Employers, best employers and their work cultures...

What makes a best employer?

       What better way to start our HBO journey than with a reading on Mindtree - a company founded by an AIM Alumni, Mr Ashok Soota. The reading was interesting, specially the part where Mr Soota talks about how diversity in the senior team members apparently posed as a threat of potential conflict and how they looked at it as a source of different ideas instead.

     How Mindtree grew gave us an idea about how the culture of a company as the company gains ground. How people from different backgrounds effect the culture? Moreover, how the business that the company plans to do decides the culture and the values that the company with hold on to. Moreover, the more resilient these values are, they more resilient the company will be in the face of  adversity. It is such companies, which uphold the values and imbibe them deeply in their employees turn out to be the most sincere employers. Its such companies that get the most respect from their employees and a long lasting trust.

What is Corporate Culture?

Corporate culture! What is it? Is it just a how people behave themselves in a professional setup. Or is it much deeper than that. I heard to a variety of outlooks that my classmates had regarding corporate culture. People in the class discussed their experiences with corporate culture. For example, we had people from the automobile industry experience comparing the corporate culture with that of other industries and trying to prove how cultures are a function of a lot many underlying factors. These factors are things like the nature of the company's business, their geographic location and the macro culture.

The discussion reminded me of my experiences with my former employer TCS. I was serving in a project for my client MorganStanley(MS) and did interact closely with MS employees from both US and Japan. The US employees were much more considerate when delegating work. Their deadlines would be lax and they would take interest in understanding our problems. if any, in handling their requests. Japanese on the other hand posed much harder deadlines. One reason, perhaps , was that the local Japanese capital market worked under extremely strict deadline which translated into harder deadlines for us. The other reason could be the macro culture of discipline and hard-working abilities of the Japanese which they also expected from people who work with them. Also, Japanese employees where immensely good team workers. They did everything in teams. They communicated so well in teams and maintained great transparency. This teamwork, is again a direct result of the local macro culture of the Japanese.

HBO - A Start...

HBO has been the buzz word in my room for a couple of weeks now. The reason being that my roomies from the May-08 batch have their HBO walk-about dates nearing it and it has, to an extent, captured their imagination. Sriram, for example, is planning to hold a inter-AIM cricket tourney and not just a simple one. He is planning to hold an IPO and issue shares for each team. The share would then be traded as the matches are played and a virtual stock market would be simulated. Teams would act as companies and their stock values would go up as they perform better. Interesting! You bet!

Indeed HBO has interesting things to offer. Its not just understanding behaviourism in organisations, but understanding how this behaviourism effects the way corporations shape up their culture and values. HBO for me is a journey in understanding how corporations manage and enhance thier human resources and how these indivisuals shape up corporations.s