Rasika Karunatilake, Managing Director at Sysco LABS, the captive innovation arm of Sysco Corporation, shares insights into the company’s people strategy, crafted to empower employees to excel on a global scale. From motivating employees with a higher purpose to nurturing leadership and fostering diversity, equity and inclusion, Rasika talks about growing and sustaining a world-class business out of Sri Lanka and the trends currently occupying his attention.
How have you reimagined the workplace to empower employees to grow and be the best they can be? How have you created a workplace that thrives despite the unfolding economic challenges?
People are our most precious resource. One of our primary goals is to create a sanctuary for employees so that they are in a positive frame of mind and bring their best selves to work every day. There are two key aspects that we focus on in our people strategy, in order to encourage their growth and motivate them to deliver to world-class standards.
The first: intrinsic motivation, covers career growth, learning and development and enhancement of attributes like belonging. With belonging, we look at aspects of employee engagement and recognition, which contribute towards a crucial factor: the employee experience. We focus on creating a positive employee experience – from recruitment to onboarding and across the entire employee life cycle – which is on par with that offered by Sysco’s network of global centres. We foster a culture of knowledge sharing which promotes collaboration and enables employees to enhance their skill sets and learn from the experiences of senior talent.
The second aspect of the strategy revolves around extrinsic motivation: here we focus on competitive rewards because they are the primary motivational factor. We recently revamped our Sysco LABS Elite benefits program, which takes care of a multitude of different requirements, including physical and mental well-being. Since work arrangements are also a key extrinsic motivation factor, we have put in place measures to improve work-life balance and flexibility and our workspaces enable collaboration and ideation.
Another way we motivate our team is by encouraging them to live our purpose which connects them with the “why” behind what we do. Our purpose of ‘Connecting the world to share food and care for one another’ is at the core of all we do. We thus ensure that all our employees are aware of the impact they have on a Fortune 100 company operating in a trillion-dollar global industry. Sysco generated $68 billion in sales revenue for the last financial year, and we make sure our teams are aware of their role in that result.
What is the recipe for building a technology business that can operate at a world-class level and continue to deliver value at scale?
We focus on three areas: technology, people and processes. When it comes to technology, we are in a business that is subject to rapid change; our aim is to constantly ride on the leading edge of technology and innovation. We encourage our employees to stay up-to-date on global technology trends and explore ways in which we can capitalize on new developments. Where people are concerned, we focus heavily on recruiting and retaining the best talent and building the leadership to enable growth.
And the third area is the maturity of our process and systems which are continuously evolving as we move forward.
How critical is the role of an enablement team to achieve growth on a global scale?
Many companies view the enablement function as merely being ‘support services’. However, in our case, our enablement teams are crucial for our success. They administer the people, brand, finance and operations strategy and their unstinting objective is to enable our core business to deliver seamlessly.
Specific to the current external conditions, there are some peripheral operational areas that we have focused on. Due to the volatility of the country and the risk, we have established robust business contingency processes to navigate through the current crisis. We have continued our focus on health and safety where we have taken critical measures like establishing emergency response teams to assist employees in difficulty. Our most recent focus has been on security where our associates are provided with a safe environment with the right infrastructure.
When building a team, how important are the values of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and how can a leader ensure that these values cascade across the organization?
DE&I is a vital element of the culture at Sysco LABS. We entrust our leaders with fostering respectful working environments that encourage teams to be welcoming, creative and collaborative. Our DE&I policy stands on five pillars: Females at Work, Ethnicity, Race, Religion, LGBTQI+ People at Work, Persons with Disabilities, and Policies, Procedures and Branding. We have launched multiple initiatives and hosted regular events to foster and promote DE&I; we have engaged with internal and external facilitators to help sensitize our associates to the different aspects of DE&I and have also empowered a committee of associates who have volunteered to work towards developing and improving these initiatives while flagging areas of concern to management for speedy action.
As a leader, what trends occupy your attention the most?
When we speak of trends, technology trends demand considerable attention. There is a lot of interest in the 4th Industrial Revolution and enabling technologies like AI, augmented reality, 3D printing, cloud computing, robotics, and IoT. Another factor occupying our attention is the outward migration of skilled professionals which is affecting all sectors at present.
How important is it to groom leaders, and what is the best way to do it?
As our organization progresses, hiring and developing talent with good leadership skills, at all levels, is crucial to sustaining growth. We do this by aiming to identify leadership traits at the point of recruitment. Once an employee has joined the team, we have multiple initiatives to groom leaders. We have two key leadership development programs that we introduced at junior and mid-level viz. the Frontline Leadership Program and Project Summit which are platforms to facilitate accelerated growth. We also have detailed succession plans to map leaders to roles across the Sysco LABS organization.
In all, succeeding on a global scale requires a strong people strategy and engineering the right set of internal conditions that can help overcome varying external circumstances, and deliver sustainable growth.