3 Key Mantras that will help Transform 2021

As first published in The Economic Times – HR World.

Genpact CHRO Piyush Mehta’s top - 3 learnings for the year after the year-we-won’t-forget.

We have completed a whole year since all of us have been socially distancing, remotely working, and anxiously adapting. And while the fear of the unknown spiked anxiety, it’s also led to large-hearted acts of incomparable courage and compassion. Even as the world undertakes the largest mass inoculation drive in human history, we know that we’ll all remember the year gone by for the rest of our lives. I know I will.

 Through 2020, I, like most of us, have had a front-row seat to the wonders of our ability to adapt, rise, and thrive. But a couple of months or so into 2021, and we’re wondering how the world will change. Will it change? How will I cope? When can I hang out with my friends at the neighbourhood pub and watch the game again? I don’t have all the answers, but here are three key phrases, mantras, if you will, that I hope will help transform 2021 for me.

 1. Restless curiosity

 That saying, famously attributed to the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, about how the mind opens to a new idea and never returns to its original size... it’s true! Curiosity is the catalyst for our bravest inventions, the boldest new ideas, and the most successful people. As the world returns to normalcy, there’s more appetite for big, bold ideas than ever before. Early on in the battle against Covid-19, we knew that the safety of frontline health workers was of paramount importance, and one of our clients, a global healthcare company, needed to determine the hospitals that would have the highest demand, ensure that it had enough inventory, and adapt its supply chain to respond. Our people combined their knowledge of the industry with their technical prowess and swiftly developed a machine-learning powered forecasting tool. A day later, when the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) requested PPE supplies targeting the very same area, our client was already one step ahead. And being just one day ahead helped keep more healthcare workers safe.

 And so, in 2020, we learned the power of prioritization and rewarding inquisitiveness in our people. We learned the power of encouraging our people to fail if that means doing things that no one has done before or in a way that hasn’t been tried earlier. The power of being curious, asking questions, and taking off on a quest for answers are defining aspects of our organisation’s culture. And we love helping our people to unlearn and relearn all the time.

 2. Ruthless collaboration

 People working with people is the shortest route to acing anything. One of my favourite stories from how our people collaborate is from early 2020. It was two days before the Chinese New Year, and the city of Wuhan was in lockdown. That evening, our office in China heard that a leading hospital had run out of PPEs for healthcare workers. Local markets were sold out too, but our office had masks meant for our employees. The team decided to send all 6,000 masks to the Red Cross at Wuhan on the first day of the Chinese New Year. Then, our other offices across India, Europe, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Japan, also took it upon themselves to ensure that their colleagues in China had the masks they would need too. As a fitting end to this tale of such exemplary compassion, not only were an equal number of masks eventually returned to all the offices that had selflessly donated theirs, but we also managed to send 40,000 more of them to clients in Japan.

 We learned that traditional hierarchical organisational structures need to give way to constellations of teams comprising people with varying skillsets who come together around specific goals. This fluidity gives people the autonomy they need to build a sense of partnership. And to create the kind of company people love working for, we must first listen to what our people are saying. Technologies like AI, chatbots and Organisational Network Analysis (ONA) programmes can be leveraged to find out how our people are really feeling through an analysis of communication patterns to continually identify rockstar performers and flag attrition risks in time.

 3. Relentless pursuit

 “The future belongs to those that create it.” Really? What if it could belong to everyone? Wouldn’t it be great if we could help build a world that worked better for all? People want to work for companies that do good, are good. And so, maybe the work we do should also help our clients make the biggest possible impact in the world.

 One of the most chilling aftershocks of the pandemic has been the drying up of cash flow for small companies around the world. Our teams helped some of our banking clients in the US build solutions to help small businesses survive possible closures. If technology could be accessible to improve millions of lives every day, or if the decisions we took tilted the world a little more towards the good-for-all, we’d all find more meaning and purpose in our everyday lives. For another of our clients, one of the world’s largest social media companies, our people use cutting-edge AI to filter out hate speech and other unacceptable content. In turn, knowing how hate speech can be hard on those who moderate it every day, we focused on programmes to enhance our moderators’ wellbeing and resilience. The work they do each day helps build a safer world for all of us. Because doing good, creating a better world, a better planet, is also just good business.

 Much like ‘open sesame’ unlocked many treasures for Alibaba (the fabled carpenter from Persia, not Jack Ma’s company), these were the three significant learnings that I intend to leverage in 2021!