IT Life Cycle
Talent, be it in-house or with your sourcing partners, has become complex in 2023. Global services, especially, are always on the lookout for talent sources that are highly engaged and stable, ensuring high-quality work and low attrition. Impact Sourcing, or hiring skilled and motivated talent from disadvantaged groups around the world, is proving to be a solution – helping forward-thinking organizations tap into new talent pools, fill roles, create pipelines, and realize substantial business benefits.
Everest Group has designed a panel for Athena Alliance leaders and decision-makers. CXOs and several founders will share real-world lessons on creating an inclusive workforce focusing on marginalized communities and the business case to persuade the skeptics. All have a particular focus on women – as UN Women calls it – Gender Responsive Procurement. You will want to engage all these companies because of how they are marrying quality global services and sustainability, the ultimate of “doing good while doing well.”
Catch Rita Soni, Principal Analyst for Impact Sourcing and Sustainability at Everest Group, as she joins the conversation at this event.
Seeing impact sourcing in action at Vindhya e-Infomedia validated to Everest Group that this growing business practice is more than a feel-good story but a win-win for individuals, companies, and communities. Hearing about the positive benefits firsthand from people with disabilities employed at the Bengaluru center left a lasting impression on the analysts who share their perspectives in this blog.
The Everest Group team was excited to see impact sourcing in practice, some for the first time, at Vindhya e-Infomedia, but they also had questions about whether impact sourcing would live up to its promise.
The visit to the Bengaluru center exceeded their expectations and reinforced that impact sourcing is a business imperative in today’s ESG-focused times. Highlights of the trip were meeting Vindhya e-Infomedia Founder and Managing Director Pavithra Y. Sundareshan and hearing from its employees.
Impact sourcing specialist Vindhya e-Infomedia was founded in 2006 with a vision of uniting business with impact. It has centers in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Nagpur, Mysore, and Krishnagiri (Tamil Nadu) and plans to expand across India and abroad.
Employing people with disabilities as its main workforce, the company provides data entry, claims processing, customer onboarding, payroll, and data management processes to such clients as Airtel, IBM, and SAP AG. With its team of more than 2,400 employees based in cities, Vindhya defies the stereotype that only small companies in India operate Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) centers in rural areas.
Impact sourcing specialists like Vindhya e-Infomedia intentionally hire people from marginalized communities and train them to deliver IT and BPO services. These providers offer economic opportunities to individuals who face difficulties in finding employment, such as people with disabilities, those from marginalized communities or without formal educational degrees, and single parents.
Hiring people from these target groups often requires organizations to enhance their physical and digital infrastructures and/or modify policies to create a conducive work environment. However, the idea is not to create separate work areas for impact hires but rather to bring inclusivity to everything at the workplace – a belief that runs at the very core of Vindhya’s operating system.
Impact sourcing has the power to change the trajectories of individuals’ lives, as the team learned from hearing about the backgrounds, job profiles, and aspirations of employees at the Bengaluru center. Their resilience, persistence, and tremendous willpower to achieve was uplifting to the analysts who focus their work on impact sourcing.
The team was truly inspired! Here are the stories of four individuals who demonstrated the ways impact sourcing is benefitting individuals, families, and communities:
Vidya Patil
“The job at Vindhya gave me financial freedom and self-reliance. It has transitioned me from being a dependent to a caretaker and a breadwinner for my family. With this job, I could support my family as well as support my niece’s higher education. Vindhya provided immense financial and emotional support to me during my brother’s medical emergency. Vindhya is not just a workplace but a family itself, and I will always be utterly grateful to Vindhya.”
Digbijoy Adak
“I had completed my 10th grade education and knew how to use computers. However, since I was not highly educated, I was not able to find a good respectable job. I used to work with a small orchestra group for my livelihood. During that time, I came to know about Vindhya. A friend of mine was working here and informed me about it. I am very happy now. I have found a job in Vindhya and have become a self-sufficient and independent person.”
What he did not say directly but implied, is that his disability has been an unjust cause of discrimination in the past. At Vindhya, one’s disability status is not a barrier to a good job.
N Yashoda
Madhabi Sardar
The real significance of this business practice can be seen in the countless lives touched by the dignity of a good job, as these inspiring and heart-warming stories show.
Like any journey, even this one has obstacles. Impact sourcing often requires an extensive process to access the right talent. Additionally, investments in skilling and upskilling resources pose a challenge in managing high training costs.
The lack of benchmarks to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) or evaluate success makes it difficult to prepare appropriate success stories and business cases for impact sourcing. However, impact sourcing specialists are implementing robust practices to mitigate these challenges, and meaningful collaboration among all involved stakeholders is needed.
The visit was an eye-opening, humbling experience for the team who saw that the benefits of impact sourcing go beyond providing a paycheck but also give individuals a sense of community and belonging.
Pavitra’s parting words that impact sourcing is about ‘shared prosperity’ resounded with the analysts. Building partnerships to create an impact that benefits all involved stakeholders is needed to move the practice forward.
The visit reinforced Everest Group’s commitment to advancing impact sourcing globally. As a signatory of the Clinton Global Initiative’s “Commitment to Action,” the firm has pledged to bring in half a million impact sourcing full-time equivalents (FTEs) into the ecosystem by the end of 2025 and has committed its research and expertise to help enterprises frame their impact sourcing strategies.
For more insights on measuring and using data for better business outcomes, register for the virtual roundtable, Measuring the Impact of Impact Sourcing. To discuss impact sourcing, reach out to [email protected], [email protected], or [email protected].
By working together, employers, training institutions, the government, and other stakeholders can create a sustainable and inclusive impact-sourcing movement in India that empowers the rural population and drives overall social transformation.
Everest Group, in partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), has pledged to increase the impact sourcing workforce across the globe. Through our Commitment to Action proposal, the firm provides a platform for impact sourcing stakeholders to connect and access our research on the global impact sourcing market.
View the event on LinkedIn, which was delivered live on Thursday, March 16, 2023.
Impact sourcing is an ethical outsourcing practice that intentionally focuses on maximizing societal and business outcomes ♻️. Over the years, we’ve witnessed growth in impact sourcing globally, specifically in customer experience management (CXM) by both traditional providers and impact sourcing specialists👥.
Impact sourcing delivers many benefits for workers, the communities around them, and businesses employing them; however, there are also barriers.
📢Watch this LinkedIn Live recording as our analysts and Global Mentorship Initiative CEO, Jon Browning, break down the benefits impact sourcing workers experience and the challenges businesses face when recruiting them.
Any organization interested in learning more about sustainability, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives, and impact sourcing and is looking to get started with an initiative of their own should attend💻.
What questions does the event address?
✅ What are the key trends and drivers leading to impact sourcing demand?
✅ What are the key benefits of impact sourcing for providers and buyers of outsourcing services?
✅ What are some significant impact sourcing initiatives by traditional service providers and impact sourcing specialists?
✅ What are the recommendations for implementing impact sourcing and challenges faced by buyers and service providers?
✅ What is the future outlook of impact sourcing?
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