India's best companies to work for 2017: Pitney Bowes won't hound you for attendance

Rank: 9
Pitney Bowes
Founded: 2007
Employee strength: 660
Gender Ratio (F/M): 1:3.93
Rank 2016: 29

NEW DELHI: A great place to work isn’t always about fun and games. At the Pitney Bowes headquarters in Noida, tucked away in the suburban areas of the national capital region, most heads are down and busy at work.

The office is frills-free and sports an old-school cubicle format with cabins for the bosses and meeting rooms filled with teams discussing projects.

One busy person is 30-year-old Shachi Dhawan, director, professional services, who heads a team of 90, of which 25 are women. Dhawan joined PB in 2014 and soon after that she had a baby. The company then provided four months of maternity leave, but she came back to work in just two and a half months after her delivery. Coming back to work earlier than required was a choice Dhawan made on her own.

“Working here isn’t stressful,” she says. “My managers were supportive and I had the option to work from home and flexi-time when I was required to be in office.”

This could be one of the factors why the company boasts of an average attrition rate of 12 per cent, while the industry average remains between 15 per cent & 20 per cent.

Isha Khurana, 30, has been with the company for nearly three years and has recently moved to a strategic planning role which requires her to work directly with the company’s managing director Manish Choudhary’s office.

“Being able to interact with the senior leadership is very encouraging. This role requires me to take decisions on the trot and that’s very good for my career,” she says.

Choudhary, who was PB’s first employee in India, says there’s no one thing that makes the company an employer of choice. "All the ingredients that go into the recipe have to be in right proportion. Our ingredients start at people and making sure that their hearts and minds are in one place."

Another ingredient is the company’s ability to provide growth opportunities. Close to 70 per cent of the people who joined the company in India in the first year are still with the company and Choudhary says, " All of them have taken global roles and opportunities. The type of exposure you get here, I don't think many companies offer that. Our people know how their growth progression would be. When you see your seniors succeed, you feel motivated. It becomes a pattern."

The pattern incorporates a high degree of trust and empowerment. For instance, PB does not monitor employee attendance. "There is a bio-metric scanner for security reasons, but unless an employee's work is suffering, we do not monitor attendance and time spent," says Ruchi Bhalla, director, HR.

Bhalla's work includes leading change, building and enabling leadership, talent acquisition and management, organisational effectiveness and driving strategic processes.

For her, what has changed the company for the better, is the fact that they now operate like a startup. "Times are changing. We have to focus on what we can give people as employers. For this, we thought, why not concentrate on being accelerators and providing space for innovation within the office itself? This would help keep the workforce on its toes with hackathons," she says.

The result: nearly a third of the pitched projects during the company's hackathon, PB League of Innovation this year, have become products for clients.