money Employers rethink talent and recruiting amid coronavirus
The phrase “the new normal” has become synonymous with the COVID-19 pandemic, but what that new normal exactly entails is up for speculation, especially when it comes to the world of business. Genpact (G) CEO Tiger Tyagarajan appeared on Yahoo Finance’s “The First Trade” to discuss how the coronavirus will accelerate the transition to a work-from-home digital economy.
“Whether it is a number of businesses moving much more to online or it is a shopper’s adoption to cloud, or it’s analytics on the fly, and real-time anywhere, it’s just going to accelerate. We are already beginning to see that.”
Tyagarajan said the contagion has forced businesses to fast-forward and adapt to a work-from-home environment.
“Wow, we could not imagine that all of the work that we are now doing could be done from home … but the technologies we are using have been around for some time; it’s just that we didn’t get a motivation to push us there,” he said.
“I fundamentally believe that every business and industry will figure out what needs to go back and what doesn’t need to go back,” he added.
Tyagarajan points to how Genpact’s financial accounting work for large corporations has thrived in the work-from-home environment.
“For more than 200 of them, we closed the books for the first quarter, all remotely, all work-from-home for our teams and our clients’ teams — 98% of them were done faster than ever before, between half a day or two days faster. ... The question is, why can’t we close the books from home?”
‘Opens up a whole set of opportunities’
Tyagarajan also believes companies will be able to pull from a much deeper talent pool as a result of telecommuting.
“It’s something that we think it opens up a whole set of opportunities for those people to actually say, ‘I’d like to join the workforce of so-and-so industry or company, and I don’t need to relocate.’ For companies ... this opens up the opportunity to access talent that is much more global than ever before,” he said.
“I don’t need to make sure that the person relocates to wherever our offices are in New York or Boston or Palo Alto, and these are not easy places to live in any case, even though they are great places to live,” he said. “I live in New York City; I love it, but I know a lot of people don’t want to move to crowded places like New York City.”
Tyagarajan also noted that the re-skilling of workers during the pandemic is on “turbocharge.” He noted that Genpact launched a significant campaign that has re-skilled and redeployed 3,000 people out of its 95,000 workforce in the last six weeks.
Reggie Wade is a writer for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @ReggieWade.
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