Cos keep 'chatrooms' open

NEW DELHI: If you don’t communicate well with your employees, you may well lose them to those who do. And they could be your competitors! Corporate India seems all ears to that idea. Scores of companies are innovating to create whole range of channels to talk about growth areas for employees within the organisation, shares ideas, allow personal help seekers on topics as diverse as keeping pets to discussing future course of action for the company.

For instance, IT companies such as, Agilent and NIIT have e-zine on company’s growth, knowledge and idea sharing portals, respectively; it’s comic and story books for Pantaloon’s front end staff, that talk about the company’s vision and ‘Bookworm contests’ testing how often employees frequent the office library. Others like Motorola communicate with their employees through webcasts and radio shows that could be downloaded from the intranet, townhalls ie open houses for employees.

So, what was once a one way communication on internal movements, has now seem to be getting institutionalised in organisations as a 360-degree idea. And companies have increased their spends on such initiatives by as much as 200% higher in the last 2-5 years.

“It is important to let employees know about the acquisitons that you make, the kind of people you get on board, how do they fit-in in the changing work environment so that they are not mislead by your rivals,” says Rosita Rabindra, executive vice-president, HR, NIIT Technologies. “Its essential to get across your point well, as well as get the feedback to make improvements and retain people.”

This is what companies across sectors are working on. Agilent’s Innovation day and Product day for instance, has been fairly successful. Innovation day, an annual event launched last year, gets the employees to talk about new innovations across functions and the best idea gets a cash prize of Rs 50,000. The company also hosts a website called ‘All Ideas Matter’ where anyone can share ideas. On an average, says the company, around 60-70% ideas get implemented. Open houses with the top brass has also seen increasing participation from young employees.

NIIT has an intranet called iNiitian, knowledge portals like Matrix where one can share and discuss the ongoing projects, business ideas, ‘I seek’, a technical knowledge sharing platform to talk about various technical aspects, technical research; Wiki, an annual seminar on technological innovation. For all these, ideas are invited and every portal has a set of people who sift through them to get ideas that could be discussed and taken forward. All this has led to an increased spend 100% for the company, in the last 6-7 years.

The medium of communication also varies depending on the target audience. Says Atul Takle, head, internal communication, Pantaloon, “One needs to understand the profile of the target audience. What works in an IT company may not work here.” For the larger audience, Pantaloon has relaunched its intranet called ‘Future Bites’ last month. It has fresh features like Sudoku puzzles, interactive sections, a forum called ‘Future Ideas’ sharing new ideas for its 17,000 employees across 170 stores in 35 cities.