This is what is so great about Microsoft - when employees get together and make a good case for a cause, the company rallies behind the employees. I witnessed this first hand last year as part of the core team behind APLDC - the 1st Asian Pacific Leadership Development Conference, a conference geared towards creating a forum for Asian Pacific employees at Microsoft. Now here's another example - the 1st One India Women's conference in Hyderabad, India.
Recently, I had the chance to go behind-the-scenes with one of the organizers, Haritha Kandalla. Here's some excerpts from the conversation:
How did it all begin?
The initiative we now call WAW India (Women at work) started as a thought seeded into the minds of the women at the India Development Center (Hyderabad, India) by S Somasegar (CVP, Developer Division). A few of us decided to get together and decided to start WAW Hyderabad, a forum that we wanted to start off small with holding small events. During one of our meetings, we realized that we were working on policies without knowing what the women professional population actually wants, and decided to go ahead and hold a conference and find out what the real areas of work are. All our energies since have centered around organizing and holding the inaugural One India Women’s Conference (held on 8-9 March, 2007), where we invited and got participation from all six MS businesses in India.
As part of organizing these conferences, especially when its the first time, employees find themselves really stretching themselves developing their leadership and management skills. The logistics and communication skills required to get everything lined up, speakers, food or content, takes a ton of effort and hard work.
The One Women's India had excellent speakers including Ms. Vinita Bali (MD, Britannia Industries), Ms. Rekha Menon (Lead Exec, Accenture Geographic Services) and Ms. Sangita Reddy (MD, Apollo Hospitals Group) Anna Collins (GM, client Services), Neelam Dhawan (MD, MS India), and Dr. Anna Rowley.
Challenges:
- Working with a diverse set of project leaders, each with a strong set of opinions, most of them right to arrive at a consensus!
- Working with the leaders, ensuring that the schedules matched their free time, ensuring that the agenda items they were keen to include did get addressed during the conference.
- Working with budget constraints – we had enough money to run the conference, but we didn’t have enough to do something that would definitely stay with people as an event. We therefore had to ensure that we had content that was powerful, that the gifts we would give the participants would be extremely useful even though not costing us too much etc.
- Working with time crunches – it was required on my occasions for me to step in when we were losing time during the run up to the conference to spend extra hours to get some work done that a particular project leader was simply unable to do due to lack of time and professional commitments.
What makes it worth it all is the impact on the audience - e.g. all the 120 participants came up to the organizers and told them that they had done a great job and that they really gained something significant by attending the conference. We had the same experience after APLDC - folks coming up asking why we hadnt done this before!
Now, months and months of work culminating in an impact like that – that’s truly priceless!