Aligning people's mind with Business Goals Date:   Monday , June 04, 2012 Maverick Systems founded in 2000, is an independent software testing company which has end to end testing capabilities covering test process consulting, managed testing services, security testing, transformation testing and testing program management. Their clients include some of the big names in the banking and financial sector, insurance companies, software product companies, governments and system integrators. In a candid chat with Aravind Ponniraivan, Head-delivery Operations, Maveric Systems talks about the current trends following the industry. Aravind talks about the various aspects he advocates to his employee’s satisfaction and what practices a company needs to improvise in order to witness the success rate Maveric Systems has been achieving. Progression observed in the industry Indian IT industry has been witnessing high volatility, mainly due to economic uncertainties. Right talent acquisition and retention has been in the fore-front of focus to encounter these challenges. The industry, in the last few years has been experimenting with acquiring a diversified talent pool as against a traditional practice of breeding talent within the industry. Business domain specialization has gained more importance and made veterans in the respective domain more valuable than ever before to have a second career in IT. Quicker turn-around time in developing leadership and tapping talent as early as in the first year of college are the other trends that is currently witnessed to beat the profitability battle and stay ahead of the competition. Like in any growing company, our business strategy gets redefined more frequently than compared to large organizations. Since Maveric grew up as a people centric organization, thankfully we did not stumble upon too many challenges in aligning our people’s mind with our business goals. More informal than formal communication mechanisms ensured our business strategy gets communicated to our team at ease. When you can get your people connected across all levels, always, without any strong agenda, communication along with its intended spirit traverses naturally without much distortion. Challenges to get good talent in the industry It only gets more complex as numbers grow and competition intensifies. In the past, only lateral recruits were subject to in-depth assessment of potential but the last few years have seen entry level talent put under intense scrutiny as clients have started to look at them more closely and draw entry level pre-requisites. Many innovative models of assessment have been tried in campuses and many companies have started to invest in campuses to ensure a steady flow of quality input year on year. With the Industry-academia gap still wide open, Indian IT firms are seeing a big obstacle in turning around students to professionals. Being a growing organization and caught in the middle of economic meltdown, we are finding it difficult to match the top line industry compensation. Secondly, since our engagement model demands our team to work out of our client’s site across the globe, we lose some good talent that has location preferences. As we foray into new domains such as telecom, mobilizing a larger set of experienced professionals, in a short period of time seems to be a big task ahead. Significant People Practices In our experience, unconditional transparency, genuineness and investment on employee welfare without any strings attached have helped us retain the best of our talent. We managed to create a work environment that is unbiased and non-political, thus an open platform for our employees to discuss sensitive topics more freely and enabling them to give their best without much external disturbances. In my view, downturn hasn’t directly contributed to significantly change people practices. However, CXOs were left with no choice but to look at revenue and profitability at the cost of everything else. I am particularly excited by the outcome of industry-academia partnership and the long term benefits it can bring about to an organization. Maveric had partnered with LIBA (Loyola Institute of Business Administration) about six years back and this partnership has continued to give the best breed to young leaders for the last three years - the kind of talent any large company would envy. Changing demographics and employee satisfaction Employee satisfaction is about feeling assured that the work that you execute demands the potential and experience that you possess. It is also about how convinced you are, with both your, peers and superior’s ability to play their respective roles. In essence, if majority of your employees look forward to enter your office premises the next morning, if they have more friends than colleagues within the firm, if they respect and feel respected, if they feel comfortable to challenge their boss’s decision, I guess you have taken care of employee satisfaction. Honestly, I don’t think demographics and technology would play a crucial role in employee satisfaction than compared to work environment and quality of colleagues.