Holly ho, Santa Claus is coming to office

BANGALORE: When Rabo India Finance chief operating officer Geert Embrechts walked into office on Friday morning, dressed as Santa Claus, 80-odd employees at the finance company’s Mumbai office were rather amused.

Embrechts’s surprise Santa act floored everyone. Employees couldn’t hide their glee when he, along with two other MDs, went around the office doling out gifts and shouting a merry ‘hohoho’!

Workstations are being spruced up. Cubicles are being decorated with mistletoe, holly, stars, streamers and danglers. Carols are being belted out through the public address system. And companies are treating employees to wine-and-cake dos and big-ticket year-end parties.

Christmas cheer and the New Year revelry is fast spreading across corporate India. In a globalising world, it’s not just the business best practices and deal-making expertise that are being brought in. Indian firms, with a growing pool of MNCs, are learning to celebrate Christmas with the same fervour and zeal that their western counterparts do.
Reeling under talent crunch and rising attrition, India Inc sees this as a good way to create bonding between the company and employees.

Leading the bandwagon predictably are the most global IT and ITeS companies, followed closely by banks, hotels and telecom companies. The X’ mas and New Year spirit is evident in companies like Hutch, Leela Palace Kempinski hotel and HSBC, which have put up big X’ mas trees and planned year-end bashes for their employees.

At Infosys, India’s most profitable IT company, techies will be getting creative this year-end. According to an Infosys spokesperson: “Many of our development centres across the world have lined up events like crib making contests, best dressed santa, short story writing, cubicle decoration, fancy dress, carol singing and also cultural events like skits, puppet shows dance shows etc.”

Mumbai-based BPO major FirstSource (formerly known as ICICI OneSource) has lined up events at all centres, including Kolkata, Bangalore and Mumbai.

“While the events remain more or less similar over the past couple of years, the scope, excitement, scale and spend has increased significantly,” says a company spokesperson. Satya Sai Sylada, HR head (India and Mauritius), Hinduja TMT, says their year-end celebration budget has gone up by 30% this year. It gets better when the company is American. Automobile major Ford has not only declared a week-long holiday starting December 26, it organised a big New Year bash for its employees last week.

Bangalore-based Sasken Communication Technologies has given its employees a nine-day vacation, beginning from December 23.

Advertising company JWT has a party with the theme ‘pimps and whores’ that will attempt to bring out the ‘wild bollywood side’ of its employees and urges them to use turn up at their funkiest best.

The budget for the annual bash, which is being arranged for about 300 employees in Mumbai, has gone up by 20% this year.

Big 92.7 FM radio station is promoting the idea of ‘secret santa’ — an attempt to spread the bonhomie between employees. “It’s easy to go out and get generic gifts for employees, but with this idea there is a secret santa for every employee who has to try and find out what their colleague wants. The idea is to get employees involved,” says Farida Kaliyadan, station head. The idea has been a hit with 300 employees in the southern region.

But not every company has a party to usher in the New Year. Intelenet Global Services has decided to celebrate this Christmas with a difference by playing Santa Claus and gift to the underprivileged.

The theme for this year’s Christmas celebration at Intelenet is ‘gift a Christmas’. FirstSource is collecting items like rice and toiletries to donate to orphanages and old-age homes. Dell International Services has come up with the idea of the `Dell wishing tree’. KS Narahari, director-communications, Dell International Services India, says: “This is part of our `helping you grow’ initiative. We have placed a box next to the Christmas trees on each floor of our four centres, with a chart featuring names, pictures and details of 50 underprivileged children in the age group of 5-15 years. The company is requesting employees to buy appropriate gifts for children which we will hand over to them later.”

(With inputs from Shreya Biswas, Yamini Dhall, Meenakshi Verma & Arun Iyer. This is the first of a three-part series.)