Work culture

A matter of experience

Sudipta Dev writes about the efforts made by SAS India to meet the aspirations of its highly experienced and ‘specialist’ workforce

Eight years. That’s the kind of experience you need to have before being considered for a job at SAS India. Not surprising, the majority of its employees are well over 30 years of age. For an industry where the average age of the workforce is in the mid-twenties, this is a deviant trend and poses an additional challenge for the company’s HR team. Considering the fact that they have to match the well-known high HR standards set by the parent organisation (SAS Institute), it makes the job only tougher. “The profile of our workforce is varied as we are into niche areas. They have been around the world, have worked in different companies, and consequently their aspirations are also different,” says Gauri Deshmukh, Head—Human Resources, SAS India. This category of people cannot be lured by just an overseas trip, training or money, and requires building a different kind of a culture in the company.

People with industry-specific skills are hired by the company and deputed on work, which can further enhance their already existing skills. “The more clear we are about the expectation of a person, the better it becomes for him or her to perform,” admits Deshmukh. Maybe, this is the reason why the attrition rate is well below the industry average, at 12 percent. All the tools and processes are well-tuned to meet their career aspirations.

“We work more like a consulting organisation. That is, we are able to create a vision for the customer and demonstrate the capability to deliver the vision. It is about selling a dream to them and telling them how we can fulfil it for them,” says Rajiv Kumar, Senior Executive, Marketing, SAS India. Adds Deshmukh, “Taking into consideration the seniority of people working with us we cannot engage them in normal kind of fun. More than that we have to engage them intellectually. We were able to achieve this successfully through SAS 9.”

The SAS 9 experience

The cornerstone of all businesses in the organisation is SAS 9, which comprises usability, manageability, scalability and interoperability. The company has invested $1billion in this new way of doing business, which has brought about a lot of excitement in the market and boosted the morale of every SAS employee. In an effort to make people feel empowered about the achievements made by the organisation in the past and feel a part of the future, it was necessary to build a scenario where they would feel that they are a part of something that had never happened before. So what did they do? “From the CEO downwards, we took the entire organisation for a trekking expedition. We trekked for almost three-and-a-half hours up a hill near Karjat. This was not a training programme, but an effort to make people experience the change and feel the difference,” informs Deshmukh. Obviously, this exercise was much more than a run-off-the mill experiential learning programme, and all were aware of the fact.

Rappelling down a steep waterfall was an experience that that none of the team members had tried before, nor were they the adventurous kind. It was however the “can do” spirit and the challenge of doing something that they had not done before that led them on. “At the end of it most of us successfully rappelled down the waterfall, and this very fact made us feel good about the outing. Within a day, the esprit de corps of the whole organisation was apparent,” states Deshmukh with pride.

The internal communication system has been the perfect mode for channelising this spirit. The different modes include ‘skip level meetings’ which are held regularly; open houses organised every two months; regular e-mails from the CEO; and one-on-one personal meetings with the HR head for those who want to share their problems. The effort is clearly to create a greater bonding between people and make them feel involved at every level.

Training focus

The training focus at SAS India is three-pronged. First is the starting block product training, which everyone has to go through, from HR to finance and even the receptionist! Then there is indepth training in their own functional areas. For instance, sending five sales people to Singapore to attend a solution selling workshop. The third is the experiential workshop mode, which is in fact quite popular. Deshmukh explains why: “The kind of profile we have is not where people can sit in a classroom. For example, the Delhi team, every Friday afternoon, organises the ‘Gyan Badhao’ session on their own.”

Knowledge sharing is in fact a key requisite for every employee. In the appraisal form, one of the statutes is about knowledge sharing initiatives made by the individual.

Though the average age of employees is in the wrong side of 30, the organisation is very much young at heart, claims Kumar. In fact, every second day people find an occasion or an excuse to celebrate and have fun.

Workforce Profile

sudipta@expresscomputeronline.com