Soliciting Ideas


Aquil Busrai, executive director – HR, IBM India/South Asia who points out the above ideology says that being alive to this change in the workforce of the 21st century by building HR policies to support this will help attract potential candidates and at the same time, create a highly motivated workforce. And this can only be possible if employees are empowered to contribute to their brand’s growth and potential candidates, too, feel that the employer truly believes in “employee empowerment” and is not just paying lip service.

Arnab Banerjee, VP- sales & marketing, Ceat which has an ‘Advisory Management Council (AMC)’, an employee group consisting of high-calibre young professionals who ideate over critical strategic issues facing the company’s future growth plans, says, “Involving employees in the process gets them to share with the company their views and ideas. The recent repositioning exercise that CEAT undertook was spearheaded by a young CEAT marketing team.” When CEAT embarked on the brand repositioning exercise, they realised that the proposition of “Born Tough” and the rhino as the identity, though salient had long lost their relevance. “While the non-commercial team and the younger employees were clearly for the new identity, there was strong opposition from the commercial marketing team/older employees who saw the rhino as still relevant in the truck segment. A very young team orchestrated this entire exercise of convincing the entire set of employees before launching the identity change campaign,” adds Banerjee.

Propagating ideas…

Anurag Jain, Regional Managing Director-Asia Pacific and President- Applications Solutions (AS) and Insurance & Business Process Solutions (IBPS), Perot Systems believes that new age companies can achieve success when the branding or management strategies of the company are derived through a strong foundational culture of employee participation. Employees and potential candidates are tuned in to the market dynamics and in this age of web 2.0 and pervasive social media, they are the main influencers of the company’s brand in the marketplace. For the branding of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative, they called for nominations from associates and received several entries. The name that was finally shortlisted was ‘Deeksha’, a sanskrit word that stands for initiation of divine energy transfer. Even a suggestion as small as making the pronunciation right of the company name was taken into consideration. “The “Perot” in Perot Systems is pronounced with “T” being silent; our associates wanted to ensure that the name was pronounced correctly and hence we began a radio campaign to ensure that the correct pronunciation reached out to people,” adds Jain. At IBM, recently, when one of the business units was re-defining its vision and mission, they sought the creative talent of their employee base. They reached out to the employees through a contest, which enabled them to submit their creative ideas.

Fostering ideas…

At Birlasoft, they had created a new brand identity and there was a slight difference between the old logo and the new logo. “The challenge we had, was to make the internal audience aware and receptive to this change. We decided to create a graphical animation with a real model in it. The model we used was an employee. The whole series was around how this character learns different aspects of the brand and in the process evolves from a casual, laidback person into a thorough professional. The campaign was an instant hit,” adds Shiva Subramaniam, assistant. manager, brand marketing and corporate communications, Birlasoft. Vijay Nair, business analyst, Birlasoft narrates another experience: Birlasoft Hyderabad center was just setup and not many knew about the company. We had to establish brand awareness, primarily among prospective employees. People at the Hyderabad office wanted an aggressive local brand presence. We set up a local team of people from diverse roles with a common voice and christened it as ‘Voice of Birlasoft’ with two clear objectives through which the exercise was carried out: CSR and external and internal branding activities.

So the next time, you are planning a brand revamp, besides, just the branding team, do remember to shoot an email to all your employees as the ideas and suggestions put forth by them might just take you by surprise!