By integrating its Interactive & Consulting business, sapient India wants to get the best of both the worlds. Vareen Ray & Surbhi Chawla explore.
Sapient Corporation is a global services firm that markets its services through two primary areas of focus - Sapient Interactive & Sapient Consulting. Sapient Interactive is an interactive marketing agency, which functions like any other ad agency providing branding & marketing strategies, web design & development and emerging media expertise to its clients. Sapient Consulting, on the other hand, provides business & IT strategy, system design, programme management, custom development, systems integration & outsourced services.
It was in the year 1999 that Sapient decided to enter India. This was not the best of times as most IT companies in US at that time were either recovering from the dot com bubble burst or were chalking out strategies to deal with the Y2K bug. However, for Sapient this was an opportunity they wanted to grab at once. That decision has been vindicated, for Sapient today has three offices in India, an employee roster of over 6,000 employees and they see the current slowdown as a big opportunity. 4Ps B&M caught up with Prashant Bhatnagar, VP, Sapient India to ascertain what makes Sapient an Employer of Choice. Excerpts from the interview.
How important is the role of HR in the verticals of Sapient Consulting and Sapient Interactive?
Our 'People Success Organisation' (PSO) is a strategic contributor to the growth and scale of our business. Addressing the bulk of people related issues is done by ensuring that we find the right candidates who believe in our core values and adopt our culture with ease. PSO helps tremendously in ensuring that we hire the right people who are smart, adaptable and capable of multi-tasking.
PSO equips people to align with Sapient's core values of client focused delivery, creativity, leadership, openness, people growth and relationships through a very effective integration process.
What kind of people challenges does Sapient face and how does the company deal with them?
Sapient is a leading global services firm, where people play a critical role to ensure overall success. Given the challenges around recruiting in today's competitive environment and more subsequently the challenges of attrition we have a robust mechanism in place to stay ahead of those challenges. Internal referrals are one of our key hiring tools, which helps us succeed. Sapient's referral programme serves as a crucial talent sourcing tool and encourages people to bring in prospective hires who have the potential to align with Sapient's strategic context and core values. Over 40% of Sapient's people, with 2-4 years of experience are from referrals. We have experienced that hiring through referral is more productive as the drop out ratio is less and the new recruits have higher level of commitment.
Integration is an essential component and the right sourcing of the candidates with respect to the roles they are assigned as well as integrating them with the Sapient culture in the most effective manner helps in dealing with most of the challenges.
Keeping in mind the people challenges, how does Sapient brand itself as the 'Employer of Choice'?
When people ask what the single most appealing reason for working with Sapient is, the response is unanimous - our work environment & culture. Sapient is defined by a cohesive work culture, high levels of people engagement and a global platform to build careers. We consistently seek feedback from our people on what can be improved and this information gathered through group discussions and twice-a-year company wide engagement surveys is leveraged by the leadership team to define our retention and people growth strategy.
From an internal branding perspective people retention is a key focus at Sapient. We analyse and understand why people stay at Sapient rather than focusing only on why people leave. By reinforcing what people intrinsically "love" about Sapient, we are able to manage attrition much better. We also lay a lot of emphasis on culture building among our people. Once a person joins Sapient they attend a week-long induction training, called Sapient Start. The objective of Sapient Start is to enable every new hire to "choose to connect and align to our Strategic Context | Our Future."
What is the USP of Sapient as far as HR's concerned?
A critical aspect of our people philosophy at Sapient is to enable people to 'choose' to align to a common future and using processes and tools to get there. This ensures that we are going into an exponentially better tomorrow, with everyone working towards the same purpose. There is also a strong sense of continuity and evolution in our year-on-year strategy, which is directly linked to our overall purpose.
The cultural fabric of Sapient is rooted in our overall Strategic Context, which includes our company purpose, our values, our vision, goals and our client value proposition. Our Strategic Context defines the work environment of Sapient, of how we interact with our clients, our partners and each other.
Communicating our Strategic Context starts right from the interview stage. We want great people to join us because we want people to 'get' what the company is about. We have several 'in person' interviews with every candidate. This ensures that the individual can make an informed choice about our values and what we stand for before coming to Sapient.
Today one of the crucial aspects to motivate employees is to ensure that they have ample growth opportunities. So what is done in this respect at Sapient?
As a services company, our main assets are the skills & knowledge that our people bring to client engagements. We take the development of each employee seriously and invest each year in training. We believe that effective development goes beyond the individual to involve supervisors. Our managers identify growth opportunities, encourage training, reinforce learning and assess improvements in performance.
Once the individual is through with his induction process, he is assigned to a coach or a career manager. The role of a Career Manager is to help provide the new hire with a seamless integration into Sapient by actively engaging in their career development, providing support during various stages of their careers and acting as a mentor. We have a dedicated learning & development team that conducts company wide training programmes. These trainings range from technical trainings to soft skills.
Sapient has a buddy programme for people joining at manager & above designations. The objective of the programme is to provide context around organisation strategy & structure, organisation & service positioning, role clarity, greater awareness and knowledge of organisational processes & tools that are required to be successful at Sapient.
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