Entertaining Employees: The Vineet Nayar Way

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India is a young country. IT industry is younger. While a young
workforce brings in a lot of enthusiasm and energy, it also gets bored
a little too quickly. It is no surprise that IT firms go out of their
way to make work life quite fun for the employees.



HCL Technologies CEO Vineet Nayar, whose book, Employees First,
Customers Second, has attracted a lot of attention globally, apparently
thinks creating a fun environment for employees is too important a job
to be delegated. And guess what. On a Town Hall meeting recently, he
actually made his appearance on the stage in a filmi
way—dancing to the tune of Salman Khan's famous number mera
hi jalwa. And the thunderous applause meant he achieved what he
intended to: to entertain employees.

 

HCL, under Nayar, has, of late been trying hard to project its employee
friendly image. While neither Nayar nor HCL is first to attach
importance to employees, Nayar stunned everyone, when he explicitly put
the customer after the employee in his book. No one had crossed that
line, so far.



HCL's realization of the importance of an employee-friendly image
actually comes at a time when most Indian IT companies, including
Infosys—which made the Indian way of feel-good HR a serious
globally accepted HR strategy—are quite subdued in their tone
about their employee practices, after the recession.



Interestingly, when most other companies were quite vocal about their
HR practices, it was not on HCL'a agenda. For example, HCL Tech hardly
ever participated in employee surveys, even though sister company, HCL
Infosystems regularly participates in most such surveys and usually
fares quite well. HCL Infosystem topped the DQ-IDC Best Employer
Survey, the only employee survey that is specific to IT industry, a
couple of years back and has been among the top three employers in the
last five years. HCL Technologies has not participated in the survey in
that period.



While no one knows for sure the sudden thrust on employee first, HCL
Technologies has always been a rebel, treading a different path than
its peers. Be it in choosing the strategy, getting into service areas
or verticals, it has always tried to be what some critics call
Desperate Differentiation. More often than not, it has worked. But
there are exceptions like BPO as well.



Only time will tell if this will succeed. Meanwhile, Chandra, Suresh,
Girish and Krish—can you match it?