Articles

Delivering technology for health sciences can be challenging. This industry is rife with cost, regulation, and privacy concerns, making digital transformation efforts in that market unfathomably tricky. It requires expertise that only arises from deliberate practice over many years and projects. This is a segment where Cognizant is finding significant success.

Cognizant might be the biggest company you’ve never heard of. Cognizant is a professional services company – that employs a workforce of over 350,000 associates. Cognizant makes its money, and furthers its reputation, helping other organizations achieve their digital transformation goals. It has a substantial presence in health sciences, communications, financial services, and automotive, to touch on just a few of its market segments.

Cognizant is successful at what it does. The company has grown from its founding nearly thirty years ago to number 185 on the latest Fortune 500 list. In addition, cognizant's most recent earnings reported top-line revenue of $4.8B; its overall top-line growth was nearly flat, but its health sciences revenue was up 3.5% year-on-year (only its Communications, Media & Technology group did better). This shows strong demand for what Cognizant is delivering.

alling all innovators, culture creators, tastemakers and game changers — the world is in the midst of a fundamental change in how work is done. Thanks to meaningful advancements in technology and the pressures of a global health pandemic, businesses everywhere are living through the newest evolution of work: remote work at scale or, as we’ve termed it, “Remotopia.”

However, many business leaders are struggling to come to terms with the shift to remote work, from adopting the flexibility required to meet employee expectations, to managing rampant attrition. Unfortunately, if the past 18 months has revealed anything, it’s that the employee/employer relationship has long been broken.

Healing that relationship is no longer optional. When the daily grind was put on hold for many office workers last year, people had the time, space and perspective to evaluate how their professional choices contributed — or didn’t — to their own value systems. People started to see how their lives fit around work instead of the other way around. Today, the power dynamic has shifted, especially as employees and job candidates now have unprecedented access to:

• Information about work (i.e., commensurate compensation, competitors, environments, practices, bargaining rights, ownership models, distribution of profit and wealth, and the impact of investment decisions)
   
• Alternatives to work (downshifting careers, entrepreneurship, self-employment, much-needed vocations)

Organizations that recognize Remotopia as an essential place for the future of work — and do what’s needed to become future-fit — will thrive. Those that don’t will continue to struggle to attract and keep top talent.

When COVID-19 forced the global workforce into working remotely, the first question most of us asked was how can we possibly innovate? That question was quickly followed by how much can we innovate right now?

More than a year and a half into the global pandemic, technology innovation has unleashed a new normal in which everything previously stuck in analog has downshifted to a digital autobahn. Remote high-speed interactions at school, at work and in all elements of society accelerated, and for better or worse, there’s no turning back.

With software engineering and collaborative technology dominating like never before, turning even the most ardent Luddites into digital savants, it’s high time we drop any notion of “new” and simply embrace our normal.

Optionality and redefining ‘normal’

As business leaders consider more opportunities to ignite change, it’s become critical to take a new look at corporate cultures and adopt a mindset of “optionality,” which places more power and control in the hands of employees, for both in-person and remote activities.

Consider the new questions raised by the collaboration platforms embraced early in the pandemic and still heavily used today:
 

• Is work best done in pajamas at the kitchen table?
• Do we put our “real” clothes on and venture back into the office?
• How will answers to both these questions impact our ability to recruit and retain our best talent?

The answers are not necessarily rooted in technology. The fact is, it doesn’t matter if you sit in Paris, France, or Paris, Texas — the best talent doesn’t have to move an inch to fulfill their roles if we remake our culture and provide employees with alternatives that empower them and improve their experience.