Circle of Happiness


Happiness comes from giving, not getting. If we try to bring happiness to others, we cannot stop it from coming to us also. To get joy, we must give it, and to keep joy, we must scatter it. - John Templeton

Social Responsibility is a core value of Happiest Minds. It is also one of our vision statements where we have set out to “be a leader in integrating social responsibility initiatives with core business operations”.

Our CSR initiative, called the Circle of Happiness:

• Establishes volunteering & community involvement

• Celebrates our important milestones with acts of giving

• Executes a process for leveraging our capabilities and contribute to socially relevant causes and builds a social engagement program that enables us to engage with clients & partners and make a difference to society and the environment

• A core team anchors this program, defines its charter at a granular level, interfaces with social organizations and coordinates volunteer activities


Some of our CSR initiatives in FY21 were:

• Total 2.76 million meals to Akshaya Patra Foundation totaling ₹​ 13,283,798

• COVID Relief - ₹​ 1,596,200 to Akshaya Patra; ₹​ 160,333 to CM Relief; ₹​ 443,540 to PM CARES Fund; total ₹​ 22 lacs

• Support to Happiest Minds & families with COVID-19 - hospitalization, plasma donation etc.

• Daan Utsav - ₹​ 663,010 - Baale Mane, Balajothi, OBLF, Jeevarathni & Ankura



Learning and Development at Happiest Minds is a continuous process of excelling a learning culture which is Agile, Creative, Collaborative and Technologically advanced in alignment with business and organization goals.

Onboarding Program


A newly onboarded Happiest Mind goes through a structured Assimilation process which provides them with basics to quickly integrate into the organizational culture, understand the Mission & Vision, awareness on internal processes and get insight into the Business domain. The process also ensures that all mandatory programs related to Security Awareness, Policies, comprehensive POSH Program & Equal employment opportunity are covered as per compliance & to create a culture of inclusiveness. The programs are delivered using a blended approach consisting of Classroom, Virtual program, and Online learning portals.

Continuous Learning


Happiest Minds facilitates and promotes continuous learning in several ways. As part of the continuous learning process, various learning initiatives are designed and recommended as per the role, project needs, Business Strategy and Career Aspirations of individuals.


Individual Learning Maps


During our annual performance appraisal, all Happiest Minds can indicate their training needs, or the Managers can recommend the training need for the individual. This information is consolidated by the Learning & Development team as Individual Learning Maps. Based on these Learning Maps, we design and calendarize Technical programs, Soft Skills, Behavioral, Managerial, Leadership & Certifications for individuals to attend during the year.


Multiskilling


When new projects are initiated, a request is raised in the internal system to identify people who can execute the project. These requests have the skills required for the project. We frequently analyze the skills attached to these requests and identify new skills as they arrive in the market or most frequently required skills. Equipped with this information, we proactively design training programs & interventions for Happiest Minds to upskill themselves as per the Industry needs.


Project-Based Ongoing Training Needs

Ongoing Training Need analysis with business leaders is done on quarterly basis and training programs are calendarized for respective business units. Specialized technology, Functional and Domain related interventions are also carried out as per the organizational need.

Transformational Programs

Mindfulness Programs

We have adopted ‘The Mindful IT Company’ as a tagline in our logo. We have distilled the principles of mindfulness for Happiest Minds and identified tools and techniques that inculcate this practice. In order to inculcate mindfulness, 60 minutes in a week is set aside for the team to engage with a customized blend of select techniques such as Mindful Meditation, Active Listening, Body Scan, Desktop Yoga and Mindful Coaching, among others. 101 sessions covering 3,679 Happiest Minds have been conducted so far.

In FY21, 745 Happiest Minds have undergone Mindfulness training; 78% coverage.

Happiest Minds’ Feedback to Mindfulness Training



Welcome to Management

“Welcome to Management” is a customized program for our new Managers who are taking the first step into managerial positions. This program focuses on building key skills on planning, delegating, managing, decision-making. Also, the program covers aspects of emotional intelligence, awareness of personality styles and communication skills empowering them to become confident managers.

Campus to Corporate

Campus to Corporate training is a long duration program to help transition smoothly into the corporate organization. This program focusses on building in-depth skills on Technologies & Professional Development skills on corporate communication, managing time, building self-confidence and the mindset shift that is required when moving from a college to corporate environment.

Progressive Programs & Initiatives

MEDAL (Managerial Excellence & Development of Agile Leaders)

A customized learning initiative to enrich the leadership community on various facets of entrepreneurship to run the business. This program aims to bring the leaders across the organization and provide a platform to deep dive into the various business domains and cover aspects of building High performance teams, Diversified thinking process, Finance, Agility, Marketing and Change Management

Research suggests that the proportion of women in key leadership roles remains low in most organizations, despite compelling evidence that increased diversity amongst leadership ranks increases organizational performance. Women face an unique set of challenges when progressing into leadership positions, including unconscious bias, a scarcity of role models, and a continually shrinking peer group.

Happiest Minds’ Women in Excellence (WE) program is a learning intervention which aims to bridge this gap by enabling and enhancing personal, inter-personal and group skills. After the completion of the program, senior leaders are assigned to mentor the participants.

For the year, we organized WE Program which was exclusively delivered for Women at Happiest Minds which covered 9 Modules - Managing Conflict, Understanding Myself - MBTI Debrief, Live your Values etc. which was delivered by our internal leadership & Trainers. A few sessions like Personal Branding & Influencing, Emotional Equity was delivered by External speakers, post which a one-month Mentorship Program was done by internal Leadership team for individual Women Happiest Minds. 34 Women Managers participated in the FY21 Program.





Multiskilling Initiative

To respond to the ever-growing technology changes and to thrive in the industry ahead of the curve, it is very important to ensure upskilling of our workforce with new skills and emerging technologies. Multiskilling initiative encourages our Happiest Minds to be trained on minimum of one additional skill or technology to keep pace with the changing marketplace. Our internal tool has a library of 1,300+ skills that an individual can choose from and add to his/her profile. The skill information of people is continually updated as they acquire new skills through various learning initiatives or project work. This information is used for identifying and rolling out learning programs & Interventions.

Competency Based Professional Development Programs

Competency Based Learning Interventions and Learning programs focuses on people skills & personality attributes to enhance an individual’s self-awareness, interpersonal skills, communication skills, social skills, job performance skills, character traits, managerial effectiveness and Leadership Skills.

Trainings & Certifications
Happiest Minds allows role or job certification program reimbursement for its members. 45 Happiest Minds completed 45 Certification Programs in FY21.

Business Impact

Change Management during Pandemic
Culture of continuous learning, structured learning processes, Multiple learning methodologies and established Internal trainer pool seamlessly transitioned to remote working during Pandemic. During the year FY21, the average hours achieved on trainings is 30 hours.



Customized programs and initiatives during Pandemic

Emotional Intelligence Program
Mindful Thinking Program
Pro bono Programs on communication skills, Time management
Partnership programs from industry and vendors
Extending online learning platforms to support continual learning
Digital Wellbeing program
Financial Wellness for Women
Emotional and mental fitness
Remote programs on Agile, resulting in Exams and Certifications
Online curated learning paths to upskill on various technologies and professional development



Increased Revenue

Optimization of Operational Cost and providing opportunities to utilize inhouse talent led to increased revenue numbers in FY21.

Alignment with Customer Roadmap

Intervention by L&D to upskill Happiest Minds on Net Core & Safe Agile trainings really helped the offshore team align with the customer roadmap.

67% of Happiest Minds trained on additional skills as per the Multiskilling initiative. 343 project deployments across the BU’s.

Trainings & Certifications (2020-21)

AWS BIG DATA
  • Confluent Certified
BACKEND
  • AWS Certified Sysops
  • Splunk Fundamentals 1
CEH
  • Certified Ethical Hacker
  • Certified Information
CLOUD
  • AWS Certified Cloud
  • Azure Administrator
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Microsoft Certified Azure

  
GOVERNANCE
  • ITIL Foundation IT
  • ITIL Foundation v.3
  • ITIL Foundation v4
NETWORKING
  • CAPM
  • CCNA
  • CCNA Routing and
  • CCNP
  • CCNP Routing
  • Cisco ENSDWI
  • FORTINET NSE 1
  • FORTINET NSE 2
  • FORTINET NSE 3
  • NSE 1 network Security
  • NSE 2 network Security
  • NSE 3 network Security

PROJECT MANAGEMENT
  • Certified Product Owner
  • Certified SAFe 5 Agilist
  • Certified Scrum Master
  • Certified Scrum Product
  • Certified Scrum MasterA®
  • SAFe 5 Agilist
  • Scrum Fundamentals
RPA
  • RPA Developer UiPath
  • RPA UiPa foundation

   

 
SALESFORCE
  • Salesforce Certified
  • Salesforce Service Cloud
NETWORKING
  • CEH
  • CompTIA Security Plus
  • CompTIA Security +
  • Computer Hacking
  • IBM Qradar SIEM V
  • ZScaler Certified Cloud

Improved Delivery and Performance

Business Requirement was to implement modern BI platform and streamline reporting environment. Happiest Minds were upskilled on Azure Data Lake, Power BI and Kafka Integration, which resulted in unified data view across the organization, enabling swift business decision-making. It also eliminated the need for Manual report generation across Business units.

Our approach to Talent Acquisition as a Center of Excellence is AI-enabled, Analytics-driven with Agility in decision-making process. Our differentiated hiring processes, Day of Experience, focus on future skills and Happiness as our core theme makes Happiest Minds Technologies an employer with value and difference. We continually strive to provide the best experience to candidates. Differentiated hiring processes and post offer engagement led to growing offer to joiner ratio consistently over the last four years. Over the last 4 years, we have achieved significant reduction in overall turnaround time from 83 days to 51 days.

TA in Times of Pandemic

Since the pandemic hit us, the TA team made several realignments in its recruitment process such as:

• All Interviews are conducted online over MS Teams or a Skype platform.

• Most of the time, recruiter connects the Interviewer and candidate over teams and takes a photo of the candidate for future references.

• During or after the People Practice Interview, the recruiter asks for the candidate documents (like photo or
Aadhaar or PAN) and team cross checks the photograph with the document before releasing the offer letter.

TA team has consistently delivered exceeding results in alignment with business goals.

TA structure and our automation-led evaluation process have been designed to provide scalability consistently.

Enhanced Candidate Experience
Impact on Offer to Joiner Ratio

Initiatives on Improving Candidate Experience



Yearly Plan & Actual Hires
Consistent Influence on Growth



Delivering Excellence Consistently



We are an equal employment opportunity provider and as part of our Equal Opportunity Policy, we provide equal opportunities at all levels of employment without discrimination on grounds of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, language, age, sexual orientation, religion, marital status, socio-economic status or special ability.

During the fiscal year, we hired 1,388 people out of which 345 were women. The geo-wise and employment type split of recruitment is as follows:



Our diversity ratio for the year currently stands at 24.5%. We aspire to raise this percentage to 26% in FY22. We have undertaken various measures to increase the diversity such as:

• Hiring: Each BU is working on the D&I Target assigned through hiring drives, hackathons, and usual lateral hiring process. Each BU has given dedicated target to work on increasing the diversity ratio, which is reviewed every quarter and dashboard is published to the Executive Board.

• Referral Policy: We encourage referrer by paying 5% extra for each women joiner referred by the team.

• Awareness Session: Constant awareness sessions are done to encourage leaders and managers to hire more women and diverse workforce

• Retention: Connect with all resignation cases at BU Level to see what best can be done to retain the talent and look at avenues for connecting with women Alumni to attract women to join back whenever the right opportunity comes in.

• We have increased our focus to hire disabled personnel for various roles in partnership with vendors.

908

Happiest Mind

423

Partners

57

Interns