Diversifying GCCs in India
India is home to capability centres of 1,300+ global organisations, directly employing 1.3+ million people, generating approximately US$33.8 billion in revenue as of FY20201. The first wave of GCCs was primarily driven to provide the cost arbitrage to global organisations. Today, this sector has provided value far beyond the anticipated ‘wage and cost benefits.’ As India tries to digitise itself, GCCs have significantly helped in developing a high-quality talent pool to meet the demand for the ‘digital growth engine’ of India. Quite a few GCCs have successfully experimented with mentoring start-ups, and this has significantly accelerated the evolution of the start-up ecosystem in India.
GCCs, in general, have a critical role to play in creating this high-quality workforce of the future. GCC contended with an intimidating 22% attrition in the FY21-22 which now reflects the pre-pandemic numbers3. Today, the generational mix has 90% of the workforce as GenZ and Millenials. GenZ makes up about 30% of this mix and is expected to grow steadily. Towards this the GCCs have embarked upon building an organisation that attracts and retains the best of the talent. It’s a no surprise that 27% of India’s best places to work for women and 40% of the India’s most inclusive companies are part of GCC3. Most GCCs have already evolved from being a ‘service provider’ to also being a ‘value creator’ over the past few years. This evolution has helped them learn new organisational capabilities that may help them in partnering with their parent organisations to create the high-quality workforce of the future. Many GCCs have already started on this journey and experimented with few initiatives to reskill and upskill their workforce. For example, quite a few GCCs have already partnered with academia to bring in changes at the grassroots levels to ensure industry ready talent supply and conducted extensive in-house training programmes to ensure existing employees are continuously upskilled. They have focused on leadership development to make sure they develop a strong and sustainable pipeline of globally mature leaders. GCCs have also ensured that their Indian workforce mirrors the diversity present in their global workforce to get the best value from all sections of society (e.g., women, veterans, LGBTQ+) by following best-in-class inclusive practices.
While GCCs have been constantly investing in talent in their own capacity, there are a few areas that they need to consistently focus on to achieve the goal of creating the workforce of the future. These areas are across the talent stages – from ‘ensuring industry ready entry-level talent’ to ‘building an up-to-date, globally mature force of thinkers and influencers’ to ‘create leadership with grit and global transformational thinking’. All of these are very important and complex areas, and it will need collective, collaborative, and enthusiastic involvement of government, industry bodies, and GCCs to bring together their best thinking and capabilities to create the ‘skills-of-the-future-at-scale’. If done well, this will not only help the global parent organisations and GCCs succeed in this rapidly changing world but also further burnish India’s image as a high-quality talent crucible of the world.
In summary, GCCs continue to pursue the following strategies to power growth:
1. Capability development: Continuing to develop professional and technical/ functional skills in order to help improve productivity. They are using it for sharing global working styles e.g. agile ways of working, usage of DevOps. They are also powering a drive to improve the slim employable population by uplifting the academic quality in the country thereby increasing the employable pool.
2. Leadership Development: They continue to strengthen the leadership capability of the leaders in GCC, thereby enabling an environment for the workforce to thrive in and build careers within these companies. Research has shown that strong leadership capacities enables organisations to be six times more likely to be innovative and to be agile2. Leadership continues to be a critical lever for the GCCs.
3. Diversity and Inclusion: Besides focusing on creating an inclusive workplace for women, generational, LGBT+, PWDs etc, they are working to strengthen employability in tier 2, tier 3 towns. The GCCs are actively engaged in creating an environment that welcomes people from different backgrounds and different skillsets.
Talent is the key lever for growth of the GCCs. As a consequence, GCCs continue evolving and continue to shape and lead the workforce practices in the country.
(The above authored piece has been penned down by Mohnish Sinha, D&I Lead and Partner, Deloitte India, specifically for BW People publication)
