In an interaction with BW Businessworld, Manish Choudhary, SVP, Global Innovation & MD India Operations, Pitney Bowes Inc. talks about the company's hiring intentions and the strategy behind the company ranked as India's top companies to work for

Pitney Bowes has been one of India’s Top companies to work for seven times in a row. What has been the strategy?

Our culture of doing the ‘right thing the right way’ is a key differentiator rooted in decades-long commitment to our clients, stakeholders and communities. Pitney Bowes is a global technology company powering billions of transactions in the physical and digital world of commerce. We began operations almost a century ago as leaders in the physical world of mailing and evolved to become innovators that combine the best of physical and digital solutions to redefine global commerce.

As a 100 year-old start-up, innovation and reinvention are a part of our DNA and what’s kept us around all these years. Our secret is simple, we invest in our people. At Pitney Bowes, we have a diverse workforce ranging from mechanical engineers to data scientists to quality assurance experts to support functions, and our job is to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to do truly challenging and rewarding work. By providing our people with the best learning and development opportunities, we are able to create a highly engaged, driven and motivated workforce which has been named one of India’s Best Employers seven times.

How do you see India as a marketplace and what are you hiring intentions?

We are always looking for bright talented people to join us and continue to hire people working on new technologies who are driven to make a difference in the way businesses conduct commerce. In order to keep pace with changing technological trends and support the burgeoning Indian start-up ecosystem, we launched the Pitney Bowes Accelerator Program in 2014 and have since then mentored 18 start-ups working in areas of customer information management, mobile, data analytics, location-based services, ecommerce management and machine learning.

We host regular hackathons and connect with larger developer communities on open Cloud-based platforms. Earlier this year, we held Code Inspire 2.0, a women-only hackathon where more than 2,000 women participated from across India. We are currently hosting the Global SMB Hackathon, targeted at developers around the world to build applications and solutions for potentially more than one million Pitney Bowes clients.

The company has been successful in retaining the best talent. How do you manage to retain the best talent in the organisation?

People are bound to stay if you provide people with great work, an engaging environment and ample opportunities for career progression and growth. Globally we have 14,000+ diverse employees that take great pride in helping clients succeed in the physical and digital worlds of commerce. There’s no one thing that keeps people engaged, it’s about making sure that people’s heart and mind are in the right place and the company is as invested in them as they expect their people to be.

Can you share some insights into any employee appreciation program practised in the company?

We value innovation and reinvention and our appreciation programs nurture this culture. We have Hackathons and Innovation Awards that recognise teams to create business relevant hacks annually. At the end of every year, the best innovative team is recognized through the Innovation of the Year Award.

Employees are inspired to hone and enrich their skills. Under the Technical Ladder Program, a specialized career path enables employees to accelerate their careers while leading some of the most critical projects in the organization. We emphasize our client-focused culture with Excellence Awards that recognize people who exemplify our ethos of Client. Team. Win. Innovate.

We have a number of programs such as Appreciation Week and Pay-it-Forward that encourage employees to recognize colleagues from different teams and foster cross-business collaboration.

Do you undertake skill development for your employees?

Skill enhancement is the most important factor to stay in a job and is therefore the best bet for companies to retain top talent. Pitney Bowes has a number of programs in place to help employees learn and grow.

Our Global Early in Career program is an 18-month mentoring program to help accelerate development of our young talent through a series of structured networking sessions. We have a number of other Learning & Development and Mentoring programs for employees and focussed programs such as Aspire to Inspire, targeted for potential women leaders.

We also focus immensely on peer-learning programs to tap into the depth of knowledge possessed by our subject matter experts, enabling them to gradually become effective mentors to younger talent.Pitney Bowes regularly hosts Developer Meets in association with leading industry bodies that bring together tech leaders to speak on current hot topics such as Machine Learning, AI, Big Data among others.