The Human Spirit Is The Best Weapon: Priyanka Singh, CHRO, Excitel

How efficiently are you managing the productivity of the employees?

The COVID 19 pandemic has posed challenging times for everyone, disrupting life and business continuity. Understanding the need of the hour, we phased out our physical presence in the office by ensuring Digi-readiness. We transitioned our entire call center (100+ employees) to work from home in less than 3 days and have made the virtual office click in no time.

We were already in the habit of following our daily cadences through apps like ‘Asana’, which captures our daily logs and do weekly reviews on Zoom, thereby tracking efficiency and delivery of all team members. Each function head meets their team virtually in the morning at 10:00 am to help plan the daily activities of their team members and in the evening a follow-up call discusses the progress and issues faced if any.

Other daily reports like call center statistics, daily installations, uptime, etc. are being enabled through our cutting-edge call center and network monitoring tools. Besides, we are under “essential services” so some of our employees are already in field and I am deeply thankful for their commitment. It is their spirit and commitment which keeps Excitel going.

In these tough times, you play the lead role to keep up the motivation of all the people in the organization. How are you keeping people more happy and hopeful?

Our No 1 priority in these times is to keep our employees motivated and in a positive frame of mind. With the lockdown restricting regular interactions, we have taken multiple steps to keep employees motivated.

As an organization, we believe that the human spirit is the best weapon as well as a tool to help overcome such challenging times. That’s why we are sharing video stories of our ‘Value Champions’, star employees, who have risen above the situation and delivered positive results despite adverse situations. These stories are being shared on a weekly basis over email and team Whatsapp groups. To maintain camaraderie and express gratitude amongst teams, we also created a video showing how different employees are working from home and thanking every function for their endeavor. The top management regularly shares its videos and photographs while working over Whatsapp to portray we are in this together.

Communication is extremely important in such times, and we had a company-wide town hall on Zoom in which most (approx. 700) of the employees participated. The management shared the readiness of the company and addressed the difficulties and challenges employees are facing on the ground. The feedback was much more honest compared to a physical townhall since people feel more comfortable sharing diverse opinions over a chat medium compared to expressing it in front of the entire crowd. This created a shared feeling of a family that is together in this difficult time.

Besides this; we have introduced “Ask your HR”, an HR redressal forum, every Tuesday and Thursday between 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm to resolve employee grievances. In one time we have 30 to 40 participants who nominate themselves and we resolve their query then and there for faster redressal. Last but not least, we have introduced engagement activities to keep young agents and employees happy and motivated, with some fun games, chats, best workstation selfies among others to break the monotony and dullness while they work from home.

Are you using techniques for remote working using Cutting-Edge Goal Strategies (OKRs) for employees?

Yes, OKRs are very objective and easy to measure goals which are easy to measure even in remote working environments. Besides, our weekly review happens through apps like Asana and Zoom and so the management is well aware of the week to week progress on each of the OKR.

Due to Work from Home, all are finding some time to connect with each other. Is the 360-degree feedback mechanism workable while distancing?

Of course, the 360-degree feedback mechanism is based on anonymous web surveys and it is based on long term past performance. So this mechanism is working as it is. The results are being shared with the leaders, but of course, we have to wait for the office to open before we can share the results with all employees to ensure a wider impact.

HR leaders are playing a crucial role for all the employees. Are you opening channels for leadership and the employees to boost productivity?

Yes. As mentioned the Virtual Town Hall with nearly 700 employees gave us a great platform to have exchanges between the management and employees. The day at Excitel still begins with an address by our CEO, Vivek Raina, every day to lead by example and support employees in case of any difficulty. We don't believe in sitting in our own IVORY TOWER and making the ground staff work.

We have already formed a task force on some major issues and are working to remove those roadblocks thus enhancing productivity. I think as an organization we are very resilient and we have overcome many challenges in the past and hence I am quite certain we will rise above this difficult situation as well.