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NEW DELHI: As India’s $60-billion IT industry comes out of recession and prepares to chase the $100-billion goal, rising attrition, commoditising of workforce and wage inflation are among its top worries.

Vineet Nayar, chief executive of HCL Technologies, who created a debate with his ‘employee first, customer second’ philosophy, tells that many Indian tech firms are only serving shareholders and are ignoring their employees.

He adds that the traditional metrics of evaluating employers, such as through attrition, are obsolete, and says the industry needs to reinvent itself for the ‘Facebook generation’.
Excerpts from the interview:

Many organisations will find it difficult to put customers second. What do you really mean by ‘employee first, customer second’?

The first question you need to ask is what business are you in, and what should the company be focused on to deliver value. The second question is, who creates that value? And the answer is, employees. Management will have to be accountable for enthusing employees and ensuring they create value. It’s management’s business to enthuse and enable value creation in terms of employees.

I think today, we have four stakeholders — shareholders, employees, customers and society. Unfortunately, we are in the stranglehold of only one stakeholder, the shareholder.
If the same transparency and resolve that management has for shareholders exists for the employees too, you will enjoy huge success. But you will do it only if you see it as a strategy for growth and not merely as an HR strategy.
I saw it as a strategy for growth and I did it because I think it’s a fantastic way to grow. Management should be accountable to employees the way it is to the shareholders.

As a business leader, what are the top workforce challenges you face?

Most of our business models have become irrelevant. In my mind there are many CEOs across industries who are at the edge of a building that is on fire, because the employees’ trust in the management is at its lowest, the business models have become more and more obsolete because they have become commoditised, the price points are lower.

So how these top management folks run their companies and what they do is going to be tested really big between 2010 and 2015.

We are obsessed with size today. But I think at HCL we are not into the business of drawing lines, we are in the business of making graphs, which is what Apple is doing, Google is doing and even Amazon is doing, by recreating business both on how they run it, and what they do. So you have to innovate on both what you do, and how you do it, because the building is already on fire. Quarter after quarter, companies give out their attrition rates and it becomes a metric for everybody to evaluate them as employers.
As India’s $60-billion IT industry comes out of recession and prepares to chase the $100-billion goal, rising attrition, commoditising of workforce and wage inflation are among its top worries.

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This post was submitted by Harshit Agrawal.

Thanks to timesofindia.indiatimes.com