Challenges to Meet
Challenge is part of any innovation process, and Avaya is not an isolated case. There are a number of challenging technologies that Avaya has worked on in the past. Its ambition is to provide rich, intelligent, and multi-model communication to all enterprise employees at the right place, on the right device, and at the right time. The specific challenge here is to innovate to help employees with special needs such as visual, hearing or other impairments.

Enterprises have evolved from being centralized to distributed, and, in a vast number of cases, spanning multiple continents. Providing seamless communication, working across multiple regulatory, cultural, and social environments, with an easy-to-use interface and providing the tightest security is certainly a very problem that keeps Avaya busy, excited, and challenged.

Is Avaya doing something innovative in the way it manages researchers/research? According to Tuljapurkar, the bottom line is to provide its employees the freedom and exposure: the freedom to learn and develop new technologies and products, and the exposure to real-life customer issues, so that the company knows which technologies and products to focus on.

While Avaya India has various initiatives for recruitment and retention, Tuljapurkar feels the best way to attract best employees and retain them is by providing them a challenging and rewarding work culture where they can learn, grow, and build their careers. "There are no particular challenges that we are facing. In fact, while the industry is rife with stories of high-attrition and difficulties in recruitment, we have managed to counter these challenges quite well, thanks to our culture. We believe that a happy employee is a great help in recruitment and retention, so we focus on creating a great number of happy employees," Tuljapurkar adds.

At Avaya, seniors try to make the interaction with a prospective employee very personal, from day one, and are open in all communication. "For instance, the last time we hired a senior level person, we invited him to a brainstorming session with the rest of the team so he could get familiar with the operating environment, culture, and the people. In turn, we could also assess how he would fit into the organization. We have followed this method successfully to bring several senior people into the organization and in most cases do not leave scope for unusual surprises and a mismatch in expectations," says Rajeev Shroff, senior VP, Avaya Global Services Delivery.

Moving forward, the company plans to take this initiative for every prospective employee wanting to work with Avaya, by encouraging prospective employees to visit the organization and interact with employees on a one-on-one basis, to get a feel of the culture. "The opportunities for personal development that we offer at Avaya by encouraging higher studies through 100% funding for high performers keeps our employees motivated and helps us retain and develop talent," Shroff adds.

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