Each organization in the world demonstrates a particular behavior while dealing with customers, employees, media, or anybody else. That behavior is the outcome of the policies and practices the organization either created or adopted from the industry.
In most of the cases, organizations tend to (and in some cases, have to) look at the industry for the guidance in defining those policies and practices and industry has always been open to provide the most tried-and-tested version.
Though it could have been created in-house but why to recreate something when a generally-accepted version is already available? Hopefully, Edison didn’t think that way when he re-created the bulb. Anyway, once a policy or practice is created or adopted, it is tracked throughout to keep it relevant in this ever-changing atmosphere of size, demand, generation, etc.
For example, a practice that was followed by a small size organization may not give equally good result when organization grows to mid size, or a policy written for gen-x may not be that relevant to gen-y, and so on. If an organization is not tracking and improving its policies and practices with the change in the atmosphere, it may cost the organization and that cost could have chain reaction too e.g. a wrong policy may result an attrition, which may cause the knowledge loss and quality, and then loss of goodwill and revenue.
Adopting an industry policy or practice has advantages – most significant advantage is the lowest risk but it could come at the cost of being same among equals. On the other side, creating or recreating it in-house may have disadvantages – most significant disadvantage is the chance of being failure. So why to take the risk of trying something new that no other organization has ever tried or heard of?
Every policy and practice has some direct beneficiaries e.g. organization, customer, employees. These beneficiaries are very vocal and reactive if a policy or practice does not fit-in. But there is a fourth beneficiary too who occasionally gets any benefits out of organization’s policies and practices. The Industry. The same industry that has been open to provide all kind of new-and-old, tried-and-tested, ready-to-use policies and practices for the organization to adopt or refer from. But where does the industry get those policies and practices? Organizations. It’s a cycle.
Organizations adopt from the industry and industry adopts from organizations. If each organization decides to give back at least one single policy or practice to the industry in its lifetime, this cycle will continue to take the industry forward. It could be as small a policy as dress code or as big a practice as six sigma or it could be just an improvement in an existing policy and practice. Industry may criticize it. Industry may reject it. Industry may love it. But let the industry discuss it, refer to, or adopt from. It has another advantage of being first among equals. Being leader. Giving-back-to-industry is not the goal but byproduct of being first, being leader and being innovative.
(Manoj Agrawal is Engineering Manager at GlobalLogic. He has more than 13 years of experience in Software Design and Development)