In 2016, Somany Ceramics Limited (SCL), a ceramic tile manufacturing company in India, needed industry-ready workers to meet the company’s expansion plan; however, the whole ceramics industry was affected by a shortage of labour. Most of the technically competent ceramics and construction personnel in India preferred to work in the construction industry or join other sectors such as information technology. The company’s human resources team needed to develop a strategy to hire an adequate number of skilled employees and to retain them as the competitors also attempted to take advantage of growth opportunities in the global ceramics industry.
In June 2016, Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart Private Limited (Flipkart) faced a common issue among online retailers: the firm needed to optimize its product return rates to reduce losses caused by returns. Accordingly, Flipkart changed its return policy, including raising the commission fees charged to sellers by an average of 5 per cent. Many sellers resented the policy change, and more than 1,800 led an online protest against Flipkart, which was unprecedented in India. These sellers made their accounts inactive and removed the product listings for nearly 1 million product units. Seeing an opportunity, Amazon India decreased its commissions on various product categories by 2–7 per cent to lure disgruntled sellers to its platform. While its competitors experienced rapid growth, Flipkart struggled to keep the market share it had acquired so far. The company experienced a massive drop in its valuation during fiscal year 2015–16, and had not registered any profit since its inception in 2007. Flipkart had to reduce its losses resulting from a high number of returns without displeasing both of its key stakeholders—sellers and customers.
In 2016, India witnessed an intense war for talent acquisition in consulting when Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India LLP (Deloitte) poached 20 partners and their teams—around 300 people in total—from KPMG India (KPMG). Deloitte offered a higher compensation to attract KPMG executives and lured partners with a salary jump in proportion to the number of team members they could bring from KPMG. The rivalry between the firms was fuelled by their desire to challenge Ernst & Young Global Limited, the market leader, which had 125 partners in its advisory vertical. This was the biggest poaching attempt in the industry since 2011 and the third time in the span of a year that KPMG partners had quit to join rival companies. For KPMG, it was a big blow, as the company lost many partners from the vertical that was leading its growth globally. KPMG management was now confronted with the challenge of defending against any such future poaching attempts by its competitors and retaining existing employees. The firm needed to engage its existing employees and boost their motivation to avoid further damage.
A tense situation arose in 2015 after a faculty member at the Premier School of Management in New Delhi, India, mistakenly emailed a test paper to a group email address that included the school’s students, faculty, and alumni. An alumna who received the email responded to the professor using the “reply to all” option. The tone of her email was considered to be disrespectful to the professor. The professor responded by sending his own “reply to all,” explaining his error to the alumna and chastising her for using a tone inappropriate for a student-to-teacher communication. The alumna apologized, but one of the students on the group email then wrote his own offensive email to the alumna. Was there a way to defuse the mounting tension and avoid a possible rift between the alumna and her former school?