The company has launched ‘Simplicity 2.0’ which aims to burst silos and empower employees. The cosmetic major reached out to over 250 employees and asked them to list the ‘biggest time wasters’ in the organisation. The outcome was 106 suggestions. “We are currently focusing on the first 25 and will come up with clear solutions. The idea is to reduce complexities and help people collaborate better,” says Jain.

Similarly, Titan has passed on the responsibility for profit and balance sheet to a large number of people in the hierarchy. “Around 70-80 people started owning profit and cash responsibility,” says Venkataraman.

Marico, meanwhile, calls itself an organisation which inculcates an entrepreneurial mindset. Last year it launched an initiative called ‘Talent Value Proposition’, which asked employees to chart their own road map in the organisation. “It’s not about introducing new programmes and policies, we firmly believe that it is imperative to keep the entire talent value proposition contextual to the future of the industry and the organisation. We just didn’t want to retain and attract new talents, but we also wanted them to acknowledge our value proposition and help them stay and grow along with us,” explains Saugata Gupta, MD and CEO, Marico.

The pandemic, says, Arvind Laddha, CEO, Mercer India, has made organisations more open to taking risks and becoming agile. “They have managed to navigate uncertainty and are realising that it’s a given. But not all are walking the talk. One reason for this is the compulsion to protect what they have and not bend the house.”

Faridun Dotiwala, partner, McKinsey, agrees with Laddha. According to Dotiwala, while 80-90% companies say that agility is most important for them, only 30-40% are actually walking the talk. “The ones which are seriously trying to reinvent are just 3-4%. Companies that have done it have experienced a 30-40% increase in revenue and profitability,” he adds.

Dotiwala says most legacy organisations wanting to become agile have a tendency to equate speed with agility. “Agile organisations combine speed and stability. Agility has to be linked to the ability of the organisation to reconfigure people’s strategies, resources and structures to the most value-creating opportunities. It’s not just allowing people to do what they want, agile organisations are far more disciplined and transparent,” he further explains.

Culture Of Taking Risks

Agility comes with a huge appetite for risk. Jeff Bezos, founder, Amazon, often tells his employees that taking risks and failing is important. “Jeff says learning from your failures and applying them to the next big idea is at the heart of delighting customers,” says Deepti Varma, director, HR, Amazon India. She cites the example of Amazon phone, which didn’t do well at all and was pulled out within months of its launch. Despite the innovation failing Varma claims none of the members who were part of that initiative were penalised. “In fact, the leader of that team today holds a senior leadership position. We have a process called COE (correction of errors), wherein we put down what we learnt from the failed initiative and how we would use that learning for our future innovations.”

“We want to make risky jobs attractive, so we create a safe environment wherein if one does jobs that need fast turnaround or involve an element of risk taking, we invest time there and tell the employee not to worry about risk-taking,” explains Razdan of HUL. She says the FMCG major has carved out a unit which focuses on creating new brands. “Their focus is very different from the core of the business. Employees who are part of it get short-term, long-term as well as team rewards. It is less about functional silos, and more about telling people to take risks,” she adds.

Risk-taking is at the heart of innovations, and industry experts believe the onus is on leaders to create an environment where not only do they empower their employees to take risks, but also back them if they fail. Nestle’s Narayanan cites the example of the Maggi crisis to drive home the point. He says after the company came out of the crisis (Nestle was accused of having lead content in Maggi noodles beyond permissible levels) in 2014, he asked his employees to build on the company’s strength. “I told them to fast-track our innovative capabilities as a company. Instead of launching a new product in two-and-half years we should try coming up with an innovation every six months. One of the missives that I gave my team was if everything fails, as chairman of the company I will take the onus.” The company came up with as many as 64 innovations within the first two years of the Maggi crisis.

Only one out of every 10 innovations succeed, but for that companies need to take risks and invest. The innovation could be a new product, packaging or even a service. Tanishq for instance, launched its ‘Endless Aisle’ programme during the pandemic, enabling consumers to shop from any store across the country on their mobile or tablet. A consumer in Jaipur got access to the inventory at the Tanishq store in Bhubaneswar and was able to buy a gold bangle unique to Odisha. Venkataraman says that the company managed to do ₹600 crore of sales through ‘Endless Aisle’ in FY21.

L’Oréal, on the other hand, trained over 2 lakh hair-dressers to give online beauty tips to their patrons during the pandemic. “All these ideas came from our empowered team,” says Jain.

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