Sahil Sharma, the Senior Vice President & Global Head of Human Resources at RateGain, is helping redefine career growth and development. As the commercially savvy HR leader of SaaS company RateGain he has completed several milestones to build a better workplace for his peers. With deep insight into human relations, Sharma has forged a mindset that promotes the equality and creativity required to maintain a modern travel and hospitality business.
As one of the world’s largest processors of electronic transactions and price points for the travel and hospitality industry, RateGain lets hotels, airlines, online travel agents, cruises, and others unlock new revenue streams. The company today has over 600 employees who work with over 2200 customers across 100+ countries including 23 of the top 30 Hotel Chains, 25 of the top 30 OTAs, and all the top car rental outfits. In order to provide world class products, Sharma is laser focused on building and sustaining a diverse, global and happy workforce.
Core Pillars Of RateGain Culture
When talking about the core pillars of RateGain culture, Sharma explains that they emphasize the well-being of their employees, who feel valued as part of the company and contribute regularly to its progress. And when all the employees are treated as equals, they feel confident enough to voice their opinions.
1) Building An Ownership Society
Often, employees feel neglected when it comes to their contribution to an organization. Sharma believes that a positive work culture starts with building an ownership society. In other words, employees should feel that they are part of the ownership of a company.
The employee should feel like they are truly contributing to the growth of the organisation, and they should feel trusted by the hierarchy in their organization. When employees think of work as leading a function, it improves their overall approach to the job. They are strongly connected to the culture of their company and have no qualms in owning their role in the success of their organization.
Sharma appreciates the enthusiasm and the passion at RateGain which keeps everyone excited. Although the company is twenty years old, he feels that every day is a new challenge.
“Every day is like Day Zero for us, and I love it,” he says. “We might be a publicly listed company with offices across multiple countries, but still operate with the enthusiasm of a startup – and that helps us drive ownership across the hierarachy.”
2) Celebrating Failures
RateGain emphasizes the value of self-accountability. If a person is successful, then the success is owned by that individual. If they fail, then they own their failures. This rule of self-accountability applies to everyone in the organization. The culture of accepting one’s own success and failure starts from the top, and everyone is accountable for their actions. Everyone at RateGain ensures that they are providing adequate support.
Sharma explains that RateGain celebrates failures as well as success. If there is a failure in the organization, the upper management does not reprimand the people responsible. Instead, they accept the failure, celebrate the efforts and learn from the past to implement the learnings.
“I think the appetite of the organization to accept failures and celebrate them is just phenomenal,” Sharma says. “There’s a culture that you will build where it’s about reprimanding people for their failures, versus just getting everyone together in a row and saying, ‘Okay, this was a big client that we were chasing, we lost it, there is a failure. But let’s just celebrate the kinds of efforts that have gone into it.’”
3) Performance-Oriented Culture
Most organizations adopt hard measures for an individual when things go wrong. As a result, there is a lack of loyalty and a sense of job insecurity among the other employees. This is not the case with RateGain, because Sharma believes in building a performance-oriented culture in the organization. It is not just about rewarding the people for their success and sucking out every ounce of their energy. The performance-oriented culture is about rewarding the employees with positive affirmations and appreciating their efforts despite the success or failure of a project.
4) Agile Mindset
The fourth pillar of RateGain’s culture is the agile mindset of the company. The Standard Operating Procedures are simple and easy to follow. Each employee has quick access to upper management and they do not have to endure long periods of approval. This creates a sense of ease and builds trust in the administration of the organization, while also increasing the efficiency of processes.
Milestones In Achieving Career Growth For The Working Class
Sharma believes that the people in each organization are that team’s most valuable assets. They are the wheels that move an organization towards success. Unfortunately, many companies ignore the well-being of their employees. When Sharma worked for a healthcare company in America, he realized the tedious process of streamlining culture and performance. He felt that people wasted a lot of their potential by staying in the same position and was inspired when he was introduced to RateGain founder and chairman Bhanu Chopra.
Sharma recalls, “When I got introduced to Bhanu Chopra I liked the way he was so passionate about what he wanted to do for people… I got very excited to come and join a space where I could build something from scratch.”
To help redefine the work culture, Sharma looked at a number of things:
1) Overall Performance Management Process
The first step in redefining the work culture of a business is to redefine the performance management process. The conventional methods of measuring an employee’s performance are based on the amount of work they get done rather than their contribution to the organization. Sharma believes in providing the proper resources to improve the performance management process through integration and inclusivity.
2) Adequate Health And Safety Measures
Career growth starts with the mental and physical health of the employees. If a company provides adequate health benefits to its employees, they are less likely to feel neglected. Moreover, the safety measures placed in an organization help employees tackle health hazards.
With adequate health and safety measures, the chances of burnout reduce significantly. People are more likely to come forward with the problems they are facing rather than take a sabbatical. Sharma believes that employees across the globe are entitled to the best health care facilities that a company can provide. They should be treated with care and diligence as they put so many hours of their life into the success of an organization.
3) Training People For Better Roles
Another remarkable thing about RateGain is that they train their employees for future roles. As a result, they don’t have to rely much on external talent pool when they are looking to fill a new position. They take nominations for a job and ask their employees to work for higher positions. This allows qualified members of the company to fill higher positions internally.
Sharma demonstrates this through the example of the most recent fiscal year: “In 2021/22, that fiscal year, I set a target of 50% of roles getting filled in the next three years. Through our changes in the processes and programs, we were able to close about 10% of roles internally in the last fiscal. We will achieve about 25% of this target in this fiscal.
Fresh graduates can bring fresh perspective and a different way of thinking to your business. They are eager to learn, build their experience and apply their skills in the workforce. At RateGain, we invest heavily in building this pool of fresh graduates from colleges. In June’22, we onboarded over 35 fresh graduates to take on various roles across the globe as compared to 14 of these fresh graduates in FY’22.
4) Building a Diverse and Inclusive Workplace
Sharma aims to build a diverse workplace where people from all races, genders, and cultures can join without any discrimination. He offers an example of the difference between the diversity in the organization when he joined RateGain and the current dynamics of the RateGain workplace.
“Six years ago, when I joined, we were at 15 to 85 which means that there were 85 men to every 15 women. Now we are 34% women in the company and the remaining 66% are men,” said Sharma.
He continues, “When you think about how many organizations talk about development, you see that getting from having the conversation to deploying it is a long road. Not just tactical responses, but deeply rooted, consistent paths that an associate can look at and say, ‘Here’s where my journey can go.’”
RateGain has achieved tremendous milestones when it comes to not only growing revenues but also career growth. By filling the higher roles internally, they have created a culture where people feel valued and are allowed to develop and grow. Sahil Sharma is an excellent example of how a single person can create change and bring value to the lives of the people working in an organization.
