Mindtree addresses L&T’s end-to-end workforce processes to drive employee engagement

• Award Recipient

  Larsen & Toubro in partnership with Mindtree

• Accolade

  

  Finalist

• Category

  

  People and Process Change

• What put this entry on the shortlist

  The implementation of Mindtree’s Smart Worker solution translated into significant savings via a significant reduction in induction time; the four-to-seven-day average induction time decreased to between six hours and two days on average, depending on the project. Worker availability improved by 25%, redundant activities were cut in half, and retention increased by 50%.

The Situation: Human behavior and mindset are the most difficult things to change in any strategic transformation. When business leaders faced one of the most challenging and disruptive environments for managing and monitoring employees in recent history, making dramatic changes to processes and approaches was a daunting task. Engineering and construction giant Larsen & Toubro (L&T) needed a better way to onboard and monitor its workforce across many worksites and projects, but it had to upend its legacy and manual processes to do so. L&T, in partnership with Mindtree, embarked on shifting its entire workforce engagement for greater efficiency and safety.

The holistic approach to using the Smart Worker platform while addressing the dramatic shifts that L&T required landed this initiative as a finalist in the People and Process Change OneOffice™ Awards.

L&T, Mindtree’s majority owner, is a large engineering firm with thousands of workforce members in the field daily. It sought a more cohesive, data-driven approach for hiring, managing, monitoring, and upskilling its workforce and, most importantly, ensuring on-the-job safety and well-being. L&T’s key Engineering Procurement Construction (EPC) projects vary by sector, segment, and scale, but all its projects have a large workforce on-site, up to 25,000 at times during peak construction phases. With workers spread across shifts and locations, it had been a challenge to monitor attendance, availability, safety, and Safe to Start Work permits. The varying degrees of skill level and manual processes involved made managing staff on worksites a repetitive and manual task. Plus, inherent risks in the type of work—employees working at great heights, for example—made it imperative for management to know more about workers in the field at any given time. L&T sought to have real-time information about its workers at the click of a button to improve efficiency, training, and worker safety.

The solution: Together with L&T, Mindtree developed the “Smart Worker” platform using data to streamline processes associated with all workforce touchpoints

The Smart Worker solution set out to streamline all workforce processes and SOPs—from onboarding to attendance, availability, productivity, skills, and training—and eliminate manual and paper-based recordkeeping. From the point of hire, Smart Worker digitally documents a full educational and employment history for each workforce and then builds upon that profile for greater workforce customization. Several HR-oriented functions show critical data such as onboarding time, attendance information, and skills dashboards have been enabled to show a snapshot of the workforce across projects and work sites. Features include facial recognition and QR scans for attendance records, continuous feedback, and targeting reductions in redundancy when the same worker is employed across multiple sites. The training module digitalizes and brings the transparency on training carried across projects to the number of training hours per worker. The availability and productivity measurement function relies on RFID tags to show the geographic availability of the workforce to enable re-allocations of the workforce for better productivity and safety compliance adherence.

The Results: Gaining visibility into critical workforce information across sites for all projects saves time and money, and, most importantly, it can save lives

The implementation of Mindtree’s Smart Worker solution translated into significant savings via a significant reduction in induction time; the four-to-seven-day average induction time decreased to between six hours and two days on average, depending on the project. Worker availability improved by 25%, redundant activities were cut in half, and retention increased by 50%.

The culture of digital transformation within L&T has been the greatest fruit of its labor; people are embracing change and the digitalization of processes. Part of the success we see in the training retention data is due to immersive VR-based training, where workers feel that their jobs are cutting-edge and less mundane than traditional EPC training practices. The rich data the platform provides has also provided analytics to determine trends and patterns and helped the organization during challenging times brought about by the pandemic, where lockdowns shifted people to dispersed, home-based locations. The Smart Worker solution enabled management to reach workers quickly and easily based on proximity to project sites when on-site work resumed.

Since the solution was implemented, more than 1.5 million workers have been registered across multiple projects, with approximately 21,000 active users daily. The solution has proven versatile and stable at scale. L&T is reaping the benefits of improved workforce availability, faster onboarding of workers, focused training interventions, and complete real-time visibility and transparency. This real-time monitoring is even beginning to use AI-based models for risk assessment to predict and respond to incidents. The number of L&T’s incident-free sites has increased. The workforce feels safer knowing that monitoring and precautions are in place to ensure safety.

L&T points out that such a holistic undertaking is not without its challenges, such as gaining the buy-in of stakeholders across all levels to ensure complete adoption of the solution for a successful implementation. Transparency was particularly important as expectations varied wildly across projects and sites. Making the platform easy to use was critical for adoption and to overcome the greatest hurdle most people find in any workplace: change.

The Bottom Line: Change is hard. A dramatic shift in an approach to employee experience must be holistic, including skilling and safety, to ensure successful adoption. But most importantly, it must put the worker at the heart of the design

Smart Worker tracks every aspect of workforce engagement, from attendance to performance and safety. While this overhaul was not without its challenges, a critical element of its success was that its design philosophy empathized with the construction site worker and their daily activities at the site, striving for a simple and easy-to-use solution that benefits the whole organization from end to end.