Anything audacious always has an element of shock in it – positive as well as negative. When it comes to coming up with policies which benefits people, Mindfire never runs low on audacity. This year we started for the first time in our company a concept called winter vacation. For a whole week, starting December 29th 2014, office was closed and people were given this time to enjoy with family and friends. Some went on road trips, some went to holiday destinations, some joined Yoga camps, some spent time on learning new technology, some read books and most used this time to reflect on the year gone by and plan for the New Year. We ran an internal survey to capture people feedback on this initiative and an overwhelming majority, 97%, felt that this is an awesome initiative and should be continued every year.
Q.Would you like this initiative to continue in the future?
People felt this initiative helps in managing work and life better.
Q. How effective is this initiative towards getting a better work-life balance?
As dear our people are to us so are our clients. We would never do anything which puts our clients at any kind of risk. The fundamental belief of Mindfire is honoring every commitment made and never faltering on promises – be those made to people working at Mindfire or clients who have trusted us with their business. All clients were communicated about this winter vacation 2 months in advance and the pleasant surprise was the way almost all out clients felt about this initiative – they were happy and encouraged us to go ahead and get it done! We are proud to say that we work for super awesome clients at Mindfire. Few clients who had major work releases were accommodated too by committed teams at Mindfire who worked during vacation to get the work done. We can say it proudly that we had ZERO client issue with this 1 week vacation for the whole company.
Everything comes for a price – in absolute economic terms the price is only money but in a more holistic sense the price can be happiness, trust and money of course. Money wise there was revenue loss since no effort hour was logged by anyone and no client was billed. What we gained was happiness of people and renewed trust on Mindfire – that we are a company which cares about the people who work for it. We are sure this renewed vigor will manifest itself in improved client satisfaction with the quality of work and more value for the money invested in projects.
The below response best captures what people felt about this vacation –
Q. The following statement best reflects your take on this vacation.
Society wise this initiative had a very positive impact on people outside Mindfire about what Mindfire is and the perception they had about our company. Families and friends of employees at Mindfire were pleasantly shocked and have expressed their happiness and gratitude through our employee survey on vacation.
For survey details click here. Survey Results