Treat employees like they make a difference and they will!!

Pratima Thakar, Director - Air Supply

 

 

"Talent wins’ games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships." – Michael Jordan

 

In 2012, Google decided to understand what it really means to have a perfect team? After studying 180 teams across the company, they concluded that a great team is where members show sensitivity, and most importantly, listen to one another. Google concluded that the most important factor in building a team is psychological safety. I believe, it is essentially also what takes to build a family.

 

How can you link safety, trust and dependability to concrete results? Very often, it is tough to draw these parallels, but as the head of airline contracting for the Holidays, at India’s largest OTA, with a team reporting into me, I can easily say that ‘care’ and a feeling of belonging, play a large role in making things happen.

 

As a support function to various line of business (LOB), my team has risen many times to face the challenge head on, in times of crisis. The most recent case is the Jet airways case. In April 2019, the team stretched beyond 16-17 hours every day to ensure that customer calls were answered to the best of our ability and we controlled the damage as far as possible to ensure our customers were not adversely impacted.

 

In my fourteen years here, I have learnt that the only way to align every member of the team to the same vision and goal is by creating the environment of an extended family. I believe that an internal feeling of care towards each other translates to a feeling of care towards customers. A feeling of accountability towards each other translates to accountability towards the customer.

 

Earlier this year, the entire team got together to buy one of our teammates a new phone - something he had been unable to do due to financial constraints. As is the tradition in our team, this was followed by a celebration. We found out that a lot can happen over a samosa party!