Swimming against the tide

In this age of AI, creating an employee-first culture may seem counter-intuitive. But not if you believe in the primacy of building human relationships at the workplace

I must confess when I first heard that Vineet Nayar, the chief executive officer of HCLTech, a frontline Indian software firm, was propagating the concept of an employee-first culture almost two decades ago, I was more than a tad sceptical. How did it make sense to prioritise employee well-being over the holy grail of customer delight?

At the start of the 1990s, one of the precepts that had been drilled into us in business school came from Peter Drucker, one of the wisest management philosophers of all time. “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer,” he wrote.

Then