It?s all about technology. And precisely that is what makes Symantec India an attractive employer for its 2,700 tech-savvy employees. Symantec, the $5-billion, California-based market leader in security solutions acquired Veritas, a key player in back-up software, in 2005 and thus began its foray into India with 1,300 employees. Symantec had issues with retention, post acquisition, due to the diverse focus areas of the two companies and, needless to say, synergising takes time. Pune-based Abhay Valsangkar, senior director, human resources, who has been with the company for over three years, has spent two-and-a-half decades in the HR function. A graduate from Tata Institute of Social Sciences with a law degree from Bombay University and previous assignments at Cadbury?s, ICI and Citicorp, Valsangkar in a conversation with FE?s Malvika Chandan shares his focus areas at Symantec. Excerpts:
How is Symantec structured in India?
Symantec India functions as an independent region within the Symantec World, and reports to the company headquarters in the US.
We have an all-India leadership team in the country, and our HR and people strategy include integrating globally deployed systems, that are common for Symantec worldwide employees and introducing local interventions for our employees in India. We have here the Centre of Innovation or R&D, which houses a good majority of 2,700 employees and is our mainstay in India. Pune, for example, where we have one of our centres of innovation, houses the largest number of Symantec employees as compared with other cities worldwide. We also have relatively smaller functions in India such as customer service, sales and support function.
Given that Symantec is an amalgamation of different entities that it acquired in the past, how has the company maintained its authenticity?
At Symantec, we treat our identity seriously and HR has helped facilitate the process of arriving at the overall identity structure. As an overlying principle whenever Symantec acquired a new company, its approach has been to keep certain parts of the earlier culture aside and adopt some of the cultural characteristics of the acquired company. We have always felt that our success lies in the emotional engagement of our employees with the company in addition to routine hygiene programmes. Symantec India used programmatic interventions to foster feeling of emotional engagement.For example, ten months ago when Symantec India started the process of finding its name, ?Symantechie? repeatedly came up and seemed to have a resounding connect with our people. At Symantec, we have what we call the ?technical ladder? wherein people can rise up the organisational ladder simply on technological capability without having to assume people or management leadership. Likewise, when we asked our people to pictorially describe through their own hand-drawn images what Symantec means to them, the picture that won the first place was the one drawn that was depicting our four core values of innovation, accountability, customer service and trust.
What are some of Symantec India?s HR best practices?
Most of our employee initiatives revolve around what we at Symantec call the W2C2 model, which fosters our belief in providing challenging work and a conducive work culture coupled with competitive compensation and career development.?Anchors? is one of our HR initiatives, which has been successful. The underlying principle is to assign people who have been with the organisation for at least five years and have a track record backed by meritocracy the task of guiding and serving as a sounding board to younger employees in the organisation so that they stay and build successful careers at Symantec. The whole idea is to get existing employees to talk about what is working for them and not to wait to ask exiting employees what did not work for them.