Why Corporate And Political Leaders Turn To Infosys President Ravi Kumar About The Future Of Work

The future of work’s time has come, which is why you’d be hard-pressed to find a company that isn’t tackling the issue head-on through important strategic initiatives, enterprise projects, and more. And then, there is Ravi Kumar, president of Infosys, the global IT consulting and services company with over 250,000 employees worldwide. He’s widely regarded as a thought leader in the future of work, so much so that CEOs, politicians, and leaders from across the public and private sectors regularly reach out to him for his insights and guidance on the topic. Not surprising, given that Kumar has been deliberately focused on the future of work for the last several years at Infosys, where he’s translated the company’s vision into practical concepts and concrete insights that have benefitted clients and employees alike. Here’s how:

Be Willing to Test, Experiment, and Take Risks to Accelerate Rapidly

How do you take a broad concept like the future of work and translate it into something real and concrete that produces meaningful outcomes? In a word: Experiment. It’s the way that Kumar has been able to operationalize the future of work at Infosys: “I call it a ‘stackable narrative,’ where we have an idea, test a hypothesis, and build on our learnings over a period of time. We do this this across the Infosys platform, and given our size and reach, we’re able to test and experiment at scale, so results can happen quickly.”

 The approach has been applied to multiple areas of the company, none more so than in the areas of job creation and workforce transformation, shifting the paradigm at Infosys about what is important from a talent and human capital perspective. It’s why you’ll see the company hire employees who have non-STEM backgrounds, from liberal arts and sociology, to anthropology and design. It’s also why the company prioritizes skills over degrees when hiring, experimenting with different ways to radically reskill professionals who are making mid-career shifts from traditional jobs (think bank teller, front desk receptionist or sales professional) into digital jobs like cyber security or data scientist.

With a global shortage of technology workers predicted to be as high as 85 million by 2030, representing $8.5 trillion in lost annual revenue, it’s particularly meaningful that Kumar has focused the company’s experimentation on tackling this issue. “We have been able to shift this trend at our company and we’ll see even more massive impact to come. But it wouldn’t have happened without our willingness to try something different and take risks.” 

The Future of Work Will Positively Impact Inclusion and Diversity

How will inclusion and diversity be different in the future? It’s an important question for Infosys and woven into the wide range of future-oriented initiatives across the company. As Kumar points out: “What we’re doing is evolving beyond a model of work established during the industrial revolution. It was a model that was non-inclusive, non-diverse in just about every sense of the word.” He adds: “The model also extended to the physical workplace. We all had to come into an office, or a factory, and it set us up to approach things in a homogenous way, from how we hired talent to the way we solved problems. We’re now looking at this very differently.”

For example: “We’ve seen how hiring liberal arts graduates brings a different type of cognitive diversity into our company, on our teams, and for our clients. We also know that good work can be done from anywhere, which allows us to tap into underserved and overlooked markets for talent, particularly in rural areas. That provides different parts of the country with access to technology jobs and career paths that didn’t exist in the past. That’s what we believe inclusion and the democratization of work looks like in practice.”

Hire People Who Can Learn How to Learn

How can one of the world’s largest IT services companies thrive by deliberately hiring non-technology talent? For Kumar, it comes down to training: “Early on, our hypothesis was that we could develop strong technology skills in a very different way, so we looked in places where others weren’t looking. We know there are millions of Americans who lack a traditional college degree, they may be stuck in low-potential jobs, but they have very high potential. For instance, we can hire someone with no technology experience for a data operations role, which is an entry-level role in our company. In just a couple of years, with the right training, education, and support that we’re able to provide, that individual can move into a skilled data scientist role. And we are doing that at scale.” He adds: “We find that individuals with non-traditional technology backgrounds are much more valuable, because they can come into our company with the mindset of an apprentice who is eager to learn. That means more to us than a rookie undergraduate with no previous life experience. The key is hiring people who can learn how to learn.”

Consequently, Infosys has established numerous public-private partnerships with community colleges and computer science K-12 teachers across the United States. “We’ve created a digital apprenticeship that can scale. I want this to reach people that for reasons beyond their control, may feel stuck with the types of opportunities available to them in the past. Programs like the ones we’re creating at Infosys provide thousands with a pathway forward. We know that diversity and inclusion across the technology world needs a huge amount of work, but this is an experiment that we’re very hopeful about and believe it will create an incredible impact to the workforce across the country.” 

The results have been significant for Infosys, a company with a large presence in India, but historically less well-known in the United States. “Infosys was recognized by Great Places to Work® and Fortune as one of the 2021 Best Big Companies to Work ™ and our flagship internship program, InStep, was ranked number one in the ‘Best Overall Internship Program’ category in the 2021 Vault Internship Rankings. These are great indications of how we’ve progressed.”

Every Company is a Technology Company

“Here’s a simple example of how we’re changing: Over the past year, employers didn’t have a choice but to move to a virtual workplace. Moving forward, employees will expect to have the choice to come into a physical workplace or to work virtually. The question is whether companies acknowledge that these choices exist and how they’ll embrace them.” He sees other trends that companies will need to embrace in order to stay relevant and maintain a compelling value proposition for current employees: “Right now, we’re drawing on the social capital of the past. We’re still relying on the cultures and systems we created at a different time, but those are also changing. For example, we see an accelerated shift to a gig economy. That will become an even more vibrant part of the enterprise model over time, and companies who can figure out how to also attract and integrate a strong pool of reliable gig workers into their own talent mix would be well-served.”

He adds: “We’re wired to our assumptions of the past, but it’s time to rethink our assumptions. For instance, in the past, as a consulting company, we would send consultants to our clients to help them solve an enterprise challenge. Going forward, rather than do the heavy lifting for them, we’ll teach them how to fish in different ways, because every company is going to become a technology company. As such, our job is to help our clients reskill their workforce and build their own internal capabilities of the future. Companies that understand and embrace that idea will be in the strongest position possible to take advantage of whatever the future brings.”