1: Ep 001 - In Conversation With Piyush Mehta (CHRO, Genpact)

Thank you, Archa, really delighted to be on your first show on SH Radio and thank you for having me.

Sure. I'll share with you something that's equally anecdotal, equally strange, and especially if you consider the outcomes, which is that I've learned, or attempted to learn, to give myself haircuts. And clearly the learning curve is steep and I'm at the bottom of that steep slope right now. So lots of things will change post-COVID, and for me it'll be the value of a haircut. I will look at it very differently now, especially the people who have to bear with my haircut in my family and my friend circle. Or maybe I'll just become more skilled at it by the end of it. But yeah, I think salons will have long queues after they open up finally, so looking forward to that.

One, Archa, I would say that our view as an organization and my view in general is that we should do a very cautious restart. Just springing back to the old normal, in my view, would be nothing short of disastrous. I think this needs to be a very gradual start. We should not flip the switch back; it needs to be a slow, gradual process. And our personal view is that about 20% of the corporate work done in person in, let's say, last year should come back on site, and a lot of it should move first permanently back home, and a lot of it should transition over a period of time. I think the definition of office will evolve. I think a lot of in-person corporate work will go virtual. This whole concept of physical distancing, for example, if you're going to sit six feet away from someone at work and do meetings remotely, then the whole question of doing things together becomes very different. Virtual is as good, right? So I think it questions the definitions of what could have been virtual work and what needed to be done in office. In addition to that, I think it'll have important ramifications for talent and for people. It won't be geographically centric anymore. It'll enable enterprises to broaden the talent pool that they have an opportunity to leverage and emphasize new skills. How businesses attract and retain top talent will change, and the skills and competencies which people are looking for will change. Another interesting view is it'll question the whole definition of headquarters. Does a company need to have headquarters? Does its headquarters need to exist? As an organization where we've always believed in having distributed headquarters or virtual headquarters or no headquarters, we feel like the time has come to actually question no headquarters.

You know, Archa, it's interesting. Among all the things that COVID has impacted, I think that's one thing which, in our view, has not been impacted. So our view was that curiosity, energy, and the ability to learn with agility are going to be the skills of the future even before, or should I say pre-COVID. I think it becomes even more important post-COVID because this was based on the premise that the half-life of most skills is two to three years. What is relevant today may not be necessarily relevant a year from now. It is becoming impossible to anticipate the future, but what is clear is that there will be dramatic change. So if you pull all of that together, the ability to be first of all humble, and because you are humble you will be open to the fact that you need to learn and you need to unlearn and then you need to learn again. Curiosity, which you associated with learning, and then continuous reskilling and learning agility, these are things which will be very, very important in the new world. A lot of things in the new world are not predictable today. All of us are sitting here and reading what we think the future will be. If the future is 50% of that, that'll be great, but the balance 50% is what we will have to learn and grow into. So I will go back to curiosity, humility, and learning agility being really, really important.

Yeah, so look, I think two or three things. To the point that you made, leaders will face challenges of creating a virtual culture and shared purpose. So I think leading with a true sense of humility and empathy will become very important. As people increasingly work out of their homes, we'll have to find different ways to get to know our colleagues better, interact with them in different environments, more informality in certain cases. The famous examples of kids and pets interrupting the work day, all of this actually can have a hugely positive spin to it; it's not necessarily negative. So I think an integration of the personal with the professional, a way to ease stress and a way to collaborate and communicate effectively virtually, will become some of the permanent changes that I think will be important. Because look, physical distancing will become the new norm. There will be less and less travel. I already talked about the physical corporate headquarters concept evolving. The 9-to-5 workday will be a thing of the past; it already was in many cases, especially in our industry. And those kinds of things will impact things a lot more. Job proximity, once it's no longer a priority, will impact how and where people live. Commuting times will dramatically reduce. Impact will happen on productivity, some positive and some not so positive. All of that will come under a major amount of scrutiny, and then that needs to be fed back in, and managers need to find ways to leverage that effectively.

Great question, Archa. So if anything, I think during this crisis our conversations within the organization have only increased rather than reduced. Whether it starts from our CEO, Tiger, sending out messages to all employees once a week. He records a video, and interestingly that video is done at home. It gives you a peek into his apartment and how he's living at this point of time, etc. So it becomes an informal method of communication with 100,000 people across the company every week. That is followed with, and the important thing is how do you keep that conversational across the 100,000 people? So we make sure we bring in questions in advance, we make sure that half of that time is spent responding to key concerns which employees may have. And similarly, there are town halls which the leadership team does with their respective teams on an ongoing basis. I have a town hall coming up later this month with a thousand people in my team. And again, the idea is to celebrate together, to share achievements, to update, to exchange views, to get innovative ideas. We've launched a forum which is going out to 100,000 people to get feedback from them on what we can do better at this point of time. So I'm just giving you a few examples. Giving back to the community and involving people in giving back to the community is a tremendous way of bringing the organization together even virtually. Online learning is very powerful at this point of time, and our entire Genome proposition, which was our learning proposition for people, was built on being virtual and was built on being created and curated by the internal organization. That's something which we believe is a big opportunity. So actually, if you ask me, we seem to be busier than we were before the crisis.

Hugely important. I think this is the silver lining on the cloud. It's given us an opportunity to show our colleagues, our teams, our leaders a combination of the professional side and the other side. And I think that is an opportunity for a more empathetic platform to be created in how people get managed.

Thank you, Archa. And if you're looking for someone to give highly discounted and highly skilled haircuts, send them my way.

Thank you so much.