GCCs have effectively graduated from their roots as pure cost centers. Today, they are regarded as the strategic engines of innovation, digital transformation, and core product development for their parent organizations. While multiple global companies are increasing their investments in these hubs, several GCCs are currently going through phases of hyper-growth. Which means that they need to expand their teams as quickly as possible, flying from hundreds to thousands of employees within months.
This rise is a reflection of the amount of value GCC staff augmentation brings to the table, but scaling teams is not without its own unique challenges. Some are more complex than others. Below are five of the most common and serious issues that GCCs face as they look to successfully scale their teams.
1. The Talent Scramble: Quality vs. Velocity
The lack of restraint, with a GCC needing to hire hundreds of resources every quarter, leads to dangerously prioritizing volume over quality hiring.
Do you know – GCCs are hiring at a significantly faster pace than traditional IT services firms, growing workforces by 18–27% annually, compared with just 4–6% growth in traditional IT services, according to staffing data cited in The Times of India. This rapid scale-up highlights the intense competition for tech talent in GCC environments.
Software development nature: GCCs work in fiercely competitive local markets, where they directly compete with both other GCCs and booming local startups for the same limited pool of niche talent. This can result in a velocity-driven recruitment of:
Poor Quality Hires: Hiring managers under pressure to meet numbers might relax the skill profiles, leading to lower productivity and integration issues in the future.
Wage Inflation: Rapid competition for scarce talent leads to rising costs in compensation and makes the GCC a high-cost disruptor that ultimately undermines the GCC’s business case
Early Stage Bandwidth Suckers: Fast-moving candidates taken on quickly after offers in short order may not be sufficiently engaged with the mission, resulting in high amounts of churn (informally known as bad attrition) soon after (often just before) onboarding, thus neutralizing hiring effort.
Solution Focus: Don Metrics about Time-to-Hire to Time-to-Productivity. This consists of increasing the Employee Value Proposition (EVP), putting money into a strong employer brand to entice passive, high-quality candidates, and using predictive analytics to spot the talent most likely to perform and stick around.
2. Bridging the Skills Chasm at Scale
Once a GCC is large, the spectrum of technologies it can handle widens. It does this by transitioning from supporting IT 1.0 to driving end-to-end global products. This rapid evolution in the skills needed by the present and future workforce creates a huge skills gap.
The challenge here is two-fold:
Enhancing the Current Workforce: Veteran employees bright in the conventional roles must pivot to domains such as DevOps, cybersecurity, or data science. It has become a difficult task to scale the training infrastructure to train several hundred or thousands of people simultaneously, without affecting the core business.
Standardization and Consistency: The entry of new employees in different areas creates a logistical nightmare if one has to maintain some level of standard baseline of technical proficiency, process knowledge, and domain expertise. The GCC’s mission needs very specific, context-related information, so generic training programs never help.
Solution: Modular, customized L&D framework. Such shifts involve transition from classroom to mentorship outside the classroom and focus on certification programs for specialists and to create internal talent academies (e.g., create an “AI & Automation Academy”) to ensure a more streamlined pipeline of internal talent. The need of the hour for scalable learning & development is making use of digital learning platforms that provide tailored, adaptive paths based on what an employee does currently and where they are most likely to grow next.
3. The Infrastructure and Process Overload
Small GCC teams do well with light-weight governance and flexible, ad-hoc processes. But scaling teams adds layers of complexity – and without industrializing the processes, the operational bottlenecks can become a business-ending black hole.
Key issues include:
Fragmented Processes: Business units or product lines scale on their own and develop disparate workflows that lack standardization, leading to unnecessary friction in cross-functional collaboration and higher operational risk.
Technology Debt: If your HR, project management, or knowledge sharing systems are basic and manual, then they will begin to break when demand increases. Not having scalable, automated tools for your core operations can be a real productivity killer.
Loss of Operational Visibility: Leadership can no longer see the ground truth. Centralized real-time data on resource utilization, project health, and financial burn rate are almost non-existent, and slow decision-making to a crawl.
Solution Focus: Treat the operations as a part of the strategy. Get started early with Processing Industrialization, which entails the automation of HR and core finance functions, codifying project governance (e.g., portfolio management tools), and developing a single, central knowledge base to ensure that information is traveling seamlessly through expanding teams.
4. Maintaining Cultural Cohesion and Engagement
Culture is a tricky thing, and few things test it harder than fast, revolutionary growth at scale — and even fewer things do this while working in a hybrid work environment.
When scaling teams, GCCs risk:
The Outsider Challenge: Freshly on-boarded, newly hired employees who come from outside the University may sometimes have trouble garnering a sense of community towards the mission of the department or the identity of their local team. The absence of a strong local identity may lead such employees towards disengagement.
Hybrid Collaboration Friction: The pandemic made it clear that teams can’t be confined to a single floor, building, city, or even time zone, and maintaining unbroken lines of communication and a sense of connectedness became hard. Relying too much on virtual tools removes the accidental engagement of face-to-face interactions that create collaboration silos.
Strategic Identity Erosion: the larger the team, the harder it is for individuals to feel their contribution is more than just being back office / one in many — killing the motivation and innovation you set out to create.
Solution-focused: Culture to be designed and evaluated around scale. It means setting strong cultural anchors, heavy manager training to lead hybrid teams, and engagement initiatives specifically designed to transcend geographical and functional boundaries. This involves establishing expectations for communication and focusing on mental health and wellness programs to help people cope in a high-pressure, fast-changing environment.
5. The Strain on the Leadership Pipeline
While there are many challenges in scaling, perhaps the biggest of which is an absence of leaders. The need for this often exceeds the ability of the GCC to home-groom leaders, which results in two consequential traps:
Accidental Manager: Even high-performing individual contributors (ICs) can lack the skills to manage other people well, but if they have both great technical skills and poor people skills, they may find themselves thrust into management, leading to disastrous results for the team — and ultimately losing a great IC.
Constraints on Leadership Bandwidth: Established leaders get overloaded with direct reports, leading to burnout and limited time to think strategically and guide interesting and challenging expertise. This results in a slowdown of the entire scale-up effort as there are not enough leaders to drive the effort.
Solution Focus: Institution-side or accelerate the LDP (Leadership Development Program). Make this LDP centered on core management skills (feedback, coaching, delegation) and strategic alignment. Conduct a robust Succession Planning process, Early identification of high-potential employees, pairing them with senior leaders for structured mentored engagement, ensuring that a consistent, trained source of future management is available prior to the next wave of hiring.
Conclusion
Growing a GCC team is then an experiment with high payoff. This goes beyond capital and hiring plans; it is an evolution from tactical execution to organizational design.
And this is where Avekshaa Technologies comes in place. Applying deep domain expertise combined with proprietary frameworks, Avekshaa Technologies enables Global Capability Centers to industrialize their craft, drive higher workforce productivity, and create heavy lift, scalable architectures, so that fast team growth maps to sustained business impact and strategic value development for the parent corporation. Together, GCC staff augmentation can transform how a challenge to scaling gets solved, and instead, the founding stone for growth that helps leapfrog into market leadership when partnered with Avekshaa Technologies.
