Mumbai, July 22: As India’s Global Capability Centers continue their evolution from operational support hubs to strategic business partners, Great Place To Work India unveiled its latest insights report, “The Zero Drag Experience: Navigating Why Culture Matters in the Next Era of Global Capability Centres Growth”. The report was launched at The Great GCC Culture Summit 2026, held on July 9, 2026, at Taj MG Road, Bengaluru, where leading GCC executives, CHROs, business leaders, and transformation experts came together to explore how culture can serve as a catalyst for business growth and organizational resilience.
The report examines the role of workplace culture in enabling organizations to reduce friction, strengthen leadership, improve employee engagement, and build agile, high-performing workplaces capable of navigating constant change. The findings complement the Summit’s central theme of helping GCCs build organizations where trust, belonging, and leadership drive long-term business success. Summit discussions further reinforced that as GCCs evolve into innovation-led strategic partners, inclusive leadership, stronger manager capability, and trust-based cultures are emerging as critical drivers of sustained business growth and resilience.
The report further identifies three underlying forces shaping the next phase of GCC growth: AI adoption and upskilling, innovation, and talent. While these priorities may differ, the research finds that they are united by one common requirement: speed. Despite significant investments, workforce readiness gaps, bureaucracy, and talent retention challenges continue to slow progress. The report describes this as “organizational drag”, the friction that slows execution, delays innovation, and constrains organizational growth. The report shows that 41% organisations today remain in the frictional stage.
The recent findings highlight where lower-performing GCCs fall behind their peers, revealing that bottom-quartile organizations score 22% lower on workplace wellbeing, 16% lower on employee empowerment, 15% lower on leadership accessibility, and 11% lower on career growth. These findings underscore that the biggest gaps in talent retention are driven by the everyday employee experience, shaping whether employees feel supported, valued, and confident about their future within the organization. In addition, the study further finds that everyday employee experience drives organizational velocity and talent retention. As GCCs compete for AI-ready talent, employee experience is becoming as critical as talent attraction.
The latest insights highlight what Great Place To Work calls the “Great Place To Work Effect”, which is the relationship between leadership behaviours, employee experience, workplace culture, and business performance. According to the report, high-trust leaders shape employee experiences that strengthen collaboration, innovation, agility, belonging, and well-being, ultimately influencing outcomes ranging from productivity and customer satisfaction to retention and market resilience. The findings reinforce that culture is increasingly operating as a business enabler rather than a people initiative alone.
Besides unveiling the report, The Great GCC Culture Summit 2026 explored how GCC leaders are adapting to growing responsibilities in innovation, digital transformation, and enterprise leadership, and why culture is becoming critical to sustaining organizational performance. Leaders at the summit also emphasized that transparent career growth, employee well-being, and manager capability are becoming key differentiators in attracting and retaining top talent, while balancing AI-enabled decision-making with human judgment will be critical to building future-ready organizations.
Speaking on the occasion, Akshat Shah, MD, Great Place To Work India, said:
“If there is one word that defines the GCC story in India today, it is acceleration. However, while technology continues to advance at an unprecedented pace, people systems often struggle to keep up. Our study has found that only 13% of GCCs are in accelerated innovation stage. What slows down the pace of innovation is a lack of psychological safety, approval dependency, silos and low ownership. Therefore, the organizations that will define the next decade of the GCC story, will be the ones where trust accelerates performance, resulting in frictionless workplaces.”
The report also points to a growing readiness challenge as organizations accelerate AI adoption. It notes that 30% of CHROs anticipate significant AI-driven role changes, while AI and digital adoption have emerged as the top future workforce priority. At the same time, the research finds that 1 in 4 employees do not experience psychological safety at the workplace, and mid-level managers emerge as the least supported cohort for upskilling. These findings indicate that workforce readiness will become a critical determinant of how successfully GCCs navigate future transformation.
An interactive Culture Lab during the Great GCC Culture Summit enabled participants to exchange practical approaches for strengthening organizational trust and resilience by means of shared ownership, while a panel discussion on the evolving GCC leader created real-time learning value for the participants as they understood that business performance gets fuelled when leaders practice empathy, listening, and managerial enablement. Another insightful session explored GCC talent retention strategies. It highlighted open communication, accessible leadership, clarity of career growth, opportunity to learn, and quality of work as important components of an engaging workplace culture.
While facilitating the Culture Lab, Sunil Bablani, Director, IT & GCC Vertical, Great Place To Work India, highlighted the leaders’ role in building culture:
“When organizations are 200 people strong, culture feels natural; however, in organizations larger than 1000 employees, culture building requires intentionality, and that’s where many organizations get tested. Recent research suggests that while GCCs perform strongly in empowerment and inclusion, agility and execution continue to be areas where many organizations struggle as they scale. This is where leaders play a critical role in reducing uncertainty through clear communication, active listening, and focus on managerial enablement. This year, the Great Place To Work Certified™ top-scoring GCCs boast of 86% positive sentiment on Inspiring, 83% on Speaking, and 87% on Caring. These are promising findings because our research proves that talent stays longer when employees feel supported, appreciated, and confident about their future in the organization.”
The report concludes that reducing organizational drag is ultimately a leadership imperative. It identifies three leadership actions that help accelerate organizational velocity, creating clarity during periods of uncertainty, enabling action by encouraging participation and experimentation, and building commitment through meaningful workplace experiences. According to the findings, organizations that strengthen these leadership practices are better positioned to improve readiness, innovation, and long-term talent retention.
The Summit also marked the announcement of the upcoming Best GCC Workplaces recognition, a new initiative by Great Place To Work India to celebrate Global Capability Centers building high-trust, high-performance workplace cultures.
The Great GCC Culture Summit 2026 reaffirmed Great Place To Work India’s commitment to advancing workplace excellence by bringing together leaders to share practical insights, research-backed frameworks, and proven approaches for building high-trust, high-performance organizations.