Employees First, Customers Second

By putting employees on top of the pyramid, an organization can hold on to talent while strengthening relationships with customers.

When I became president of global IT services firm HCL Technologies in 2005, the company was in a perilous situation. We were growing at a brisk pace — as high as 30 percent annual revenue increase — but even so were steadily losing market share to our competitors. Although many employees chose to look at the glass as half full, many of the most talented ones sensed we were headed for trouble and were making tracks for other companies. This combination of slowing growth and accelerating employee attrition worried me, as well as members of the management team, and I knew that something had to be done.

That something evolved into two initiatives. First, a revised and radical business strategy, providing end-to-end IT solutions to create partnerships with global customers, rather than discrete solutions on a short-term contract basis. Second, a management approach that came to be called Employees First, Customers Second. The central tenet is that management’s main responsibility is to do everything they can to maximize the efforts of employees who work in the value zone — the interface between employee and customer where genuine value is created.

Over a period of five years, the combination of our changed strategy and management approach produced results. We increased revenues even during the recession. We stemmed the outward flow of good employees. We increased the size of our typical contract and strengthened relationships with customers. We increased employee satisfaction scores. This article offers an overview of how we accomplished this transformation.

First, a word about strategy. In our knowledge-based economy, traditional paths to corporate growth such as product and service innovations are no longer as reliable as they once were. Few companies are able to produce a steady stream of product improvements, let alone real breakthroughs, to fuel significant growth and achieve or maintain market leadership. Few of us can achieve the sustained innovation and marketing genius of an Apple or a Google. Although new for us, the strategy of providing end-to-end IT services to create long-term partnerships with customers was the way the industry was going. We would still have to differentiate ourselves and gain a competitive advantage. The obvious solution was to focus on the “how” of our service offering: execution.