Q. How did you tackle this situation? What was your approach?
A. Any change is difficult and acceptability is always doubtful, as it takes a long time to change something that had always been your way of leading life. Communicating your purpose honestly and showing employees value in the change is important in such a scenario. Making people a part of the change and its outcome has always given better results. Understanding of the current culture; commitment to change by defining company’s strategic direction; deciding what the organisation culture should look like to support success; and the willingness of the employees to change for creating the desired organisational culture are the elements that bring cultural change. Hence, we adopted a multi-pronged approach:
• The primary focus was on standardisation of people practices and processes to end the era of management by exception. This was important to bring in fairness in the organisation and also for laying down standard operating procedures for routine, yet essential people matters. This also gave people like Mr. Kapoor confidence in the change.
• Second was the focus on 3Cs of engagement i.e. care, connect and communication through people focused HR practices. This was a simple, yet effective way of telling employees what the organisation feels for them.
• Third, was to create avenues for employees to continuously up-skill themselves, so that employees grow and excel in their current roles and prepare themselves for future. Finally, this was backed by gradual introduction of participative decision making and involvement of all employees by seeking continuous feedback on all internal customers, and thus building the HR strategy around the feedback received.
Q. What do you think was lacking in UTi, India culture and what did you do for it?
A. When we started, the organisation lacked a basic culture of transparency and communication. Conducting comprehensive surveys to understand the employee needs and wants helped a lot. Thoughtfully designed surveys backed with sharing of information and positioning each initiative in the light of employee needs did wonders here.
Care was demonstrated by simple steps like taking care of employee and their families’ health, being a part of their joys and sorrows, rendering help when needed. This helped in spreading the message that the company cares for the well-being of employees and their families.
Establishing a connect with every employee of the organisation and giving them a feeling of equality was crucial for the organisation. Employees spend most of their waking hours at work and hence making organisation a fun place to work was essential. A great practice that we adopted here was to involve employees in conceptualising and implementing fun activities for themselves. This helped in establishing a connect and encouraged employees to look beyond their daily tasks. Building a connect between the leadership team, especially CEO, and the employees was another area where we needed to work. This was done through one-on-one sessions and providing various other opportunities to employees to interact freely and openly with the senior leaders.
Further, all this was backed by involving employees in the decision making process through various platforms like voting, one-on-one calls by HR, formal feedback post events. Also, care, open communication and honest approach helped in breaking all the organisational challenges.
Q. How did you direct the company into investing in people and building potential?
A. Since there was a complete lack of focus on L&D in the organisation, we had to start from the scratch. All our efforts, hence, were focused on building a learning and development function to work towards building a learning culture. So, a comprehensive training needs identification process was conducted to identify training needs to be further converted into structured training interventions with customised content and pre and post evaluation mechanisms.
Q. What did you do to build a culture of meritocracy to avoid favouritism and nepotism? How did you get of the yes-man culture?
A. Any organisation that is governed in a traditional and bureaucratic style, the yes-man culture is bound to exist. At UTi India, being a blue-eyed boy was viewed more important than being a distinguished outperformer. The primary thing that was done was to bring in clarity of objectives. We initiated a goal setting exercise across organisation. This way every employee had a set of KRAs/KPIs with specific measurement criteria leaving no room for ambiguity at the time of assessment. This provided employees a sense of direction and equipped managers to effectively carry out assessments; thus, removing room for favouritism and nepotism.
Creating a shared understanding of performance management and its importance in the organistion was another important task we had at hand. We did it by conducting a series of workshops for the entire employee base to bring home the point in line with the philosophy that change is not successful until the need for that change has been established amongst the stakeholders. These workshops were a good means of interacting and solving all doubts and queries related to performance management. The thought behind this was that focus on performance and merit shall, thereby, breed a culture of meritrocracy in due course of time.
Q. How did you work towards ensuring that consistency in practices followed across locations?
A. An engagement and communication desk was set up to work on Pan India initiatives aimed at increasing the engagement and communication levels in the organisation. Centralisation of the key people processes and practices was another big step taken with the intent of building credibility of the initiatives and ensuring standard and effective execution at a Pan India level. This helped in bringing in a sense of belongingness and oneness, as what happened for engagement at one location was replicated across locations, thus bringing people together.
