Sunday, January 31, 2010

HCL

After a couple days of sightseeing and cultural activities, we had to get down to business and start our corporate visits. The first corporate visit was to HCL, because we were severely delayed due to traffic, we were a bit late and did not get to do a tour of the facility but we did have a few interesting discussions regarding HCL as a company and what HCL provides to its employees to be recognized as the number one place to work in India. HCL provides 4 general business services; custom application development, BPO, engineering and design (hardware), and IT infrastructure management. They claim to have had 31% growth in 2009, however I would like to look into that a little closer, because in light of the current economic environment, that seems to be a bit high. What was of most interest to me was to hear about the human resource policies and benefits they offer their employees to be known as the number one employer. I was interested to compare these practices to those of the company I work for. They seem to have done a lot of research in employee engagement and they based a lot their initiatives in trying to increase employee engagement. Their format for making sure they were hiring and retaining individuals with high engagement were to find the difference makers, create an inclusive, rewarding, and engaging corporate philosophy, an encourage professional growth and cultural transformation. HCL offered a number of extra benefits for their employees, the one that stood out to me in particular is what they call the Genie. This is basically a concierge service that is offered to employees to help out with everyday tasks that can easily be done but take time the employee may not have. There was a fairly large list of the things the genie would be able to do for the employee, unfortunately I was not able to write them all down. This seems like it would be a service that would be nice to have for myself, considering the time and effort we give to our companies, it would be nice to know that they recognize and appreciate the time commitment and are willing to help out. Overall, the visit seemed a little rushed because we were so late, and the presentation felt like a sales pitch, but it was interesting and a good way to start out the series of corporate visits we were to make during the trip.

Later that night we were invited to the Parashar's home for dinner. It was a very enjoyable evening, Dr. and Mrs. Parashar were great hosts, the food was the best tasting food I have had to that point in India. They had a lovely house and were very friendly, it was also good to meet Monica's uncle, sister, and brother-in-law, everyone was very friendly and it was great to talk with them, especially Monica's sister and brother-in-law who lived in the U.S. and recently moved back to Delhi. I was really hoping to have the experience spending time in a social setting with individuals who were living in India, luckily this was the first of two opportunities we had to experience this great Indian hospitality.

No comments:

Post a Comment