Work Culture
Why organizational culture matters
CSC India believes that a positive and open work culture is essential for ensuring high standards in any organization, writesNikita Upadhyay
A comfortable and relaxed work atmosphere at CSC India helps its employees to increase their productivity and efficiency. Both the individual and the organization play an important role in doing so. The former’s initiative, caliber and creativity matters and while the latter’s motivational attitude does the miracles. This inspires, guides and leads others towards a positive and productive work culture, resulting in organizational development and also satisfaction to its personnel.
“Professionals at CSC India are the people who think collaboratively and are willing to share everything related to work. When it comes to client satisfaction, our teams take it in their strides to make it happen. Every personnel associated with us strives to make the company grow,” stated Neelam Malhotra, Vice President, HR, CSC India. The company values the diversity of its employees and their unique perspectives. By valuing each other’s differences, the organization demonstrates its commitment to treating everyone with fairness and respect.
The first step
The organization believes in bringing out the best from its people. Freshers are provided with trainings to equip them to give their best to the workplace which not only helps the organization to achieve its targets but also helps their employees’ learning and development. It mandates 60 hours of compulsory training on various technical and soft skill aspects for all its employees.
The aggregate of the Individual Development Plan of all its employees forms the basis of the annual training calendar of the company. The training department aggregates the areas of development as identified by all the employees and plans an annual calendar to support their requirements.
The training calendar has a fair mix of all kinds of trainings like technology or process training, domain training, soft skills training, and other work related trainings like time management, stress management, overseas orientation, accent neutralization, etc.
The training department circulates the training calendar every month and employees can nominate themselves for the same. These are conducted by both in-house and external faculties and cover the role-based and self-development areas.
It has a documented training policy for this and a full-fledged training department that is driven with support and supervision from the senior management.
Nurturing the potential talent
Mentoring program primarily focuses on developing women employees. The objective here is to develop leaders by supporting women to discover and hone their potential as also to retain talent and improve effectiveness. The target is to see more and more women in the leadership roles. The mentoring initiative focuses on unlocking and unleashing the potential of its women employees and preparing them to take on higher responsibilities. It is also about making them believe in themselves.
“Our priority was placement rather than growth, development and fitment. However we are now settling in and our endeavor is to build a powerful workforce with high performance employees through a talent management strategy which requires not only finding the right people with the right skills but also continuing to develop them to meet the business needs,” informed Malhotra.
The company believes that effective managers are very important to an organization’s success story. Hence it has a strong managerial orientation program which is an initiative under the CSC India leadership excellence framework. This role-based mandatory training program aims at providing managers with in-depth knowledge of the organizational policies and procedures helping them to take more effective managerial decisions. This is not a skill building program but a foundation stone for developing strong managerial capabilities through various channels.
Crucial pointers
Promotion to the next level and salary increment is purely based on merit. Promotion is not an entitlement after serving a certain time in a job or grade and performance rating but will also depend on the responsibility actually assumed by the employee and the company’s needs for people in the higher grade.
“We have launched an employee assistance program called ‘Sparsh’, which assists all the employees and their immediate family members to identify challenges and resolve them confidentially and effectively,” informed Malhotra.
The company truly believes in a participatory culture. All the day-to-day management with respect to food, recreation and corporate social responsibility is handled by the employees through employee-run committees elected democratically. Right from involving employees in planning and running the company’s business to getting groups of employees to manage areas that are of interest to the employees, the organization believes in empowerment.
The mission of the company is to help clients achieve their strategic goals and profit from the use of information technology. “Employee development is one of our core values and it strongly focuses on developing our employees in every possible way. All our employees are offered extensive training to enhance their professional and personal interests,” insisted Malhotra.
| Gender breakup | ||||
| Total | Women | Men | Total | % of Women Employees |
| Grand Total | 3028 | 11605 | 14633 | 20.70% |
Bridging the gaps
The open-door philosophy is adopted which translates to all managers in the organization. Connect@HR is a round-table discussion initiative aimed at building a connection between the HR and the employees and enhancing the organization’s culture of openness and trust. Employees are encouraged to be honest and forthcoming about improvements that they think can be made. Participation is through invitation.
‘People Hours’ refers to any individual meeting the Head of HR personally or over a conference call in hours fixed over a week. ‘Unison’ provides a platform to the employees to interact with the senior management members, reiterating the value of two-way communication.
‘Communication Meeting’ refers to the regular division-specific communication on a four-monthly basis wherein the achievements and focus areas are shared with all the employees addressed by the respective division heads. Ourspace—the company’s intranet carries stories about their recent wins, employees speak, senior management speak, customer satisfaction scored, monthly cascade of all departments, etc. It also has a toll-free number on which any employee can call any time to report non-compliance issues on the ethical front.
| Age categorization | |
| Age Group | |
| 20 to 25 years | 18.50% |
| 26 to 30 years | 45.90% |
| 31 to 35 years | 24.70% |
| 36 to 40 years | 7.40% |
| 41 to 45 years | 2.30% |
| > 45 years | 1.20% |
Beyond work
To keep the environment joyful, they have recreation rooms across all centres which includes table tennis, pool tables, carom boards, etc., where tiring minds can relax. A well-equipped library for assistance contains books, reference materials and even facilities like gymnasium to take care of the physical health of the employees. The meditation room helps increase the performance manifold as the work is done with more efficiency and energy.
To encourage and support the cause of employees who aspire to acquire higher qualification or work voluntarily for some social cause it provides a platform to opt for sabbatical. They believe in promoting a work culture that recognizes stellar contribution of employees beyond their routine jobs and suitably rewards them. The employee recognition program is called ‘The Accolades.’ This is centrally driven by the HR, supported by an online application tool. Under the umbrella of ‘Accolades,’ they have a series of rewards at the divisional and organizational level spread all over the calendar year.
Societal focus
“In our own capacity we are making an endeavor to contribute to society. In this category, all activities are steered by the Binergy Committee at CSC India, which acts as the torchbearer for the CSR efforts,” stated Malhotra. It is an eight to 12-member team at each CSC India location. The team is democratically elected by the employees for a term of one year.
Each team is mentored by a senior manager, who provides direction to the members. The team manages all the CSR initiatives and is supported by employees who volunteer and participate in various social responsibility initiatives. The company also encourages its employees to take up to six-months sabbatical for working on social projects during which the employees are paid half their salary and are appraised on the basis of their performance in the social development project undertaken by them, thus ensuring accountability of initiatives.
The objectives of this committee is to help the lesser privileged sections of the society through long-term sustainable and measurable initiatives, and participation in national, international, governmental and NGO initiatives like blood, donation, pulse polio, etc. These support people affected by natural calamities and disasters and offer a platform for their employees to give back to society.