BW Communities

Case Study: The Responsibility Of Being An Employer

BW Online Bureau Nov 08, 2014

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root available-locales="en_US," default-locale="en_US"><static-content language-id="en_US"><![CDATA[Mahir Virkar was late for a session at the office, and just when he least wanted it, he ran into dear friend Prabal Lohar (‘Pablo' since school). They greeted loudly, hugged and exchanged some pointless pleasantries when Pablo said, "Hey, what's this I hear, you had a small encounter with folks from HeadsUp? I met Vishesh the other day at the Ganesh Pooja, and he was telling me…" (see the first part of the BW case: <a href="/bw/2009_10_23_Case_Study_Slipping_Down_The_Learning_Curve.html" target="_blank">Slipping Down The Learning Curve</a>).Mahir laughed it off, but Pablo said, "Listen, you know employees cannot always be monitored and policed. This is life! Good vendors and services are rare to come by, and, at the end of the day, you must get your sale done and profit booked and feel happy when you go home and baby says ‘pa-pa'!" Mahir knew there was no exit here, so he said, "You must know, Pablo, I am not even a graduate, ha! ha! I may be wrong because I was looking at the world from my window. Where I come from, we have different beliefs."Pablo said, "Whatever your beliefs, my friend, you cannot always keep your employees in sync with your principles and the business and the clients. It is not possible, so please wake up and smell the coffee!"Mahir thumped him on the shoulder and said, "Yes! That's the word I was looking for! Coffee! Why don't you come over tomorrow? I have some excellent coffee from Sumatra, slow-roasted and all that. Come, come, there is also some bhakarwadi that aai has sent!" With that, Mahir was gone. He needed to reach his office fast as there was a sensitive employee matter to sort out and the meeting was scheduled for 5 p.m. Just the thought of it made him wince.It was Ravi. For months, Mahir had been grappling with the relationship. Ravi was from Vita, a small village in Nasik, where he produced flyers and leaflets for various political parties, a temple, some shops that were launching a new this or that. Ravi's visualising and designing skills were respected and this fetched him a few rupees. But Mahir wanted him to complete his graduation, "and after that I will get you a job," he had assured.With a lot of difficulty, Ravi had scraped through some sort of distant learning package and Mahir hired him at Red Dot, which was in the business of website development and interactive marketing. Red Dot was Mahir's brainchild, which he had set up in 2001. Ravi did not have any formal training in designing, but his work was brilliant. For three years, Mahir put him through all kinds of design work and groomed him to a level where he had overcome his language barrier and had started taking client briefs himself. But, during the past one year, something about this relationship had changed. Uddhav, strategic advisor to Red Dot and Mahir, had not missed the anxiety building up in Mahir. Yesterday, he had asked him: "Name one thing about Ravi that is bothersome." And Mahir had said, "He has come to ‘know' me and my style, and also knows I will never ask him to go." Uddhav had smiled and said, "Then it is simple, no? Just ask him to go." Mahir had reacted to that with a convulsed shake of his shoulders, "What do you mean? How can I ask him to go? He has an old mother, that rascal! I think more of her than him!" Uddhav said, "The mother is fine, Mahir. Send her maintenance money, that's OK. But answer this: when a person has been working for more than 4-5 years with you, it's time to ask why he is still with you. Do you have a real answer?" And Uddhav had left him to deal with it. Now back in his office, Mahir realised it was complacency that had killed Ravi's creativity; he was delivering all right, but his delivery was bad; clients (in Mumbai, Nagpur, Baroda) were unhappy. Ravi cribbed saying he could not manage people. Things had come to a head last week when Mahir had admonished him. A job was due at 4 p.m., and at 3:30 p.m. Ravi was relaxing on his chair listening to A.R. Rahman. "I have not given the job any thought," he told Mahir nonchalantly. "Sorry, I cannot think…"That was when Mahir decided to discuss the matter with Uddhav. Ravi had never talked like this ever. "Ravi, is a star. He knows it," he told Uddhav. "He is a part of the reason why Red Dot is successful. It's not as if success has gone to his head. It has just dulled him. He is not only producing mediocre work, he is also delaying the whole system. Worse, he does not care!" <script type="text/javascript"> var intro = jQuery.trim(jQuery('#commenth4').text()) var page = jQuery.trim(jQuery('#storyPage').text()) if (page.indexOf(intro) < 0) { jQuery('#commenth4').attr('style', 'display:block;') } </script> Today, Uddhav and Mahir were going to have a chat with Ravi. Since Uddhav was the mentor and advisor at Red Dot, they had spent enough time, whole of last week, talking about what needed to be done.When Ravi came in, Uddhav began gently, "Ravi, you need to take time off. Don't come to work for 15 days. Chill a bit, meet friends, adjust your world view to reality outside your work life. Put your feet up and think about life, the universe and the dog. Read a bit, catch a movie; do what always wanted to do. You know what, your work is deteriorating and this is a surprise for Mahir and me. Perhaps you feel jaded doing the same thing over and over again. Maybe you have even outgrown Red Dot. Maybe the work you are doing is no longer of the calibre that you would want to do. Maybe you just need a fresh challenge? All this you need to figure out, for only you can. Maybe you simply need a new mountain to climb and feel good about life… We don't know, Ravi. That is why we are asking you to go and find out why you are jaded."Ravi sat there, one leg out, both arms clutching the outward knee, rocking himself back and forth. Snatches of sentences and words were flying at him, "You have potential… Red Dot values you… Your colleagues think highly of you." Now Mahir was saying, "And if you decide that you don't want to come back at all, that would be OK too." <img style="width: 150px; height: 150px" src="http://www.businessworld.in/bw/image/CaseStudy/case-9-11-150x150.jpg" alt=" " width="150" height="150" align="right" />"Why?" asked Ravi gruffly. Uddhav said, "We spent a lot of time debating exactly that question. Neither Mahir nor I want you to go. Then it struck us that you have actually become a habit here, just as Red Dot has become a habit in your life; you are simply going through the motions and not bringing anything to the table. "This, we realised, was why you were not contributing. Not creating. Not sizzling. Worse, you have stopped giving, not just to Red Dot, but to friends who you grew up with here — Pakya, Vinoo, Kailas. We have seen a huge mountain of doubt and apprehension in you, which blocks everything. This is also hindering the growth of Red Dot and your friends here. So, take 10 days off, climb this mountain of self doubt; overcome it, kill it, summit it to see what's happened… and come back and tell us, do you want to claim our mountain or yours."Not Ravi, but the whole of Red Dot's challenge was unusual, yet interesting. Ten years of liberalisation had blessed the big metros with abundance; smartly clad MNC managers zipped around talking about ‘moving India' to the small towns, taking the benefits of the largess to the ‘lesser Indians'.Even before India had woken up to moving to tier II and III cities, Mahir had done it, by recruiting from small towns like Sangli, Kolhapur, Ahmednagar, Beed, Jalgaon, etc. and from developing colleges in Ahmednagar, Nagpur, etc. where the youngsters were passionate about a profession. He trained them from scratch in creative design, HTML, technical knowledge for Web-based applications, quality assurance, etc. People had called him mad for the seeming risk he was taking as he was neck deep in loans. But what it reaped for Red Dot was stability, loyalty, commitment, and, most of all, a commonality of ethos and ethics, which was precious to Mahir. From the client's perspective, it assured a more dependable and consistent delivery team. In an era, when people switched jobs, cities, countries, partners, employers, Mahir continued to have employees who stuck on for at least 3-4 years. He achieved this using an emotional connect, through their native language — Red Dot buzzed with four different dialects of Marathi, Milind Ingle (piped), Sandeep Khare/ Salil Kulkarni poetry and the breathtaking fragrance of pitla-bhaat and fodlela kaanda that the bachelor boys enjoyed. In turn, for all these men and women from the smallest towns of Maharashtra, Red Dot was a safe haven, where they got challenging assignments, where their skills grew, they were appreciated and, finally, they could send a decent packet home every month. They didn't need to go to the US.Of course, a couple of Jalgaon boys picked up skills at Red Dot and left for other jobs in the US. But Mahir did not grudge them that, and he also knew that others were dreaming of doing likewise. But he needed to ensure that the time and effort he invested in his team did not go into building the future of some other company. So, he needed to give them the right opportunities, so that not only did their technical skills grow, but also their emotional, managerial and personal skills. One way to enable their growth was to let Red Dot staffers interface with clients. This was becoming more critical in recent times, especially after a few clients commented that Red Dot had only one person they could rely on — Mahir. It then became imperative that he build a client-facing team to reassure his more mature clients that Red Dot's team could attend to their needs. However, like many self-driven entrepreneurs, Mahir sought personal satisfaction alongside professional. And this was where Uddhav was immensely valuable for Mahir. Uddhav knew why Mahir chose the kind of people he did. Uddhav knew the effort and investment Mahir made in these people. Uddhav knew what Mahir's orientation to work was. And Mahir knew Red Dot. Red Dot had been built literally by the bootstraps, and, today, it continued to reflect that personality. However, it was a personality, work method and way of doing business that could not be scaled. Red Dot needed to grow and it needed several people who could manage its business, clients, ideating, business mining and image management. But the truth was that Red Dot would soon need to grow in areas that Mahir would not be able to supervise personally or be a part of — there just wasn't that much time for him to do everything. For example, the circles he had been drawing around Ravi to groom him, skill him, grow him, monitor him was something Ravi took for granted as something that was natural from a fellow native towner. But for Mahir, all this was far more than time; it was energy which he was not willing to dissipate. He wanted to "add value" to every step, he wanted to "personally respond" to clients, he wanted to be the personal friend, guide and philosopher to every of his 54 brethren and sisters from Maharashtra. This was creating small bottlenecks, which while not disrupting, caused grief. Mahir kept asking Uddhav, "Can you groom one or two people to take over what I am doing, in a manner that I understand and appreciate? In a manner that I believe it ought to be done? In a manner that I find my values being upheld?" <script type="text/javascript"> var intro = jQuery.trim(jQuery('#commenth4').text()) var page = jQuery.trim(jQuery('#storyPage').text()) if (page.indexOf(intro) < 0) { jQuery('#commenth4').attr('style', 'display:block;') } </script> Yet last week, Mahir changed his mind: "Hey! I am not sure I want this done, man. That interaction with ‘Ojas-The- Errant' and HeadsUp has shown me the error of delegating top management." But the very next minute he shook his head vigorously denying that thought, and said, "No, you go ahead and tell me what to do." Uddhav had designed yet another classroom workshop to take the 10 staffers on the workshop, forward, which was scheduled for the next day.This was the day and Pablo too arrived at 10 a.m. to meet Mahir and demanded his slow-roasted coffee. "Just follow me… you will get coffee and a free lesson, come," said Mahir and took him into the audio visual room where Uddhav's classroom was beginning. Gesturing to a confused Pablo to be quiet and watch, Mahir text messaged his assistant, "OK, now the special coffee please…"Uddhav (in session): Say, we have a colleague who we hired because he is brilliant. Then one day he becomes dull, short changes the client, behaves badly, does not deliver 100 per cent, client is annoyed. What should Red Dot do? Kailaas/Meghna/Rohit/Anthony: Sack him? Mahesh/Kalpana/Hanif/Pakya: Warning? Uddhav: Hold on to that thought. Question No. 2: Your client has a service running on their website called ‘search'. Search is actually a feature that helps improve productivity, leads to sales, ensures returning customers. But the more a person uses the search feature, the more the Web server is kept occupied. Question is how can you improve ‘search' so that system resources are used in a more optimal manner? The client does not realise that the ‘search' feature is keeping the server engaged and could be at a cost to another visitor who is in a hurry but finds the pages are slow to load. You, as Red Dot, know why the page is slow to upload. Now, from the client's point of view (whose website it is), both visitors to the site are being served. Only Red Dot knows that the process can be streamlined (and should be streamlined) for better business results. Will you present this as a problem to be solved, to the client? Kalpana: Is this a billable job? (Much argument follows over the correctness of this). Uddhav: You are the service provider and you are committed to provide least cost, best option to every customer; that is what your motto says, now tell me…Kailaas: I disagree. I have been doing ‘search' stuff for the last seven years and there is no money in this. And it is not our focus too. If I fix everything that you are saying, then our clients may pay Rs 5,000 for that. The next client doesn't want to pay and uses Google's free tool instead. Then?Uddhav: Then? Then, the client finds out that you knew the way out but didn't tell him. Should the client sack us or give us a warning? See, you feel the money isn't worth slaving over this client. But when you took on the client, you swore to deliver 100 per cent on all counts. So, where did this individual assessment of cost-benefit come from? ‘Serve the client' includes everything, no? Including behaving well?Pakya: See, there are other aspects of ‘search' that can be rewarding for a client and cannot be done by using Google and are based on analytics and tweaking content based on intelligence. This is something that can result in value-add, if explained properly to a client.Uddhav: Aa-ha! Now why is this pleasing? Hmm… See how we have moved from understanding a problem to understanding client to client comfort… so what will you tell the client so that he does not imagine that you are shortchanging him?Hanif: He must study the user behaviours carefully to see their segmentation as well as their usage, and how he can serve this better.Uddhav: You have three minutes, form two teams. I am your client, a Fortune 500 company. Please present to me why you will do what you will do… As the teams presented and fumbled, Uddhav tweaked and structured their script bit by bit. "If you say that, won't your client think you are unsure? He is your client, he is coming to you for solutions, you have to be confident about what you are selling! Meghna, you are the client, you have two minutes only... why is Kailaas's approach not convincing you?"Uddhav was deftly moving from problem definition to problem presentation, to how to present PROBLEM A from the point of view of the client rather than the Red Dot point of view so that the client understands exactly what the manager was saying; how to listen to the client before speaking; how to use the key words and concepts that the client is talking about to win conversations and grab attention; ("It's about listening to the client, hearing his words, hearing the tone of his words!") how to identify the key concerns of a client and to attend to those first, before moving on to what Red Dot has in mind; how to make the client win rather than make Red Dot win in a conversation, so that business for Red Dot increases…"Remember, the client is not right because he is king; he is right because he owns the problem. And as long as he has a problem, you need to be there, till you set it right… working to get the fee cheque is not why we are here…" Mahir: And yes, about that employee who misbehaved; I won't sack him. Never. I will correct him till he buys into the correction. Once he is a good egg, he is free to go. Anybody who has worked here even two years, carries a bit of Red Dot in him. He is a Red Dot product! When he goes away he continues to carry Red Dot with him. He had better carry it well, I say! At 12 noon, the class ended, Mahir introduced Uddhav to Pablo, "Meet Uddhav, our strategic advisor. He refines and redefines our ideas by making them simpler." Pablo shook hands most vigorously in expression of his joy. Then he said to Mahir, "I now see that you can keep your employees in sync with your principles if that is what you believe! Congratulations! I just woke up to the coffee!" Classroom/Syndicate Discussion Grooming employees is emotional; warning and firing them, professional. casestudymeera at gmail dot com <script type="text/javascript"> var intro = jQuery.trim(jQuery('#commenth4').text()) var page = jQuery.trim(jQuery('#storyPage').text()) if (page.indexOf(intro) < 0) { jQuery('#commenth4').attr('style', 'display:block;') } </script>