Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

Padmaja Krishnan, director marketing, planning and research, CSC, showed me something interesting during our meeting. I was on a visit to the CSC office at Noida in the National Capital Region to find out what really makes CSC one of the best employers as revealed by DQ's annual Best Employers Survey last year. She invites one of her colleagues to chat on an internal messenger called 'Same Time' hosted by the company itself. “It's just an internal platform that allows you to ping anyone in the CSC community and build the right bond,” she explains.

One of the fastest growing companies in India in IT services (the company clocked a growth of nearly 100% last fiscal), CSC has over 4,400 world-class professionals on its roles. Interestingly, after a hiatus of a year when the company chose not to participate in DQ-IDC Best Eemployer survey 2004, CSC was back in the Top 20 last year.

Nurturing Talent
Employee satisfaction levels are at an all time low in the industry. When all companies, except HCL Infosystems and TCS, saw a dip in the overall satisfaction levels, CSC witnessed nearly 31% of its employees vote in its favor as the most preferred employer in the Top 20 Survey last year. CSC did appreciably on key parameters such as training, overall company culture, and job content.

Employee development is a key parameter of the company's culture today and there is a strong focus on training at CSC. An institution globally known for research and educational activities in the finance and insurance domain, LOMA, recently honored CSC India with the prestigious Excellence in Education Award. The award recognizes companies doing an outstanding job of developing their human resources through the use of LOMA's professional education and learning programs.

Says Krishnan, “The award is the recognition of the commitment made by us and the leadership to support and encourage professional development for the employees, which in turn prepares both the individual and the company to meet tomorrow's challenges.” While the Indore facility has received the award for the past three years in a row, it's the first time for the Noida center.

Best Practices There is no age of retirement. This is a policy in the organization and employees are expected to take a call on this. The initiative helps create a bond with the organization and a sense of ownership among employees An employee can take a sabbatical of up to 6 months to work with an NGO. The employee is paid half the salary during this period and is appraised on his/her performance at the NGO when the person gets back to the CSC India mainstream employment. Significant contribution is given adequate weightage during appraisal At least 90 hours of additional training beyond projects for every employee. This is incorporated into the KRAs of the line managers A career development plan jointly generated by an employee and his/her manager that documents the employee's short- and long-term career goals and the training and developmental experiences necessary to mutually achieve these goals. This is coupled with mentoring that involves counselling others through formal or informal methods A culture of innovation at work is practiced and propagated. Citations are put up regularly on the Intranet and the company website. Employees are also allowed to choose their mentors and the innovator and mentor teams meet at least twice a month. Employees are also encouraged to write white papers.

Additionally, every employee gets 90 hours of training that is over and above the experience gathered from work and from project-specific training. Another critical component of employee development is a comprehensive career development plan where employees are given complete freedom to decide on how they would like to plan their careers. To put it simply, one can chalk out a career plan, map growth against the plan, identify shortcomings and the support required to fill in these gaps. Incidentally, CSC today has the largest number of certified professionals in its space. 

It's All About Innovation
Today innovation has emerged as the single-largest driver of growth and everyone-from Nasscom to McKinsey-is talking about innovation. Not to lag behind the trend, CSC has come up with the concept of 'Innovation at Work'. While citations are put up regularly on the Intranet and the company website, employees are also allowed to choose their mentors, and the innovator and mentor teams meet at least twice a month. Employees are also encouraged to write white papers.

If the ideas and the subsequent results are found to be good, the management evolves tangible business results from these outcomes. Any innovative work is given adequate recognition and rewards.

There is also a practice of competency integration. Its purpose is to improve the efficiency and agility of interdependent work by integrating the process of different workforce. Says Krishnan, “This helps us to come up with some great tools to integrate people development with organizational development.”

The CSR Thrust
CSC also allows its employees take sabbaticals for social work. “We realized over the years that many people in the team consider social work as part of their long-term aspirations,” she says. So the management took the rare initiative of integrating this with the career plan of an individual. There's a catch of course-one is required to give at least three years to the organization before a sabbatical for social work can be undertaken.

Social service has been blended with career path, and employees are appraised on significant contribution to the society. Beyond sabbatical for a social cause, the regular sabbatical is there too. Here the conditions are a little more relaxed, with the employees required to serve the company for at least two years. If the course pursued during the sabbatical is aligned with the business requirements of the organization, the employee gets financial support of up to Rs 1 lakh.

Processes that Matter
HR today has clearly evolved beyond policies and initiatives. It has touched every process in the organization. Every large organization is trying to attain the highest level of certifications to send out the right message to its human resources as well as to the industry. CSC is not an exception, of course. The company's Indore facility has been assessed for PCMM Level 5 and its new business groups have been assessed for Level 3. Explains Krishnan, “The certification is a reassurance of the good work that we have done to streamline our people processes.” The additional factor is to meet the industry standard.

As CSC tries to move up the value chain in its business, there is no doubt that its people are its greatest asset today. Says Krishnan, “The biggest challenge is to keep our very talented workforce challenged continuously.” In addition to the employee development and empowerment schemes, CSC provides its employees with a dual career path. Programmers and technologists are offered the same kind of growth, as is done in the case of employees who later move on to business-driven role. “We are an equal opportunity player and this is not just gender specific, but all pervasive,” adds Krishnan.

Bhaswati Chakravorty
bhaswatic@cybermedia.co.in 

Page(s)   1