Steaming Ahead
By putting people ahead of structure,Forbes Marshall, rides high on a culture of openness and flexibility
Imagine an organisation where you can change your job portfolio if you are not satisfied with your current role. Imagine a workplace where the directors not only know the senior authorities by name but also every person working on the shopfloor along with their employment history, progress and family. Sounds something out of an international case study, doesn’t it?
Well, this is exactly how Forbes Marshall, India’s leading steam engineering and control instrumentation firm, functions. And rightly so it has been ranked the fifth best workplace for the year 2013-14 based on a survey conducted by the Great Place to Work Institute, across India. The company has won the accolade for the fifth time and is the only company in Pune to have consistently been ranked high in the survey year-on-year.
Employee engagement has been one of the core principles of the organisation. Naushad Forbes, director, Forbes Marshall, and vice-president, Confederation of Indian Industry, giving credit to his father, Darius Forbes, one of the founders of the company, says, “Around the mid-60s, my father made the company a ‘nopeon’ organisation. At that time peons were very common and the ‘no peon’ policy caused a lot of consternation in the company. All of our peons were put into other areas of work. In fact, one of them retired after 40 years as one of our most skilled packers.”
He further said that the principle was to not have people whose sole job in the company was to take care of someone else. “Each person should be valued for the skills and the contribution that they themselves make and each contribution is just as much deserving of worth, respect as any other. Each employee has different roles to play in the organisation and all should be respected equally. This very basic principle comes naturally to us today but at that time it was quite unusual.”
Farhad Forbes, director, Forbes Marshall and Naushad’s older brother, further cites an example where during the earlier days there were people on the machine shop called ‘helpers’. “Helpers were equivalent to a peon and they would load, unload the job and clean the machine. The machine operators wouldn’t do the same as they would hurt their back or harm themselves. We changed this philosophy and put safety mechanisms in place and thus the operator, even if he is a graduate, became responsible for the entire machine; be it lifting the equipment, handling or cleaning it. There were no more helpers.”
This philosophy is what the two brothers have inherited and have stuck to all these years. Says Farhad, “In the 90’s when I was at business school, management of HR was just beginning to formalise. While I learnt strategies and marketing, sources seen as competitive advantage, I also learnt one of the greatest lessons of life. I had a professor at Stanford Business School and he was one of the people who said that your greatest source of competitive advantage actually can come through people. And that is something very difficult to duplicate because marketing strategy or manufacturing practises can be copied but one cannot copy culture as it comes from people. So, if you can have a culture that is built on people that is a sustainable competitive advantage, which is what, I think, we have built up.”
To read more, please click here – Manufacturing Today , Issue 9, Sept 2014
Ref: Manufacturing Today, Issue 9, Sept 2014
