Joe Fuller: The pandemic has forced businesses to reassess their operations from the bottom up. This has added momentum to trends like digitalization, the shift to remote work, and new approaches to jobs and skills. And against the backdrop of social and political friction, it has underscored the need for greater diversity. So how can businesses respond to the challenges of reopening while simultaneously addressing entrenched social inequities and implementing post-Covid strategies?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. My guest today is “Tiger” Tyagarajan, president and CEO of the professional services firm Genpact. Tiger brings the dual perspective of the CEO of a public company and a consultant. We’ll talk about the urgency of finding workers with in-demand skills and how to go about re-skilling one’s existing workforce. Tiger is also a long-time advocate of gender equity and diversity. We’ll discuss what it takes to build and maintain a genuinely diverse workforce across a global company. Welcome to the podcast, Tiger.

”Tiger” Tyagarajan: Thank you, Joe. Thank you for having me on your podcast.

Fuller: Tiger, you’ve had a varied career and eventually finding yourself at GE and then taking Genpact out of GE to create a separate company. Could you just tell us a little bit about your background and how you find yourself leading Genpact?

Tyagarajan: Joe, I go back to growing up in Mumbai in India, grew up as an engineer—that was my background as an education—spent some years in the consumer goods industry with Unilever, a few years with Citibank, and then found myself at GE in the days when GE was the storied organization with many, many businesses. And after spending some time in financial services, set up this business that today is Genpact as a back-office, shared-services organization for GE Capital and GE in the late ’90s. And then in 2005, we spun off into an independent company, and then I took over as the CEO in 2011.

Fuller: So could you just tell us a little bit about Genpact’s services? And when you talk about a shared service, are you talking about programming assets? Are you talking about storage? Are you talking about cloud assets?

Tyagarajan: Let’s take finance, procurement, supply chain. Or if you take financial services, how do you actually underwrite and approve a loan? How do you deal with customer service? Or how do you manage insurance claims that come in? All of those, when you bring them together into a common group, a common set of locations, try and consolidate those to provide those services to the businesses. One can call them shared services, because they are shared by multiple business units across the globe. And these days, you infiltrate that with technology, with cloud, with digital, with analytics, because you really want to create step-change value for the businesses that those organizations serve.

Fuller: Here we are in the summer of 2021. And companies are beginning to wrestle with to what extent and how quickly or are they going to return to their normal working processes. And I imagine that’s causing companies to really fundamentally rethink what they’re going to do inside the four walls of the enterprise, what they’re going to distribute, how they’re going to reconfigure processes that in reflection of changed attitudes of workforce or of customers or even ongoing public health concerns. Are you seeing that in your client base? And as you talk about your business plan and think about the future of Genpact, how are you factoring those considerations into your thinking?

Tyagarajan: What we see over the next 18 months is not one big colossal experiment, but a series of experiments that is going to get conducted on what is the right design for various types of work and services to be performed at its best and optimal level that satisfies customers, that improves services, as well as delivers to employee experience and satisfaction. Now that we’ve learned that there is a way by which you can do it remotely and you don’t have to always be in the office, there is no one answer that we actually know is the best. I think it’s going to depend on different industries, different businesses in different industries, having different thoughts around what’s the best way to do it. I can imagine teams feeling frustrated that they’re not getting together often enough, and that’s going to change some of the dial there. At the same time, I think the ability to attract talent is, I think, off the charts when you tell people you don’t need to commute two hours every day.

Fuller: Tiger, how can you help a company change its mindset from one of “we come up with a concept, we pilot, and we scale it” to “we’re doing experiments.” And the glory of experiments, if not confirmation of your hypothesis, it’s disconfirming data.

Tyagarajan: Every enterprise that we serve has to decide, on some part, they have no option. The part could be, “We just all come back to the office, all work will be back to 2019 December.” Okay, well, that’s going to be an experiment as far as we are concerned, because only 10 percent of our clients potentially may do that. Another set of clients may say, “This type of work, we think, needs to be done in this way in its distribution.” Let’s take closing the books for large enterprises. It’s potentially possible to expect a client and us to discuss and say, “Why don’t we have the 200 people who are involved in closing the books for a global enterprise—a $50 billion global enterprise, across a hundred countries—and we bring the teams together once a month at the time of month close and quarter close, which is, let’s say, the last five days of the month. And other days of the month, they actually work from a remote environment.” Well, that’s an experiment. The good news for a business like ours is that at any given point in time, since we are dealing with 500 customers, and each of them is taking a different decision along a continuum, along multiple dimensions. For us, we are a laboratory that is actually watching all of this. And the benefit we should take to clients is what is the overarching final experiment? And what is that showing that every client of ours should benefit from?

Fuller: Tiger, a term you hear in the corporate world constantly is “transformation.” And often these are really more restructurings related to improving cost and asset productivity and things like that. How is this going to differ from what we’ve witnessed in terms of these previous waves of transformation? And is that a function of the accelerating technology we all recognize being out there or is that specific to Covid?

Tyagarajan: So transformation, I would say today, is less about anything new that is being leveraged versus the past. It’s, actually, instead of taking five years to undertake a journey, can we try and get this done in 18 months, 12 months? So the one word that is clear in everyone’s mind is speed—speed of decision, speed of value, or speed to value. How do we do it faster than before? How do we cut to the chase? How do we get consensus, but not take forever to build that consensus? The Zoom environment, if you want to call it that, actually allowed us to do that better than before. So I hope that we continue, and I think we will. I think transformation is forever, because I don’t think any of us can say what are the new technologies that are going to be available a year from now or new ways of working that is going to change some things that we take for granted today. And our job is to continuously look for that and bring that in, quickly experiment, and do all of that in a much faster cycle time, because now our clients expect that.

Fuller: How do you get the workforce ready for that type of change? And how do you accommodate human beings’ desire for stability and predictability in their lives with an operating environment, which you’re telling us is going to essentially be in constant flux in perpetuity?

Tyagarajan: Constant learning becomes a big value that you drive. You incentivize people to learn. You then provide them the tools. Fortunately, the same technologies provide you great tools to learn. Lifelong learning is now a reality. I mean, there’s no option. So, back to your, how do you get transformation done, and what’s the biggest roadblock? Culture change is the biggest roadblock. The more successful a team has been in the past, the more difficult that change is. The more expert the group is… Underwriting experts and insurance or risk experts and banking are tough, because I’ve done this for 25 years and I’m really good, and they are really good.

Fuller: Well, tell us how you’re managing that process at Genpact. You talked about incentives. You talked about the need to allow people the opportunity to learn across their careers. That gets us to another word that’s used very broadly these days by employers and policymakers, but not a lot of people providing operative definition or the tools to do it, which is “re-skilling.” So, how do you approach that at Genpact? Because you have to look across a wide array of business processes and technologies and sectors simultaneously.

Tyagarajan: Not to talk about countries—25-plus countries—and 100,000 people. I do spend quite a bit of my time on this topic, personally, as the CEO of the enterprise. How do you get people constantly motivated to learn and re-skill? Because otherwise you will have large populations and groups left behind. Obviously, like most things in life, it’s a carrot and stick. You have to paint the picture of the future. Some businesses have accelerated through the pandemic. Some businesses have found it difficult to accelerate. And one of the dimensions that has made a difference is how digitized were you already as a workforce? Simple leverage of technology. So one is, what’s in it for me—from, if I get it, where do I go? How do I leverage it to become better myself? Get bigger jobs, get paid more, get promoted, et cetera. And then I think it’s important to also paint the picture of what happens if you don’t. The fact that, as a business, as a team, and as an individual, you start losing. And it’s not a loss that is 10 years away. Humans respond very differently. Example being climate change. When the negative impact is so far away that you say, I’ll deal with it at some point. When the impact is very close, I think humans respond really well. So, that’s one. And then you create—I mean, organizations do this well, which is you create a certification program. You create visibility metrics, competition. And we have done all of these. And, of course, you need a platform. The one other change that’s happened, Joe, is the platform leverages technology in order to make it much more self-service.

Fuller: Listening to you, there was a balance there of causing people to confront that there’s a hard reality here, but that this can be exciting. “We can encourage you. We’ll provide you help.” How do you convey those messages where they come across as inspirational, exciting, motivating, and not, “If you do not do this, either we as a company will be extinct or you will not be part of the team anymore?”

Tyagarajan: We always search for groups of people and teams and individuals who jump onto that bandwagon quickly. And then you make them the heroes. You show other people what they’ve done and what their colleagues have done that have got them very quickly to a different path, an accelerated path, a job that they otherwise wouldn’t have got. During the pandemic, in the first five months, we had about 7,000 people in that four month period out of a total group of a 100,000 who did not have a job. And we took the decision to actually put them on this platform—we call that the “Genome” platform—where you actually have to learn. And we said, “Look, you have a 60-day period. We’re going to give you the tools to learn. At the end of that, we’ll find roles for you.” Because in the meanwhile, we had a bunch of growth coming in from other clients, consumer goods companies, retail, healthcare—no surprise, again. We trained those people. We told them what they could get if they trained themselves. And we managed to redeploy 6,700 out of the 7,000 people into new jobs that, in the normal course, they would not have asked for, but for the fact that they invested in that training, above and beyond. Now the 300 I left out were people who either were unmotivated to do it, or they tried and tried and tried and just couldn’t relearn. They had to be let go. So you can’t also run an altruistic organization forever. So you have to try that balance. But making all of that visible is the one thing that I would say makes a big difference.

Fuller: When you think about the future and your staffing needs in the future, does the change in environment and permanent fluidity—in terms of work processes and very dynamic adoptions of technology—does that start to change what you’re looking for in a recruiting process?

Tyagarajan: It does change, pretty materially, the kind of people who I think you want, the kind of people who are going to thrive into the future. And those are not people who have specific skills in a specific topic but are, in a very agile way, able to recraft and repaint their own career as technologies change. Historically, because of the nature of our business, since we serve so many different industries, so many different services, we’ve always placed a very high value on learnability and curiosity as core strengths of individuals. We believe—and I believe—that you can actually make people become that way over time. We’ve had situations when we’ve taken over a client’s operations in Ohio, in Arkansas, places where these are teams that I’ve done the same thing for 15, 20 years, and have done them really well. We’ve taken them on. And then we’ve changed the culture of the team. And these are people in their 40s, 50s, great careers they’ve had, but they’ve done everything the same way. We’ve introduced everything that we talked about now, and we’ve changed the way they think about their life. They want to learn more. They want to constantly look for change. They want to compete. We incent[tivise] them more based on performance. So it’s a very performance-oriented culture. Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet. You got to do a bunch of these things. But at the core, you’ve got to hire for learnability, and you’ve got to inject learnability and curiosity into the culture of most organizations and teams.

Fuller: Let’s talk about the hiring part of that, because you don’t go to university and major in learnability. You’re not an honors recipient of a degree in flexibility and intellectual nimbleness. How do you identify that? Is that part of an interviewing process? Is that a part of looking across someone’s resume and seeing patterns? Do you have any tips about that?

Tyagarajan: Yeah, many lessons we’ve learned, Joe. And I would say, if you had asked me the question 15 years back on my views on how much of the number of people we hired, the proportion of the people that we hire would be liberal arts in our kind of a business, I would have said small proportion. Today, I would say maybe 50 percent. Now, why am I saying that? Because I think what that kind of an education does, now, that’s not the only education that we look for, but one of the beauties of that kind of education is that people are able to connect the dots better. They are able to ask all the questions—they may not have the answers—and then they listen. So we test for listening, we test for questioning, and we test for openness and inclusion in being able to work with a diverse group of people.

Fuller: It’s funny you should say all this, because I just co-authored a paper, which was being published this week, about how the job specifications for C-suite executives have changed over the last 20 years, and easily the most rapidly growing skill set that boards and senior executives are seeking when they are looking for candidates to be chief financial officer, chief marketing officer, CIO, even a new CEO, are the category of skills called “social skills,” which is the ability to interact with others in just the way you were saying. And those are coming at the expense of operating and administrative skills, which historically dominated these job descriptions. You mentioned the ability to work with others, and different types of people. And you’ve been a very, very visible leader in business on issues like gender equity. Could you share a little bit about how your commitment to that developed and what Genpact is doing in that and in diversity inclusion broadly?

Tyagarajan: Historically, we’ve always said our objective as a business is to attract and retain the best talent in the world. And one of the things that struck me in the early part of our evolution was that very quickly we got to a point where 40 percent to 50 percent of our team at the lower levels were women. But as it rose up into the senior leadership level, it dropped off materially. My team was one out of 15. If the fundamental belief is that there’s as much talent among women as men, then our own talent should reflect that. And it didn’t as we went up into the senior leadership level. So we started a program 15 years back around improving gender diversity across the company, particularly, as we moved into the senior ranks. We drove a bunch of programs on hiring, on training and promotions, and retention. And over the years, we moved that needle to today, now close to 40 percent of senior leaders in the company are woman. So we’ve made material progress. I’ve told my team I’m not satisfied until we hit 50 percent, because that’s what I would expect the world to be, and representative of the world. And one of the changes—that, I think, was a little easier to do because it is much more binary—was the board. And I said, “We have to change the complexion of the board and the shape of the board, because that’s an example that I can set, and that’s an example that others can follow.” And, therefore, from having zero women out of 11 on the board in 2012, we now have five out of 11 as women on the board. And I’m very proud of that. But, actually, it has made a big difference to the 100,000 people in the company who look up to the board and say, “This company walks the talk.” What it has done is allow different thinking to come into the room. We are on a similar path with racial equity in places like the U.S. and Canada and the U.K., where it’s a very important topic. And over time, embracing things like LGBTQ, et cetera. But the core thing is, when you have people with different backgrounds… and I actually call it “cognitive diversity”—what we’re looking for is cognitive diversity. If you have cognitive diversity, you have the best solution for the customer.

Fuller: Well, that certainly is consistent with our research, and that, if you get that type of cognitive diversity, then you can have the type of cognitive conflict, really, where you get innovation and fresh thinking, if you can manage the tendency of people who get into cognitive conflict to start having what’s called “affective conflict” as part of the conflict. You also, you’ve been involved with some other initiatives like Catalyst and the 30 Percent Club. Could you speak to those a little bit?

Tyagarajan: So Catalyst is a great organization that has been focused on women in the workplace. I joined the board a few years back in order to be able to grab best practices. An example is, we found often that there’s a certain stage in a woman’s career when they step out of the workforce, and then they want to come back five years later, seven years later. And we realize that they are finding it difficult to come back, because there’s a lot of cycle time that happens in the process of recruiting someone back into the workforce in the middle. And the longer that cycle time takes, the more the individual gets cognitive dissonance saying, “I don’t think I’m fit for this role,” and they drop off. So we changed our hiring process for such people. We shortened it to a concentrated burst of four or five days. And our drop-off rate became zero. And we got some great women to join the workforce.

Fuller: One of the things that’s clearly now front and center for employers in their strategy for returning to some next normal in the workplace… the dividing line between home life, family considerations, caregiving obligations, and work was not just penetrated, is basically removed as a function of Covid. And in our research, and in my writing course, the economics of care and caregiving is something that we’ve been keenly interested in in the Managing the Future of Work Project. How do you view the company’s role, Tiger, in that dialogue? Because historically, the company has said, “I try to pay you a decently. I try to provide you benefits. I want to accommodate what’s going on in your life, but it’s frankly, none of my business, and it would be almost inappropriate for me to be saying, ‘Well, tell me about your child who has a chronic condition or that your parents are living with you now and you’re worried about them.’” Where’s the line now? And how are you thinking about that dialogue with your colleagues and with a 100,000 people. What kind of benefits or services or assistance you ought to be thinking about providing that maybe you would not have occurred to you pre-Covid?

Tyagarajan: We’ve always thought of those lines being blurred because of the way we grew up as a pretty distributed virtual organization, historically. I’ve had situations where someone has come to me and said, “I don’t want to attend a meeting between 5:00 PM and 8:00 PM. I’m perfectly fine attending a meeting at 9:30 PM, just before I go to sleep. I’m perfectly fine doing an hour’s call.” So we’ve been sensitive. I think that the pandemic has sharpened that sensitivity 100 times more. It’s made it much more pervasive. Organizations that have not been virtual so far have now experienced this world, and now have to figure out a balance, because the world is going to be a new balance. I think that educating our managers and our team leaders on what that means on how they work with their teams—I think, as an example, when we started talking about opening up some of our offices, for example, in New York or in London, where things are opening up, we said, “We will not have a mandate that says the office is open.” The reality is that actually some people would still not be able to get to office now, because schools may not be open yet. Lots of other things may not fully be back to what it was in 2019. Now, the good news for us is, we can run our business that way with zero impact on our business. If you are in a retail or warehouse industry, it’s much tougher. Another example of going back to the past is in different parts of the world. We’ve always had a much more uniform approach to time off for maternity. And it’s also been extended to paternity. Now, that’s even more important in the post pandemic and during the pandemic world. Some of that is going to be in constant conversation with our employees and talent. And that’s why it is important to be empathetic and listening.

Fuller: Tiger, another big initiative that we can see across is racial diversity in the workforce and creating better pathways to engagement and economic equity. What are you doing at Genpact to advance that? And how does actually, the services you provide, play into this desire on companies’ parts to have more diversity of both thought, but also, and gender, but also of race?

Tyagarajan: We should reflect the population that we serve, the community that we belong to, the customers we serve. Our employee in various ways should reflect that. And we talked about gender. That applies globally, gender. But the racial equity discussion doesn’t apply to all parts of the world, but applies clearly to the U.S., as an example. And what we are doing is really over the last 12 months, 15 months, is dial up our focus on racial equity. And some of the programs we are doing there are based on learnings from our gender program. So, for example, the fact that we made metrics visible in our gender program was one of the huge reasons for our success. We have started establishing goals. Now, the goals have to be bold, but they have to be achievable. And we are working with our HR and hiring teams in identifying the right places to go hire from. And then, when we have training programs—which we have a lot that people go through in order to keep getting re-skilled and promoted to the next level—we are insisting that the training class must be diverse, because if you have a great intake of a diverse population, but you don’t have a continuous training class that is diverse, it means at some point in time, those people are going to get left behind in terms of promotions. I don’t think we know all the answers. Unlike the gender program, it’s not a 25-country program. This is a much more contained program in certain parts of the world. So we have to have answers that come from our clients. And one of the beauties of our business is that we deal with founder clients. So we’re engaging with clients to get best practices from them.

Fuller: Are clients evaluating you on the diversity of your teams that are serving them?

Tyagarajan: I would think so, Joe. I guess I would say probably not overtly and explicitly, but I’d be surprised if it’s not there, because I would, if I were dealing with someone. Because I come to the conclusion that, if I’m going to partner with this organization and they don’t have that diversity, it means that they’re not open-minded. It means that they don’t have cognitive diversity enough. It means that they may not come up with the best solutions.

Fuller: One of the terms that you use in describing the culture at Genpact and creating an environment that’s going to be able to innovate at the right pace, respond to the dynamism in the marketplace for technology, and the implications of that for the service you provide your customers is “collective intelligence.” What do you mean by that?

Tyagarajan: So it’s actually a term that we came up with when we were developing our learning platform. When someone learns something in one part of the organization, how do you find a way to make it available to everyone, and everyone gets the benefit of that one learning? The fact that we can walk up to a client and tell them. “Three days back, this was done between our team and Europe and our European client, and, therefore, for you in Ohio and for your European business, we are going to bring that learning that was tried out three days back, “ is a huge benefit for our client and, therefore, for us. So I believe organizations that find a way to bring that collective intelligence together in a rapid agile fashion is going to be hugely beneficial and huge value creating for everyone.

Fuller: We’ll, Tiger, let me end our conversation with just a quick question. What was the biggest surprise for you over the period of Covid? And you’ve talked a lot about metrics. What’s the metric that you’re going to focus on for yourself in this period of post-Covid recovery?

Tyagarajan: Have I spent enough time talking to people about—and being empathetic with them—about what they are going through? Kind of a little bit to your earlier question on the work-life balance and when all of that pervades everything. How do you actually sense that in a semi-systematic fashion? So one of our learnings—or one of my learnings—through the pandemic is the importance of just mental health, emotional health of people in the workforce. Now we measure it every day. There’s a way by which we collect mental health and emotional health of people, where people self-declare. We’re realizing it’s such an important metric.

Fuller: And biggest surprise during Covid?

Tyagarajan: The fact that, actually, the world could switch all of its products and services, delivery, and keep the world going without doing it the old way. Sitting at home and doing customer supply-chain transactions. A new leader joins the company, and 18 months later hasn’t met a single person in the company. If you had asked me, Joe, 18 months back, is that even possible? I’d say, “No. Why would it even be possible? It’s not possible.” The fact that technologies were available and could be done, and human ingenuity to do that… just because there were constraints that forced us tells me that sometimes innovation comes from applying constraints.

Fuller: Well, Tiger, thanks so much for joining us on the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Tyagarajan: Thank you, Joe. I really enjoyed the conversation. Fuller: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.