Welcome to the Podcast

Transcript from the first Episode of Hardly Working with Maulik and Nishanth

Nishanth:
Welcome to the first episode of our podcast Hardly Working. We’re going to be discussing trends in work, culture, business and strategy. Each season we’re going to pick one subject and dive into a range of different topics, looking for solutions to problems that everyone must have faced at work. We’re going to try and combine some of our personal experiences with real world case studies, and hope that at the end of each episode, you have a new insight or a new tool that you can use in your working life, either as an employer or as an employee. Let’s start with a little background about ourselves. Maulik is a brand practitioner. He is someone who I’ve worked with, and let me tell you, he is quite a colorful person, quite literally sometimes. Maulik Do you want to elaborate?

Maulik:
Thank you for that colorful introduction and I’m so glad that people can’t see me in that colorful avatar that you mentioned to begin with. No, and I think before I just delve in and talk about myself, I think it’s a wonderful thing that we have sort of started this podcast and like Nishanth mentioned, the idea of, you know, the workplace and workplace happenings is something that is of so much prominence in our life and having to talk about it and to people around is something that’s a great opportunity we feel. And I think we have a lot of stories to not only tell, but also to hear, and I think this would become a great engagement platform for everybody who is working today. Having said that, I think Nishanth, back to who I am and my introduction. I have done my MBA in Communications Management, and with specialization in advertising. For almost 10 years now, I have been into Brand Practicing and I have got to work with the biggest of the brands in the country. And I’ve also got to work with small and medium enterprises, which I find are the underbelly of the Indian business scenario. And it’s always a pleasure to be able to use the brand as a tool to help businesses, not only to get their revenues, profits, but also own their cultures, the people skills, and, you know, the way they communicate and talk about themselves. I think that’s a great pleasure. I think in a gist, it makes me happy to be associated with businesses and brands.

Nishanth:
That’s interesting. So because you have an experience of working with both big brands and small and medium enterprises, what would you say is the difference in the work culture or the way people work in either of these organizations?

Maulik:
I think one thing that I would probably like to say is that India, or the Indian business scenario is such that we were all or the biggest of the companies were family owned businesses, you know, they started with this one person who had a dream. So whether you it is The Tatas or The Reliance group, or many others for that matter of fact, the similar thing is observed in, the small and medium enterprises, the core idea of one person’s vision being taken forward is sort of what is driving businesses. Technically speaking, I don’t think that I would say there would be a difference except for the scale. Many times of course, you might say that we see the big ones more, which is obvious, but the small ones themselves have a very close knit culture. And sometimes if you try to map into the big ones, the ambition and the drive, to sort of become the big one, and like they say all businesses started in garages. I think the beauty is that you have a tracing back of all the companies and you will see that there is similarity, I do not see that there would be much difference. They all started, sort of following a certain trajectory and living their truth. Of course, that’s an ideal way of talking about it. And therefore, the differences exist, and not everybody becomes as big as they should, or they do not achieve their true potential.

Nishanth:
I think that’s interesting. Like you mentioned, the reason we started this podcast is because we noticed a lot of similarities in the work culture across different companies, and across different enterprises. And I think that’s one of the goals of our podcast is to sort of find insights that will appeal to everybody regardless of where they work. And regardless of whether they are in upper management or they’re just an intern.

Maulik :
Absolutely, In fact, I think that that is the core point. We spend almost about say, 8 to 10 hours, sometimes more at the workplace. And many times many companies say we are “family”. Sometimes I feel if that is the truth, then all of us really, really need to, know the value of where we are working and feel good about it importantly, and it is not only the onus of employees to feel good, it is also the onus of the employer to see to it that the employees are happy and they themselves also, are getting what they want from their work. The transactional nature, probably moving towards the relational I think is an important factor. And I think therefore, it sort of appeals to everybody.

But Nishanth, before we go ahead, I think I want to talk to the audience about you a bit, you know, I have known you for a couple of years now, and I, you know, it’s been such a fun time working with you and I’ve seen that you are a person who is into more of this experience design. While there is an aspect where I work in wherein I define what a brand is or what the strategy should be, or how they should take their business to the next level, on a planning level, I see you bring that to life. And I think that’s very amazing. Why don’t you tell us about the journey of taking a brand into the real world? I think that’s what you do a lot more.

Nishanth:
Thanks Maulik. Technically speaking, I have trained as an Industrial Designer, which deals mostly with products and mass manufacture. But when I started getting into the workspace and when I started working with different brands and different companies, I realized that there are lots of gaps. What ends up happening is that there are lots of different agencies, each handling one aspect of the brand or one part of the design, and there’s a huge disconnect between the creative thought in each part of this. You would want there to be a seamless brand expression, but there tends to be a huge disconnect. So I ended up doing a lot of work in experience design that consists of anything from designing a logo, to designing packaging, to designing full on branded environments, and retail environments and restaurants and things like that. And I’ve worked with both large, multinational companies, as well as really small people who are just starting out, like you said, just starting up in their garages. So yeah, that’s a little bit about me

Maulik:
I think we were talking about what we want people to take away from this podcast that we’ve started. I think a lot of it will be our stories as well as, over a period of time, as we engage more with our listeners, you know, to hear their stories. And I think because the workplace the way it is drastically changing today, we see that there is such a, I would not call it a disconnect, but I would say, you know, there is, as you say, you know, like you were mentioning to me in one of the conversations about, you know, a new kind of workforce coming in a younger workforce coming in, and of course, an existing workforce. I think there is I would not say a conflict at this point of time. But maybe a confluence.

I think identifying how confluences can happen is something which will be of particular interest, I think to a lot of our listeners and particularly to me also, I find that there should be ways of bringing about confluence instead of conflict.

Nishanth:
Definitely we see with Millennials more and more Millennials are making up a larger percentage of the workforce, Gen Z is coming into the workforce at this point. They have a certain way of thinking, they have certain requirements or they have certain expectations of work when they’re joining a company or when they’re joining the workforce. And a lot of companies, and a lot of company cultures, aren’t set up to match that. Companies are still lagging behind in that. So there is a little bit of a mismatch between the expectations and the reality. Which is bringing about a lot of interesting changes and a lot of interesting discussions in the workforce. That’s one of the things that brought about this podcast as well. I like the idea of bringing about confluence rather than conflict. I mean, there is going to be some level of conflict. But the goal here is to bring about what’s best for both the employees, the employers and the customers, because at the end of the day, that’s what’s important, that will lead to what’s best for the company as well.

Maulik:
True that’s very well said and, in fact, I was talking to a global CMO in a virtual interaction. And he mentioned a very interesting thing. I asked him, “Who wins, employee first organizations or customer first organizations?” And the person said, obviously, that, companies need to take care of their employees because if employees are not happy, not satisfied, they’re not going to be contributing positively. But having said that customers are as important, because without customers, there cannot be employees. And I think therefore the idea of confluence, the idea of balance, among all the stakeholders is important. And I think that’s where our podcast will possibly bring about a host of issues and talking points, which would be of interest to different stakeholders at all levels, you know, employees, employers, at all functional levels. I think that should be enough about us. I think we should just start the episodes talking about various things.

Nishanth:
For our listeners, we will be uploading a new episode every Monday, and you should be able to find this anywhere you get your podcasts. Also look out for us on Medium where we’ll be sharing some references and cases that we mentioned during the podcast. I think that’s it from us, and I think it’s time to get back to work.