Today there is as much competition in getting and retaining talent as there is in getting and retaining customers. In a knowledge Economy, talent is without doubt the key differentiator.  Creating an environment where the employee is not only satisfied and engaged but delighted could be the way for an organization to create a sustainable advantage in the talent market place. 

Businessgyan and TASMAC with the support of Cnergyis put together a panel of Experts to share their experiences in creating a delightful experience for employees and interact with the Audience to generate ideas on how to retain talent and create a fantastic culture in the organization.

The Panel Members were :

N S Parthasarathy
Executive Vice President, MindTree Consulting

Pallab Bandyopadhyay
VP - HR Asia Pacific - Perot Systems

Srinivas Kandula
Head HR, iGATE

Sudheesh Venkatesh
Head HR, TESCO

Prasad Rajappan
Founder - Cnergyis

Excerpts from the Q and A session:

Q. Compared to olden times, the modern days look good for employees. Today employees have gyms, pick up and drop service, crèches and walking into office in Bermuda shorts is allowed. Employees of today are pampered to the hilt. And the problem is that employees are not valuing what they have got. So in such a scenario, what are the benefits of employees' engagement?

Pallabh: Employee engagement can be defined in terms of rationality. You do what you are doing because that's what your employer tells you to do. But then, there is an emotional side, which is way beyond than what you are doing. For instance, let me give you an example of engagement that I personally experienced with Jet Airways. I was traveling from Mumbai to Bangalore with my unwell mother. When I was coming back from Mumbai, I had spoken to the Jet Airways people, and as luck would have it, inspite of all my interactions the Jet Airways staff had not made provisions for my mother, who was on a wheel chair. I spoke to the Jet Airways official at the Mumbai airport, and immediately he appointed one person to take care of us and apologized to me profusely for the mishap. He ensured that everything went smooth for us, and that kind of personal attention from Jet Airways, will make me think twice before changing loyalty to another airline.

Balaji: The thought on being engaged, reminds me of the book ‘Joy' by Geet Sethi. He says that if you compare joy with success, joy is more important. For him, joy was playing billiards and he could go on playing the game 24 hours a day. That is joy. Sumantra Ghosal also talks about the same idea. So how do you create an atmosphere where a person can find his calling in the organization? Is it easy to find what an employee's calling is?

Pallabh: We need to understand that different people have different callings. One sure shot thing we can do is to make the organization socially responsible. The company should work for a larger cause. I remember this ad for Tata Steel, which had a tagline "We also make steel". I also have admiration for MindTree, because of its social responsiveness. At a deeper level, I am a father of a differently-abled child, so I am able to understand, how relevant it is for an organization.

Partha: I think it's important to understand the concept of expectations. Remember that expectations across 2-3 years gap varies and expectations of various generations vary as well. I don't want people to think that we HR folks are all doing a big favor to the employees. Hence, I agree with Sudheesh, when he said that happy people lead to happy customers. One of the taglines we have in MindTree is "Imagination, Action and Joy". Lot of people have never seen "joy "as a part of the mission statement. We did survey of 200 people across various disciplines, about how to define joy in a corporate setting. Majority of respondents said that joy is satisfaction of a job well done. If people enjoy what they are doing, they give their best. This is basic human nature. The employer has to figure out how to make sure people are enjoying what they are doing. That's what we have to strive for.

Prasad: All of us have been talking about, "employee retention". If you really want the best for your company, don't work on employee retention, work on "employer retention". Create an atmosphere, where the employee will be worried if he is going to be retained or not. Note that, this point is not from a control perspective. For instance consider the Tatas, every employee feels proud to be a Tata employee. If this can happen in your company, then half the battle is won!

Sudheesh: To my mind there is absolutely no doubt that if the person does the right job, then he can delight customers. How do you get him there? You don't want a situation where, the employee is a square peg in a round hole. For many of us, because of peer pressure and society pressure that acts on us, we make career choices to please others. We can figure out through trial and error and failures in life, about what our true calling is. The Bhagwad Geetha says  Swadharme Nidhanam Shreyaha, Paradharmo Bhayavahaha, meaning we will be happiest when we follow our calling.  If you put people on those jobs where it's their true calling, their results are the best.

Srinivas: I think organizations have done everything other than studying the work which an employee has to do; therefore we have issues with engagement. Organizations create confusion amongst employees, rather than enabling them to discover their calling. Confusion is created with all kinds of titles, designations, and structures. Infact the most rigid caste hierarchy, I have seen is in corporate organizations. Engagement can be created by redesigning the work and making motivation inbuilt.

Q. An employee delight program has to have an objective in itself. Also an employee may not have enough skills for doing a certain job. So, in such a scenario, where do you put your priority?

Pallabh: We are unfortunately always looking for the perfect fit. If you choose a person who is 100% fit for that role, and then he discovers the job to be the same thing that he was doing, how will you prevent boredom from creeping in? Hence, its important to give a chance to "half baked" people. Because for these people who are not that experienced, the process will be very exciting. We sadly look at only one dimension. For instance, a software engineer should fit perfectly into the given job description. But there are things beyond that which we should look at. Nokia is a good example, where they got a group of social anthropologists who have nothing to do with mobile technology, work with them. They came out with the "human touch" campaign of Nokia. That kind of thinking, a specialist can't bring to the table. So in some jobs, it is advisable to get people who come from a different background.

Q. Most IT companies use the Henry Ford model of industrialization, Isn't employee delight decreasing when you have a line production kind of model, or a factory of software engineers? Am sure MindTree was a better company when it had 200 people, rather than 1000s of people!

Partha: I don't agree that IT companies can convert everything into a manufacturing process. There maybe many processes which can be transferred, to people with lower skills, as you don't need an Einstein to write software. I think that realization has dawned on people. But wherever it can be done it should be, as there is no reason why we should not do it. MindTree is better company than when it was 200 people strong, but this is not a one line answer. When we were 200 people, we were like a bunch of school kids, we were trying to do many things. 50% of things we did were risky. We are a lot more mature today, and certain things we did right early on had laid the foundation for the company.

Q. Srinivas, how long have you been working with iGATE? Have you done enough of what you mentioned in your speech and what are the results? Isn't it time we realized that we can't give external inducement to create delight.

Srinivas: I have been with iGate for the last 1.5 years and in IT for last 3 years. We have been trying to create awareness. We have abolished a couple of grids and created a new compensation structure. Infact, I was obsessed with writing a book titled "You Can Fail". I wanted to understand why people fail. We have enough literature on success, so to understand failure I met 100s of people and get their opinions on the same. So my point is that in order to succeed in creating employee delight, we need to fail first. The Nobel prize was given to Simon for bounded rationality, in which he states that in life to take a decision you will never have 100% of data. You will always take decision based on intuition or conviction. Hence in terms of employee delight as well, I would ask all HR folks to go with their gut and intuition.

Q. Since we have established that there is no clear recipe for employee delight, can we have 3 things we need to focus for employee delight.

Sudheesh

1. Get the 1

3. Appeal to the deeper motives of people

Partha

1. Listen more and understand expectations.

2. Don't lose track of the fact that an employee has a role to perform.

3. Look at innovating in small things.

Prasad:

1. Do enough to understand what exactly the employee needs. For instance in order to have less taxable income for our employees we introduced Sodexho coupons. But 90% of employees thought company is taking money. So we need to understand each employee's needs and exceed these expectations

Srinivas:

1. We have made the entire process complex. We need to simplify it.

2. Provide dignity to people

3. Learn to make sacrifices. Don't do too much of business and forget about employees.

Pallabh:

1. Understand that each employee has different interests and tastes. We need to support that.

2. What might delight one employee might not delight the other.

They were speaking at a Panel Discussion organized by Businessgyan and TASMAC in association with Cynergyis, on the topic ‘Creating Employee Delight'. 

Compiled by Mr. Rajiv Mathew for Businessgyan

Issue BG84 Mar 08

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