The key to any successful company starts from within: it’s people! The more informed they are about their roles in relation to other departments as well as what customers need – not just wants- will give them an edge in their performance and satisfaction. Employees with all of the necessary information, power, recognition, reward, and training needed are the biggest assets of INTECH.
During the pandemic when every INTECHian is working from home, it is critically required to put in some structures to keep everyone connected, informed, and motivated. To deal with the challenges that come with remotely working teams, INTECH created structured online meetings not only between project teams and the senior leadership but also between cross-functional teams across the organization. This encourages empowering communication between departments and individuals across different teams and departments.
The entire workforce of INTECH is divided into groups that we call ‘Houses’. Each house contains approx 20 people from the company and is led by a couple of senior leaders from the core team. The synergy resulting from these properly structured and empowered teams is incredible.
With these relatively smaller groups of people in each house, we created the structure of ‘House Calls. These are online meetings happening once a month and provide a great opportunity for the company to reach out and be connected to each and every employee consistently and powerfully.
Through House Calls INTECH strives to empower teams to make decisions for themselves, and hence we are able to create cohesive, productive work environments where people feel like they have a stake in the company. We use this strategy because it allows employees to adapt quickly and efficiently when circumstances change without having our leadership become stagnant or out of touch with what is happening on the front lines.
House Calls are ideally one-hour online meetings either on Zoom or Google Meet. And these calls do not include the specific discussions of the projects that the employees are working on, however, they share their inputs and their experiences of working on those projects.
The objectives of House Calls are:
- Knowing each other
- Provide feedback and inputs
- Knowledge sharing
- Acknowledging each other for achievements
We get to know each other and interact being INTECHian from different groups and departments. It is a very informal way to know each other apart from formals needs. We show them the world of INTECH by sharing the growth of INTECH in terms of financials and employee headcount and breakdowns or breakthroughs if any. This helps us to maintain a very transparent culture amongst our employees.
It is a concept designed after nationwide lockdown due to COVID 19, with the perspective of being in communication while we are at home. We interact with each employee to know them and to support them if needed. However, the core intention of the House Calls for everyone is ‘Sourcing Being INTECHians’ and empower each one to deal with anything powerfully.