Spirituality & Quality are not two separate departments at work for us at 4iApps

Spirituality means different things to different people. For some it is about conforming to their religious rituals, for some it is about chanting hymns while for some others it means meditation and yogic practices. Ever thought of how spirituality at work works like? Well, no…it’s not just about a place of worship at the corner of your workstation and celebrating festivities together with your colleagues.
For us in 4i, Spirituality is a way of living and working having embraced some simple yet powerful ingredients when one thinks of even work and all its associated variables. These are:
Unquestionable Integrity – it is doing the right thing even when no one is watching you. Take this, if you and your best pal at office belong to two sensitive departments, there is every temptation to blurt out discreet information during a casual chat. But exercising control here talks high of one’s integrity.
Absolute Honesty – the ability to speak that damn truth always! Huh…its so difficult yeah? Take this, your boss asks you to send all the 3 offer letters before you leave and you forget in your rush to get home. Next day you decide to tell that little lie to your boss that you indeed sent them all. While you are so flawlessly lying to your boss, a call comes in from one of the candidates asking for the offer letter. There you are, trapped!
Earnest Efforts – how often do we find someone who gives that 100% shot at work? Go to the nearby supermarket and the salesperson half-heartedly guides you to your product; engage an auditor to audit all your work and they give you a clean chit for the fee that you pay; depressingly, the instances just go on & none seems to take an effort to remain earnest. It’s a different breed of humans who give their 100% best in what they have been given to do and another 100% to initiate & accomplish what they have not been asked to do.

Quality, a department which is dumped into the back burner of most companies. Why? Because it keeps asking for metrics, monitoring data, agenda, minutes – Arrrgh! Hate those half-yearly audits and Management Review meetings? Yes?…as it overloads your already burdensome work?
It just requires a slight paradigm shift. As kids, in our growing years, we have all heard this command from our parent(s) – “Do certain things immediately and hand-in-hand so you don’t have a tough time later”. This is exactly what is expected from all of us as practitioners in our own functions. Just set aside a 15-min recap time in your day to capture those metrics/ write those minutes right after you are out of a meeting. See how easy life gets when that audit is announced. You got a double benefit too; you have your department data on your fingertips good enough to impress yourself!
Philip Crosby famously quoted, “It is much less expensive to prevent errors than to re-work, scrap, or service them”.
Yet another classic Japanese quote goes like this, “a place for everything and everything in its place”. So next time you take out a file, keep it back in its place and save some future trivial tension! In today’s scenario, we better relate to softcopies of files & folders. So let me say, next time you create a new excel file, give it an appropriate file name and save it in the recommended folder structure. You, your team and your PM will thank you for the easy and logical retrieval in future!
So, go ahead and infuse Spirituality & Quality into your bloodstream. They go a long way in elevating your position in career, in life and in the way this world starts seeing you!

Posted on behalf of Arthy Shankar Manager – Human Resource & Quality | 4iApps India