INNOVATIONDRIVEN BY

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ UNION CASE STUDY ON

EMPLOYEES FIRST

www.hcltech.com

Entrepreneurial freedom

In 2005, HCL Technologies Limited's newly installed president Vineet Nayar (now Vice Chairman) kick-started a transformation throughout the company via a radical strategy called Employees First, Customers Second (EFCS). The focus was on ensuring that employees are enthused, enabled and empowered to make their own decisions. It was a brave and ultimately beneficial approach that not only led to increased productivity and profits for HCL’s clients, but also changed the management landscape.

‘HCL employees have the freedom to develop their own ideas, decide and act,’ says Prithvi Shergill, Chief Human Resources Officer. ‘And the role of corporate and line-ofbusiness leadership is to enhance the autonomy and sense of purpose and employment experience of our people.’

The strategy involves staff having candid conversations to decide if they need to change their own working practices, those of the team or the organisation as a whole. Everyone is expected to highlight their perspective on individual and organisational strengths and weaknesses. The necessary changes are then enacted with the aim of making everyone accountable for their own performance. ‘Highlighting what they are good at helps employees to create an environment of collaboration in which colleagues can achieve an objective together, while identifying areas that can be developed further results in advice and support from others,’ explains R. Anand, Vice President, Reward, Career & Talent Management.

The company operates an internal social platform featuring a discussion forum

through which employees can blog, raise issues, share views and engage in dialogue with senior management. A self-assessment tool called EPIC (Employee Passion Indicative Count) has been introduced to help employees identify their ‘passion drivers’ because these are what keep people motivated.

‘By understanding what they are passionate about and what their strengths are as well as their potential, we gain sufficient insight to ensure that we deploy our people in the most effective and most productive way,’ says Prithvi. ‘This drives enhanced contributions and innovation, which is of great benefit to the organisation and in turn helps each individual’s personal growth. Through our values and programmes we focus on making HCL people “ideapreneurs” who seed, nurture and harvest ideas for the benefit of the customer, the organisation and themselves as individuals.’

One example of that is Anupam Anand, a project manager at HCL who noticed that the search engine of a major US client was only configured to its own web browser. He therefore installed a default pack in all of the client’s products so that its search engine would become the default one in all users’ systems. He also suggested the use of a universal installer, which is a file that installs the customer’s search engine as the default search engine in all web browsers to maximise their user base. These initiatives were expected to generate $15 million of business for the client in 2013, and the universal installer resulted in 758 million unique clicks by customers worldwide in just one year.

Another HCL success story is employee and avid blogger Vineet Bhatt. He came up with the innovative idea of inviting active bloggers to post their experiences of a global security

HCL Technologies’ strategy of empowering its

employees has helped establish the Indian organisation

as one of the world’s leading IT services companies

A Cambridge University Case Study 1

‘HCL employees have the freedom to develop their own ideas, decide and act,’ says Prithvi Shergill, Chief Human Resources Officer. ‘And the role of corporate and line-ofbusiness leadership is to enhance the autonomy and sense of purpose and employment experience of our people.’

The strategy involves staff having candid conversations to decide if they need to change their own working practices, those of the team or the organisation as a whole. Everyone is expected to highlight their perspective on individual and organisational strengths and weaknesses. The necessary changes are then enacted with the aim of making everyone accountable for their own performance. ‘Highlighting what they are good at helps employees to create an environment of collaboration in which colleagues can achieve an objective together, while identifying areas that can be developed further results in advice and support from others,’ explains R. Anand, Vice President, Reward, Career & Talent Management.

The company operates an internal social platform featuring a discussion forum

The next generation

Outreach programmes

HCL has largely grown by encouraging self-starting businesses and partnerships with companies and educational institutions as well as their clients, all of which are incorporated into HCL’s culture and way of working.

To engage new talent, HCL Technologies has set up a programme called Make A Difference, Lead The Difference (MAD LTD), which involves students worldwide submitting innovative ideas to the scheme’s website (www.madltd.com). Senior leaders from within and outside HCL then evaluate these. ‘We take the best idea, and that person is then mentored and funded to develop it to its full potential,’ says General Manager Kavita Khushalani. ‘They work with us for six months as CEO of their own platform to bring their business idea to fruition.’

A similar initiative called Ideathon involves students blogging their ideas to HCL, with the top few getting to engage with the CEO. Furthermore, more than 150 Global Engagement Managers (GEMS) are hired directly from some of top business schools as senior management trainees with significant leadership responsibilities.

HCL employees also give back to the community through outreach programmes. There are HCL Youth Centres across deprived areas of India where staff teach English, maths and science. ‘Thanks to our virtual learning platform, even HCL staff in England can contribute towards improving the English of the children in our youth centres online,’ says Srimathi Shivashankar, Head of Diversity & Sustainability.

Overall, HCL is seen as an innovative, successful organisation with a value system that attracts people who demonstrate the required entrepreneurial energy that enables the company to thrive in a challenging environment and create a reputation for being a place of work that values change and growth.

Rising revenuesThese great ideas and many more have resulted in HCL’s own revenue rising by up to 60 per cent each year since HCL’s investment in this company culture began, and revenue generation per employee rose from $38,000 in 2007 to $52,000 in 2012. Customer satisfaction indices have also jumped by almost 80 per cent. ‘We believe there is a direct correlation between the recent cultural transformation of the business and its subsequent performance,’ says Abhishek Shankar, Head of Brand & Thought Leadership.

This approach has also impressed competitors, the media and the academic world alike. It has earned the company numerous awards, including being named one of ‘Britain’s Top Employers’ in 2013 for the seventh year running by the CRF Institute. The award recognises the outstanding working conditions created by the company at its London office. HCL has also been acknowledged by Fortune magazine as the ‘World’s Most Modern Management’, while Harvard Business School teaches its students about HCL as a case study on business transformation.

In total, HCL has 90,000 ‘ideapreneurs’ working across 31 countries. They are divided between the company’s two major divisions: HCL Technologies, a globally focused part of the business that supplies technology services, and HCL Infosystems, an ICT system integrator that manufactures and distributes computers, phones and other electrical appliances to the Indian market. The company’s services include custombuilding software; research and development; infrastructure services and engineering; and business process outsourcing.

software client’s products on either their personal blogs or the customer’s own blog channel. Bloggers whose posts drove traffic to the customer’s website and resulted in a purchase were rewarded. The idea was warmly welcomed and initiated by the client, resulting in $2 million of additional revenue.

‘HCL has set up a programmecalled Make A Difference,Lead the Difference(MAD ltd), which involvesstudents worldwide’

2A Cambridge University Case Study

“Strategies for Success” is the official Cambridge

University Students’ Union (CUSU) publication

for students, graduates and alumni. It equips

individuals with all the resources they need to

seek out and establish the career that’s right for

them. It is also a platform for sharing ideas of

best practice, highlighting other leading

institutions that are raising standards in their

respective fields, such as education providers,

industry bodies and outstanding employers.

To know more visit www.cambridge-strategies.org

To know more on visit http://microsite.hcltech.com/ideapreneurship/

HCL Technologies is one of the select few organisations profiled in the CUSU Strategies for Success: Employers, education, excellence and careers publication.

A Cambridge University Case Study