"Employees First,Customers Second" approach to business!

The "Employees first,Customers second" is a radical initiative adopted by HCL technologies under the leadership of Mr.Vineet Nayaar,Vice chairman and CEO.

I feel this concept really makes sense and sooner or later is going to be embraced by other service firms,not just limited to IT.

When I joined my first job after engineering,during our induction program,a lot of focus was on drumming the fact into the trainees's head that "Customer is God". But there wasn't any focus on motivating the trainees to treat customers as God.In a service business,the quality of your services is lot dependent on the employees.So,if the employees aren't genuinely happy about their job and aren't motivated enough to serve the customers better,customer centricity philosophy couldn't be put into practice.

Employees are like ambassadors of a company and are the face of the organization.The customer sees the organization through the eyes of the employees.If the employee is well engaged and motivated,his productivity would be increased by a significant margin.Improved productivity would mean greater business for the company.

The employees first approach can be implemented by having an extremely decentralized organization where the accountability and decision making power is pushed down the hierarchy.Every employee has to be feel that he's accountable for his actions and his actions have bearing on the company's topline.After all the biggest assets are the company's employees and they are instrumental in generating the cashflows for the company.

Some random observations!!

Some of the observations that I've made as a student :

• In engineering colleges,being a topper or one of the toppers can be a crime! You are outcasted as an anti-social homosapien and are ridiculed by the victims of the bell curve who live no stones unturned to make the topper's life miserable.Even if a topper is seen peeing in the toilet,one of the below average/average "smart" guys mocks saying "Abe time waste mat kar,jaa ke padh le! ".This might sound amusing,but such incidents does happen!In B-schools,its a bit different though :D
  

• Not the best of students get the best of jobs on campus but then life is great leveller.Eventually,most of the hardworking/talented guys get what they truely deserve in the long run.It's important to turn a deaf ear to sarcastic comments and focus on the task at hand.

• There definetely IS something called as "luck" but then bad luck can screw up things for you only in short run.Life's extremely fair.In long run,your returns are commensurate to your abilities and investments.
  

• Most of the so called "Campus heroes" who are always in the limelight and seem to have an habit of showing off their smartness at everything aren't the ones who fair the best in their lives.Such breed of people are brilliant multitaskers but are great frauds too! They try to compensate for their incompetence/lack of preparation using all sort of unfair means.I've seen many down to earth humble guys maintaining a very low profile on campus doing much better than these "oversmart" guys.
  

Blunt bottomline: "Humility and substance matter"

• Students madly drop years after class-12 to prepare for getting into top engineering colleges but in retrospection it would look really stupid.Most of the engineers eventually try hard to get into top B-schools where you have junta from some ordinary private college to IIT/BITS/NITs and other premier institutes.Also,it's fascinating that in terms of quality,the private colleges chaps are as talented as the premier institute guys and many end up performing much better than the premier institute guys.Surely,no dearth of talent in India!
  

• Nothing goes waste in life.Very often it's said academics don't matter much in life but that's really a misconception.Its true only if one is really gifted and can outsmart his/her peers.But such cases aren't many.Look at the selection procedure of any B-school or any other higher education institute,academics play a very important role in selection process.Needless to mention,many coming to hire in top campuses,shorlist candidates on the basis of past academics.