“The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses — behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.” ~ Muhammad Ali, Professional Boxer, and Activist
Mindset in India has just been certified as a “Great place to work.” What an affirmation of the culture we have built for our people!
Great Place To Work® is the global authority on High Trust and High-Performance culture that helps companies measure the organizational culture – two things we believe drive our employees.
Great place to work talks about “Building a better society by helping companies to transform their workplaces.” We couldn’t agree more!
Mindset worked hard to live its vision, behind the scenes, in the arena of our projects, and out on the road in our daily work, long before we danced under the lights of ‘Great Place to Work.’ In 2020, we took up the challenge of setting up Mindset Consulting’s first foray into international markets by opening the first branch outside the United States.
An essential aspect of setting up and subsequently building a Mindset in India mirrored our global vision. We, the leadership of Mindset, wanted to ensure that we build a great employee experience that stands on a foundation of trust and freedom, one that makes the employees want to come to work.
In our first two years of setting up in India, we drove the following for our employees:
- Built an environment where they love to return to
- Grew their skills and experience helping them to be poised for the next generation of innovation
- Ensured we were there for them, providing an environment where employees can be there for each other and where our teams can be there for their own families.
So what did our efforts yield?
“You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- Our first confirmation of what we had built up came when 100% of the employees responded to the survey.
- Secondly, our scores stood far above the industry average
- Lastly, the comments from our team told us that our team loves what we have built up together – an open culture, a culture of respect – respect for the individual, and a respect for the desire to grow.
Our teams provided quantitative and qualitative feedback via the survey about the strength of involving our people in our decisions, driving unique benefits, and respecting the boundaries of work and personal life while providing space for everyone to decide what that means to them. They talked about:
- the open communication culture that surpasses any hierarchy making everyone feel heard and leading to a culture of collaboration “Together everyone achieves more.”
- the learning culture and the opportunities to grow as a result
- the culture of living the vision of employees is the most important
As we got the survey results, we found we had surpassed by significant margins the industry average in all dimensions measured in the Trust Model with respect to standing the tallest.
How did we achieve this?
“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
We did this together. As we saw in our response rate, all our people have been involved in building this company.
- We provided an environment where people could be fearlessly themselves
- We provided the tools and the platforms that helped people develop ideas and grow themselves through learning and innovation; whether on customer projects or building products.
- We maintain a listening and collaborative culture. We put in place policies and activities driven for the people and by the people.
Meet Raju: Our current learning content platform has seen an uptake in training activities. Due to a suggestion from Raju and another alumnus of Mindset, we changed our learning platform. Instead, we used one that brought a significant amount of content to our team.
Meet Ganesh: He gave us feedback that we need to celebrate and acknowledge those who are getting confirmed. We tuned up our celebrations. He set together the concept for training our youngest employees in the functional aspects of the SAP Universe. This now helps the team look at projects holistically.
Meet Harikrishna: He told us we need to do more in-house innovations and work on the latest technologies. We steered our team towards BTP with efforts led by Abhilash Gampa, our director responsible for the software in India.
Our backend and front-end teams came together to create a training program for our freshers. The intent was to help them get up to speed with the complex world of SAP.
Similarly, several of our policies are in place as our employees feel empowered to give us feedback. This included the good and the bad. They raised their wishes, desires, and concerns. We found it easy to put in place an environment where they would love to work.
On January 26, 2023, I wrote about India’s Republic Day. As a part of writing the posts, I found this quote. “The governing principle of the Indian Constitution is “of the people, for the people and by the people,” which signifies that the power is vested in the hands of the citizens of India.”.
I thought to myself – There is nothing more that signifies what we built up as our company’s culture. And the journey is far from being over.
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” — Maya Angelou, American poet, and civil rights activist.
Cheers and thank you to all of you, dear team, who made this happen!
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