UST Global: Winning mind-share in bad times

CHENNAI, INDIA: Bad times are the times of retrospection, correction and of course panic and blame, as we have witnessed in the recent times, when the recession bug hit most of the industries globally.

All of a sudden companies have started thinking more in terms of economics. Cost-consciousness made them think of every single penny they spent. But a decision driven by panic one is not always a wise one. Penny-wise thought may end up in pound-foolish implementation.

It is this “wise” aspect of investment that UST Global would rather focus on when it comes to the service of its clients.

“We should not get overwhelmed by the global economic slowdown and allow cost management to be our primary focus,” warns Arun Narayanan, joint chief operating officer of UST Global. “Rather, our focus should be to help our clients develop proprietary IT solutions that help them win the mind-share as well as market-share of their clients.”

At the same time, UST Global’s secondary focus is helping its clients reduce the cost of maintaining IT systems, says Arun Narayanan. Any activity that doesn’t add value to the client needs to be evaluated.

Those who emerge victorious out of a recession are those invest more on the winning areas of their business and cut back on those that are non-strategic, he says citing research on the behavior of companies during earlier recessionary economies.

“We manage our costs by developing innovative ways for accelerated competency development. Our clients in general agree that a person with three to four years of experience at UST performs better than an industry professional with five to six years of experience elsewhere. Our unique competency assessment and development program, Handprint, provides the framework for well-rounded development of our associates.”

According to him, there is a continuous focus on developing the soft skills required for adding value to its clients.

“In addition, we constantly improve the productivity of our teams through creating innovative processes and tools that multiply their capabilities.”

Arun Narayanan said video conferencing was a great tool for improving the social architecture of UST's teams, and it enabled their global teams to stay connected with their clients.

“We were able to realize a saving of around 5 per cent in our travel budget annually by leveraging on our video conferencing infrastructure,” he said. “UST Global is proud to be recognized as a 'Green Company', and was environmentally concerned long before the global economic difficulties.”

Other small things that save money (and help the environment) include turning off desktops each day; making sure that certain lights are turned off in unoccupied offices and more.

Arun Narayanan added that some of its green initiatives were conceptualized and developed completely by its associates in UST Global's innovation lab in early 2007.

“We were able to reduce the power consumption by around 10 per cent annually by implementing automatic switch off for desktops. Our Green programs were originally begun to help the environment and not as cost-cutting measures.”

Many of these processes were in place long before the economic crunch in which the world finds itself today, he added.

“Our employees are thrilled to see our focus on clients and on revenues even during the recessionary times. We have an aggressive growth target for 2009 and our associates are confident about meeting this goal.”

Downturn has not hampered UST's culture of constantly keeping in touch with their people, said Arun Narayanan.

“We have a daily company-wide newsletter, 'News@Noon', where all company-wide issues are discussed. Add to that 'Meetus@4', where every associate has the opportunity to meet UST Global senior management and ask no-holds-barred questions.”

Also the company's executive management team goes into the field regularly meeting with associates, and client teams, asking them how UST can better serve its clients and how senior management can expedite their proposals.

He asserted that UST Global's corporate culture, one anchored in ‘humanity, humility and integrity,’ is one shared by its newest associates to the founding members of senior management.

“By staying true to our ideals, and providing a client-centric, corporate intimacy model in which we over-deliver on our contracts (we call it ‘commitment beyond contract’), our internal and external clients are confident we will over-deliver on our promise and fulfill beyond their expectations,” he shares the equation of success.

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