People and Management October 2018 | Page 34

THE GIG ECONOMY THE RED BOX ANGREZI PAATHSHAALA CACTUS is a global medical communications agency with a unique business model. To meet their customers’ requirements for speedy turnaround and specialised subject matter expertise, their workforce includes a large number of freelancers who can work from anywhere and can select the number of hours they want to work. They conduct regular surveys to engage with freelancers and send updates and bulletins. The system allows the freelancers to mark their unavailability. Therefore, jobs are only allocated to them when they are free to take them on. The freelancers also have the option of developing their skills through organisations’ academic resources and are offered incentives and bonuses as reward for regular high- performing. 34 Marico created the Nihar Shanti Amla brand with a purpose; fi ve percent of all proceeds from sales under the brand are contributed to the cause of children’s education. As part of this, the organisation launched the fi rst-of-its-kind mobile phone based tutorial – Angrezi Mobile Paathshaala, a missed call based English learning platform. Through this initiative, people are encouraged to give a missed call to a designated number, following which they receive a call back leading them to a series of interactive English language learning modules. The outcome has been phenomenal; the app has been able to garner more than 16.20 lakh unique callers since its inception. | Vol. 9 Issue 6 • Sep-Oct 2018, Noida / Pre-Event Edition Everything begins with an idea. Adobe strongly believes in empowering its employees to explore, evaluate, and evolve their own idea through the Red Box Process. They fund early exploration of potential ideas through a pre-paid innovation credit card directly handed to the employees with an authorised budget which empowers them to spend 20 percent of their time to work on new ideas. The red box program has brought to light a host of new ideas, at a much faster rate and lower cost than previous innovation efforts. The red box has also earned strong enthusiasm and commitment from employees who have consistently given the program a Net Promoter Score of over 90 percent. In the fi rst three months of the program, few innovators had already earned blue box funding and were set on the path to turning their dream into reality.