Shyamal Majumdar: The Qlife model

HUMAN FACTOR

For talent retention, Qualcomm India banks on innovation and industry-academia partnership

Qualcomm is a leader in developing and delivering innovative digital wireless communications products and services based on the company's CDMA digital technology. It is also in the Fortune magazine's list of the 100 best companies to work for. One of the best example of this is the almost nil attrition rate in the company's Indian subsidiary that employs 300 people right now and is proposing to take many more on board soon.

Qualcomm India President Kanwalinder Singh says the reason for this is simple: "Innovation is in the company's DNA and that means we make our people feel challenged all the time." Their ability to influence the organisation and their satisfaction with their professional work environment also helps build their commitment to the company. Being part of an innovative organisation is important both for retention and commitment, Singh says.

The "knowledge organisation" is also mindful of the role students in India will play in advancing high technology through difficult business cycles. That explains the company's bid to catch them young by teaming up with students of IIT Chennai and Bangalore to work at the cutting edge of technology. Qualcomm India is also thinking in terms of strengthening the academia-industry partnership by exploring funding options and setting up of labs in premier educational institutes in the country. "The company's experience all over the globe has shown such partnerships help attract talent: these brilliant minds see for themselves how committed Qualcomm is towards excellence," Singh says.

All this is part of the California-headquartered parent's worldwide best practices model called the Qlife that represents the culture at the company. QLife is a work/life balance solution. Apart from other HR initiatives, it offers counselling on family life through educational workshops, adoption assistance, child and elder care resource referral and so on. Qlife relates "to the whole person" and has nothing to do with career development. Leisure Life, for instance, offers classes in knitting, swimming and tennis, as well as adventure outings.

At the heart of Qualcomm's HR practice is a robust performance management system. As global corporations struggle to balance critical global HR strategies and local initiatives, the challenge is to blend the broad corporate strategies down to the local business units. Qualcomm uses that approach successfully for its employees located outside of the US.

Also consider the communication avenues the company has opened. Through a programme called "Executive Insight," senior executives talk with employees about company issues and opens themselves up to whatever questions employees might have about anything they do. Employees can learn about employment benefits, job openings, and the latest product initiatives from these presentations.

The company also has approved advanced engineering degree programmes on-line at all locations, live classroom sessions, web-based programmes and computer-based training in technical and professional areas such as leadership development, supervisory skills, time management and an award winning Corporate Learning Center that focuses on providing leading-edge learning and development solutions for local, regional and international offices.

Most of the company's training, particularly in technical skills and health and safety, have been developed in-house and delivered over the Intranet. Among the benefits seen are: much lower cost and greater consistency of quality in course provision, greater flexibility for the user in when they take training, and greater retention of learning because of the interactive nature of the coursework.

The HR practices, Qualcomm feels, should be flexible and customised to suit the needs of people of different age groups. Most companies make the mistake of having a standardised format. For example, a study done by Korn Ferry International titled What do employees really want? shows that what employees want depends very much on the stage where each one is in their career. All the main groups in the study say that their priorities are first work/life balance, and then job security, followed by financial rewards. The only group for whom job security drives retention is the late career group "" those over 50.

For early career employees (30 and under), job security does not have a positive effect on either retention or commitment, whereas career advancement is significant to the retention of this group. For mid-career employees (31 to 50), commitment to the company increases if they are able to manage their own careers, and professional satisfaction results in greater retention for this age group than for either their younger or older colleagues. For late career employees (over 50), professional satisfaction relates to neither retention nor commitment. This is the only group for whom job security drives retention.

The best example of Qualcomm's eagerness to present a humane face is evident from the following example: When most companies were laying off their workforces and announcing hiring freezes, Qualcomm held staff reduction to under 5 per cent and actually created 1,500 new jobs.