Organisations today can be slotted into two main categories. The ones that want to make money while they are still young (start-ups) and the ones that never want to age (older enterprises). Either way, the emphasis is on being nimble and agile in order to quickly respond to emerging market opportunities. At the core of any such organisation is a workforce that is fluid and diverse.
Take a closer look at the next generation of companies that are emerging and the message is clear: the market leader of today is not determined by number of resources under command, but how diverse and effective these resources are.
In India, workforce diversity is often equated with ethnic backgrounds and geographical origins. We need less of engineers from diverse streams who can write code and more of people with diversity in thought and approach. Data scientists, artists, physicists or musicians, the technologists of tomorrow might not be a brilliant programmer but a brilliant personality who is simply good at what he/she does.
This is important because, technologies are not exclusive to businesses anymore and organisations are born global. They want to see quick success or fail fast, hence they lay emphasis on exploring diverse ideas in the shortest time possible.
Achieving diversity needs skill and cultural leadership is about craftsmanship. It is much more than ticking checkboxes during hiring.
The job of a glue is to stick two things together, but it is the quantity and the pressure applied that determine whether they are stuck or staying together. They are two different things.
Leadership should redefine the culture and propagate its intrinsic adoption. There is a need to have a focused approach to ensure that every employee in the company reflects their outlook.
Here are some pointers:
1. Hire people who are refreshing and bolder for your current organisation’s culture. They are talented and complement your current culture. It is these who would challenge the status quo and subtly graduate your current culture. Culture is equally about influencing others and getting influenced by others.
2. Contradictions are as important as affection. Promote controlled debates and tensions to think beyond comfort zones. No culture can thrive, if it’s exclusive.
3. Make difference of opinions mainstream. Stop treating them as a HR issue that needs to be addressed. Train teams to leave ego outside the door and be more inclusive of diverse opinions.
4. Reduce intake of people who believe in behaving within a boundary; instead, look for people who are about “getting things done”.
The fallacies of not being ‘truly diverse’ in cultural outlook can have disastrous consequences on a company. When N.R. Narayana Murthy stated famously that Indian IT companies need to stop sending people on H1-B visas and focus on hiring locally in the United States, he was acknowledging the fact that the Indian IT industry had by and large been lagging behind its peers when it came to adopting a culturally-diverse workforce.
Many biases are inherently etched in the minds of the people who make up an organisation; these are hard to detect, but do have an impact. Harvard University provides a free ‘Implicit Association Test’ that assesses an individual’s conditioned responses to various culturally diverse challenges, and the results it generates can be genuinely an eye-opener for most of us.
This is a good tool for every individual to assess their perceptions and do a course correction as required. Now, if not earlier, is a real wake-up call for the Indian corporate world. The game has changed. The market won’t ever be local again, and the business leadership should act as a guiding light in adapting to this change and travelling alone the course it dictates.
( Chetan Shinde is senior vice-president, HR at Pramati Technologies. )
