Choosing Innovation Over Servility In Corporate Culture In 2022

The unicorns are going strong, COVID or no COVID. The fact remains that today, the approach to employees has changed simply because companies need to develop new products or services faster and better than their competitors to stay “alive.” In order to respond quickly to market needs, while most of the organizations still focus on addressing the problems, few are raising the bar by empowering the workforce instead of laying authority on them. SpaceX, Amazon, Apple are the kind of brands people aspire to create one day. Hence, they have to hardwire innovation into their framework and culture. While Amazon works on ‘empower every employee to innovate’, SpaceX provides incentives to employees who present their ideas. Apple’s culture of innovation has led to a seamless supply chain and employee satisfaction.

According to Mckinsey’s research on leadership and innovation titled, Breaking down the barriers to innovation released in 2019, ‘94% of senior executives agree that innovation is the core driver of growth, performance, and valuation’. This culture of innovation encourages every member of the organization to contribute their ideas. Indian organizations too are joining the party, as per another report by Microsoft and IDC titled, Culture of innovation: Foundation for business resilience and economic recovery in Asia-Pacific released in 2020. It points out that despite the pandemic, 77% of Indian organizations have found innovation to be critical or important to their performance and resilience. It also highlights that in six months of 2020, organizations in India have increased their ability to innovate by 4 per cent, thanks to maturing their culture of innovation.

Photo by Benjamin Child on Unsplash

Edtech organizations like Square Panda India, OLA and PayTm have taken a leap towards the change. PayTM for instance is looking to leverage the intellectual capital of employees who live in smaller towns. Its founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma says, “We figured out that we could now recruit from cities where we were previously not going and people don’t have to move to the big cities.” Paytm is famously known to build new business in just anywhere between 30 days to 6 months.

Southeast Asia’s fintech unicorn NIUM doubled its workforce in the year 2021- through hiring, retention, and acquisition- welcoming new team members in more than 18 locations worldwide. Their stated goal was to cultivate insurgent and creative risk-takers. NIUM’s CEO, Prajit Nanu says, “After the pandemic, people chose organizations based on values, and innovation is among our core values. We are always looking for talented people who can co-create. We give complete autonomy to try new things, regardless of the results and it helps in bringing best and unique solutions.”

Srinivas Chunduru, Group CHRO, Ola aims for empowerment too “Employees of different functions are encouraged to acquire specialized training by doing special assignments/ projects, speaking at public forums, cracking a business problem, attending training programs that cover deeper functional elements, etc. The idea is to make the training a fun, enriching, and engaging exercise and hence we have gamified it.”

Ashish Jhalani, MD, Square Panda adds, “We’ve always focussed on creating an environment where my team will find their own internal motivations. It helps to find better ways to innovate, increasing employee engagement and overall health of your business.”

Clearly, new age organisations are looking for the risk-takers, the problem-solvers and the ones that get excited by the impossible.