We are a big company now and not the Wild West, says Flipkart's Chief Administrative Officer

Interview with Nitin Seth, chief administrative officer, Flipkart

Flipkart's successful Big Billion Day sale during which it sold more items than global rival Amazon shows that it is back on the right track claims the company. Admitting to making business and hiring mistakes last year, Nitin Seth, Chief Administrative Officer at Flipkart, tells Alnoor Peermohamed and Apurva Venkat in an interview that the company has now put in place more processes for everything from hiring to making decisions for both short and long term.

When people interviewed for jobs here, they always said they were offered a massive jump in salary. Has that gone away now?
In the early stages we were over exuberant and sure in hindsight we looked irrational. Now there is more clarity on how we want to peg ourselves, which is at the high end in the market. For every role in the company, we have a benchmark. It means that if somebody should be given a 40 per cent increase we will do it, but if someone should be given a 15-20 per cent per cent increase we will do that too. The sheer point is that there is rational behaviour coming in and I would say we are a big company now and not the wild west.

 

You had a reshuffle at the start of the year and a lot of top talent has quit since then. Has this played on employee morale?
It is fair to say that last year was a year of big experiments and some of them did not go off very well. There were business calls we made and also management calls we made. This year we had to go through a "let's fix our house process" which meant that there is a reshuffle in the management team. There are two ways of looking at it - there is change happening and there is uncertainty. You can say nothing's wrong, everything's fine and we will keep going that merry way. But I think there is tremendous amount of honesty in this company. If we felt there was something not going right, we have stopped and taken corrective actions.

The second thing I would say is that the management team that we have today, I think is one of the most high quality management team you can have anywhere. I would really struggle to see you know how many companies have anything even close to this quality of leadership. It has taken some time and we have gone through a process. You know there was a period when we had an 18 member management team.

How do you keep up the morale of the employees up at such a time?
In this business from an employee sentiment perspective there is nothing that works like business success. You know Flipsters are not here to do just ordinary jobs, they are not driven just by salary or things like that. They are here to do something exceptional. If you see our BBD (Big Billion Day) sale, we had each of our 12 offices packed with hundreds of people who were here for 24 hours for 5 days in a row. If anything, the number of people we estimated would be staying in the offices were a lot more. That happened not because we were giving people some kind of an incentive or some money for doing those things. It is that DNA. It is very important understand the Flipster DNA, and that it is very driven by that kind of sense of success.

There was this general sense of pessimism that the market is flat and the India story over. I think we have proven conclusively that it is far from the case. We do our pulse check on a regular basis and it is extraordinarily positive. I would agree and acknowledge that there are tough phases that we have gone through, but I think it also is part of growing up as a company.

As organisations grow they end up becoming poaching grounds for rivals. Amazon is very aggressive and Alibaba wants to come into India. Do you think you will end up being the poaching ground?
To an extent yes, but I do not want to be disrespectful to colleagues who have left. I would say we are very conscious about our top talent and we are very we know who they are. We are confident that they are highly highly vested into the company, not just because we have a very significant stock option program, but also because there is an aspect of being emotionally vested into the company. This is an extraordinarily talent rich organisation and this an aspect which may be people have not realised. To me actually the secret sauce and the most significant aspect is the talent and how deep a pervasive the talent is.

Have you failed to tell this story?
Probably. We have been so focused on the business side we have not celebrated our talent as much as we should have. We took it a little bit for granted.

Technology and automation is disrupting jobs. How will that affect Flipkart and will be see a slowdown in hiring?
This is why e-commerce is such a great model. It is about how you achieve non-linear growth without increasing your headcount and cost in the same proportion. I know where you are going with this and I spend a lot of time in the IT industry and it's a big issue. A lot of jobs are getting more automated for BPO, but that is less of an issue for us I think. We come less from a cost perspective and more from a scalability perspective. But I will be a little disappointed if the company grows in terms of GMV and a unit perspective and the headcount and costs are also growing.