‘Being’ and ‘Doing’: The Yin and Yang of Go MMT

Travel, Tourism and hospitality are the most badly impacted sectors during the pandemic and being a travel company MakeMytrip has also been largely affected. How the HR Leaders have paved the way out and have navigated the organisation and its employees by ensuring that the employees are safe, connected, productive and motivated throughout. 

Beyond her KRA’s, Nikita Zutshi is also a part of the core team of Corporate Social Responsibility. Along with colleagues, she facilitated the launch of the ‘Be the Change’ initiative. The initiatives have been taken to help offset carbon footprints. Some notable achievements have been - Plantation of a Million Trees in Udaipur & Rajsamand districts of Rajasthan through Seva Mandir; All our offices are 100% single-use plastic-free, and MMT is working with government bodies & others to make Neil Island in Andaman single-use plastic-free.

Elaborating about some of her significant initiatives; shared that she started two channels called Holiday Experts (HE) and Certified Travel Associate (CTA). HE is an offering for stay-at-home women. CTA and Certified travel associate includes retirees, students, anyone with a love for travelling. Both models are 100 per cent variable payout. 

All around the world; the travel & Tourism sector has cost thousands of jobs and also witnessed a steep low graph of revenue. The company took several cost rationalisations and restructuring measures to re-engineer the cost structure to make it more variable or semi-variable. The good news, however, is that with the business coming back, we restored our team members salaries.

MakeMyTrip has been upping the game in HR with a singular focus to help the organisation lead its next curve of growth and excellence. The last few years have seen them go through many significant events like the merger of Ibibio group with MMT, the launch of a new line of businesses, the ramp-up of tech centres in Bangalore and many more. They operate in a very dynamic and ever-evolving environment, as the travel industry is susceptible to many external variables that impact their business. 

In such scenario, as HR they have been ahead of our game with initiatives around, strong HR Business Partnering structure, extensive work on employer branding, deployment of progressive people policies like “Uncapped Leave” and “International reward trips”, creating a sustainable and productive work culture, managing Perceptions, creating right structures, the right person for the right job and many more.

One on one and group discussions with key people (cross-section of all levels) revealed that what is most important is Customer Focus, Excellence and Innovation. Exploring further on the lived experience of culture, we found that most people found the culture to be caring, allowing experiments, a fun place to be, execution-focused and innovative. Keeping all this in mind, we are suggesting a “Being and Doing” Model to describe our core values and our collective behaviours.