltd., the Indian arm of the Allegis Group, a leading talent staffing and recruitment services firm, had become the best-practice advisor on enabling disability inclusion. With a large internal workforce that provided contract staffing and permanent hiring, they provided a template for various organizations that wanted to bring talent with disability into their workforce. Slowly and steadily, there was an increase in the number of people with disability inducted into formal white-collar jobs within Allegis and the clients it serviced. However, some challenges persisted. Given the accommodation requirements for hiring persons with disability, Allegis' clients questioned the business benefits of being disability-inclusive. A few organizations struggled to enable their hires, resulting in a few people with disability opting out of jobs in large and well-reputed organizations. The case broadens the scope of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity (DEI) agenda within organizations by focusing on the dimension of enabling disability inclusion. The case helps debate the need for disability inclusion, the enabling systems and mindsets to be truly disability-inclusive, and its intangible benefits for organizations.
The COVID-19 pandemic required most organizations to enable a work-from-home/work-from-anywhere approach. The enforced necessity became a habit for many employees, who preferred the new flexibility. However, with organizations wanting to bring employees back to the office, there was resistance due to an unexpected reason. The work-from-home environment had allowed moonlighting for a few employees, who undertook gigs and even permanent assignments with other employers. This phenomenon is widespread among IT/ITeS and other consulting/knowledge industries. The motivations for these assignments were additional income and increased learning and exposure. While dual employment was not legally allowed in India, employment contracts enforcing this rule and penalizing employees led to increased talent loss. Employees were happy to leave the organization for less formal or rigid work environments, resulting in higher attrition. Organizations' dilemma was to reject moonlighting through strict contracts, employee monitoring, and informal checks or formalize it through making moonighting "ethical". Still, measures rejecting moonlighting could dilute the culture of trust and increase attrition, not just of the moonlighting employees. However, organizations could embrace this phenomenon and formalize moonlighting through appropriate policies and guidelines, which led to increased risk to employee commitment, ensuring productivity, information and security risk, and the organizations' capability in predictable client servicing.
A people experience platform, entomo delivers a digital experience for all customers' employees to revamp talent development, performance, and engagement through hyper-personalized insights and nudges for each employee. The entomo talent experience suite provides a solution for all facets required for enhanced talent development and people performance. Recognizing that 'enterprises of tomorrow' require hyper-personalized experiences of relevant upskilling, the entomo platform enables an individualized skill gap analysis, learning journey, and nudges for self-development. At an aggregate level, the platform also indicated skill repository analysis, which enabled strategic investment in talent acquisition and/or development. entomo is increasingly receiving recognition and awards as a leader in digital performance management. However, a myopic view by some industry practitioners, who preferred to use the subjective assessment of organizational skills or focus on other HR initiatives rather than getting the organization future-ready, presented some challenges to entomo. Employees, those experiencing technology and digital fatigue, were further challenged by yet another platform, thus reducing the stickiness of the offering.
dotin.in was a technology start-up founded by Ganesh Iyer in California, a spin-off from a product venture incubated by Cisco Systems created to solve the attraction and retention of talent. Leveraging their understanding of artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML) techniques, dotin incorporated the motivation science developed from the Color Munsell Theory. The insights of individual motivations are assessed through a quick 60-second color preference assessment based on Holland's vocational personality type, Gardner's multiple intelligence theory, and the Color Munsell System. It also incorporated an assessment of learning style to develop individual fit reports for specific job roles. dotin then based their report of fit based on a standard job competency dictionary of ONET taxonomy. The patented product was proposed as an end-to-end solution for talent management. dotin appealed to the recruiter community by providing a large database of potential candidates comprising passive job seekers. This database was developed by accessing and stitching together applicant information from multiple data sources, compliant with data privacy norms and laws. Recruiters could then connect with these passive applicants and invite them for specific job opportunities. If the applicant evinced interest, they responded to a one-minute color motivation patented assessment. The emerging analysis delivered a comprehensive functional (skill) fit, motivation and behavior, and preferred learning style. The resulting report offered insights to recruiters who hire internal and external talent. By assessing the fit and suitability for future roles, organizations could make informed data-based decisions on the potential capability of their talent and succession pipelines. The dotin assessment suggests appropriate development interventions to develop future leaders based on individual learning styles and motivation.
Founded in May 2020, FirstConnect Solutions is a micro, small, and medium enterprise (MSME) focused on providing recruitment and staffing solutions. When the pandemic hit recruitment activities across industries, FirstConnect Solutions demonstrated its mettle through robust growth within the first year, meeting clients' expectations by successfully filling the few but challenging recruitment mandates. The pandemic environment also allowed the firm to hire inexperienced recruiters and train them on the job. The company motivated recruiters with monetary incentives linked to successful placement and a powerful reward and recognition program. While all employees appreciated the organization's culture, FirstConnect continued to lose recruiters after they were painstakingly trained and had just started to become productive. To ensure client service did not suffer, FirstConnect hired gig recruiters, who were paid only for sourcing relevant candidate profiles through a milestone-based incentive system. The variability in quality and availability meant that this route of ensuring client satisfaction was not entirely reliable owing to an uncertain talent pool. The dilemma for FirstConnect was to identify the target demographic segments for its permanent workforce and how to build its employer brand and employee value proposition to prevent attrition. Further, it needed to determine the percentage of work to be managed by gig workers without risking their client servicing capability.
Thoughtworks , a mid-sized IT consulting firm that integrated strategy, design and software engineering for their clients, with over 10,000 technologists spread over 48 offices in 17 countries, started in 1993. Thoughtworks developed a strong inclusivity culture and was anchored on three principal values: creating a sustainable for-profit organization, championing software excellence, and advocating social and economic justice for all. The organization had always embraced gender and cultural diversity and initiated multiple organizational practices to support and build inclusivity. In India, ThoughtWorks had been pioneering "Women in Tech" to promote gender diversity as the most visible inclusivity agenda. After the 2018 historic judgment repealing Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, the opportunity to broaden the inclusivity domain to embrace LGBTQ+ workforce emerged. The founders and senior management had also taken public stands on the discriminatory attitude toward the LGBTQ+ community and the criminalization legislation in force in India. The organization had taken multiple initiatives and introduced progressive policies to demonstrate its support toward the LGBTQ+ community. However, LGBTQ+ inclusion was creating some dilemmas for the organization.
In 2016, MakeMyTrip, a prominent player in the online booking of travel space in India, moved to acquire arch-rival Goibibo (GI) to consolidate market share, build complementary synergies, and enable profitable growth. MMT was a leader in the online travel and premium hotel booking segment. GI penetrated the economy hotel segment and acquired redBus (RB) to diversify into the online bus booking space. Due to the merger, the processes of policies of the three entities in various aspects of business had to be aligned for smooth operations so as to capitalize on the expected synergies of the separate entities. Key priorities during a merger are in engaging and retaining critical talent and aligning human resource management policies and practices, including employer branding, talent acquisition (internal and external), performance management, benefits and policies, and separation and exits. Strategic talent decisions and cultural alignment can significantly influence the capabilities and performance needed of the workforce after a merger and acquisition (M&A). An integration project team had been commissioned for this and was expected to make recommendations to achieve this standardization. The case examines the challenges of identifying all aspects of people systems and processes that influence organizational culture. Alignment and standardization of the disparate organizational policies of the merging entities and communication of the final policies and practices require balancing organizational and employee needs and expectations. The case highlights the need to prioritize the integration of functions based on strategic organizational requirements.
Ernst & Young (EY) is a global consortium of firms offering advisory, taxation, and audit services across all industries and countries. The People Advisory Services (PAS) team within EY specialized in advising their clients on all people-related systems and processes, including global mobility compensation and taxation. Amarpal Singh Chadha's challenge, as the partner at EY PAS, lay in suggesting the most economical, compliant, and appropriate global compensation structure that adhered to the client's specified budget requirements. Part (A) of the case challenges the students to present the best possible options that address the employees' needs and meet the host countries' processes and compliances. Part (B) of the case introduces taxation complexities that individuals may experience during expatriate and mobility assignments.
GHCL Ltd. (erstwhile Gujarat Heavy Chemicals Limited), a large chemical manufacturing publicly listed organization with over 6000 employees, had been recognized as a "Great Place to Work" (GPTW) for four consecutive years. However, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted normal manufacturing and supply chain operations, impacting cash flows and challenged business continuity. With its working capital under pressure, the GHCL management team faced significant challenges in managing the costs. As a pre-emptive measure to sustain employee morale, the organization had announced that there would be no retrenchment of employees. With a major digitization effort to pivot the organization to Industry 4.0 standards, large investment decisions were planned, including investing in a cloud-based human resource information system (HRIS). Feedback from the previous year's GPTW survey had thrown up a number of action points that Goswami, the CHRO, wanted to implement. GHCL was focused on sustaining the GPTW accreditation, even during the pandemic. The challenge for Goswami was to work on the various cost levers, minimize HR costs without diluting employee experience and long-term organizational objectives. The virtual environment of working also required higher digitization and stronger communication measures, which were likely to extend even beyond the end of the pandemic. Managing people's decisions in an uncertain business climate is a key learning objective of the case.
Ernst & Young (EY) is a global consortium of firms offering advisory, taxation, and audit services across all industries and countries. The People Advisory Services (PAS) team within EY specialized in advising their clients on all people-related systems and processes, including global mobility compensation and taxation. Amarpal Singh Chadha's challenge, as the partner at EY PAS, lay in suggesting the most economical, compliant, and appropriate global compensation structure that adhered to the client's specified budget requirements. Part (A) of the case challenges the students to present the best possible options that address the employees' needs and meet the host countries' processes and compliances. Part (B) of the case introduces taxation complexities that individuals may experience during expatriate and mobility assignments.
VA Tech Wabag, an Indian MNC firm was an industry leader in total water management. The case presents an alternative method of talent development that focuses on leveraging an individual's strengths against the practice of focusing on functional and behavioral competencies and develops training need analysis (TNA). This approach appears to be contrary to the ongoing deficit culture, which concentrates on weaknesses. The HR head of the organization resists the paradigm shift in the approach to capability development. The case addresses three principal issues. 1. Understanding the strengths-based approach to capability building 2. Clarifying the competency-based approach to talent management 3. Building leadership capabilities by understanding and leveraging individual strengths and appreciating the role of competencies in enabling success. All of this raises the question of the role of competency frameworks, the TNA approach's limitations, and synergizing both ideologies. Some specific questions raised by this case are: Is it possible to build capability by adopting either approach? What are the challenges of adopting strengths-based approach for recruitment? How can the organization leverage team strengths? Understanding these dichotomies can help L&D functions manage the best out of their talent and build effective leaders.
inFeedo leveraged its understanding of artificial intelligence (AI), NLP, and machine learning (ML) techniques to develop a chatbot named Amber. With CEO sponsorship within client organizations, Amber engaged with employees at pre-defined periods as a "virtual assistant of the CEO." The aggregated chat sentiment provided employee engagement analytics to the leadership team. The platform predicted disengaged employees and identified the attrition risk. Besides, compared to the annual engagement surveys, the broad-based sentiment analysis was more effective in reporting employee engagement. Employee engagement measurement involves massive spending by organizations. However, these engagement surveys are costly, face delays in translating information to action, and lack actionable insights for the practitioners. The case touches upon issues such as the use of "Amber" as a replacement for the conventional practices within HR, the changing role of HR, the efficacy of the use of AI in transactional HR work, ethics of using AI, and challenges of instituting a culture change within the HR divisions. Can leveraging AI help the function break out of its "administrative" image and emerge as a strategic contributor to the organization's direction-setting exercises? Additionally, the ethics around the use of AI-based chatbots and the resulting data analytics present challenges to both the users and the advocates of this new system.