Work Culture

Committed to employee growth

A global business environment, cross-functional training and transfer opportunities to other roles within the company, are the greatest attractions that HP BPO offers to retain its best talent, writes Chirasrota Jena.

Global e-Business Operations Private Limited, popularly known as HP BPO, started its operation in 2000. The company acts as a collaborative partner with customers by enhancing productivity, reducing complexity and driving economies of scale. At the same time, it provides breadth and depth of offerings by being a leader in finance and accounting and drawing from the experience of shared services and capabilities in service horizontals. It specialises in finance and accounting solutions, with expertise in HR, supply chain management, decision support and business analytics. Set up by HP as part of its services business, HP BPO partners with customers to help transform their business through domain expertise, operational excellence, and technology enablement.

Established by HP as a part of its services business, HP BPO partners with customers to help transform their business through domain expertise, operational excellence, and technology enablement. HP BPO employs 10,000 professionals in 10 global delivery business centres around the world. In India there are as many as 6,000 employees in its two centres, located one each in Bangalore and in Chennai. Karthikeyan Selvaraj, Head of HR, HP BPO India, says, “We pride ourselves for being a learning organisation that believes in both personal and professional development of employees. There are lots of different learning and development opportunities that employees can take advantage of, from process-specific trainings to programmes aimed at overall career development.” The male female ratio at HP BPO is 50:50. Most of the employees are in the age group of 22-25 years.

Selection process

As recruitment is an important part of running an organisation, HP BPO follows a very rigorous selection procedure which assesses the domain knowledge of candidates and their long-term career commitment to HP. The candidates undergo a written test and multiple rounds of interviews to make the cut. Candidates who pass the written test go through a preliminary round with the staffing team. Short-listed candidates are then put through a technical panel and also a final HR round of interviews.

Selvaraj informs, “We do not compromise on any grounds while selecting candidates because we believe that the right match between an employee’s skill sets and the company’s requirements is absolutely crucial for us to be competitive in the marketplace. When hiring, we also consider soft skills that candidates possess such as communication and interpersonal skills, positive attitude and those who can work well in teams. Given that the BPO is spread across 10 business centres around the world, we expect potential candidates to be able to work in a challenging environment supporting global customers.”  

The recruitment team looks out for domain experts and qualified people with a background in Finance, Management, Marketing, Economics, Statistics, Indus-trial Engineering and Operations. The company hires entry-level candidates who have at least 1st class in their graduate degree.  But for middle management, comprising production leads, supervisors, practice leaders, project managers, consultants and business analysts, the candidates should have a minimum of 5-10 years of industry experience. They are exposed to both managing front-end engagements with clients as well as backend operations, while working in a multi-cultural business environment. The employees are CAs, MBAs and general graduates. Selvaraj says, “More recently, we are seeing a lot of traction among customers looking to go beyond transaction processing to a high-end knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) environment. We are gearing up for this move by recruiting the right kind of people for our decision support and analytics business.”

‘Learning One’

HP BPO lays great emphasis on soft skills in a global delivery and customer-centric environment. “For example, we have rolled out a customer engagement programme to help managers communicate more effectively with global customers. We have also rolled out another programme to inculcate the importance of customer-centricity among employees and to help them develop relevant competencies,” says Selvaraj. He adds that a programme called ‘Learning One’ gives employees portable skills to enhance their personal development. They can take classes in financial fitness, yoga, self-defense and communications. HP BPO has also tied up with leading management schools in India for short-term and long-term courses on General Management, Finance and Quality. The programme will equip our high-performing employees with the relevant management skills to contribute to the company’s growing BPO business.  

All new employees who have joined HP BPO have to go through six months of probation period. In this probation period, they have to go through a week-long structured induction programme, which assimilates them into the culture of the company, walks them through various aspects of the BPO business and sensitises them to the HP work culture. Senior managers, learning and development experts generally deliver these programmes. Upon completion of this induction programme, new hires would have to undergo a rigorous three-four weeks long technical training that focusses on skills enhancement. Subse-quently, each new employee is assigned to a partner or ‘buddy’ to help them integrate into a real working environment.  

Recognising the talent

HP BPO has an accelerated development path for its high performers called LEAP (Leadership Advancement Programme). A reward and recognition programme for high performing employees and those that display HP values at work has been rolled out for employees. Selvaraj opines, “HP BPO relies on a blend of conventional HR policies and bold new employee oriented initiatives to attract talent and to be an employer of choice in the industry. Our strategy is largely retention-led as HP BPO has grown rapidly since its inception and this has brought with it the challenges of managing a large workforce, and keeping relatively young talent motivated. The emphasis is on attracting people with the right skills and high potential, and retaining them for long-term relationships.” 

The company follows the appraisal standard of HP globally. HP measures performance broadly on two parameters, the first is what gets done, and the second is how it gets done. Employees are appraised on their behavioural competencies, team leadership skills and upholding HP values at work. Every employee goes through a structured, formal appraisal once a year. Their performance output is measured against well-defined objectives, which are shared and mutually agreed upon with their managers. Performance monitoring and feedback is a continuous process, wherein the company has given coaching to its people managers to work with their teams to give feedback regularly. These are done through one-on-one meetings, which help employees tackle all performance-related issues in time and work towards achieving their goals. 

The objective behind this is to ensure that employees are aware of their performance goals and have an opportunity to work on improvement areas. This process has brought in transparency and fairness to our performance measurement system.

All employees are aware of their contributions to the organisation and there are no surprises at the end of the performance period. Says Selvaraj, “There is a strong culture of compliance and continuous improvement through business audits, a rigorous Six Sigma approach and robust business continuity planning practices, proven transition expertise and comprehensive people management programmes leading to an attrition rate that is significantly below industry average.”  

Work-life balance

Though the present attrition rate is 17 percent but the company is working on employee welfare programmes to reduce it. HP BPO has taken major steps to recruit and retain people. It provides them opportunities to lead large teams and manage processes at a relatively young age as most of its employees are in the range of 22-25 years. The organisation has given them exposure to work in different business environments globally. HP BPO has 10 business centres around the world. Selvaraj says, “Our employees often travel to these centres to help set up new processes, manage transitions, and even head a global delivery centre in another country. There are opportunities to be cross-trained and move into other roles within the company. For example, those employees who are presently doing finance and accounting work can move into the decision support and analytics team.”

As HP BPO is operating from Spain, Poland, Romania, Costa Rica, Mexico, China, Singapore and India, there are ample scopes for the employees to take the opportunities of a global environment. HP believes in work-life balance. Therefore, it provides flexi-work hours and an option of working from home on a need basis. Functions that work on a project basis can be done from home if there is a personal emergency or medical reason. There is freedom in every moment for the employees to work according to his or her choice. The company is also organising social gatherings where employees’ families are also involved in the whole entertainment process. “HP BPO acts just like an extended family for its employees. Developing an ownership culture at the workplace is a tough task, but it is the only way to ensure employee loyalty and bridge the gap between employer and employee,” says Selvaraj. Ownership culture optimises productivity and excellence beyond expectations, and helps in combating attrition.