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Looking ahead: Yeshasvini Ramaswamy, director, People Practices, e2e Business Solutions

At the entry level, architectural firms in India spend about Rs. 70,000-Rs. 90,000 per employee, and in some cases close to Rs. 1.5 lakh for seeing them grow. Currently this segment faces attrition levels exceeding 50 per cent. Attrition rates are at similar levels, even at middle and senior ranks, as architects who have experience and know-how are in great demand.

In order to understand the issues involved, Bangalore-based e2e Business Solutions conducted a survey for adapting the best practices in architectural firms, particularly from the U.S. The survey covered 10 leading architectural firms in the U.S.

“In our preliminary survey we found the U.S. architectural firms have better corporatised structure leading to enhanced transparency and clear-cut career paths,” said Yeshasvini Ramaswamy, director, people practices, e2e Business Solutions. “American firms tend to be system oriented, which helps achieve higher output and quality. In addition, systems tend to capture metrics that one can work and build on,” the e2e survey seems to feel.

Some of the organisations surveyed include Gensler, a $ 536 million firm, with over 2,900 employees in 29 offices worldwide; and Callison, a 750-employee company with $ 129.5 million turnover.

“Implementing processes that are transparent with clearly demarcated accountability and sound people management practices helps mitigate problems in attrition and quality of work output” finds out Yeshasvini after the endeavour.

* The office must become a resource centre for information, a place where employees can leverage expertise from past projects. The lessons one learns have to incorporate elements such as how the project was clinched, problems encountered, solutions provided, and client feedback and analysis while executing projects.

* Due to the rapid growth experienced in architectural firms in India, employees in Indian architectural firms are merely executing work and are unable to move up the learning curve.

* American architectural firms address this problem with strategic tie-ups with universities. Most top-level architectural firms have tie- ups with universities or other learning centres. Since American Universities are very large resource centres, older methodologies which may have been forgotten come to light and are used.

* Serious and structured mentoring is one factor that is largely missing in the Indian scenario. American firms place emphasis on mentoring fresh graduates learning the nuances of architecture. Thus graduates mature rapidly into well-rounded professionals.

* In the 10 firms surveyed, mentoring forms an integral part of the organisation practices. The process consists of mentoring committees which themselves have been mentored successfully.

* In order to address the insecurities, the mentor is about three positions above the protégé. There are clear roadmaps and signs with accountability weaved in. Budgeting support is also provided for the mentoring program. Should the mentor-protégé relationship fail, a face-saving exit process is also provided for.

* Addressing discrepancies at site and on-office planning is another area that is well addressed in the U.S. Frequent site visits and architectural tours with learning are put in place in the event calendar for employees. In large offices, it is possible that people (not directly involved in executing work on site) ever get to visit project sites. This leads to a disconnect between middle and top- level architects and ground realities.

We wanted to have a hang of the organisational (HR) practices in architectural firms, with an international presence and apply similar customised practices in the Indian context.

The aim of this online survey exercise by e2e Business Solutions is to identify global best practices, and customise it to the Indian scenario after looking into the requirement and validity of the process. Hence a 60 man days detailed survey involving processes practiced by top architectural firms.

In our pre-survey research it was observed that to a large extent the U.S. architectural firms and architectural-engineering firms were the strongest in systems, and followed many standard practices in HR which were well publicised and researched.

The same cannot be said of Europe or the Indian scenario in terms of visibility and transparencies.

Lacking is a strong term. As firms scale up, how management treats people becomes critical. Broadly, people practices in a firm will determine its success or failure. This is especially true over the long term.

Indian, European architectural/creative/legal firms tend to centre around individuals who started the firm. The reason for that is the proprietors have strong and unique creative abilities. With passage of time customers tend to associate the firm with these people only.

With the spurt in the market, the entire set-up has to be more and more team driven. Thus, people management processes will play a key role in success per project.

One of the important points noticed was some of the bigger firms have profit-sharing understanding with architects (senior associates and above). Architects working for a particular office tend to negotiate terms and conditions with the clients themselves and handle costs, including that of their teams on their own. In some cases style and quality tend to get compromised because of ad hoc judgments.

With the implementation of internal processes and standardisations, ad hoc decisions and implementations can be easily addressed.

With Indian architecture firms scaling up rapidly, the need for HR practices is clearly now being felt. It is also time to create awareness among the architectural fraternity about standardisation of procedures, creating greater accountability and transparency in implementing processes.

Culturally, Indians are individual players and are generally not team players. It can be said that rules are more honoured in the breach than observed. Therefore the manner in which organisational practices are introduced makes a difference. For example, mentoring is a very difficult concept in practice in the Indian context.

Care should be taken in terms of addressing insecurities and building up supporting practices like knowledge sharing and other types of team building activities first.

And, we have to recognise that HR practices can act as business enablers in the architectural firms, specially given their rapid growth.

This can be done by linking HR effectiveness to financial measures such as value of intellectual capital and organisational capabilities. This is in a sense the ultimate measure for any organisation.

This will also prevent HR from being viewed as a cost to the organisation. Ideal HR implementation is a positive investment whose yield can only increase with time.

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