The media is full of news about downsizing and layoffs across the world, especially in USA, Europe and recently in Japan. It is disconcerting, to say the least. Losing one’s job is something which nightmares are made of. From a company’s point of view also it a question of survival.

What about a small Indian company, like CommLab, most of whose customers are in these countries? How do we plan to cope or coping, for that matter?

For us, downsizing is never an option because we consider sacking our employees to cut down costs akin to a family asking some of its members to leave home because there isn’t much on the table! We are conservative and cautious when we take in a person or create a position. Once a person is taken in, he is with us in good times and bad times.

How do we then meet our expenses if the business starts drying up? Well, I remember a scion of a huge conglomerate saying that if we don’t have enough money, we don’t cook costly dishes but subsist on staples. We can have everything we need, if we accept that there are always alternatives. The resistance is therefore more mental and psychological. A manager always traveling first class finds it very difficult to travel second class; but he can, till the company tides over. When the company doesn’t raise the bogey of retrenchment or cuts in salaries, usually the employees show their appreciation by working harder and spending lesser of company’s resources. We can survive longer, if we decide to.

Recession is the best time for a company to get new business because your customers are also looking for ways and means of reducing their expenses. We offer our services at much lesser price than usual because we know that our customers will appreciate it and make good in the days to come. Will you not, if you are in their place?

This is also the best time to do some serious housekeeping – evaluating existing systems and procedures, training employees and a host of other “maintenance” activities which are “important but not urgent”. This is the best time to “sharpen our axes” and be ready for the slump to come to an end.

Business cycles are natural and inevitable. If we accept this fact, our brains can come up with numerous creative ways to survive and subsist during tough times. So recession is good news at CommLab.

We at CommLab believe that whatever we focus, we achieve. If we focus on negatives of recession we tend to go down. If we focus on what is great about this situation, we tend to get empowering strategies to improve company’s performance.

As CommLab India is a 100% Export Unit and 90% of our business comes from US, it was a concern that US is getting hit by recession. The usual feelings and thoughts of a lot of Indian companies are to reduce costs by laying off people, cutting down perks, reducing travelling and slashing training budgets. We took a very drastically different approach – we decided on very different results:

• Focus on getting business from Global fortune companies located in Australia, UK, Canada and Saudi Arabia. From the time we heard of the impending economic meltdown, we started focusing on markets outside US. In less than three months time, we have acquired clients in all these countries – Oil majors in Saudi, a very large Insurance Company in Australia, consumer goods giant in UK and Networking and IT Company in Canada.

• Increase our products and services range to attract price-sensitive US clients. We decided to add a Corporate University with the price of a catalog company but features of custom courseware. It offers a huge cost advantage as the client has to pay only per user. We are also marketing our competence in producing huge number of courses using authoring tools like Captivate, Articulate and Lectora.

• Focusing on achieving 3 times more turnover as compared to last year! We believe that in recession, all the US clients would like to reduce their cost but still need the essential product and sales training in order to beat the recession and competition. We have decided to campaign for very cost effective and quick turnaround product training solutions to these companies.

• Focusing on streamlining processes to generate greater ROI per employee. Even though we are not an ISO certified company, all our processes are documented. All employees at CommLab go through an Elearning course on the processes and need to pass the course in order to be eligible to work at CommLab. These processes help us in meeting quality and deadlines. This eliminates lot of wastage of manpower and other resources.

• Gave 6 monthly hikes to boost employee morale and enthusiasm to achieve greater performance. We believe that in order to get something we need to first give it. To meet the target of increasing the turnover by 4 times this year, we decided to give increments and salary hikes to all our employees so that we in turn achieve our targets.

Because we Dream, We Do!

Ayesha Habeeb Omer, Ph.D
Chief Operating Officer