Overview

HCL Technologies is a next-generation global technology company that helps enterprises reimagine their businesses for the digital age. Our technology products and services are built on four decades of innovation, with a world-renowned management philosophy, a strong culture of invention and risk-taking, and a relentless focus on customer relationships. HCL also takes pride in its many diversity, social responsibility, sustainability, and education initiatives. Through its worldwide network of R&D facilities and co-innovation labs, global delivery capabilities, and over 168,000+ ‘Ideapreneurs’ across 50 countries, HCL delivers holistic services across industry verticals to leading enterprises, including 250 of the Fortune 500 and 650 of the Global 2000.

Supernova Award Category

Future of Work: Employee Experience

The Problem

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world of work has changed, and organizations have had to shift their resources to support shelter-in-place, work-from-home models. Distributed workforce management strategies have also shifted, moving from line-of-sight and in-person practices to digital-first remote management approaches.

In March 2020, in accordance with Covid-19 shelter-in-place mandates, HCL transitioned the majority of its employees to work from home. The organization was concerned with how it would continue to work productively in a distributed workplace, and how the WFH transition would impact the wellbeing of its employees. By understanding how these elements were impacted by the WFH environment, and what were the biggest barriers to productivity and the impact on employee wellbeing, HCL could then develop strategies to improve employee journeys, work design, and the overall employee experience.
 

The Solution

To understand the impact of the WFH paradigm shift, HCL isolated rich data for a large sample of +10,000 employees for 17 months before and during the WFH transition, from its personnel records and workforce analytics system – Sapience Analytics. The company had deployed Sapience Analytics prior to the pandemic; as a result, HCL was “pre wired” with embedded analytics to understand work patterns.

Metrics tracked include information on hours worked. This is measured in a sophisticated way, as the software considers when an employee engages in a relevant task (which counts as work time), by monitoring which software tools the employee uses. The key outcome measure is productivity – output divided by hours worked. Data included time allocated to various activities – meetings, collaboration, and time focused on performing work without distractions, as well as networking activities (contacts) with colleagues inside and outside the firm.

The results

The data provided key insights and visibility into what was happening across HCL’s workforce as its employees were plunged into a brave new world of working from home – helping HCL identify the key impacts to productivity and performance. In 2020, enhancement in productivity was significant, resulting in improved quality output. During the WFH transition, total hours worked increased by up to 30%, including a 15-20% rise in work after normal business hours.

As a result of the learnings gained, HCL put in place new remote workplace management strategies and new initiatives to curb productivity detractors such as excessive meeting times and encourage supervisors to devote more 1:1 time and coaching for improved professional development of team members.

Output during WFH is roughly .50% greater per hour for employees with longer company tenure, holding age and experience constant. This finding suggested that greater firm-specific human capital in the form of familiarity with company procedures, or more fully developed networks and working relationships with colleagues and clients, were helpful during the WFH transition.

HCL’s leadership team has started envisaging ways to incentivize this firm-specific human capital. One such instance was the introduction of skill premium allowance for niche and critical skills.

Metrics

Granularity of work data captured included:

• In the WFH period, employees worked +1.5 hours/day but output was the same as pre-WFH periods.
• Productivity decreased by .3 output percentage points/hour worked. So, if employees had not increased time worked while working from home, on average they’d have completed only 88-94 of 100 tasks assigned.
• Longer tenured employees were able to adapt more effectively to the WFH shock. Familiarity with company procedures, fully developed networks and working relationships with colleagues and clients likely benefited them.
• During WFH, employees spent more time in formal and informal meetings, especially video conferences, and spent substantially less time working without interruption, networking (both within the firm and with clients) and receiving coaching or meeting 1:1 with supervisors.
• Women were more adversely affected by WFH than men. Employees with children at home increased working hours significantly more than those without children at home, but productivity fell more than for those without children.

The Technology

Sapience Analytics provides real-time work analytics to deliver an unprecedented level of operational visibility around enterprise resource investments in people, processes, and technology. Providing a fully automated and real-time multifaceted view of Enterprise Effort, Sapience supports data-driven digital transformation – enabling businesses to build a better version of their organization every day for ultimate agility and competitive advantage.

Disruptive Factor

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a tectonic shift and a retooling of the workplace. Organizations and employees had to put flexibility first during the pandemic due to office and school closures. Workplace flexibility suddenly became a “must have,” versus a “nice to have,” as workers found themselves in scenarios that blurred the lines of home and the workplace.

As a result, the pandemic was a watershed event in redefining workplace flexibility forever as organizations have had to adapt to the needs of a remote and de facto digital workplace, putting flexibility at the top of both employer and employee agendas.

To do this, organizations need a data-driven strategy to understand and respond to ever-evolving work needs across people, processes and technology. This provides the visibility and agility to dynamically transform the workplace, fostering workforce management strategies that enable flexibility in myriad ways: when employees work, what work they focus on, how the work is done, and who does the work.

By having enterprise work analytics in place, HCL was able to monitor work trends throughout the pandemic, to assess their employees’ productivity, engagement, performance, and enable functional leaders to make data-driven decisions to transparently improve the productivity profile of the organization and understand and improve the employee experience.

Shining Moment

HCL has always realized great value in its workforce analytics deployment. As a result of HCL’s Sapience deployment and its integration with work processes, HCL has seen higher employee productivity, better employee work-life balance and quantifiable incremental value for its customers.

This workforce analytics deployment become even more pronounced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, helping guide the company to help employees succeed in the new world of work.