Conduent Workforce Grew By 30 Percent In Last Year: CEO Lokesh Prasad
Lokesh Prasad, CEO – APAC, Conduent Inc. talks to BW People about the hiring plans, diversity in the company, and employee engagement activities.
What is the current headcount? What are the hiring plans for the next year?
Conduent India has over 13,000 people, with a global headcount of approximately 82,000 people as on 31 December 2018. In India we grew our workforce by 30 percent in the past year, and also set up a new centre in Visakhapatnam, expanding our national footprint. In less than nine months of starting operations in Visakhapatnam, we have created 1,000 jobs in the city. Our talented workforce is at the center of our Accushoring philosophy and is the cornerstone of our drive towards growth. Accushoring means that we will perform work in locations where we can deliver the greatest value for our clients (externally) and for ourselves, internally, and where it makes the most sense globally from an economic and talent perspective. In 2019, we are seeking the right talent to support our expansion across the APAC markets.
What kind of talent is the company keen on hiring?
Conduent is hiring across all its locations for technology, research and innovation, and service delivery roles. Some of the positions we are looking to fill include Software Developers, Solutions Architects, Business Analysts, Researchers, Program Managers, Data Scientists, and Scrum Masters. The technical positions require skills for analysis, design, coding, test, and maintenance of software modules, subsystems or systems that make up our technology platforms. Research positions are focused on innovating with cutting-edge technology and modernizing the platforms these technologies support. The service delivery positions will be responsible for providing services that result in efficient and world-class digital interactions solutions Conduent offers to its clients.
How do you plan to hire diverse talent?
We have multicultural teams, where colleagues bring diverse perspectives to problem-solving. This drives creativity, innovation, and improved decision-making, all of which are key to competing in a global marketplace. Conduent implements an equal opportunity employment policy that follows a hiring practice that is age, race, gender, and minority neutral. We have made steps to educate our workforce across the APAC region through diversity and unconscious bias training. Our Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) initiatives include community involvement with civic organizations that promote diversity to help with our sensitization efforts. We hold LGBTQ+ community sensitization sessions for managers across India in an effort to support an environment that is inclusive and accepting of differences.
How has automation impacted the business of the company? What changes have been introduced as a result of the automation wave?
Our focus on automation is based on standardizing and centralizing our business processes to build scale, leveraging the power of data in decision-making with a focus on data science and analytics viz. intelligent automation and, building best-of-breed open platforms to enhance core processes, which are further augmented through automation. We see substantial benefits coming through with these broad interventions across our core processes, such as talent acquisition, onboarding, procurement, billing and revenue management. We are continually looking at introducing technology stacks that can help evolve applications quickly and reliably to create experiences that are individualized, intelligent and immediate.
What are the latest initiatives around employees?
We have made significant steps towards creating opportunities for engagement, open communication, access to learning platforms, and building a more inclusive and safe workspace.
Learning@Conduent: All employees can now participate in a series of new, live e-learning events in 2019, offered through our partnership with Skillsoft. This offers an opportunity to learn from today’s foremost experts in global, modern-day business imperatives, including innovation, influence, technology, digitization, leadership and much more.
ConduentIdeaBox: We launched the ConduentIdeaBox to crowdsource and implement ideas that can help us improve our processes, policies and more. This is a program that is owned, managed and driven by employees.
Bar Raiser Program: This program has been introduced to enhance the interview capability of our frontline leaders and help them identify top talent.
Conduent Technology University (CTU): CTU was created to bridge technology skill gaps, upskill, cross-skill and help make the workforce future-ready. The CTU recently introduced a first-of-its-kind certification process: the AEP, an Assessment Evaluation Process to measure skill levels of the participants. CTU also assesses and certifies employees undergoing training with the CTU.
What kind of performance appraisal system is followed?
We follow an improved performance development process supported by a new technology platform that focuses on continuous learning and feedback as key elements of strengthening individual and company performance. It is a streamlined and user-friendly platform, which encourages collaboration and development discussions between teams and their managers who can work together in a highly matrixed environment to identify learning opportunities.
This review process essentially entails:
