‘We utilize the time to learn, improve & bond’: Manish Jain

These are quite challenging times for our industry, as retail has been completely shut down for the last 2 weeks and will be shut for some more time.

Our clients who drive growth for us are going through some of the most challenging times in their business too. However, we all feel that there is always light at the end of the tunnel and that this will pass through and businesses will gain momentum again. Everyone’s priority right now is to make sure that everyone is safe and come out safely when this global catastrophe slows down. 

As far as our business is concerned, all the action for us happens on the floor at our manufacturing unit and in its absence, there is not much we or our employees can do. However, we looked at these 21 days as an opportunity and started to list down things that we usually overlook due to the regular work pressures and deadlines. Here are the few things we are trying to do during these 21 days of work from home.

Learn & Improve

We realized that there are a lot of areas where we need to stay updated and improve ourselves, and there can’t be a better time than this. We have started different groups for different departments, where we discuss new things, go through case studies and see how can we implement them in our processes. 

For example, our engineering and planning group is responsible for creating shop floor and manufacturing drawings for all the work which happens on the floor. We started with a small online training module in which we learnt about best practices in terms of engineering drawings. Post that, we instructed every team member to create their own set of drawings based on the best practices. Every member in this group presented their examples to the each other and the best from each of them was chosen to create Shark’s template for shop floor drawings. Once this was accomplished, the team was told to take a re-look at all the existing drawings of current projects and improve them based on the new improved design engineering guidelines drawn during the sessions. The team will now be engaged for these 21 days to evolve and improve all the existing project shop drawings and by the end of 21 days, we would cover almost every project and come out with world class shop drawings for each of them.

Back to School / Individual Development

We are also encouraging Shark’s team to take on a lot of online courses which will help them learn and develop themselves in their areas of interest. These short online courses will give them the first steps to explore further or go for advanced learning if they find it interesting. These courses are spread across various functions and skills such as Operations Management,  Production Management, Inventory & Procurement, Design Thinking, Customer Management Best Practices etc. We feel that if our employees keep themselves updated and keep learning, it will immensely help them and also help the whole organization on a larger canvas  

Customer Reviews

We are also connecting with our clients and requesting them to review the projects we have done for them in the past 1 year. The entire team looking after each of the customers is part of the review - Key Accounts, Planning & Engineering, Production, and Fit-Outs - and we discuss the overall performance, including the challenges, issues faced by the customer, etc., and also the positives. This exercise is giving us a lot of insights into how to improve our delivery for each of our clients

Zoom Party

Finally, as all of us are usually busy in our day to day work, we hardly get time to socialize or interact with each other beyond work.  So during these 21 days, we are planning to host a Shark party on Zoom where all the Shark’s are invited to join and hang out, chat up, joke, talk about how they are spending their days during the lockdown, etc. We think that this will create greater bonding among us and convey that we are there for each other and also instill a sense of security in everyone. This is critical as during these challenging times, everyone is worried about the loss of job due to zero revenue and hampered growth.