Our Caregiver-First Approach Supports The Employees’ Journey: Kapil Takkalapally, Director- HR Providence India

Kapil, congratulations to your organization for winning the Excellence in employee experience award at the BW People HR Excellence Awards 2023.  How would you define employee experience within your organization? Is there a quantifiable measurement tool like a happiness index within your organization to gauge employee experience?

We believe that great employee experiences can only happen when employees feel that they are living the organization’s promise. At Providence, our promise is “Know me, care for me, ease my way.” This promise stems from our 170-year-old legacy of providing equitable, accessible and affordable health care to all. In India – where we are transforming and innovating care and the care experience through technology and engineering – we bring this promise to life by creating personalized experiences to engage our employees, whom we call ‘caregivers’, making each caregiver feel individually cared for, and in control of their own journeys. 

We measure the impact of our caregiver experience programs in a number of ways, including our annual caregiver experience survey, regular focus group discussions, in-person feedback, candidate experience surveys, post-event surveys, external industry benchmarking surveys, and external recognition of our programs, such as our Learning & Development, DEI and well-being programs. In 2022, our employee experience survey scores showed a 92% sustainable engagement rate, while 94% of our caregivers felt aligned to our mission and values. Our ability to attract top talent from the technology and services industries also reflects positively on our growing employer brand and strong value proposition.

What initiatives or programs does the company have in place to enhance employee experience?

As a health system, we must ensure that our patients experience holistic health and well-being, and our caregivers (our employees) experience the same. It is a moral responsibility for us and a core tenet of the work that we do to enable our vision of health for a better world. Therefore, when establishing Providence India in 2020, it was imperative for us to ensure that we take a “Caregiver-First” approach to all our overall benefits, programs and practices tailored for our caregivers.

We are committed to providing caregiver experiences that further our goal to build an inclusive organization that unlocks human potential, unleashes innovation, and creates an environment where everyone feels they have an equal opportunity to grow. We think of caregiver experience in a holistic manner – encompassing physical, social, and emotional aspects of their journey – attributes that are critical to their life experiences, not just their workplace experiences. 

Our caregiver experience program looks at supporting five dimensions of a caregiver’s life: to feel understood and foster a sense of belonging; to feel connected and create a sense of shared purpose to our organization’s vision; to feel cared for through our well-being and benefits programs; to feel valued through personal and professional growth in the organization; and finally, to feel autonomous with ownership of their time and their personalized benefits and journey at Providence India. We have a plethora of programs mapped against each of these dimensions. For example, our year-round holistic well-being program encompasses workshops on financial, intellectual, emotional, mental, spiritual, environmental, physical and occupational wellness. Our personalized rewards program allows core leaders to customize appreciation for their team members. And our flexible benefits program empowers our caregivers to choose the benefits that best suit them based on their own unique needs. 

What steps has the company taken to create a positive work environment and culture?

Providence  India established a strong caregiver-first culture and environment when we established operations in 2020. It started with strong leadership support and sponsorship. This approach was ingrained into every small initiative to large-scale organization-wide programs, and a few key enablers in driving such an approach include strong business sponsorship, a clear vision and objectives, robust internal communications, training, learning and development programs, and a variety of enabling tools and resources. 

For example, some of the key programs under our Caregiver Experience model have strong business sponsorship, like our 8 Dimensions of Wellness program which is sponsored by our Head of Strategy and Operations, who is a qualified medical professional and passionate about wellness. Another example is our campus hiring and experience program, which is sponsored and championed by the Group Vice President of one of our key business pillars, who works closely with Talent Acquisition and Recruitment to ensure that we drive great candidate experiences. Our clarity of vision, set by the leadership, meant that we effectively focused on caregiver experience as a differentiator and source of competitive advantage in the talent market. Our focus was to bet on benefits, culture, purpose driven work and employee experience. This has yielded strong results for us and we’ve been able to grow from 0 to 1000 caregivers in 3 years in deep technology spaces during the pandemic when there was a high demand for such talent.

As a growing organization, caregivers to enjoy the journey of making a lasting social impact, and so caregivers have multiple opportunities to do so – through donations for the poor, vulnerable or those in need. For example, for each new caregiver who comes on board, we provide nutritional health kits to adolescent girls.

Professional growth and development opportunities are important indicators to provide a holistic experience to employees. How should organisations address the challenges of employee redundancy at work?

In the past, it may have been acceptable to learn a skill and then use said skill for the duration of one’s career. Today’s reality looks radically different: the skill life cycle, or the period in which a skill is innovated, flourishes and then becomes irrelevant, continues to drop significantly. An organization must foster a growth mindset, encouraging employees to challenge themselves and test out new technologies and new ways of doing things. This, in turn, creates value, and boosts company morale and engagement.

Some practices that help us at Providence include coaching employees to adopt a growth mindset that motivates them to constantly learn and improve their skills to stay relevant and add more value to their work and roles. We have created internal mobility programs that allow employees the opportunity to move between roles even if they do not possess 100% of the skills, as these can be addressed through learning programs. 

One of our landmark innovations is a democratized learning program at Providence India. Providence was the first health system to establish its own operations in India. There’s limited domain expertise within the Indian market on US hospitals. A structured vendor-based learning program was highly expensive and wasn’t completely available in India. So, our caregivers came together to work on the problem and created a unique program called Healthcare Learning League (HLL), completely built by our caregivers in collaboration with our US-based physicians, nurses, and domain experts. It has 3 different levels of learning expertise, like US university systems, whereby one has to be certified in level 101 to proceed to level 201 and so on. These levels showcase a strong understanding of the domain and increasingly complex concepts of healthcare. This program also showcases how providing autonomy to caregivers can lead to wonderful results that are sustainable.  

How does the company address aspects like work-life balance and employee well-being in the new normal?

The psychological impact of the pandemic has made us realize that self-care is not a luxury but a necessity. Our caregiver-first approach supports our employees’ journey towards holistic well-being which includes educating them about multiple dimensions that make up health and happiness and enabling them to self-regulate their health and well-being through awareness, and building small, daily habits that get them closer to healthiest and happiest selves.  

We pride ourselves on the fact that we prioritize holistic health and wellness for our employees. We have built a culture that encourages self-care, and we employ different strategies and toolkits to enable and educate our employees.  Throughout the year we conduct expert-led sessions, holistic health interventions, offer personalized benefits and other resources that impart knowledge and new habits to accelerate their journey towards good health. 

Our flexible benefits program also offers a wide range of progressive, hyper-personalized benefits that include fitness reimbursements that encompass holistic health, a comprehensive healthcare plan for elderly parents, and family care plans covering maternity, surrogacy, infertility, reassignment surgery and more, to cater to the needs of our multigenerational workforce. 

Our flexible workday model enables caregivers to achieve a healthy work-life balance. We educate our caregivers on how to combat burnout, train managers on how to create a healthy work environment and create work processes that promote occupational wellness. 

How integral is the element of employee feedback for an HR department to create the right employee experience?

It’s essential for us to get feedback from our employees because it gives us a window into understanding their unique needs and then providing personalized experiences that will make them feel heard and cared for. 

Seeking continuous feedback on how employees are experiencing the organization, especially for “moments that matter” is of paramount importance. We think of these as moments that impact employees’ organizational experience most significantly. As such, they tend to be the most emotional and the most memorable, making up the caregiver experience – and over time, determine how positive or negative it is.