BackWork Place | An ear to the ground
How senior managers can gain insights into the business by making deliveries and serving the customer directly
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On a February morning, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal decided not to drive to his company’s headquarters in Koramangala but head further south to an office off the Hosur Road, near Bangalore’s electronics city. This is where the home-grown e-commerce giant, with revenue exceeding ₹ 1,000 crore for the year ended 31 March 2013, houses its customer support call centre. Bansal spent the morning listening in on customer calls, making a note of the kind of complaints that came in, and the speed at which Flipkart agents were able to resolve them.
Later, Bansal took his seat at a console and started taking calls himself. “I realized that we need to empower our agents more—especially while taking decisions on replacements—by supplying them easily retrievable data on the basis of which they can take quick decisions," says Bansal.
Work at the front lines has traditionally been part of the training for senior management across several industries. Internet company Yahoo!’s chief executive officer (CEO) Marissa Mayer is widely reported to have been a checkout clerk early in her career. Raymond Bickson, managing director and CEO, Indian Hotels Co. Ltd, worked in the kitchen and as a waiter in his early days. And many executives at the consumer goods company Hindustan Unilever Ltd have started their careers visiting retail outlets as salesmen, taking orders, even collecting cash.
But too often CEOs retreat from the front line. It is what London, UK, based James Allen, director at consulting firm Bain and Co., terms ‘‘the danger of the disappearing CEO". In a post on the company Founder’s Mentality Blog, Allen writes: “CEOs are increasingly coached to stay in their box—to work through the organization structure and not directly with the front line. While this empowers others in the organization, it also can lead to a lack of direction within the company and a loss of any sense of what is truly important."
We spoke to CEOs across industries like retail, food and banking, and they say they make a conscious effort to stay on the front lines through formal or informal programmes, and explain how it benefits their organizations.
Lessons from the ground
For CEOs and senior management, working on the front lines can bring crucial insights. “It’s where the moment of truth happens, and where all the action happens," says Ajay Kaul, CEO of Jubilant FoodWorks Ltd, the master franchisee of the Domino’s Pizza restaurant chain in the country. Every Monday, the 50-year-old CEO sets aside his regular formal attire and puts on a blue T-shirt with red collar, beige trousers and cap, and sticks on a name tag along with everyone else at the head office in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, in a show of solidarity with all the uniformed employees at Domino’s stores. And one day every three months, he reports to work at a Domino’s store in the New Delhi region, joining the staff in mopping floors, cleaning tables, making pizzas and delivering orders. Kaul and his senior team have been doing this for years, and he says it has been the trigger for some great ideas. “I was working at the New Friends Colony branch of Domino’s in New Delhi, and I saw a few customers come, look at the prices ( ₹ 60-plus per pizza) and hesitate. And next door at McDonald’s (a fast-food outlet), there were long lines. I realized then that if we wanted to have long lines too, we had to do something about our prices," he says.
Kaul went back and worked extensively with his marketing team to try and create a pizza at the ₹ 30 price point. That proved hard, but almost a year later, in 2008, Domino’s launched Pizza Mania—the pizza at ₹ 35.
Years later, this stint would stand him in good stead as a big multinational client had a problem with a remittance. “Having worked on the bank floor with these remittances and funds transfers, I was able to quickly identify what the problem could be due to," Bhatia recalls. Today, as CEO of CSB, a 93-year-old bank with over ₹ 23,000 crore in business for the year ended March, Bhatia spends as much time as he can in the bank’s 430 branches. He accepts that it is not always possible or practical for a CEO to actually do a floor job. “Today, for me to go into a bank branch and sit down and do a teller’s job may be contrived," he says. He prefers instead to invest time connecting with customers and encouraging employees to make the business more customer-centric, improving service standards by working on small things like a welcoming smile and a greeting.
Mark Ashman, CEO at HyperCITY Retail (India) Ltd, began his career at Marks and Spencer, UK, as a management trainee working on the shop floor. “I had to work as a sales associate, get to the store at 5am and receive stock, as well as work late on the floor in the food section. The training from then still resonates and helps me enormously even today in being able to understand the basic challenges of running a store and being able to relate to the work," he says.
Ashman, now based in Mumbai, still walks the floor several times a month, in different locations across the country. On Saturdays, he picks up a trolley and walks the aisles at a HyperCITY store in Mumbai, doing his shopping. Ninety per cent of customer insights come from being in the store, talking with sales associates and customers, and only 10% from spreadsheets, says Ashman, who takes the Saturday afternoon learnings back to the corporate office on Monday to formulate policy and address lacunae.
Taking this one step further, Sir Terry Leahy, the legendary CEO and architect of Britain’s supermarket success Tesco, writes in his book, Management In Ten Words: Practical Advice From the Man Who Created One Of the World’s Largest Retailers, about working for one week every year as a shop assistant. The CEO mans checkout counters, stocks shelves and answers customer queries. “I learnt more in that week than any other week that year (2003)…a lot about what was going wrong—things you could see only by doing them, not by watching or visiting," he writes. He discovered first-hand, for example, how much the design of a uniform, a merchandise plan or even a staff rota could affect customer experience at Tesco stores.
Leahy went on to decree that all senior managers at Tesco, as many as 3,000 of them, had to spend a week every year working as general assistants in a store, in a programme he christened TWIST (Tesco Week in Store Together). The experiment, he says, was a success. Everyone returned with a greater sense of self-worth as they could see for themselves the impact of the decisions they took on the shop floor.
Ultimately, it’s about everybody—including the CEO—pitching in. Managers can also use this tack to show employees that they are prepared to do what they ask of front-line employees—especially the more onerous or tedious work, like coming in on holidays.
In fact, senior managers at Flipkart are being encouraged to make the delivery rounds. Since April, as many as 75 senior managers have been given call centre and delivery tasks. This is especially important, says Bansal, because business has scaled up; with more product categories and sales across more pincodes, it is necessary to scale up customer connect too. “It’s important to be in the line of fire," he says.
The promoters of HT Media Ltd, which publishes Hindustan Times and Mint, and Jubilant FoodWorks are closely related. There are no promoter crossholdings.
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