 "Broadridge's 'Compass' offers depth to middle management in IT firms")
“How do you make people valuable is one thing that the companies can think of. It is every company's responsibility to make its people valuable. Organisations have to invest in helping people stay relevant,” Broadridge Financial Solutions (India) managing director, V Laxmikanth, told Business Standard.
To illustrate the problem, Laxmikanth cited a recent interview of Wipro chief executive officer, CT Kurien, with digital television news network Boom Live. In the interview, Kurien stated his company needed middle managers, who really add to technology but not those who just manage people. “Because, having a person who sits as router, routing traffic from one end to the other, communicating upward and managing downwards is not a function that you require long-term.That particular skill-set is not going to be required any more.”
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According to Laxmikanth, the IT companies, which have not built core expertise in the system, are unable to add value and scale. “Scale is no longer a function of headcount, it is more a function of what value I can bring to the table.”
Keeping this in view, he said, Broadridge had launched ‘Compass’, a career pathing tool that allows people to shape their career. “Today, this strategy has paid off. I don't worry about what my middle management is doing because the middle management has that depth.”
NYSE-listed Broadridge is a provider of investor communications and technology-driven solutions for broker-dealers, banks, mutual funds and corporate issuers globally. It posted a revenue of $1.13 billion and net earnings of $ 67 million for the six months ended December 31, 2014. India, where it has two centres, accounts for 30 per cent of its global headcount of about 6,000 people.
Under the Compass programme, Laxmikanth said, anybody who joins the organisation needs to understand the company in the first two years, during which period they are called as ‘generalists’. At the end of two years, the employees need to make a choice. There are four tracks they can choose from - product, technology, business and leadership. Once they make a choice, the company will help them plan their career for the next 7-8 years. The focus is on building experts.
“There is a lot of thought, effort and resources gone into this. With this, we have managed to build a culture with expertise in our headcount. We are able to scale our business without the unnecessary headcount,” he said.
Stating that the company’s product track was extremely strong, Laxmikanth said Broadridge associates, who had chosen the product track, would be asked to focus on understanding the product.
For instance, he explained, Broadridge today is in a position to connect to all the 800 broker dealers in the US. The company gets daily feedback from the brokers. Through this entire investor communications, the company developed a product called proxy voting platform. “There is no other company, which has built a proxy voting platform. So, what we decided in 2008-09 was that our associates focus on understanding the product.”
Similar is the case with the technology track. “If someone wants to be world-class Java expert,” he will be helped in attaining this. The business track is about understanding 70-odd markets where the company has operations. These are market experts. The leadership track is about motivating, managing people.
“We consciously put the four tracks together. We divided people in the order of these tracks based on what they wanted to do. We have a model where it takes 7-8 years to become experts. It’s a very clearly defined path,” Laxmikanth said.
As a result, he said, Broadridge never retrenched people since its inception. “We have 150 people, which is 8- 9 per cent of our headcount (in India), who have been with us for more than a decade. This is an extremely strong statistics and important trend,” he added.