The MindTree Experience

How does a company like MindTree create delight among its employees........?

Here are valuable tips from N. S. Parthasarathy ("Partha"), Executive Vice President and Co-founder at MindTree Consulting. He handles the Global delivery and Operations of all Enterprise Solutions projects for Global customers. He has been with the company from its inception in Aug 1999.

Excerpts from Mr. Parthasarathy's talk:

If you want to create a team which is working happily everyday, you should have a totally engaged team. Just an example, Observe a school bus and an IT company's bus, the children are jumping and having a lot of fun, where as the IT employees sit morosely just staring at nothing in particular. There's a lot of scope to make them happy. As managers, if we can contribute to making every employee get up in the morning and feel good to go to work half the work is done.

When we first started the company we didn't want to call our HR as HR, they were called "People Function (PF) team", similarly we didn't want to call our employees - "Employee" as the moment you refer to them as employee, there is a relationship of "Employee & Employer" it gives an impression of "Worker and the Management", so we called them as "MindTree Mind". We started off in a different and unique manner.

If you look at building engagement with people holistically, it should flow from the Mission, Vision, Values and DNA of the company. Also systems, processes and behaviour should be aligned.

It's a common belief that Employee delight is important for Employee retention, but I think retention is a side benefit. Creating Employee delight is to encourage certain behaviour. At the same time, you can't pay higher salary than anyone else, just to retain people, there are other methods to create the engagement.  We focused on 4 vital things at MindTree; first is communication, secondly everything one does at the workplace, Learning & development and lastly Inclusion & Empowerment.

We decided that our PF Team should be much closer to the business rather than the Corporate functions. Hence the PF Team is split into two parts, one reports into the corporate team and the larger part sits with the business team.

Even when we were a VC funded company, we had a simple policy which said if we treat everyone as a MindTree family, then they needed to know everything. The policy adopted was what we call the 95:95:95 rule - , 95 percent of the people should have 95 percent of the information 95 percent of the time. We share all the results with everyone. At the end of the year the chairman of the company shares the successes and failures with everyone in the company.

We have a magazine called the ‘Circle of Life'; this is for the family of MindTree minds. There is an interesting story about why we started this magazine. One day a young MindTree mind came to us and said, I want to quit as I'm getting married, When I asked him the reason, he said that his future Father in law asked him, ‘Why are you working for MindTree and not for an IBM or an Accenture'. In India the extended family has a huge influence on you, and so we wanted to tell the extended family of the MindTree minds everything that happened in the company. We started a magazine for the family, where a MindTree mind can register anyone from his or her family, uncles or aunts, future father in law or a cousin and the magazine goes to them once in a quarter. It tells them what the MindTree mind does in the company and how it helps our customers, it's a simple magazine. We thought the magazine was a great idea, until a young MindTree mind from Kerala came and said, ‘What makes you think my mother reads English?'. Well since then the magazine became multi lingual. Now that is an example of Inclusion and Empowerment.

As far as learning and development are concerned, we found tremendous benefit from introducing the concept of the knowledge community. In the IT industry, learning is a continuous process, but in the IT services industry especially in maintenance projects the learning gradually tapers off. After sometime, you've seen the code day in and day out. But for an IT professional the need to learn is very high, how do you encourage and enable learning outside the project. We decided to have many communities; a community is where like minded people get together to share and learn; they decide what to learn and also the frequency. It's like an underground Nerd activity that goes on in the company. There are 45 different communities in MindTree consulting, there is an Orators club and technology communities and role based communities like the PM Community, where you need to be a project manager. 70 percent of the MindTree minds are involved in one community or the other.

We at MindTree pride ourselves that we have created one of the most joyous environments to work in. We have made sure that the office spaces are bright and colourful and no two floors look alike. We wanted to break the monotony, it's just one small step to ensure that the MindTree minds get up in the morning and feel like going to work.

The workplace has to be Fair place, to the organization, to the customers as well as to your people. Firmness and Fairness need to go hand in hand. At the same time, you can't keep throwing the rule book at people all the time; there should be sufficient flexibility in the system. The interaction of MindTree minds has to be easy with the People Function team, it should be fun. Dealing with people should be done with sensitivity.  It is important to maintain a Process: Empathy ratio, it can't just be policies for everything, there should be a people angle, somewhere it is required for someone to listen and say, let's see how we can resolve this issue. There should also be a balanced tech - touch ratio.

Transparency and communications at all levels is essential, People Function team needs to ensure this. We have used a practice called "practitioner defined and practitioner refined" processes. Leaders have to walk the talk. The leader needs to have the courage to stand up and share his appraisal with the people, say what he has planned for the coming year. It's required to have multiple levels of contacts among people.

Partha did his MSc (Hons) in Mathematics at Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences, and later did his MTech in Computer Science at IIT, Kharagpur. He is on the Advisory Board for ICFAI Business School. He is a member of the Academic Council of the ICFAI University. Partha worked in Wipro for 15 years and was General Manager in Wipro's Technology Solutions Division. He was speaking at a Panel Discussion organized by Businessgyan and TASMAC in association with Cynergyis, on the topic ‘Creating Employee Delight'. 

Compiled by Ms. Mangal D Karnad for Businessgyan

Issue BG84 Mar 08

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