The eclectic athlete
Rajiv Mehta, a young leader himself, has created an office space based on his understanding of what his young team wants
When some chief executives want to interact with their colleagues, they casually saunter around the office. Others prefer a more purposeful stride. Rajiv Mehta, 34, takes an entirely different route. The managing director of the Indian subsidiary of sports apparel brand Puma slides—literally. The fastest route between Mehta’s rooftop cabin and that of his colleagues’ is a red, fibre-reinforced plastic, Puma-branded slide.
The slide was an afterthought, explains Mehta. The office occupies several floors in a compact commercial building in Bangalore’s Indiranagar. During the office interior fit-out, Mehta was allocated the top-most cabin, situated on the building’s terrace roof, alongside the company’s cafeteria. Colleagues predicted that he would squander time and energy running up and down the stairs, as most of his day is spent in meeting colleagues, so he asked if the space could accommodate a slide. An existing architectural void in the space allowed a slide to be constructed without any structural change to the building interior. The slide is now used regularly by Mehta and his team.
Office as living room
A curated assortment of furniture and furnishings decorate the room, built around the theme of “a little bit of modern and a little bit of retro", says Mehta. There are leather rugs, a vintage-looking chest of drawers for papers, a hand-drawn cart serving as a magazine stand and a custom-made sofa, all sporting the brand’s red and white colours. Slogans and visuals endorse sport; Mehta himself runs a few kilometres every morning. A particularly witty artwork by American artist Joey Roth captures typical office personality-types in the form of shapes.
Mehta says he likes assembling pieces from different sources, including relatively unknown designers and artists. As a result, the workspace almost resembles a living room or study—informal and personalized. The offices of those running small creative businesses often adopt this design approach; it is far less visible in the larger cabins of more corporate marketers, such as Puma.
Office as brand ambassador
The goal was to bring the brand philosophy into the workspace, says Mehta. “We call ourselves the DJ who fuses sports and lifestyle very well. Joy and energy are very important elements of our work culture." With a limited budget, the team relied on in-house expertise for the décor.
Office as hang-out zone
The workplace’s pronounced emphasis on leisure and recreation prompts an obvious question—does anyone actually get any work done? Mehta acknowledges that there are inefficiencies, such as elongated lunch or coffee breaks, unlike in the Western world, where “1 hour means 1 hour, you’ll get back to work; coffee break means 5 minutes, and you’ll get back to work". He strives to ensure that Puma’s informal work culture is balanced with a regular schedule of meetings where deliverables and timelines are monitored.
There are other challenges of working with a more wired generation—attention spans are often shorter, especially in meetings. But equally, young people can be quicker at processing information and making decisions, notices Mehta.
Office of the future?
Its approach is more likely to be echoed in creative organizations such as advertising agencies, rather than mainstream marketers.
Mehta is clearly younger than most chief executives, and has also been in the job for longer than most chief executives—for seven years, starting 2005, when Puma sales in India were negligible. Youth and job longevity is an unusual combination, and helps to explain how his team and he have translated the Puma sporting spirit into spatial design.
Now, Puma is no longer the start-up it was when Mehta joined them. Although Mehta says he cannot share sales figures, he says the brand has a 25% share of the ₹ 2,000 crore sports footwear, apparel and accessories market.
His aim is to establish Puma as a leading apparel brand, especially given that competitors Reebok and Adidas are embroiled in an ongoing controversy relating to accounting fraud at Reebok’s Indian subsidiary.
As the company expands its business and its headcount, it will be interesting to see whether its workspace retains its physical elements, and its quirky sense of humour.
Aparna Piramal Raje meets heads of organizations every month to investigate the connections between their workspace design and working styles.
Photographs by Jagadeesh NV/Mint
Write to Aparna at businessoflife@livemint.com
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