Case study: How Infosys promotes lifelong learning for its employees


What are the material issues the company has identified?

In its 2018-19 Sustainability Report Infosys identified a range of material issues, such as economic performance, community engagement, employee well-being, environmental stewardship. Among these, promoting lifelong learning for its employees stands out as a key material issue for Infosys.

Stakeholder engagement in accordance with the GRI Standards              

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) defines the Principle of Stakeholder Inclusiveness when identifying material issues (or a company’s most important impacts) as follows:

“The reporting organization shall identify its stakeholders, and explain how it has responded to their reasonable expectations and interests.”

Stakeholders must be consulted in the process of identifying a company’s most important impacts and their reasonable expectations and interests must be taken into account. This is an important cornerstone for CSR / sustainability reporting done responsibly.

Key stakeholder groups Infosys engages with:

To identify and prioritise material topics Infosys engaged with its stakeholders through the following channels: 

What actions were taken by Infosys to promote lifelong learning for its employees?

In its 2018-19 Sustainability Report Infosys reports that it took the following actions for promoting lifelong learning for its employees:

• Encouraging employees to pursue higher education
• Infosys encourages its employees to pursue higher education programmes offered in part-time / distance learning mode by reputed educational institutions. Employees can also apply for extended leave of up to two years to pursue higher education programmes. The objective of Infosys’s Higher Education Support (HES) policy is to enhance the competency and qualifications of employees and expose them to global standards of education.

• Promoting continuous education
• Infosys’s continuous education programmes span domains such as technology, business, process, and behaviour, and are designed to keep the competencies of employees current and relevant to the business needs and help them build a lifelong career at Infosys. Infosys now has approximately 700 courses on Lex (a highly scalable and modular learning platform), in addition to over 1,500 courses available in instructor-led training mode that cover the entire competency spectrum, including technical, managerial, process skills, industry domain knowledge, and leadership skills. Re-skilling existing employees in new and emerging technologies, is also a key element of Infosys’s To ensure this, Infosys created over 100 guided learning paths and made them available to employees through Lex. Managers can also create their own learning paths and learning goals and share them with their teams. Infosys’s recommendation engine also suggests appropriate learning paths, based on the adjacency skills possessed by an employee.

• Implementing foundation programmes
• In its constant quest to enhance learning effectiveness, Infosys updated some of its foundation training programme courses and also introduced two new specialisations, namely IoT and blockchain. Building on its extensive experience in India, Infosys enabled fresh hires in the US at places like Raleigh, Indianapolis, Plano, and made them project-ready. Infosys also collaborated with local universities and MOOC providers in the US for educational offerings, training almost 18,435 freshers in fiscal 2019.

• Promoting collaborative learning
• The primary goal of Infosys’s Knowledge Management (KM) strategy is the creation of an ecosystem for continuous employee education that effectively combines formal, semi-formal, and informal learning to enable the sustenance of organisational productivity, efficiency, and quality in the face of rapid changes in the business needs of Infosys’s Accordingly, several KM solutions have been deployed over the years. These solutions are made available through multiple channels and are accessible in different modes, to ease collaboration across the organisation. Infosys has received many awards for its KM from the Know Network, an external benchmarking agency, including 12 global MAKE (Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise) awards, 15 Asian MAKE awards, and 13 Indian MAKE awards.

• Providing leadership development programmes
• Deepening its focus on enabling leaders on their personalised development journey, Infosys Leadership Institute (ILI) offered a variety of leadership development experiences in fiscal 2019. ILI continued to work closely with business leaders and HR leaders to gain insights into the development focus areas and learning themes across the organisation. Based on these insights, ILI offered executive level skill-building programmes such as Executive Presence, Boardroom Excellence, Powerful Communication, and sales enablement programmes such as Human Side of the Deal, Consultative Selling, and Deal Coaching. These programmes were facilitated in partnership with the best-in-class global leadership development organisations. ILI also continued its partnership with Stanford Graduate School of Business, and had one cohort of 64 leaders graduating in 2019. Infosys also completed Leadership Talent Reviews to identify leadership capability and successor readiness. In support of Infosys’s Diversity and Inclusion objectives, ILI also enhanced its focus on women leaders by designing and offering exclusive programmes for them. Overall, Infosys had 1,352 participants across leadership levels leveraging the various development interventions. Additionally, the Infosys Knowledge Institute (IKI), established
in 2018, helps industry leaders develop a deeper understanding of business and technology trends through compelling thought leadership. Infosys’s researchers and subject matter experts provide a fact base that aids decision-making on critical business and technology issues, with current research focusing on five strategic themes: employee experience and learning, impact of AI and automation, agile enterprises, design as a multi-faceted discipline, and the role of physical location in the future of work. IKI also publishes regularly on industry, function, and technology trends.

• Offering rewards and recognition programmes
• Infosys has in place a robust system of rewards and recognition in terms of annual awards for excellence, quarterly promotions, and unit awards, to motivate employees. Infosys encourages each employee’s entrepreneurial spirit through various rewards and career development programmes and its Awards for Excellence programme recognises teams and individuals who embody excellence, one of Infosys’s foundational values. Winners of this prestigious annual rewards and recognition programme are those who have delighted clients and also inspired peers and colleagues.

Which GRI Standards and corresponding Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been addressed?

The GRI Standards addressed in this case are:

1) Disclosure 404-1 Average hours of training per year per employee

2) Disclosure 404-2 Programs for upgrading employee skills and transition assistance programs

Disclosure 404-1 Average hours of training per year per employee corresponds to:

• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
• Business theme: Employee training and education
• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
• Business theme: Gender equality
• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
• Business theme: Employee training and education 

Disclosure 404-2 Programs for upgrading employee skills and transition assistance programs corresponds to:

• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
• Business theme: Employee training and education

78% of the world’s 250 largest companies report in accordance with the GRI Standards

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References:

1) This case study is based on published information by Infosys, located at the link below. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses. However, we made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the report’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original, please revert to the original on the Global Reporting Initiative’s Sustainability Disclosure Database at the link:

http://database.globalreporting.org/

2) https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/gri-standards-download-center/

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