TALENT AND COMPETENCY MANAGEMENT

Topic: LTIMINDTREE

Submitted to
Course Instructor: Prof. Manjari Singh

Date of Submission: 07/03/2023

Group 8 | Section A

Aher Kshitija Pradip FABMC202200001

Amit Batra FABMC202200310
Kamlesh Kumar Sahu FABMC202200305
Mousumi Bhattacharjee FABMC202200306
Soham Ghosh FABMC202200307
Tripti Kumari FABMC202200308

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Abstract
This study analyzes Talent Management at LTIMINDTREE, an IT entity of the L&T group. We
began with interviewing employees at LTIMINDTREE about business issues arising due to
organizational factors. We analyzed how these issues are related to Talent and competency
management (e.g. Employee engagement, Talent Development, and Competency modeling)
and their correlation to the HRM systems. This also focuses on steps taken by the organization to
deal with these issues. The study concludes with our recommendations for the problems and
challenges in implementing them at the organizational level.

Introduction:
Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI), based in Mumbai, India, provides digital solutions and
technology consulting. Mindtree Ltd, a leading technology service and digital transformation
company, was founded in 1999 in Bangalore, India.
After acquiring a majority share in 2019, LTI renamed Mindtree as "LTIMINDTREE". It offers
digital transformation, application development and maintenance, infrastructure management,
cloud services, testing, data analytics, and more. The company serves banking, finance,
insurance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and telecommunications clients.
LTI's Mindtree acquisition expanded its cloud computing, AI, and digital transformation
solutions. The acquisition expanded LTI's clientele and global reach.  The merger was
controversial, as some Mindtree executives and employees opposed it. The two
organizations' cultures and employee losses sparked concerns. This report addresses some of
those difficulties.

Organizational Issues (discovered through the primary interview and

secondary research):

1. Reduction in staff welfare expense leading to employee disengagement.

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Personnel expenses for the year declined by 7.9% year-over-year, mostly due to a fall in staff
welfare expenses and a reduction in provision for leave encashment because of a change in leave
encashment policy. Staff Expenses as a proportion of revenue increased from 7.2% to 7.5%
during the lockdown due to the underutilization of resources.
The company doesn't conduct frequent meetings across groups/departments. Now, they have an
HR team titled "PEOPLE FUNCTION" that exclusively handles infrequently task
management-related concerns.
All of this indicates poor employee engagement practices.

HR system affected: Compensation

 According to the reviews collected from a few employees, the compensation increase isn't
competitive enough to motivate cross-functional work. Employee concerns include improper
project allocation without formal recognition of eligibility, dissatisfaction with the variable pay
structure, inefficient employee concerns, especially related to support function, very long bench
period, unfair employee annual appraisals and promotions, and improper project allocation. Pay
is also unequal (within the same role with similar skill sets and almost the same years of
experience). They give bonuses, but most of them are taxed.  Employee-management meetings
are rare. Project managers handle most communication, which slows things down. Hence, good
management communication is needed.

Steps taken by the organization:

● Employee Wellness Programs: The programs include medical check-ups, fitness
challenges, stress management workshops, and mental health support services.
● Learning & Development: The company has set up a dedicated training academy, L&T
Institute of Project Management (L&T-IPM), which offers various training programs and
workshops to enhance employees' skills and knowledge. Other initiatives include center-
of-excellence programs, performance-oriented development plans, core development
programs, theme-based programs, etc.
● Employee Engagement Events:

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Recommendation:
● Career: Provide growth possibilities, incremental incentives, training, mentorship, and
career promotion to encourage cross-functional activity.
● Communicate: Promote honest management-staff communication. Use employee
feedback.
● Congratulate: Reward and recognize employees. Reward and incentivize work
anniversaries, project completions, and promotions.
● Collaboration: Foster employee teamwork by building community and purpose. Use
more people-oriented managers across hierarchies for team-building, social activities, and
a varied, inclusive workplace.
●
● [challenges in EXHIBIT 1]

2. Demotivation of Junior employees leads to client dissatisfaction.

LTIMINDTREE has a hierarchical structure in the technical department, with senior levels
working directly with the client and communicating any technical requirement to the lower
levels. The mode of communication could be more direct and not routed through higher
management. Junior-level employees do not usually get an appreciation for their work from
clients resulting in less recognition amongst the leadership.
Due to less recognition, the salary hike is also not appropriate. Moreover, the promotion cycle is
also rigid in LTIMINDTREE. All this leads to employee demotivation, talent burnout, low-
quality deliverables, and client dissatisfaction.

HR systems linked: Compensation and Recognition

To retain talent and maintain customer service excellence, employees need occasional
encouragement and awards. According to the information gathered by LTIMINDTREE
employees, the company had trouble communicating between upper- and lower-level
management. The problem-solving information flow across the hierarchy hinders their
recognition. Poor employee-client communication necessitates a more complete problem-solving
approach. Due to a poor reward and recognition strategy, employees have lost motivation and
started to cut corners. To inspire personnel and better serve clients, remuneration models must be
designed.

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Steps taken by the organization to resolve the issue-
● Mindtree Gracias award - To build a collaborative culture, Mindtree started the
Gracias award that appreciates peer contributions and value-led behaviors.
(Mindtree, (2022). Annual report 2022. LTIMindtree)
● Crest awards- Mindtree started recognizing individual and team excellence for
significant contributions through Crest awards. ("ARSHA G on LinkedIn: Thank
you Mindtree for this appreciation. | 16 comments," 2021)
Recommendations
● Job rotations- Providing all junior-level employees with a diverse set of projects. This
will ensure a dynamic learning environment, and everyone can avoid mundane tasks.
● Accelerated promotions- Introduce assessment programs to identify potential leaders.
This will increase chances for early promotions and create a psychological impact among
employees regarding promotion opportunities inside the organization.[challenges in
EXHIBIT 2]

3. Reduction in acquisition of new clients

Board meeting outcomes of LTIMINDTREE for Q3FY2023 showed a decrease in the number of
new clients added by 35% (approx.) against the Q3 of the financial year 2022. This further led to
decreased revenue from operations, as suggested by the reports.

HR System affected: Talent Management

This kind of situation occurs when the managers are unaware of the workforce's skillsets and
how to employ them properly. This issue can be attributed to the following reasons.
1. Lack of a stable workforce: The ingress and egress level is very high. People join and
leave the organization very quickly. If the management cannot offer a competitive
package, good career growth opportunities, and a positive work-life balance, it will face
difficulties retaining talent.
2. Ineffective talent development programs may yield a workforce needing to be
equipped to deal with the dynamic requirements of the IT industry. This severely
demotivates the employees and prevents them from delivering entirely to the project
requirements.
3. Failure to adequately address employee contribution and appreciation: Often,
employee appreciation is essential to drive their performance. This can be mitigated by
adequately highlighting the employee performance in the organization and rewarding
them.

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LTIMINDTREE witnessed a high employee turnover, affecting its ability to retain talented
employees and deliver quality customer service. Poor compensation was majorly attributed to it.
Their competitors often took them away by offering better pay packages and benefits.

Steps taken by Organization:

LTIMINDTREE started a Smart Worker platform that enables Managers to access all the data
about the employees, their past performance, skillsets, etc., to be employed judiciously. It
enabled streamlining process SOPs associated with employee information keeping. They build
on the educational level and the on-hand experience gained in the organization to achieve greater
workforce customization. They employ real-time information to improve efficiency, training and
employee engagement. (Sood, V. (2019, March 21))
This has led to a cultural change in employee engagement, as they feel their work is more tech
based than mundane.

The result:
Implementation of the Smart Worker platform has yielded the following results:
1. A significant reduction in employee induction time was observed. It reduced from seven
to two days.
2. Worker availability increased by 25%
3. The redundant activity was reduced by half.
4. Employee retention increased by 50%.
5. Smart Worker solution enabled management to swiftly and efficiently contact workers
based on their proximity to project sites.

Recommendations:
LTIMINDTREE must focus more on relying on data analytics software to keep track of
employees' skillset. This can also be extended in mapping the talent with the incoming projects
to achieve the best customer experience and proper project closure. They must implement
transparency in their systems to highlight the high-performing employees and follow a proper
PMS scheme so that the best-performing employees are suitably rewarded. They need to
properly chart the Career growth map of every employee in the organization. They must strive to
implement that so that people can see the positive result and are motivated to continue with
LTIMINDTREE.

EXHIBIT 1
Possible challenges in implementing the recommended strategies:

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 ● Resistance to change: L&T and Mindtree have different cultures which may pose
challenges in adopting the change especially post-merger
● Restricted resources: These steps may involve time, money, and staff, which may be
scarce.
● Lack of management buy-in: Without management's complete support and resources,
these processes may fail.
● Insufficient measurement and evaluation: These programs may be difficult to measure
and guarantee they meet employee and company needs. Assessing their impact on
employee motivation, engagement, and retention may be difficult.

EXHIBIT 2
Challenges in implementing recommendations.
● Job rotation can backfire on the objective of diversifying the skill set of employees. It
might create favoritism for some departments.
● Employees who get accelerated promotions might leverage the opportunity for their
benefits. So, a monitoring system needs to be there.

REFERENCES

● ARSHA G on LinkedIn: Thank you Mindtree for this appreciation. | 16 comments. (2021,
November 26). LinkedIn. Retrieved March 6, 2023, from https://www.linkedin.com/posts/arsha-
g-317237189_thank-you-mindtree-for-this-appreciation-activity-6869953071640924160-iCzO/
● Employee engagement initiatives gallery (no date) Gallery. Available at:
https://www.larsentoubro.com/heavy-engineering/careers/employee-engagement-
initiatives/ (Accessed: March 6, 2023).
● LTIMindtree reviews by 366 employees | Ambitionbox (no date). Available at:
https://www.ambitionbox.com/reviews/ltimindtree-reviews (Accessed: March 6, 2023).
● Digitize your assets for Business & Operational excellence (no date). Available at:
https://www.ltimindtree.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Business-Operational-
Transformation-with-Asset-NxT.pdf (Accessed: March 6, 2023).

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 ● Mindtree addresses L&T’s end-to-end workforce processes to drive employee
engagement. Available at: https://www.hfsresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/HFS-
OneOffice-Awards-2022-PPC-LT-Mindtree-May-10.pdf
● Sood, V. (2019, March 21). A culture shock awaits Mindtree employees under L&T.
Mint. https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/a-culture-shock-awaits-mindtree-
employees-under-l-t-1553154939141.html
● Mindtree, (2022). Annual report 2022. LTIMindtree

APPENDIX

Transcripts of Interview with Mrs. Janhvi, Team Lead at LTIMINDTREE

The interview contains sensitive company-owned information, which are not to be shared outside
of the set of people evaluating the project for any purpose. Those in possession of the submission
are requested to remove any soft or hard copy of this information post-evaluation.

Tell us something about your organization and your role in it.

I am currently working at LTIMINDTREE, an IT entity of L&T group. I joined this organization
in April 2021 as a Module lead and was later promoted to Tech Lead.
I’ve been handling an account for erstwhile, Mindtree since then. I generally talk to the client
about any upcoming new requirements and gather inputs from their business teams to take it up
with MT. Additionally, I work with my internal team to develop some new ideas that can be
implemented to make the platform robust and recommend it to the client. This increases business
and builds a good rapport between LTIM and the client.

What are your views on employee engagement practices conducted in LTIM?

As a part of employee engagement practice, we do not have frequent meetings with the
leadership to discuss how the account has been doing. Also, the discussions on challenges the
team faces are only bound to happen with the project manager for the team.
The PM would be taking it forward to the leadership, but the team needs to be in direct touch
with them. Additionally, I believe it’s hearsay that the people function (HR) team is always on its
toes for the employees. However, it is contradictory when their involvement is needed. I am not
pointing to extreme scenarios where POSH and all come into the picture, but the basic ones
where the team might be struggling to deal with their PM.

How LTIM ensures the Talent management of its employees?

At times the recruitments are done specifically for some particular projects/skills. In situations
like these, the people hired are directly deployed into accounts as soon as possible to start with
their billing for the clients. However, when I was hired at LTIM, it was not project-specific

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hiring. It was an open forum hiring for some skills that they predicted would be required
eventually. In this case, people with those skills were on the bench and unbillable for 1 to 1.5
months approximately before being mapped into the projects. This is a sheer example of
underutilizing the talent available at the organization. There are also scenarios where a project is
about to close, and the resources from that account will be available to be mapped in other
projects. In these situations, there is a lack of proper planning to utilize the resources at their best
without being kept on the bench for a long time. For instance, I have been working on a project
for the last one year, and MT was informed that the project wouldn’t be extended post-
December’22. Many team members from that project were on the bench, searching for a new
project until mid-February ‘23.

Since your work involves engagement with overseas clients, how LTIM ensures
opportunities to interact with clients?

I will be very specific about my project here. We are a team of around 12 employees belonging
to grades C1, C2, C3, C4, and C5. C1s and C2s are the ones who are first technically trained and
then deployed to development/testing projects. So, when it comes to developing a piece, it is
primarily a C1 or C2 who does this part. C3s are involved in POCs, and C4/C5 acts as technical
architects/project managers from a broader perspective. At LTIM, C1s and 50% of the time, even
C2s are not allowed to come in client-facing. They do not get to interact directly with the client
for any technical discussions. C3s generally take up technical discussions/issues with the client
that the team is concerned about.
In the absence of C3, if C1 gets a chance to interact with clients, they feel they need more
confidence even after knowing they have done everything from scratch. It's unfair when most
development work is done by people who cannot come into client interactions. Their
compensation is also pre-determined based on level, and sometimes it is demotivating for them
to work without recognition. However, this was different when I worked in my previous
organizations.