Raja has over 24 years of experience in the IT industry. Raja holds engineering degree in Electronics and Communication from College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University, Chennai, and an MBA from Bharathidasan Institute of Management, Tiruchi. Raja is a Member of NASSCOM Diversity and Inclusion Steering Committee, NASSCOM Foundation’s Disability Advisory Group and CII - Disability Forum.
In an exclusive interview to India CoCreates, Raja shares his thoughts on how employee engagement is becoming increasingly important for IT organizations to shape right from their vision, mission, values and CSR activities. Excertps:
How do you define employee engagement? What are the areas (such as development of strategies, core values, products to CSR) have you engaged your employees in the recent years?
“Employee Engagement” is about how the Happiest Minds are physically, intellectually and emotionally engaged in the growth and success of the company and its customers on a continuous basis. This is the motivation that will help them get up every day and come to office charged up to give their best to whatever they do. Part of this process is to articulate aspirational mission, vision and values that align the team to a common purpose and common way of life in the company. As an early stage company, this also gives us the opportunity to enable the participation of Happiest Minds in the process of building them along with the policies that help us make these policies come alive in the day-to-day functioning of the company.
As we grow, the more important process is to enable internalization of these mission, vision and values in every single Happiest Mind – This we do through Mission Vision Values (MVV) sessions by the Executive Chairman, the MD&CEO and the Business Unit CEOs and COOs and the Chief People Officer. Delivered by these leaders who are role models themselves, these sessions are an important means of internalization.
The other means of engaging is through participation in social consciousness programs – like the Joy of Giving week, Employee contribution to the Mid-Day Meal program along with the company contribution, volunteering etc.
Organizations like IBM and NEC Japan have co-created their corporate core values and business models with their employees. What do you think are driving organizations to co-create such business value with employees?
I am not fully aware of the process by which these companies co-created their core values and business models. In general, co-creation helps buy-in from the people who have to ultimately live these values and implement these business models. Especially in large organizations, any such change management process is complex. If there is a prior understanding and acceptance of these changes and its implications among the team through the co-creation process, the chances of changes taking effect successfully are much higher than when the process is driven top down from the executive suites.
What are your views or plans of co-creation with customers and other external stakeholders? Do you think it is becoming a business imperative in the software services sector?
We already have an Advisory board with some of our key clients and external stakeholders participating in our business processes. We believe it is important for us to have this engagement at the strategy level to build in a much larger perspective of the market and customer expectations than what can be internally built up. The active participation of external board members in our strategy and governance process also brings in a very rich set of inputs that would otherwise not be available to us.
In the private sector, your organization is perhaps the pioneer in upholding the vision of happiness. What made you to attempt introduce such an emotional, if not spiritual, subject in business?
Our business depends on the emotional well-being of people. Whatever strategies we come up with, if they need to be executed successfully to deliver customer happiness, it is important that our people are in a happy state of mind. Also, if happiness is the ultimate purpose and aim of human life and if most of us spend a major portion of our waking hours working or thinking about work, it makes sense for the organization to make happiness as a central part of its business.
Organizations (including nations like Bhutan) that give importance to happiness, have methodologies to adopt to make sure that all their decisions/actions result in enhanced happiness of people. They also have methodologies to measure the happiness periodically. Do you have similar methodologies?
Yes, we have a 7 C’s Happiest People Framework that helps us to identify the critical parameters that enable happiness in the company – Culture, Community, Credibility, Contribution, Collaboration, Communication and Choice. Our Happiest People Pulse measures the Happiness of our people based on these parameters every year.
Is your happiness-centric approach to business producing any tangible business benefits?
I would think we need to wait for at least five years to provide a response to this question with reasonable data points. There are of course early indicators – high levels of retention and engagement among Happiest Minds, record breaking growth rates that requires huge effort and commitment from all concerned, customer affirmations about the difference in experience they have when they work with our teams. The best indicators are the spontaneous responses we get when people visit us – “you guys seem to be a happier lot!”