The Duos in DuPont
The
chemicals and bio-sciences giant encourages couples to work together — as long
as they’re both talented
Rajeev
Vaidya, 55, EI DuPont’s president for south Asia and ASEAN, is a Mumbai boy who
loves his sabudana khichdi at Dadar’s Prakash restaurant and swears by its
piyush, the Maharashtrian version of lassi. Rooted to the city in many ways,
Vaidya did not leave Mumbai until he mastered the best education this city
could offer — a degree from IIT. Then, in 1980, he went to the US for further
studies and a PhD.
After completing his doctoral research on how to overcome the insurmountable problem of oil and water not mixing, Vaidya found a new address. He joined DuPont, the global chemicals and bio-sciences company that he went on to work with all over the world, from the US to Shanghai to Singapore — till DuPont brought him back to India in 2010 after 29 years.
“In 1985 DuPont made me an offer I could not refuse,” Vaidya says in Godfather style. Apart from the professional merit of the offer, he had another incentive — DuPont hired his wife Shailaja, who currently works in the India operation as a scientist in the crop-sciences division. Her name is associated with more than a dozen patents registered in the US. In between her US and India stints, Shailaja had worked for Procter & Gamble before returning to DuPont.
True Partners
Rajeev and Shailaja’s story is not unique in DuPont. The propensity to hire couples is evident right from the top — DuPont’s global CEO Ellen Kullman and her husband Michael Kullman were colleagues in DuPont for almost as many years as the Vaidyas. The Kullmans were working with General Electric in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the mid-80s as marketing managers when Ellen was offered a position by the Wilmington-headquartered Du-Pont in 1988. The Kullmans pondered over the move, and whether Michael could eventually move to another Wilmington-based company or one in nearby Philadelphia. However, Ellen’s bosses pointed out that DuPont had 15 divisions and Michael could surely work for any of those — and that is what happened.
The Kullmans rose through the ranks at Du-Pont while bringing up three children in Wilmington. Ellen ended up as CEO in January 2009. Michael was already director of corporate marketing and went on to retire in 2013. He had accompanied his wife on an India visit post retirement in 2013.
The Kullmans and the Vaidyas are just two of thousands of DuPont couples who over the years have worked for the same employer. One estimate is that the company currently has around 3,500 couples on its rolls — that is, of 1 lakh employees globally, 7,000 constitute husband-wife duos. Well, almost — as early as 1996, DuPont had made an offer to a gay couple, both working for DuPont — when one got an international opportunity with the company, DuPont helped relocate his partner too.
It’s a similar pattern at the Indian subsidiary. According to Rajeev Vaidya, the DuPont Knowledge Centre in Hyderabad has employed around 25 couples, most of whom are scientists. “When you hire scientists, it is often the case that their partner is someone they have met at graduate school and are in a similar field. When we get two attractive resumes, two talented people with relevant skills, we are open to the idea of hiring both,” says Vaidya.
Joji Sekhon Gill, regional director for human resources at DuPont, says one of the core values of the company is “respect for people” and this is what drives it to help with transfers within the company when a partner is transferred.
India Story is Different
Hiring couples and helping them stay together in a company is not exactly a common practice in India, not particularly in the traditional companies. But it may be inevitable in sectors such as IT services where a lot of young people meet at the workplace and get married. A senior executive at one of India’s top IT companies says the company does not have a policy for hiring couples; at best it tries to help couples relocate wherever possible. If one partner gets a foreign posting, the company tries to arrange a work visa for the spouse too, if the spouse is also a company employee. Of course the effort is to post them on separate projects or in different divisions.
K Sudarshan, regional vice-president for global CEO recruitment firm EMA Partners, says DuPont is a very unique case; many Indian companies do not even hire first-cousins of existing employees. “Husbands and wives working together can lead to all kinds of complications and cause a great deal of stress [to those working with them]. Appraisal processes can get compromised,” Sudarshan says. “It is not easy. Managing their transfers and relocations can be a big hassle.”
That may be why examples like the Kullmans are rare in the upper echelons of global corporations. Rather, husband-wife duos are more likely to start up together. For instance, the founders of Cisco were a husband and wife team — Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner (they got divorced later), who worked for Stanford University before giving birth to the networking firm in 1984.
When VMware was founded in 1998, the American software company’s start-up team included a husband-wife duo, Mendel Rosenblum, its chief scientist, and CEO Diane Greene. And in 2004, Stewart Butterfield and wife Caterina Fake launched photo and video hosting website Flickr; both left the company in 2008, three years after Yahoo acquired it.
Altar Ego?
Starting up a business together — with collective passion and vision — is one thing, and working for an established company together is quite another. To be sure, a husband and wife duo can be a recipe for disaster—not just for the organisation but for the marriage too. Marital stress can easily creep into the workplace and office politics can find its way into the bedroom. More, a virtual 24X7 existence with the partner can make both office and marriage life jaded. Of course, big companies with multiple businesses — DuPont today has 12 businesses — help take care of the in-yourface hazard by simply posting husband and wife in different areas of operation.
Life may also be easier when you are dealing with solemn scientists than, say, adrenaline- (and testosterone-) fuelled techies. Gill, who worked for Microsoft earlier, sees the employees at the chemical giant’s Indian operation as a little more mature than the teams she oversaw at Microsoft. “A research project typically takes five to six years and then taking it to market another couple of years. So I see scientists are a little more patient and grounded lot than techies.”
Having wives in the workplace can also help improve gender diversity. Gill says in India around 23% of all DuPont employees are women. In Asia the number is higher at 33%.
Still, it’s not as if DuPont will force-fit a couple. The partner needs to have the requisite skills “that are beneficial for the company”, says Gill. But there is always scope for improvisation. Gill cites a particular case where the interviewee was deemed overqualified for a position that was vacant. She went on to create a roadmap for the employee to join — and once he settled in and proved himself, he moved to a higher position. The goal, as Gill puts it, is to “hire the best people and make life comfortable for them”.
Ensuring A Long Relationship
Hiring couples has surely contributed to Dupont’s low attrition rate. While the chemicalmaterials-FMCG industry has an attrition rate of 10%, DuPont’s is in single digits — in India and overseas. Gill says proof of the success of an accommodating strategy is that around 99% of its senior leaders are old-time company hands and there are very few lateral hires made by the company for senior positions.
“I have seen other companies struggle with leadership issues,” says Gill, who joined the company in 2012 to head HR for India and has since moved to an Asia-Pacific role. “In Du-Pont people are allowed and enabled to do different jobs at different times and the company is very open to let people move around. When I ask people what keeps you at DuPont, they point to the diversity of the experience — they feel like they have worked in more than one organisation,” adds Gill.
For Rajeev Vaidya, who now has the added responsibility of handling ASEAN along with south Asia, DuPont’s policies have worked well. However, the company has based him and his wife in Delhi, away from their roots in Mumbai. “I lived in the area behind the Sena Bhavan [the headquarters of the Shiv Sena] in the heart of Mumbai. Those were interesting times,” says a misty-eyed Vaidya. And so are these.
•
HUSBANDS, WIVES AND BUSINESS
After completing his doctoral research on how to overcome the insurmountable problem of oil and water not mixing, Vaidya found a new address. He joined DuPont, the global chemicals and bio-sciences company that he went on to work with all over the world, from the US to Shanghai to Singapore — till DuPont brought him back to India in 2010 after 29 years.
“In 1985 DuPont made me an offer I could not refuse,” Vaidya says in Godfather style. Apart from the professional merit of the offer, he had another incentive — DuPont hired his wife Shailaja, who currently works in the India operation as a scientist in the crop-sciences division. Her name is associated with more than a dozen patents registered in the US. In between her US and India stints, Shailaja had worked for Procter & Gamble before returning to DuPont.
True Partners
Rajeev and Shailaja’s story is not unique in DuPont. The propensity to hire couples is evident right from the top — DuPont’s global CEO Ellen Kullman and her husband Michael Kullman were colleagues in DuPont for almost as many years as the Vaidyas. The Kullmans were working with General Electric in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the mid-80s as marketing managers when Ellen was offered a position by the Wilmington-headquartered Du-Pont in 1988. The Kullmans pondered over the move, and whether Michael could eventually move to another Wilmington-based company or one in nearby Philadelphia. However, Ellen’s bosses pointed out that DuPont had 15 divisions and Michael could surely work for any of those — and that is what happened.
The Kullmans rose through the ranks at Du-Pont while bringing up three children in Wilmington. Ellen ended up as CEO in January 2009. Michael was already director of corporate marketing and went on to retire in 2013. He had accompanied his wife on an India visit post retirement in 2013.
The Kullmans and the Vaidyas are just two of thousands of DuPont couples who over the years have worked for the same employer. One estimate is that the company currently has around 3,500 couples on its rolls — that is, of 1 lakh employees globally, 7,000 constitute husband-wife duos. Well, almost — as early as 1996, DuPont had made an offer to a gay couple, both working for DuPont — when one got an international opportunity with the company, DuPont helped relocate his partner too.
It’s a similar pattern at the Indian subsidiary. According to Rajeev Vaidya, the DuPont Knowledge Centre in Hyderabad has employed around 25 couples, most of whom are scientists. “When you hire scientists, it is often the case that their partner is someone they have met at graduate school and are in a similar field. When we get two attractive resumes, two talented people with relevant skills, we are open to the idea of hiring both,” says Vaidya.
Joji Sekhon Gill, regional director for human resources at DuPont, says one of the core values of the company is “respect for people” and this is what drives it to help with transfers within the company when a partner is transferred.
India Story is Different
Hiring couples and helping them stay together in a company is not exactly a common practice in India, not particularly in the traditional companies. But it may be inevitable in sectors such as IT services where a lot of young people meet at the workplace and get married. A senior executive at one of India’s top IT companies says the company does not have a policy for hiring couples; at best it tries to help couples relocate wherever possible. If one partner gets a foreign posting, the company tries to arrange a work visa for the spouse too, if the spouse is also a company employee. Of course the effort is to post them on separate projects or in different divisions.
K Sudarshan, regional vice-president for global CEO recruitment firm EMA Partners, says DuPont is a very unique case; many Indian companies do not even hire first-cousins of existing employees. “Husbands and wives working together can lead to all kinds of complications and cause a great deal of stress [to those working with them]. Appraisal processes can get compromised,” Sudarshan says. “It is not easy. Managing their transfers and relocations can be a big hassle.”
That may be why examples like the Kullmans are rare in the upper echelons of global corporations. Rather, husband-wife duos are more likely to start up together. For instance, the founders of Cisco were a husband and wife team — Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner (they got divorced later), who worked for Stanford University before giving birth to the networking firm in 1984.
When VMware was founded in 1998, the American software company’s start-up team included a husband-wife duo, Mendel Rosenblum, its chief scientist, and CEO Diane Greene. And in 2004, Stewart Butterfield and wife Caterina Fake launched photo and video hosting website Flickr; both left the company in 2008, three years after Yahoo acquired it.
Altar Ego?
Starting up a business together — with collective passion and vision — is one thing, and working for an established company together is quite another. To be sure, a husband and wife duo can be a recipe for disaster—not just for the organisation but for the marriage too. Marital stress can easily creep into the workplace and office politics can find its way into the bedroom. More, a virtual 24X7 existence with the partner can make both office and marriage life jaded. Of course, big companies with multiple businesses — DuPont today has 12 businesses — help take care of the in-yourface hazard by simply posting husband and wife in different areas of operation.
Life may also be easier when you are dealing with solemn scientists than, say, adrenaline- (and testosterone-) fuelled techies. Gill, who worked for Microsoft earlier, sees the employees at the chemical giant’s Indian operation as a little more mature than the teams she oversaw at Microsoft. “A research project typically takes five to six years and then taking it to market another couple of years. So I see scientists are a little more patient and grounded lot than techies.”
Having wives in the workplace can also help improve gender diversity. Gill says in India around 23% of all DuPont employees are women. In Asia the number is higher at 33%.
Still, it’s not as if DuPont will force-fit a couple. The partner needs to have the requisite skills “that are beneficial for the company”, says Gill. But there is always scope for improvisation. Gill cites a particular case where the interviewee was deemed overqualified for a position that was vacant. She went on to create a roadmap for the employee to join — and once he settled in and proved himself, he moved to a higher position. The goal, as Gill puts it, is to “hire the best people and make life comfortable for them”.
Ensuring A Long Relationship
Hiring couples has surely contributed to Dupont’s low attrition rate. While the chemicalmaterials-FMCG industry has an attrition rate of 10%, DuPont’s is in single digits — in India and overseas. Gill says proof of the success of an accommodating strategy is that around 99% of its senior leaders are old-time company hands and there are very few lateral hires made by the company for senior positions.
“I have seen other companies struggle with leadership issues,” says Gill, who joined the company in 2012 to head HR for India and has since moved to an Asia-Pacific role. “In Du-Pont people are allowed and enabled to do different jobs at different times and the company is very open to let people move around. When I ask people what keeps you at DuPont, they point to the diversity of the experience — they feel like they have worked in more than one organisation,” adds Gill.
For Rajeev Vaidya, who now has the added responsibility of handling ASEAN along with south Asia, DuPont’s policies have worked well. However, the company has based him and his wife in Delhi, away from their roots in Mumbai. “I lived in the area behind the Sena Bhavan [the headquarters of the Shiv Sena] in the heart of Mumbai. Those were interesting times,” says a misty-eyed Vaidya. And so are these.
•
HUSBANDS, WIVES AND BUSINESS
How
to make three a company
Maintain clear and separate responsibilities, and give each other plenty of breathing space. If necessary, write down job descriptions. Then let each other work in peace.
Keep your personal lives out of the office. Conduct yourselves professionally while on “company time.” The acid test: A stranger should be able to walk into your company and not tell you are married.
Keep business out of the bedroom. Many spouse teams don’t have time during the day to talk about business. So, they take a few minutes after work to catch up, unwind together and make the transition from business partners to marriage partners.
Plan work-free vacations so you remember that you’re much more than business partners.
It’s unrealistic to believe that you can be side by side 24 hours a day and still maintain a healthy outlook and attitude. Develop outside interests in things that belong strictly to you.
The bottom line: If you and your spouse are in business together, you know it can be challenging. However, when everything clicks, there’s nothing better. That’s what makes a family business so special. Don’t leave that most important part to chance. Work hard. Make money. Have fun.
Suman Layak Source: The Freestyle Entrepreneur
Maintain clear and separate responsibilities, and give each other plenty of breathing space. If necessary, write down job descriptions. Then let each other work in peace.
Keep your personal lives out of the office. Conduct yourselves professionally while on “company time.” The acid test: A stranger should be able to walk into your company and not tell you are married.
Keep business out of the bedroom. Many spouse teams don’t have time during the day to talk about business. So, they take a few minutes after work to catch up, unwind together and make the transition from business partners to marriage partners.
Plan work-free vacations so you remember that you’re much more than business partners.
It’s unrealistic to believe that you can be side by side 24 hours a day and still maintain a healthy outlook and attitude. Develop outside interests in things that belong strictly to you.
The bottom line: If you and your spouse are in business together, you know it can be challenging. However, when everything clicks, there’s nothing better. That’s what makes a family business so special. Don’t leave that most important part to chance. Work hard. Make money. Have fun.
Suman Layak Source: The Freestyle Entrepreneur
The
chemicals and bio-sciences giant encourages couples to work together — as long
as they’re both talented
Rajeev
Vaidya, 55, EI DuPont’s president for south Asia and ASEAN, is a Mumbai boy who
loves his sabudana khichdi at Dadar’s Prakash restaurant and swears by its
piyush, the Maharashtrian version of lassi. Rooted to the city in many ways,
Vaidya did not leave Mumbai until he mastered the best education this city
could offer — a degree from IIT. Then, in 1980, he went to the US for further
studies and a PhD.
After completing his doctoral research on how to overcome the insurmountable problem of oil and water not mixing, Vaidya found a new address. He joined DuPont, the global chemicals and bio-sciences company that he went on to work with all over the world, from the US to Shanghai to Singapore — till DuPont brought him back to India in 2010 after 29 years.
“In 1985 DuPont made me an offer I could not refuse,” Vaidya says in Godfather style. Apart from the professional merit of the offer, he had another incentive — DuPont hired his wife Shailaja, who currently works in the India operation as a scientist in the crop-sciences division. Her name is associated with more than a dozen patents registered in the US. In between her US and India stints, Shailaja had worked for Procter & Gamble before returning to DuPont.
True Partners
Rajeev and Shailaja’s story is not unique in DuPont. The propensity to hire couples is evident right from the top — DuPont’s global CEO Ellen Kullman and her husband Michael Kullman were colleagues in DuPont for almost as many years as the Vaidyas. The Kullmans were working with General Electric in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the mid-80s as marketing managers when Ellen was offered a position by the Wilmington-headquartered Du-Pont in 1988. The Kullmans pondered over the move, and whether Michael could eventually move to another Wilmington-based company or one in nearby Philadelphia. However, Ellen’s bosses pointed out that DuPont had 15 divisions and Michael could surely work for any of those — and that is what happened.
The Kullmans rose through the ranks at Du-Pont while bringing up three children in Wilmington. Ellen ended up as CEO in January 2009. Michael was already director of corporate marketing and went on to retire in 2013. He had accompanied his wife on an India visit post retirement in 2013.
The Kullmans and the Vaidyas are just two of thousands of DuPont couples who over the years have worked for the same employer. One estimate is that the company currently has around 3,500 couples on its rolls — that is, of 1 lakh employees globally, 7,000 constitute husband-wife duos. Well, almost — as early as 1996, DuPont had made an offer to a gay couple, both working for DuPont — when one got an international opportunity with the company, DuPont helped relocate his partner too.
It’s a similar pattern at the Indian subsidiary. According to Rajeev Vaidya, the DuPont Knowledge Centre in Hyderabad has employed around 25 couples, most of whom are scientists. “When you hire scientists, it is often the case that their partner is someone they have met at graduate school and are in a similar field. When we get two attractive resumes, two talented people with relevant skills, we are open to the idea of hiring both,” says Vaidya.
Joji Sekhon Gill, regional director for human resources at DuPont, says one of the core values of the company is “respect for people” and this is what drives it to help with transfers within the company when a partner is transferred.
India Story is Different
Hiring couples and helping them stay together in a company is not exactly a common practice in India, not particularly in the traditional companies. But it may be inevitable in sectors such as IT services where a lot of young people meet at the workplace and get married. A senior executive at one of India’s top IT companies says the company does not have a policy for hiring couples; at best it tries to help couples relocate wherever possible. If one partner gets a foreign posting, the company tries to arrange a work visa for the spouse too, if the spouse is also a company employee. Of course the effort is to post them on separate projects or in different divisions.
K Sudarshan, regional vice-president for global CEO recruitment firm EMA Partners, says DuPont is a very unique case; many Indian companies do not even hire first-cousins of existing employees. “Husbands and wives working together can lead to all kinds of complications and cause a great deal of stress [to those working with them]. Appraisal processes can get compromised,” Sudarshan says. “It is not easy. Managing their transfers and relocations can be a big hassle.”
That may be why examples like the Kullmans are rare in the upper echelons of global corporations. Rather, husband-wife duos are more likely to start up together. For instance, the founders of Cisco were a husband and wife team — Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner (they got divorced later), who worked for Stanford University before giving birth to the networking firm in 1984.
When VMware was founded in 1998, the American software company’s start-up team included a husband-wife duo, Mendel Rosenblum, its chief scientist, and CEO Diane Greene. And in 2004, Stewart Butterfield and wife Caterina Fake launched photo and video hosting website Flickr; both left the company in 2008, three years after Yahoo acquired it.
Altar Ego?
Starting up a business together — with collective passion and vision — is one thing, and working for an established company together is quite another. To be sure, a husband and wife duo can be a recipe for disaster—not just for the organisation but for the marriage too. Marital stress can easily creep into the workplace and office politics can find its way into the bedroom. More, a virtual 24X7 existence with the partner can make both office and marriage life jaded. Of course, big companies with multiple businesses — DuPont today has 12 businesses — help take care of the in-yourface hazard by simply posting husband and wife in different areas of operation.
Life may also be easier when you are dealing with solemn scientists than, say, adrenaline- (and testosterone-) fuelled techies. Gill, who worked for Microsoft earlier, sees the employees at the chemical giant’s Indian operation as a little more mature than the teams she oversaw at Microsoft. “A research project typically takes five to six years and then taking it to market another couple of years. So I see scientists are a little more patient and grounded lot than techies.”
Having wives in the workplace can also help improve gender diversity. Gill says in India around 23% of all DuPont employees are women. In Asia the number is higher at 33%.
Still, it’s not as if DuPont will force-fit a couple. The partner needs to have the requisite skills “that are beneficial for the company”, says Gill. But there is always scope for improvisation. Gill cites a particular case where the interviewee was deemed overqualified for a position that was vacant. She went on to create a roadmap for the employee to join — and once he settled in and proved himself, he moved to a higher position. The goal, as Gill puts it, is to “hire the best people and make life comfortable for them”.
Ensuring A Long Relationship
Hiring couples has surely contributed to Dupont’s low attrition rate. While the chemicalmaterials-FMCG industry has an attrition rate of 10%, DuPont’s is in single digits — in India and overseas. Gill says proof of the success of an accommodating strategy is that around 99% of its senior leaders are old-time company hands and there are very few lateral hires made by the company for senior positions.
“I have seen other companies struggle with leadership issues,” says Gill, who joined the company in 2012 to head HR for India and has since moved to an Asia-Pacific role. “In Du-Pont people are allowed and enabled to do different jobs at different times and the company is very open to let people move around. When I ask people what keeps you at DuPont, they point to the diversity of the experience — they feel like they have worked in more than one organisation,” adds Gill.
For Rajeev Vaidya, who now has the added responsibility of handling ASEAN along with south Asia, DuPont’s policies have worked well. However, the company has based him and his wife in Delhi, away from their roots in Mumbai. “I lived in the area behind the Sena Bhavan [the headquarters of the Shiv Sena] in the heart of Mumbai. Those were interesting times,” says a misty-eyed Vaidya. And so are these.
•
HUSBANDS, WIVES AND BUSINESS
After completing his doctoral research on how to overcome the insurmountable problem of oil and water not mixing, Vaidya found a new address. He joined DuPont, the global chemicals and bio-sciences company that he went on to work with all over the world, from the US to Shanghai to Singapore — till DuPont brought him back to India in 2010 after 29 years.
“In 1985 DuPont made me an offer I could not refuse,” Vaidya says in Godfather style. Apart from the professional merit of the offer, he had another incentive — DuPont hired his wife Shailaja, who currently works in the India operation as a scientist in the crop-sciences division. Her name is associated with more than a dozen patents registered in the US. In between her US and India stints, Shailaja had worked for Procter & Gamble before returning to DuPont.
True Partners
Rajeev and Shailaja’s story is not unique in DuPont. The propensity to hire couples is evident right from the top — DuPont’s global CEO Ellen Kullman and her husband Michael Kullman were colleagues in DuPont for almost as many years as the Vaidyas. The Kullmans were working with General Electric in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the mid-80s as marketing managers when Ellen was offered a position by the Wilmington-headquartered Du-Pont in 1988. The Kullmans pondered over the move, and whether Michael could eventually move to another Wilmington-based company or one in nearby Philadelphia. However, Ellen’s bosses pointed out that DuPont had 15 divisions and Michael could surely work for any of those — and that is what happened.
The Kullmans rose through the ranks at Du-Pont while bringing up three children in Wilmington. Ellen ended up as CEO in January 2009. Michael was already director of corporate marketing and went on to retire in 2013. He had accompanied his wife on an India visit post retirement in 2013.
The Kullmans and the Vaidyas are just two of thousands of DuPont couples who over the years have worked for the same employer. One estimate is that the company currently has around 3,500 couples on its rolls — that is, of 1 lakh employees globally, 7,000 constitute husband-wife duos. Well, almost — as early as 1996, DuPont had made an offer to a gay couple, both working for DuPont — when one got an international opportunity with the company, DuPont helped relocate his partner too.
It’s a similar pattern at the Indian subsidiary. According to Rajeev Vaidya, the DuPont Knowledge Centre in Hyderabad has employed around 25 couples, most of whom are scientists. “When you hire scientists, it is often the case that their partner is someone they have met at graduate school and are in a similar field. When we get two attractive resumes, two talented people with relevant skills, we are open to the idea of hiring both,” says Vaidya.
Joji Sekhon Gill, regional director for human resources at DuPont, says one of the core values of the company is “respect for people” and this is what drives it to help with transfers within the company when a partner is transferred.
India Story is Different
Hiring couples and helping them stay together in a company is not exactly a common practice in India, not particularly in the traditional companies. But it may be inevitable in sectors such as IT services where a lot of young people meet at the workplace and get married. A senior executive at one of India’s top IT companies says the company does not have a policy for hiring couples; at best it tries to help couples relocate wherever possible. If one partner gets a foreign posting, the company tries to arrange a work visa for the spouse too, if the spouse is also a company employee. Of course the effort is to post them on separate projects or in different divisions.
K Sudarshan, regional vice-president for global CEO recruitment firm EMA Partners, says DuPont is a very unique case; many Indian companies do not even hire first-cousins of existing employees. “Husbands and wives working together can lead to all kinds of complications and cause a great deal of stress [to those working with them]. Appraisal processes can get compromised,” Sudarshan says. “It is not easy. Managing their transfers and relocations can be a big hassle.”
That may be why examples like the Kullmans are rare in the upper echelons of global corporations. Rather, husband-wife duos are more likely to start up together. For instance, the founders of Cisco were a husband and wife team — Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner (they got divorced later), who worked for Stanford University before giving birth to the networking firm in 1984.
When VMware was founded in 1998, the American software company’s start-up team included a husband-wife duo, Mendel Rosenblum, its chief scientist, and CEO Diane Greene. And in 2004, Stewart Butterfield and wife Caterina Fake launched photo and video hosting website Flickr; both left the company in 2008, three years after Yahoo acquired it.
Altar Ego?
Starting up a business together — with collective passion and vision — is one thing, and working for an established company together is quite another. To be sure, a husband and wife duo can be a recipe for disaster—not just for the organisation but for the marriage too. Marital stress can easily creep into the workplace and office politics can find its way into the bedroom. More, a virtual 24X7 existence with the partner can make both office and marriage life jaded. Of course, big companies with multiple businesses — DuPont today has 12 businesses — help take care of the in-yourface hazard by simply posting husband and wife in different areas of operation.
Life may also be easier when you are dealing with solemn scientists than, say, adrenaline- (and testosterone-) fuelled techies. Gill, who worked for Microsoft earlier, sees the employees at the chemical giant’s Indian operation as a little more mature than the teams she oversaw at Microsoft. “A research project typically takes five to six years and then taking it to market another couple of years. So I see scientists are a little more patient and grounded lot than techies.”
Having wives in the workplace can also help improve gender diversity. Gill says in India around 23% of all DuPont employees are women. In Asia the number is higher at 33%.
Still, it’s not as if DuPont will force-fit a couple. The partner needs to have the requisite skills “that are beneficial for the company”, says Gill. But there is always scope for improvisation. Gill cites a particular case where the interviewee was deemed overqualified for a position that was vacant. She went on to create a roadmap for the employee to join — and once he settled in and proved himself, he moved to a higher position. The goal, as Gill puts it, is to “hire the best people and make life comfortable for them”.
Ensuring A Long Relationship
Hiring couples has surely contributed to Dupont’s low attrition rate. While the chemicalmaterials-FMCG industry has an attrition rate of 10%, DuPont’s is in single digits — in India and overseas. Gill says proof of the success of an accommodating strategy is that around 99% of its senior leaders are old-time company hands and there are very few lateral hires made by the company for senior positions.
“I have seen other companies struggle with leadership issues,” says Gill, who joined the company in 2012 to head HR for India and has since moved to an Asia-Pacific role. “In Du-Pont people are allowed and enabled to do different jobs at different times and the company is very open to let people move around. When I ask people what keeps you at DuPont, they point to the diversity of the experience — they feel like they have worked in more than one organisation,” adds Gill.
For Rajeev Vaidya, who now has the added responsibility of handling ASEAN along with south Asia, DuPont’s policies have worked well. However, the company has based him and his wife in Delhi, away from their roots in Mumbai. “I lived in the area behind the Sena Bhavan [the headquarters of the Shiv Sena] in the heart of Mumbai. Those were interesting times,” says a misty-eyed Vaidya. And so are these.
•
HUSBANDS, WIVES AND BUSINESS
How
to make three a company
Maintain clear and separate responsibilities, and give each other plenty of breathing space. If necessary, write down job descriptions. Then let each other work in peace.
Keep your personal lives out of the office. Conduct yourselves professionally while on “company time.” The acid test: A stranger should be able to walk into your company and not tell you are married.
Keep business out of the bedroom. Many spouse teams don’t have time during the day to talk about business. So, they take a few minutes after work to catch up, unwind together and make the transition from business partners to marriage partners.
Plan work-free vacations so you remember that you’re much more than business partners.
It’s unrealistic to believe that you can be side by side 24 hours a day and still maintain a healthy outlook and attitude. Develop outside interests in things that belong strictly to you.
The bottom line: If you and your spouse are in business together, you know it can be challenging. However, when everything clicks, there’s nothing better. That’s what makes a family business so special. Don’t leave that most important part to chance. Work hard. Make money. Have fun.
Suman Layak Source: The Freestyle Entrepreneur
Maintain clear and separate responsibilities, and give each other plenty of breathing space. If necessary, write down job descriptions. Then let each other work in peace.
Keep your personal lives out of the office. Conduct yourselves professionally while on “company time.” The acid test: A stranger should be able to walk into your company and not tell you are married.
Keep business out of the bedroom. Many spouse teams don’t have time during the day to talk about business. So, they take a few minutes after work to catch up, unwind together and make the transition from business partners to marriage partners.
Plan work-free vacations so you remember that you’re much more than business partners.
It’s unrealistic to believe that you can be side by side 24 hours a day and still maintain a healthy outlook and attitude. Develop outside interests in things that belong strictly to you.
The bottom line: If you and your spouse are in business together, you know it can be challenging. However, when everything clicks, there’s nothing better. That’s what makes a family business so special. Don’t leave that most important part to chance. Work hard. Make money. Have fun.
Suman Layak Source: The Freestyle Entrepreneur
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