Cognizant makes performance management more effective and meaningful with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning

Cultivating a high-performance culture

Cognizant takes pride in the high-performance culture it has cultivated, one that fuels organizational productivity, efficiency, and innovation. At the heart of this ecosystem is the company’s robust performance management system, called GoPerform. The platform leverages data, technology, and talent-management techniques to empower Cognizant’s workforce to achieve their personal and professional goals, thus continuously improving both employee satisfaction and performance.

GoPerform includes essential components such as goal setting, regular performance reviews, and continuous manager feedback. But Cognizant wanted to take performance management to new heights by making it more intelligent, more meaningful, and even more effective. Already familiar with the power of AI and ML, Cognizant set out to enhance its solution by focusing on improving the value and effectiveness of manager feedback. This enhancement would ensure that all employees received feedback that was meaningful, easy to comprehend and actionable.

Cognizant explored a few cloud options to develop the solution. Many of the company’s key business processes are powered by Microsoft technology, and the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Service seemed a great fit for the enhanced performance-management solution. Moreover, the company was impressed by the flexibility and speed of the platform and, therefore, chose to deploy the AI-based performance-management enhancement using Azure Machine Learning Service.

Elevating excellence with a lightning-fast response rate for a million comments across a year

Cognizant collaborated with Microsoft to implement the solution. Using training data provided by the company’s Human Resources department, the team created a vector-based Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to check each manager comment for effectiveness. They also engineered the solution to enable real-time feedback on those comments at an impressive sub-second response rate.

Go Perform was a pioneering AI & ML project with a number of firsts for Cognizant. This also meant that there were new security controls and guidelines being put in place before the solution could go live in a production environment. The Cognizant team had to navigate past this, which was made possible due to comprehensive support from Microsoft. They were able to implement the solution across the enterprise with a start-to-deployment time period of 7 months.

Neal Ramasamy, Chief Information Officer, Cognizant, remarks, “Providing our associates with modern career-management tools and world-class people processes is a priority. The AI capabilities offered by Azure Machine Learning Services allow us to enhance our performance-management platform and ensure that the feedback provided by managers is effective and useful for team members.”

The application has added significant value in multiple ways:

Impact at scale: By nudging managers to provide meaningful and effective feedback, and identifying gaps in their feedback, the solution instantly improves the quality of and impact of feedback.

Improved performance-management effectiveness: By documenting and classifying all feedback, the solution ensures relevant stakeholders are updated. This comprehensive approach improves the overall effectiveness of the feedback loop and ultimately improves performance. Notably, 81 percent of the feedback documented by managers were classified as "effective" when the solution was initially implemented. This rose to a whopping 96 percent in the most recent performance cycle.

A win-win for employees and managers: In a 2022 internal survey on performance processes conducted globally, associates expressed positive sentiments on the overall performance-management process, with the GoPerform platform explicitly quoted as a key enabler. In addition, the solution has achieved the remarkable feat of providing sub-second responses for about a million comments per year over the last 2 years, showcasing its efficiency and responsiveness.

Taking feedback to the next level

Cognizant has incorporated the use of Generative AI, or Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities into a Live Support Bot as part of Go Perform This has helped associates get speedy responses to their support queries. Cognizant plans to maximize the potential of the solution even further by extending the use of Generative AI to help managers form and refine their feedback, ensuring better associate comprehension and improved results. By integrating more innovative capabilities such as these, Cognizant hopes to continue to improve the value of the performance management process for managers and their teams. 

Rama Siva, Global Head – Careers and Culture, Cognizant, says, “One of Cognizant’s goals is to become an employer of choice in our industry. We set out to create a scalable, effective solution for improving the quality of feedback and have been pleased with the results of this AI-led solution. Through real-time nudges to managers, we enable our people to get more meaningful performance insights to help them advance their careers. At the same time, we are educating our managers on the leadership behaviors we expect. It’s a win-win”