Great Place to Work

This post is long due. I wanted to write about this soon after our company retreat. A lot of points were discussed during the retreat and one of the major agenda of the retreat was, as far as I understood, to make my division a great place to work. We were into diversed groups and asked to make presentations. Presentations we made, ideas we shared, concerns were raised, expectations were set and hope was revealed. All in all, a whole lot of things were unveiled.

When I look back at it, I wasn't sure what were we harping on. I think each one of us, defined a great place to work in our own way and our presentations were set on that understanding. So there were tangential views, far divergent from the views expressed before. I thought we were not converging on anything. As I feared, the ideas that were shared ended as Ideas without any of them translating into actionable items. The groups were asked to put across an action plan for making their 'idea' happen, and the groups religiously got back and I think that was the end of it.

Since I had not thought about our division in the lens of 'Great places to Work', I started to think on these lines. I was better off than most of my colleagues before I entered the red brick walls of my B-School, I worked in Texas Instruments, which was no. 1 in 2004 and no. 2 in 2005, in the Great places to Work in India survey. I was familiar with the systems and processes which makes a company a great to place to work for. So I started comparing the two. The comparison increased my confusion and I sought some element of clarity. Then I chanced upon this article on Great Places to Work in India.

The article talks about how a company is different from the rest when most of them appear to be similar. How one outperforms the other, how one ensures employee buy-in but the other doesnot, what are the parameters that make a good company great, so on and so forth. It is a captivating article. I suggest one should read this, whether they work in a great company or not, one should read it. It provides different perspectives towards the way a company functions, things which are not noticed will assume prominence, things which were taken for granted come to the lime light, certain things which are obvious are not at all obvious in most of the companies, few of them are small things which have humongous consequences. The author has done a great job in structuring the article and has increased the impact of the parameters by citing live examples from different companies.

I want to list down few interesting aspects of the article. It talks about relationships.

Relationship b/w employee and management : Trust
Relationship b/w employee and job : Pride
Relationship b/w employee and colleagues : Camaraderie

The author does a deep dive into all of the above aspects. To understand and appreciate it, one has to read the article