Genpact: Instilling social responsibility in its staff

RELATED NEWS Is philanthropy last resort for India? CSR: Looking at the philanthropic side of HUL Mandatory CSR not a great idea, feels India Inc

It had GE as a founding parent. It became the test bed of the Indian outsourcing business. It's been growing between 14-17% and has operations across the world. It is Genpact.

It might be just 13, but Genpact has a history of innovation that has defined the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry in India. It's an end to end service provider applying science to managing business processes. It has a similar approach to its corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities as well. It is a BPO driven by its workforce; this workforce is also the army that drives its corporate citizenship programmes.

Zinnia, Amit, Pankaj and Vinit from Genpact have been working with the children in RTI Vidyapeeth in Gurgaon for a while now and they will continue for the next two years. Through fun activities in which the class has to choose a leader, these volunteers are trying to help these kids understand concepts like leadership and teamwork.

Genpact is conducting this programme in partnership with not for profit organisation Junior Achievement, a worldwide partnership between the business community, educators and volunteers working together to inspire young people to dream big and reach their potential.

Zinnia Mitra, Senior Manager-BFSI, Genpact says, "All volunteering from yourself, if people get motivated and they want to do something different from their usual work and self-actualise oneself and specifically for groups of people who have done enough, seen it all, they want to do this kind of stuff."

In an effort to digitise and streamline the volunteering initiative, Genpact is partnered with Angelpoints to deploy a web based volunteer management system. This is an online networking system that connects employees across the world with local volunteer opportunities in their communities. 

Volunteers who signup are put through an induction and training programmes post with their interactions with students begins. Because this is Genpact, the focus is always on the process, project leaders manage detail records of all interactions and maintain progress report of each student. This helps the next set of volunteers take the programme forward.

CNBC-TV18's Executive-Editor Shereen Bhan caught up with Pramod Bhasin, President and CEO, Genpact, to talk to him about Genpact's social activities.

Below is a verbatim transcript. Also watch the accompanying videos.

Bhasin: We have always felt that we are privileged to work in the economies we do. We work in a lot of emerging economies who are surrounded by a lot of issues, all of us as employees are representing a very small proportion of the population. So, giving back just comes from that atmosphere and environment we work in. 

But beyond that, we have come to respect the fact that we have 42,000 employees around the world. The best way to give back is to utilise the resources and skill of the 42,000 people to make whatever difference we can. That's where we have evolved our philosophy into focusing on employee ability on education, on healthcare and in areas where we have skills, which we can then use very productively to give back. 

The second element, I would add, is it's not just around CSR, it's really mainstream into the heart and soul of what we are."

Q: Now, we have a situation over the years where companies have voluntarily decided to give their time and resources to things like education, healthcare, which do not necessarily directly impact their business. Where do you stand on this entire debate?

Bhasin: I need to say that all we will do is look after shareholder value in monetary term is extremely short-sighted. We work in Gurgaon, for instance, if we can't help the environment, it is going to impact us in someway. Now, we can do it without necessarily quantifying the benefits we will get in dollar or rupee terms, so that's one and I am very clear about this. 

Second, I think there are a lot of things that we should do just as privileged members of society. I think the role of companies has to be more; companies play a too bigger role in the world to be compartmentalise into trying to make money only for its shareholders. I think that's very incredibly narrow view and not something I will ever subscribe.

Q: What is the approach then because as far as your core business is concerned, you have annual budgets, you have short-term targets, quarterly targets and all of that? How do you approach the CSR part of your business?

Bhasin: You are right about the annual budgets and targets, so the amount of money I can put away for it is limited and it will be limited by pulls and pressures of margins, double dip recessions etc. What is not limited is the skills of our people. So, we have just announced very recently a programme where we have said every employee in our company can take a few hours of a month and will expand into a day, if necessary, to provide support and help and volunteering help. 

We have done things like in healthcare where we have run a fairly good practice, which looks at optimisation of hospitals. We work with the Delhi government on completely pro-bono basis, we have gone into two of the biggest public service hospitals in Delhi and helped reconfigure the trauma rooms, help reconfigure the emergency rooms, so that our people can help us and help change how public services are provided in those hospitals.