Work Culture

Happy employees write CSC’s success story

Faiz Askari on how CSC focusses on employee wellbeing.

As an organisation CSC has always recognised that all its accomplishments are the work of its employees. The management of the company encourages initiatives, recognises individual contributions, treats each person with respect and fairness, and gives ample opportunity for individual growth. CSC currently has more than 6,200 employees in India and is committed to make them happy.

To ensure an employee’s professional growth CSC has introduced many initiatives. Neelam Gill Malhotra, Director-Human Resources, CSC India, says, “Shaping up the skill set of every employee is a continuous approach here. They are given the opportunity to work in CSC’s state-of-the-art technical labs and experiment as much as they want on some of the rarest technologies and frameworks. We also encourage our employees to write white papers and get rewarded when their ideas see the light of the day. Innovate with CSC’s ‘Innovations@Work’ programme is a an excellent opportunity for our workforce.”

Not surprisingly, CSC in India has been rated as one of the best employers in various industry surveys.

Enjoy while@work

Focussing on the highlights of CSC’s working environment Malhotra states, “We have people-friendly HR policies and offer a variety of facilities to our employees for their professional as well as personal development. All new employees are greeted with a bouquet of flowers and a specially designed welcome kit on the day they join the organisation. It marks the beginning of a long-term relationship based on mutual trust and belief.”

Following are some of the key initiatives at CSC India:

• New employee celebration: The induction programme for new employees at CSC is called the “New Employee Celebration”. The name of the programme is indicative of the approach of the company towards new joinees. It is a three-day programme and includes meetings and presentations by the senior management, all departments and sharing of the organisational approach. Icebreakers, fun events, photo-session of the entire team are a part of the NEC.
• Career Development Plan (CDP): A career development plan jointly generated by an employee and his/her manager that documents the employee’s short-long-term career goals and the training and developmental experiences necessary to mutually achieve these goals.
• Mentoring: Mentoring involves counselling others through formal or informal methods. A mentor willingly serves as a role model for his/her protégé, sharing company insights and lessons learnt. Mentors also provide advice on career development goals, strategies and options.
  Competency integration: The purpose of competency integration is to improve the efficiency and agility of interdependent work by integrating the process of different work force.
• Competency analysis: To identify the main tasks, skills, knowledge and attitude required for various roles in the organisation that will be used in formulating job description, assessing employees’ current level of competency, and in other activities like planning career development and coordinating competency development, etc.
• Empowerment of work groups: There are three types of workgroups in the organisation: Departments, Projects and Taskforces. Department Heads (DHs)/Group Leaders (GLs)/Team Leaders (TLs) of departments and projects and sponsors of taskforces identify such responsibilities and authorities, which shall be delegated to a workgroup. The empowerment may be provided to an individual or a group and information about empowerment shall be given by concerned DH/GL/TL/sponsor to their respective managers.
• Continuous Capability Improvement (CCI) for individuals: CSC India has a defined and documented process for continuously improving individual capability of its employees.
• Knowledge management: CSC India has defined a process for knowledge management and encourages capturing of knowledge assets and their use in organisation (among individuals and teams/groups).
• Sharing is developing: As another major employee initiative, with the objective to share the tools and best practices used in different projects, the Financial Services Group (FSG) division of CSC India has initiated a discussion forum called “Care to Share”. Most of the tools shared in the forum are developed in-house to improve productivity, attain faster turnaround, and ensure efficient reporting. This is a new strategic initiative to share project experiences, ask questions, find solutions, plan together and coordinate activities. The discussion forum is attended by the project management group (PMG) and the details of the discussion are mailed to all the employees so that they can leverage this information to derive benefits in terms of saving cost and time in their projects.

Elaborating on the objective of these initiatives, Malhotra adds, “Establishing a culture that values and rewards an individual’s knowledge and encourages sharing within peer groups, is critical to the success of an organisation. The goal is to manage the knowledge aspect of the enterprise in the same way as its physical and financial assets. This process will help CSC in India generate value from its intellectual and knowledge-based resources.”

Referrals bring rewards

Giving an overview of the recruitment process of CSC, Malhotra reveals that CSC has dedicated recruitment teams for each business unit. “Within these teams recruiters are dedicated to specific skills and competencies. There is a rigorous process for selection to ensure the right fit of a candidate profile with the role and CSC culture. This process includes aptitude tests, technical interviews and HR interviews. For some roles there is also a communication test.”

As an interesting initiative for recruitment, CSC India recently started a contest, CARnival, to leverage its internal recruitment channel—the employee referral programme. CSC CARnival is a special programme being introduced to invite the best candidates known personally to the employees. The contest is a time-bound programme. Only resumes posted during the contest period will make employees eligible to win his contest.

The contest is open to all CSC India employees and creates a win-win situation for all.