Such issues can be resolved by early and continued involvement. “We’ve seen that sometimes enterprises tend to fully outsource GCC setup and forget about it,” explains Ankur. “But this is an important investment for your business. As an enterprise, you have to invest your time to build in the right culture and engineering practices, and hire the right leaders. Don’t outsource, co-create - and find partners like Thoughtworks who can design and develop along with you.”  

Talent scarcity and strategic hiring: GCCs face a tight market for talent, especially when it comes to sought-after areas like AI and cybersecurity. In a recent poll by Manpower Group, 80% of employers in India reported difficulty finding the talent they need. The challenge is particularly acute when it comes to IT and data skills.  

Building a high-performing team for the long-term    

Because of the competitive and fast-moving nature of India’s labor market, with good talent, attrition is always a risk. Dropouts –people disappearing during the recruitment process, or accepting multiple offers and not showing up when they get the job – are also not uncommon, but can be minimized with active management.  

In its work on GCCs, Thoughtworks has tackled the dropout issue with ‘Coffee Connects,’ a simple, yet effective, initiative where prospective hires are invited in regularly for coffee and conversations with the team right up until the time they join. “When we started, we had almost 12-13% dropout rates, but now we’re somewhere around 4-5%,” Vishal says. “That’s a significant drop.” 

After candidates come on board and the GCC gains momentum, a roadmap has to be developed to engage talent and deliver value on a sustained basis, or any progress is likely to prove temporary.  

“If you open a GCC doing business process outsourcing or managed services, then later want to do more product development and expect the same people to just continue doing the job, you’ll run into problems because that’s not what they were hired for,” says Nilesh.  

“We focus on helping clients think about not just the immediate term, but the long-term vision - how they see the GCC’s role in the global business,” he adds. “You have to create that path in a structured way – defining what type of roles you need, what type of reporting you should have, culture, the level of autonomy you want to give, the product portfolio and so on.” 

Clarity on these matters contributes to talent “stickiness” as it helps define the GCC’s mission and purpose, which Vishal defines as “the most important thing for any employee of an organization.”  

“Purpose is also how GCCs feel connected to their mothership or headquarters, otherwise you have two different companies with the same name – and at many GCCs, that results in friction,” Nilesh notes. “It’s very important to get the right leaders in place because ultimately, they are the ones who will help shape the culture in the formative years.”   

Vision and purpose can be communicated via programs that give developers visibility over how their work contributes to the company as a whole, like innovation days, or storytelling sessions. The main thing is that such initiatives “aren’t just one-way communication, but actively seek ideas from people,” says Nilesh.  

Another critical aspect of retaining committed talent is providing clear pathways for development. 

“While salaries matter, we all know over a period of time that’s not the main factor,” says Ankur. “If people who have been in a GCC for several years don't see growth - not just in the size of the team they’re managing, but the impact that they’re making, the kind of complexity they're handling, how global their role is – they won’t be inclined to stay.” 

These growth opportunities can be signaled and driven through: 

• Structured training programs, in aspects of management and/or to ‘upskill’ talent in emerging technologies like AI.

• Rotation programs between the GCC and headquarters.

• Temporary secondments to other roles. 

• Succession planning exercises. 

Whatever programs the organization adopts, the underlying principle is “building a culture that’s challenging people to continuously learn - which in the context of AI is becoming even more important,” Ankur explains. 

Defining the talent trajectory at REA Cyber City  

REA Cyber City fosters a shared culture with teams in the Australian headquarters, while clear runways for talent have been cultivated through a series of purposeful actions, including: 

• Making key team members in Australia an integral part of Cyber City's core leadership team, serving as dedicated champions for its continued success.

• Regular catch-ups of engineering leadership stakeholders across locations to create and maintain transparency over active projects. 

• Publishing a monthly newsletter to detail activities across Cyber City, fostering greater connection and transparency throughout the organization.

• The creation of a dedicated budget for people to travel between Australia and India, with a priority on product and tech team members so they can collaborate, share knowledge and build trust on the ground. This budget includes travel from India to Australia, giving GCC team members opportunities to experience the home office and gain insights into local property market dynamics.

• Emphasizing office experience, which along with a hybrid working policy has created common bonds and helped engage local talent. "We've spent a lot of time getting the balance right between Cyber City as an extension of REA, but also as its own entity," says Mike Breeze, Global Delivery Partnership Lead at REA. "If you walk into the office there, you could be in the REA office in Melbourne, Adelaide or Sydney. You can see all of our values reflected. It looks very much like a part of REA, but it's also got its own personality. There's a perpetual game of cricket, which just never seems to stop, and we love that."

   

• Assigning autonomy. “We’ve been purposeful from the outset on having teams that are empowered to own their work,” Mike says. “We want them to be making decisions on tech and eventually on the product side, because that empowerment drives morale and engagement immediately.”

Despite the GCC being relatively new, these approaches are already producing results - notably in terms of gender balance, with the team now over 40% female. “We’re really proud of that,” Mike says. “Because we were starting from scratch, we had a great opportunity to push hard towards 50-50, and it’s reached a point now where it's kind of driving itself, because you walk into the office and you see that mix immediately.” 

GCC leadership  

Adopting a long-term mentality towards GCC talent is becoming even more essential because that talent is increasingly global in terms of presence and impact. 

According to Nasscom, some 5,000 senior leaders at GCCs already have a seat at the global leadership table of their organizations, and that’s expected to rise to 30,000 in the next five years.

Reputed management schools like the Indian School of Business have launched dedicated programs to develop global GCC leadership, and many GCCs run internal versions of the same, but despite this, much remains to be done. “GCCs need to be more thoughtful about how they will develop these future leaders, where they will come from, and what the skills needed will be,” says Nilesh. 

These gaps are why Nilesh sees chief talent officers playing a defining role in the success of GCCs over the next decade. “They’ll have to lead by example in terms of spotting trends, making sure that the workforce has all the necessary support and infrastructure to upskill,” he explains. “That’s still missing in most GCCs.” 

“As long as there is mastery, autonomy and purpose for your GCC, and as long as your talent and capability stay and adapt, you will continue to get the advantage,” says Ankur. “AI makes it even more imperative for enterprises to really look at their GCC through these lenses, because it will change a lot in terms of what talent can do for the enterprise.” 

Future-proofing GCCs in the AI age 

As with so many other aspects of the technology industry, AI will be a defining force for GCCs over the next decade and beyond – mainly, Thoughtworks experts believe, for the better. Among the most promising use cases are: 

• Enhancing talent acquisition: “At one GCC we helped, the offer rejection ratio was around 80% - meaning for every 100 people they offered a job, 80 would not actually show up,” Nilesh explains. “That’s a huge waste of time and money. AI is now changing that game, reducing costs by screening people, finding the best fit for your needs, and supporting interviews. There are AI tools that can help with onboarding, knowledge management when a person joins, and so on.” 

• Accelerating ‘time to value: “AI will reduce boundaries in terms of the ability to learn and understand things – and that means it will help GCCs ramp up faster to start assisting specific domains or markets,” Vishal points out. “It could get much easier to add value, at a much faster pace.”

• Measuring, and improving, GCC performance: According to Nilesh, there are often disconnects between the GCC and parent enterprise on what value is being delivered, or how much. “A person who heads a GCC might think it’s operating at a high level of maturity, whereas someone sitting in headquarters might expect more to be done in terms of speed or cost optimization,” he says. “But neither has an objective way to prove whether the GCC is operating optimally. This is the challenge we’re trying to solve: creating an objective means of understanding the maturity of capabilities, AI skills, the way talent is hired and deliveries are done; how you can elevate the performance of the GCC to become a partner.” 

Fully leveraging AI, however, is likely to require more in the way of awareness and ambition. Ankur still sees a lack of focus on what Thoughtworks calls AI-first software delivery –using AI not just to optimize the time of the developer, but across the entire engineering lifecycle, to support everything from design, testing, and validation, to product management and user experience.