The CACTUS Way #4: Speak up and listen actively; differences enrich us.
India has four public holidays when all offices, schools, banks, and government offices are required to be shut.
As a global organization with customers from over 100 countries, this was stopping us from being available to our customers. This rule of keeping operations shut during four public holidays was turning away many of our regular clients, who had come to depend on us for their recurring needs.
To be able to keep our offices open on these four public holidays, we had to apply for special permission from the local government. And one of the prerequisites of securing this permission was to get at least 70% of our staff to declare that they agreed to working on these four holidays.
We always placed our customers first—we still do! This was the rationale we presented to our employees. Everybody knew that our customers were some of the busiest people working on critical research, some of it potentially lifesaving. Our national holidays were of no consequence to these researchers. We had to be available to them when they needed us.
There were a few voices who disagreed with the move. They said we were too customer-focused and growth-oriented and didn’t seem to care about the happiness of the employees. One employee was particularly vocal. “I am not going to sign this!” she said. She said that we should not force people to work on holidays. She, like most of us, looked forward to the holidays as welcome breaks where one can spend quality time with family, and she felt we were taking away their personal time.
I tried to explain our rationale to her but we failed to reach a mutual agreement. At a simplistic level, it was a choice between the customers’ need and our employees’ happiness, and we chose the former. Many thought this was unfair. Still, a majority of the people understood the rationale and gave us their consent. We managed to get the special permission to operate on the four public holidays. Our scale of operations was small back then, so keeping the office open on these days meant that the entire team had to be at work to be able to serve our customers.
Even today, we work on these four public holidays. But because our team is much bigger now, we can allow almost 70% of our team in India to take an off on these four days. The remaining 30% who work on these days are in client-facing roles and they get a compensatory holiday on another day. Besides, we actively communicate this arrangement to new recruits so that they are prepared and also understand the rationale for keeping the office open.
Having grown, we are now in a position to draft policies that take into account both our customers’ needs and our employees’ requirements, and we make concerted efforts to be more conscious of what makes our employees happy. But it took us a long time to get here. I feel if the employee had not challenged us back then, we would not have some of the people-friendly policies we have today.
Things are constantly changing around us, and we need to keep adapting. We need strong, passionate voices to keep us in check and force us to look at things from various perspectives. We may not always have a satisfactory solution in the moment, but these conversations help shape how we progress. If the employee had not shared her views as passionately as she did, we would have implemented our solutions considering they were the best and didn’t need any revision. Voicing your opinion is important. You never know how it could shape the future for you and many around you.
This writeup is part of a series called The CACTUS Way Leader Stories. The CACTUS Way is what we collectively call our 8 guiding principles. We asked the senior cadre at CACTUS to share personal experiences where they practiced or identified with these guiding principles. These stories of struggle and reinvention, despair and hope, conflict and collaboration, and self-doubt and self-discovery make for an interesting read.
Learn more about The CACTUS Way here: https://cactusglobal.com/about-us/culture-and-values/
