Transformation

It was summer of 2009 and as part of internal review, we were tasked to audit personal files of more than 60,000 employees in India. None of us had any experience of carrying out such massive task so we sought help from one and all. We asked for people from other teams to help us on part time basis over and above their daily work and honestly were also surprised to see how many helping hands came forward when we asked such help in absolute honesty. However, we still needed some administrative help to draw these files, sorting them, and putting them back post audit closure, hence our local facilities team supplied us with few “office boys” with trolleys for file transport. One of these office boys was “S####a” (let’s call him Ahmed). Ahmed was punctual, neatly dressed, always smiling, ready to stretch beyond his office duties / hours and very important eager to learn. He will listen to our instructions very carefully, asks for clarifications not to make mistakes and always ready to learn as well share his knowledge with other office boys.

Post phase 1 of total 3 phases, he was the only one who remained in the job whereas all other office boys ran away sensing the hard work with our team. By start of phase 2, recognizing his good contributions and post many internal debates (as P files were highly sensitive with huge risks), we agreed to let him lead the team of office boys and start to coordinate the file movement which was very critical so as not to lose a single personal file. By end of all 3 phases of this project, his knowledge was almost on par with our existing associates of 2+ years’ experience. With closure of project, he requested if he can continue to work with our P-File team and our team lost no opportunity to hire him as contract staff. Now this is the beginning of someone from office boy to contract staff in our team who was no longer pushing the file trolley, supplying tea/coffee to our staff but sitting in an air-conditioned office auditing new personal files and raising issues of missing documents.

Within 2 years, Ahmed was as good as any full-time associate in our teams but there was one problem as we couldn’t hire him as full-time resource for lack of a basic education leave alone graduate degree. But Ahmed was determined and ambitious, joined an evening school to complete his 10th and 12th standard.

By this time, thanks to companies like MS, Google, Yahoo etc who had their CEOs without a college degree and were hiring people without graduate degrees, we also decided to make few exceptions to hire “exceptional” people without a formal undergraduate degree.

With above changes, Ahmed got converted into a full-time resource and now having received 2 promotions in the same company, looks after the personal file process for a global pool of more than 600,000 employees across 52 countries.

To me Ahmed is a role model for perseverance, hard-working and a guy with “never say die” attitude. May his tribe increase.

I am sharing this experience because sometimes we got to take that leap of faith in people with no experience or formal degrees but great attitude and soft skills and work to make it a success. Afterall there is no single defined formula for success. ?