Infosys bags Competitive Workforce Award

On July 31, 2006, Infosys Technologies Ltd. was the first company in Asia—and the third company outside the United States—to ring the opening bell on the Nasdaq stock market. From Mysore, India, Chairman N. R. Narayana Murthy and CEO Nandan Nilekani pushed the electronic button that signaled the commencement of trading.

Watching from Mysore was Joel Almeida, a new hire who arrived in India from Texas just days before. “It was cool to watch a live view of it. There were cameras set up in Times Square. I watched them sign their names in Mysore and then saw their signatures on the electronic billboard in New York,” says Almeida, who graduated this spring from the University of Texas in Austin with an electrical engineering degree.

Almeida is part of a massive training initiative to bring U.S. graduates to Infosys’ Global Education Center (GEC) in Mysore for six months. The training is meant to assimilate the graduates into Infosys’ corporate culture and to gain experience in India. The scale and nature of the initiative, dubbed the Global Talent Program (GTP), earned Infosys the Society for Human Resource Management’s first-ever Competitive Workforce Award, which is given to an HR department that recognizes and successfully responds to key workforce trends and needs in an ever-changing economic climate.

The Training Initiative

Infosys is an international business and information technology consulting firm based in Bangalore, India, with 58,000 employees worldwide. Established in 1981, the company opened its first international office in Fremont, Calif., in 1987 where its U.S. headquarters are still based.

Over the next 19 years, as Infosys created a more global presence, the company foresaw difficulties in locating and placing high-quality employees abroad, specifically in the Americas. Finding high-quality Indian employees was becoming more difficult due to supply and demand constraints. Even when the company could secure talented Indian employees, the cost of deploying them across the world was becoming more expensive. Economically, it was more sensible to find and train local talent to fill geographical needs.

The solution was to create a large-scale plan to recruit and train new graduates from abroad. The GTP began with a pilot program of 10 young Americans who worked in Bangalore. Following the success of the pilot, the company set a goal of hiring 300 college graduates from 82 of the top U.S. universities in 2006.

Infosys began rolling out that initiative by hiring 126 new U.S. recruits and taking them to the company’s training facility in Mysore. “The reason we hire new grads is we believe in growing them with the company,” says Somnath Baishya, head of global entry-level hiring and campus relations. “We have invested heavily in training. We not only wanted to hire them from the local market, we wanted to bring the new hires to India to give them the experience of Infosys in India.”

U.S. campus relations manager Patrick Payne says: “We wanted to hire a local workforce, but we also wanted them to have a global experience. We have a truly amazing facility in the heart of Southern India. We wanted to get them to Mysore, to understand the culture and how Infosys operates.”

The training in India lasts a full six months—or longer, depending on the graduates’ technical skills. That may seem like a long time—and it is—but HR professionals at the company felt it was necessary to give trainees a real exposure to Indian culture, to teach them the way of doing business at Infosys and to train them in technical skills.

For the first week, trainees are briefed on Infosys and the Mysore facilities in general. Then, the trainees are grouped based on their education. Although a large number of the trainees come from an engineering background, some don’t. “We have one group that has a CS [computer science] background and one that doesn’t. Those who don’t have [a CS background] spend an extra month in training,” says HR support manager Peter Norlander in Fremont, Calif. “We believe we can hire smart and motivated people, even if they aren’t from technical backgrounds, and train them how to succeed [in IT],” says Baishya.

The trainees spend four months in Mysore, training on various technologies, such as Java. “A typical day is 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., during which the trainees have labs, classroom training and soft-skill training, such as communications, problem-solving and cultural assimilation,” says Arun Naya, HR manager of the GEC in Mysore. “Many nights, the HR department organizes cultural programs to teach them about the diversity in India.”

Throughout the program, the trainees take examinations to assess their learning. For the remaining two months, the trainees are deployed to development centers throughout India to gain hands-on experience with real projects.

The Hurdles

No company can undertake an initiative as massive and global in scope as this project is without facing some hurdles. A few that Infosys faced, and cleared, include:

Convincing the recruits: Despite Infosys’ stellar reputation as one of the fastest-growing technology companies, it was challenging to convince new graduates to go to India for six months. Payne says: “The pitch to the students was to talk to them about the experience, a ‘semester abroad of work-study. We realize six months is a long time in your eyes, but what other time in your experience will you be able to go to India with a growing name like Infosys who is willing to provide you a technical skill and come back to the United States with a full-time job?’ ” Alexis Heintz, a new hire who graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, couldn’t pass up the opportunity. “I was an international studies major, so I don’t have a background in computer software,” says Heintz, who arrived in July. “Infosys was willing to train me from the bottom up. I like to travel, and I was curious to see some of India.”

Demystifying India: Some of the new recruits are unsure about living in India. “There were a lot of initial apprehensions about what to expect when they reached India,” says Baishya. To assuage new hires’ fears, Norlander, a U.S. national who recently spent a year in India, spoke to the trainees one-on-one. “We get lots of funny questions,” he says. “Some of the new hires weren’t drinking the milk because they didn’t know if it was safe or not. There’s nothing wrong with the milk. They were nervous. ‘How do I talk to people?’ They learn through doing.”

Naya concurs “A few of the U.S. trainees talked to me about how apprehensive they were [before arriving in India] and how pleasantly surprised they were when they saw the facility.”

“Some of the people from our [group] brought their not-so-good clothes because they were afraid they would be walking on dusty roads,” says Heintz.

Managing global logistics: A training program with global components and key players in worldwide locations requires a lot of early morning and late evening phone calls, as well as a reliance on e-mail. The time difference between Pacific Coast time at headquarters and Indian time is 12.5 hours during U.S. daylight-saving time.

Just deciding how to get the new recruits to India was a challenge. “I [thought] we should fly them on their own from their home cities to Mysore,” says Payne. “The people in India wanted them to get to know each other and fly them out from one location together. We ended up doing kick-off events in San Francisco and Newark, N.J., and flying them out from those cities on six different flights.”

It turned out to be the right decision. “After 23 hours on a plane with each other, the trainees got to know each other better,” says Payne. “They were forming bonds by the time they got to Mysore.”

Expatriates working in India for more than six months must register with the Indian government, a process that typically takes days. Norlander worked with his colleagues and government officials to streamline the foreigner registration process down to two hours.

“I know other expats who work for big-name companies who spend days standing in line. We gave the government a lot of advance notice, and it was a large group” to process quickly, says Norlander. The new hires were the largest group of foreign nationals recruited to work in India ever.

Accommodating multicultural needs: Richard Lobo, head of employee relations, describes another challenge: “It’s difficult to create an environment where a person from almost any country will feel reasonably at home.”

But Infosys has built a world-class facility for trainees. The $120 million GEC spans 300 acres and accommodates up to 4,500 trainees. It is one of the largest training facilities in the world, staffed with 150 technical trainers. Moreover, the facility’s amenities appear to have received as much forethought and effort as the training. The GEC has multiple food courts; a swimming pool; gymnasium; soccer field; several amphitheatres; a 1,200-capacity multiplex showing the latest movies from Hollywood and Bollywood; basketball and volleyball courts; billiards, pingpong and bowling facilities; a Laundromat; barbershops; and grocery stores.

The HR professionals at Infosys spend a great deal of time discerning and accommodating the culinary preferences of their trainees. “Food is one of the most worrying aspects because it can cause stomach upset,” says Lobo. “Even among people from the same country, if you are not used to the cuisine, it can cause a problem. We cater to a wide variety of cuisine in our food courts.”

“When we first got here and weren’t used to eating Indian food, they brought in a chef,” says Almeida. “The chef included more mild Indian food, getting our stomachs used to it over three or four weeks. As you feel more comfortable, you move out into the food court, and now I’ll go in restaurants in the city and eat spicy Indian food. If we hadn’t slowly worked into it, we might have had trouble.”

The Outcome

The HR professionals at Infosys are pleased with the success of the initiative so far and plan to expand it. The company plans to hire more U.S. graduates in 2007 and to begin hiring graduates from the United Kingdom, says Baishya. “[This program] gives us the confidence to [implement] more such programs from across geographies and talent pools,” she says. “The intent in bringing them to India is not only to train them on the software side, but to expose the new hires to the Indian way of working and to give them the opportunity to interact with our Indian employees—to see Infosys as it is in India.”

Heintz, who is taking voluntary Hindi classes at the Mysore campus while she trains, understands the importance of the cross-cultural exchange in creating a global workforce. One evening she stumbled upon some young Indian women playing with a basketball. “I asked them if I could join them,” she recalls. “They asked me to teach them the rules of basketball because none of them had actually played. I taught them the basics. It was a lot of fun.” Heintz learned as much about the women’s culture as they learned about basketball.

The Indian experience makes a significant impact on the trainees, adds Norlander. “There’s a huge shift. People come in apprehensive and leave very confident. They’ve done something challenging and overcame uncertainties. Speaking from my own experience, it wouldn’t be remotely the same experience working for Infosys having no experience at all in India. Infosys reaps a local workforce that understands the [global] company.”

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