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People EQ of a company (View Comments)
Jhinuk Chowdhury
Posted On Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 10:46:14 PM
Often companies are dismissed or preserved based on one event or an act of one person. What gets overlooked is while a company can be a one person ‘brand’, it surely isn’t one person organisation
Re-building the brand…
"So, Satyam is gone! What are you guys planning to do now?" asks a peer.
The Satyamite replies, "Who says Satyam is gone when I am very much alive here and committed to create value on behalf of my company?"
“Hello your chairman has resigned!”
“When one man can create a Satyam of 53,000 people, why can’t 53,000 committed people rebuild one SATYAM?"
While media’s busy covering damages done to the company, glimpses of blogs, comments and discussions by Satyam employees clearly indicate an undercurrent – that of rebuilding Satyam.
Bouncing back…
There are umpteen examples of brands re-emerging from reputational crisis like Cadbury or Tyco. Guruvayurappan, head - HR, Omega Healthcare Management recounts one of his earlier stints with a consumer electronic major with a market share of 32 per cent of Colour TV and 37 per cent of consumer electronics that was faced with financial crisis. “Salaries came only once in 4 months. Despite this, attrition was minimal and the team worked harder to capture back the market share.”
Even at a fix as this, Satyam has its people quotient quite high. In a professional-social network website Jobeehive.com - focused around user generated rating/review of companies, Satyam gets a rating of 3.8 out of 5.0 by its employees as against Infosys with 3.6, Wipro 2.8 and TCS 3.0.
“While lack of transparency was cited as a detrimental factor, employees are optimistic that Satyam would bounce back,” says Vishwas Mudagal, CEO & founder Jobeehive.com.
Ed Cohen, global head – Satyam School of Leadership agrees that with this, there’s a sudden emotional outburst. Even as internally the company tries keeping employee morale intact, they face the external world. Suggestions from friends, apprehensions from family are common challenges they face when employer is in crisis.
Pooja HS, an engineer Satyam Computers for 2.5 years now when contacted separately said, “My friends advised me to switch the company. Even my parents in the beginning asked me to look for a better opportunity elsewhere. But I feel when Satyam supported me for 2.5 years, why wouldn’t I do the same for Satyam?”
Communicate…
Timely and strong grass-root communication is the key during such crisis. The top management must spend time to create homogeneity of understanding of where the company is and where is it likely to go.
Services firm Globsyn Group faced dipping employee morale during its acquisition of Synergy Log-in System in 2006. Recounts chairman and CEO Bikram Dasgupta, “People were used to a very different working style than what was demanded by the new management. I personally travelled around the world to understand our value systems and their position in life at that point.”
Satyam today is focused on constant through Planet Satyam – its web casting studio broadcasted 24/7 over internet.
It runs programs like:
How do employees have a dialogue with their families, kids, friends and peers on what happened at Satyam.
Communication on what’s fact and what’s rumour. Media coverage is tagged as ‘true’, ‘not true’ or ‘not sure’.
Rise of the Phoenix is a program where it looks at case studies of companies which went through similar crisis, eg; Cadbury, Arthur Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) etc and analyse how they recovered.
Face to face meeting called Restore not only attends to employees’ concerns but also turns them into facilitators who advise leaders of the company on what should they do. The Leadership team sends daily e-mailers to employees stating what’s happening.
Clearly, this shows it only takes some amount of faith and perseverance to regain the lost glory and get back on track. And that’s where the people EQ of a company comes into play. Here’s perhaps a golden lesson for all those employers and managers who don’t invest enough to build the employee EQ of their firms!
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