Innovation at HCL
The world's most modern management in India, HCL Technologies is empowering its employees and pointing the way to the future of business. Fortune, April 14, 2006.
Every employee retes their boss, their boss, and any three other company managers they choose, on 18 question using a 1- 5 scale. Such 360-degree evaluations are not uncommon, but at HCL all results are posted online for every employee to see. That's un-heard-of!
And that's not all. Every HCL employee can at any time create and electronic 'ticket' to flag anything they think requires action in the company. Amazingly, such tickets can only be 'closed' by the employees themselves. And Nayar [Vineet Nayar is president of India's 30,000-employee HCL Technologies (Research)] is vigilant that managers not intimidate employees about creating or closing tickets. Managers are evaluated partly based on how many tickets their departments are creating - the more the better.
In addition, every employee can post a question or comment on any subject in a public process called 'U and I'. About 400 come in each month, and questions and answers are all posted on the intranet.
''I want to be the company that gives superior service to may employees compared to everybody else,'' he explains. He also firmly believes the ideas that will guide HCL into the future will come not from his, but from below. Early signs suggest his bold strategy is working.Nayar has only been president for a year, a tumultuous one in which most of these innovations have been implemented. But in that time the attrition rate has dropped in half, he says. HCL's innovations are not only managerial. The company aims to become a strategic partner with customers by working with them on business process management and by magaging infrastructure remotely, a business it has pioneered in India, says Nayar. The strategy has succeeded with AMD (Research), a marquee customer for which the company does the above mentioned business. Another key custmer is Cisco (Research), a 10-year customer with whom HCL is now embracing another form of innovation-shared risk. Since February, HCL has been completely responsible for engineering one Cisco product. It gets paid based on how well the product sells. In engineering all this innovation, Nayar's humility appears to be a potent managerial asset.
Which policy of management aims at distribution of authority among the lower levels of management and empowering its employees?

Explanation

Decentralisation