We are a company that has 10,000 people in two-pizza teams: Manas Fuloria, Nagarro

Dr Manas Fuloria is Co-Founder & CEO of Nagarro and a member of the Executive Board of Allgeier SE, Nagarro's parent company. He co-founded Nagarro in 1996 and has played an instrumental role in the brand’s growth and success. Dr Fuloria received his Doctorate in Supply Chain Management from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and has a Master’s degree from Stanford University, California.

Nagarro is a global digital engineering leader with a full-service offering, including digital product engineering, digital commerce, AI and ML-based solutions, cloud, immersive technologies, IoT solutions, and consulting on next-generation ERP. The company employs over 10,000 people in 26 countries. It is headquartered in Munich, Germany and has its primary development centre in Gurugram, India.

In an exclusive interview with ETHRWorld, Dr Manas Fuloria talked about Nagarro’s unique culture, values and vision. “We are a very flat non-hierarchical and global company. Most companies have a pyramid structure where few people are on top and then that breaks into another span, and so on. We don't have that kind of structure here,” said Dr Fuloria.

What is your assessment of the current pandemic situation? How do you think it has impacted the employee sentiment and productivity in the company?

I would separate this into two parts and phases. So, there is a part that has to do with productivity and another part is about sentiment. I think there are two different phases that we have gone through, one is before April, and the other is after April. In general, productivity and customer satisfaction has been as high as it's ever been. Our customer satisfaction numbers are higher than they have ever been. We have been running 100 per cent remotely in India since March last year. So, it's been a long time now. Around 8,000 people have completely worked remotely, and it has worked.

In terms of sentiment, people have been broken into three categories, there are some people who are very happy, and they want to continue in this mode and looking to continue to stay at their hometowns that they are today in. These people have given up their leases or even sold houses and they've just moved. The other group of people wants to be able to come to the office and meet people once in a while. I think this is a dominant group that wants to come into the office.

The third group is of very few people who are in this spirit of wanting to come to the office every day and don’t want to work from home. So, we have mixed sentiment in terms of working. But post-April, the situation has been very different. We all have seen a lot of deaths and suffering in our neighbourhood, companies, among the friend circles, relatives, and families. So, the overarching sentiment comes out as depression leading to the big mental health challenge that we see ahead of us. Amid all of this, the irony is that productivity still remains good but the mental health challenges are coming to the core.

How has the company been supporting its employees to face the Covid-19 pandemic and the family members of those unfortunate employees who might have succumbed to the disease?

During this particular period, we went in battle mode to address all the needs that arose for employees. It could be the need for medicines, oxygen, beds, money, oxygen concentrators, or cylinders. We put up a Corona Management Group, which was like an informal group and there were at least a dozen people who were deeply involved, and many others who were involved in other ways. We were constantly trying to use all our contacts and networks to find solutions for our colleagues.

I think that the other interesting part was that since we are an international company, the moment the wave hit, we were able to procure oxygen concentrators which were not available in India at that time. We found a stock sitting in China, a stock in Germany and we were able to buy these stocks, not just for ourselves, but also for some other companies and also for civil administration. We were able to procure some of these goods at a short notice, using our global footprint.

Beyond that, when you talk of people who have lost their lives, we have come together to donate, on a personal level from throughout the world for these families, which has come out to be quite a substantial sum for each family. Plus, we are in active talks with the families to find ways in which we can employ may be the earlier non-working spouse. Beyond all of this, we have been setting up this mental health thing, which we are launching very soon with a third-party provider.

I think more than all of these, the feeling that it's not a company at work, but it’s friends who are trying to save each other. As we get to the main idea, it's not the bureaucracy or it is not a smart process that we have created, it is just compassion and care in our top care values. For example, even I was working from the morning to evening, just trying to talk to people and set up with whatever we could find, in terms of supporting them.

So, it's been a very, very emotional response, not a company or corporate response but an emotional response like a family. I don't think a family would react any differently from the way we reacted as a company.

I would like to know more about Nagarro’s culture, values and vision in driving the company's global and India business. You could also share some examples or insights.

We are a very flat non-hierarchical and global company. Most companies have a pyramid structure where few people are on top and then that breaks into another span, and so on. We don't have that kind of structure here. First thing is that we don't draw organisation charts. If a client asks us to provide the organisation chart, we say we don't think that way. So, we don’t have that kind of structure. We don't have any traditional CEO; we don't have any traditional CFO. My role is in organisation design more than anything else. Instead of a CFO, we have a finance council with three people. The idea is that we don't want to have these big alpha male kinds of personalities who drive the company, which is typically alpha male. Rather, we want to have people who have different roles.

For example, I don't have a closed office with a nice view or a secretary as that is something which is very hierarchical. We all have open sitting spaces and there is no reserved parking. If you come late, you try to find parking somewhere else. Sometimes it happened that I'm on a flight traveling in economy class and a team that's maybe working for the airline, that is flying in business. On our internal social media networking platform Yammer, people can complain, argue or discuss.

The idea is that we are trying to be in the best tradition of software engineering, which is agile. It's not about process, it's about individual excellence, and how teams come together to work in a very flat way and that's what we have developed. We have a very large senior management group of about 100 people and everyone, including me, are just a part of the group. We all play different roles, I also have a role in the legal aspects of being on the executive board or chairperson of the executive board, but we consider ourselves as a part of the group. We want to be sure that our senior management is not thinking in a traditional or pyramidal way.

For example, a very common thing in companies is CEO reviews and we don't do any of that. The idea is that, if the data is available to all, if the expectations are known to all, then people can review their performance, they don't need to have a review. We have many of these tweaks, I can go on and on but all we are trying is to drive towards a caring and humanistic culture, which is modern culture. I believe that the traditional command and control cultures are not tuned to the world of today.

The fact that even a small team can do a lot with technology. So, let's say you had to build the pyramids back in 3000 BC, then you needed command and control with 10,000 slaves working on it. But today, if you have to make even a big application you could do it with very small teams. If you look at Google and Amazon, etc they make amazing stuff happen with small teams. Amazon has this idea of two pizza teams, where teams should be small enough that they can be fed with two pizzas. If you think of that, we are a company that has 10,000 people in two-pizza teams.

I would like to understand, did you face some sort of challenges while getting people to work in such a kind of culture with a horizontal structure? And what is the total number of employees in India?

We are about 10,000 employees, out of which 8,500 might be in India, and we are hiring a lot. We hired about 1,000 people in India last quarter. We are accelerating at a very rapid pace. Just to be very clear, not everything that I am saying is at every level, there is a little bit of that structure. I'm not saying that there is no structure, but the culture is driving this flat idea. We spend a lot of time thinking about what the next step is to be even flatter? That's how we think. But you asked a good question about the kind of challenges that we faced.

Yes, why all companies are not following the same flat non-hierarchical model, there must be some challenges.

More and more companies have started following this flat structure, if you look at McKinsey or KPMG. It's this partner-driven structure that is much flatter than a traditional pyramidal model. It's more entrepreneurial and more self-steering. The intellectual way of looking at it is like, where the quantity of work that has to be done needs large groups of people to work on it, like the example of the pyramids, or where you have some very clear common goals that you work on.

But we are very different; we have clients that are automotive companies, banks, media companies, consulting companies, so we have many verticals. It is a platform play. We are not a single unitary company. But going back to your question, what challenges did we face, right?

So, the first thing is that half the people who join us from outside at senior levels, even if they are handpicked to match our culture, they often struggle on two counts. One is that they struggle because they don't know what to do, as it's very entrepreneurial. No one tells you what to do; you have to figure out what's going on and find your role. And the second is they don't know how to get other people to do what they want them to do.

I also get a lot of questions from investors, as we are a listed company on the German Stock Exchange, Frankfurt Stock Exchange, like how does this work, etc. But I will also say that there is a fraction of investors who are very interested in it. In terms of the large 10,000 people, there is a change, especially when we acquire a company and it has a very structured role, and now you just belong to projects, you don't belong to any people group and people guide, that structure is gone. People take some time to adapt, it takes us an extra six months for people to understand that this is different.

But I think the overall satisfaction levels are very high and we're able to bring people in China, in Romania, in Dubai, and Austria, and all over the world, and after a while, they get it and they realize that this is a different experience. I'm not saying that this is necessarily a game-changer in their view of the workplace. Not everyone says that they love it more than anywhere else. Some people say that, but not everyone does, but the difference is very clear to them.

On LinkedIn, you have written: “I enjoy working with people who are intelligent, visionary, and sincere.” Now my question is, what is your mantra to find and onboard such people in the company?

Very interesting question. I think that intelligent people are attracted to intelligent challenges and they are attracted, I would like to believe, to non-hierarchical models. One big way in which we attract such people is through acquisitions and one big thing that we say to these acquisitions, the companies that are joining us, is that look, we are a company where you can be free, where you can be an entrepreneur, and you can continue to do your intelligent work. We also have to see who it is on the other side. So, we do evaluate if it is a fit, but that is one way.

I think M&A is a very big area and the fact that we are non-hierarchical and non-traditional, people take a while to understand it. But once they understand it, it is very positive. Outside that our primary focus is on building talent; catching talent young and building talent. I think we are a great place to learn because on the one hand, we are working with amazing companies, world's top automotive companies, airlines, consulting firms, banks and so on, and on the other hand, we are not controlling. We take this young talent, and they are given these projects face to face with the client. This makes them learn very fast.

For us, building talent is a very major part of our talent strategy. From time to time, we also hire people who are outstanding in their area, but the bulk of it is coming from the internal talent pools. And the role that we play, as senior people should ideally do, is, as teachers and folks who can care for this talent. That is the kind of the way we see it.

How do you think HR can bring value to the leadership table? What are your expectations from the company’s HR Head?

HR is everything for a services company like us.

That is a very strong statement, it says ‘everything’.

It is almost everything. As you know, our company has no factories, it has offices, but you have seen it empty for the last year and a half. We have nothing; we have only people. What HR does is play a big role, in collaborative role maybe, it is defining who the company is. HR is closely linked to marketing because you put it out there, who you really are and what kind of a company are you. That is when we say, we are a caring company, or we try to make distance irrelevant across intelligent people around the world.

The second thing is, we don't have one HR head. We have a model where there is a senior leader who is kind of the custodian for the region. Every country has its own custodian. I play the dual role of the custodian for India. Then we have HR leaders in each country. And we have a coordination group which coordinates the things that we are doing in different countries. Because we have 600 people in China, we have 600 people in Romania, 800 people in Germany, 300 people in Austria and 300 in the US, and so on. There is an HR Council of three or four senior people who are just looking at every controversial or strategic topics and take decisions on them. So, one person does not decide how the company's HR runs. It is actually like a collaborative group.

The role of HR can be almost unending. I think that today with more and more automation, it's interesting to see how much artificial intelligence, financial planning, marketing can come into HR. An ideal HR team should be able to completely not just transform the HR processes, but also drive the working of a new age company.

One more point, for a flat company to work, it is important that our systems connect everyone and to give transparency of data etc to everyone. So, we have a system that we have built over a data lake. That is an intelligent system, called Ginger, which is the name of the project manager’s dog. What Ginger does is that you can ask any question about an individual’s performance or a group's performance or what is going on, or when is the next holiday coming up, or whatever. And it can give you all kinds of steering heads. The idea here is that instead of having a boss who tells you what to do, the system is giving you answers. The hint could be, for example, “You have a project release coming up. At the last release, there were these problems. Or maybe, your client had these issues in the feedback. Are you sure you want to check these issues?” It is an intelligent system doing what a boss would do. Even in developing this, HR played a key role. The system is a company. All the characters of the company are embedded in the system. Even something like that is an HR activity, because ultimately, every human being in the company is connecting with the system to be steered and guided.

If you look at something like Facebook, for example, you know it probably uses a lot of data to figure out what ads to show you or which posts to show you. In our company, we do not do anything like that. We are just working with the old world, like the ERP and Excels and all of that, but in this new world, the internal HR systems will be like the Facebook systems. I mean they will be highly sensitive and trying to align everyone to a particular goal. So, that is the way we see the future of HR.

What’s your hiring plan to support the company’s business expansion?

We are hiring full throttle. As I said, we added 1,000 people last quarter, and we plan to continue hiring at a very fast clip all through the year. Our traditional rate of growth is about 20 per cent organically. This is our historical rate of growth for the last few years. But I must say that right now the demand is through the roof and if we could add another few thousands of people, we would add them right away. We are just hiring as fast as we can. My guess would be that we would hire, maybe I should not put a number out there, but we are hiring really a lot of people. Every single quarter we are adding more people in a month than we have added typically in a quarter.