Over the last decade and a half, many organizations in India have been resounding in their sentiment that their key employees, even though highly talented and capable, lack self-confidence and interpersonal skills to make a definitive impact on their teams, customers and stakeholders. And not surprisingly, poor communication skills are cited as a major cause holding them back from delivering their job roles to their potential.
Poor communication skills, characterized by one’s limited ability to structure and articulate thoughts, result in a slew of challenges while working with each other. Distorted messages, misconstrued intents, tacit assumptions, cross cultural differences; all these dreaded villains of work-place productivity can be tackled by improving the ability to express.
Vyakta (meaning ‘to express’) specializes in enabling people by improving their communication skills and English proficiency. The core purpose of ‘Making Work Life Worth Living’ guides the coaches at Vyakta to not just enhance the capability, but also the overall sense of identity of the learners.
Ashish Kumar Jha, founder of Vyakta is an astute tactician in human capability enhancement. It was early 2000’s when Ashish teamed up with a recruitment firm and started coaching prospective candidates in English for better employability.
Gradually understanding the norms of the industry, Ashish came up with the idea of establishing Vyakta, an HR organization to help individuals realize their work life goals through developing skills and inculcating values.
Ashish reminisces the challenges he faced in the formative years of the company. He says, “It was difficult to convince the clients that communication is actually a behavioural skill, and the learner needs to change some of her habits, which demands repetition and time. We overcame this by building blended programs – using experiential workshops and tele-coaching over phone, email and skype.”
In addition to communication skills, Vyakta conducts facilitation workshops and individual coaching programs for top management teams in strategic thinking, self-development and people strategies.
Another leading light of Vyakta is V Kishore Kumar, a partner and coach. An IIT graduate of 1980 batch, he is the mainstay in managing client relations and acts in perfect tandem with Ashish, who is responsible for program design and internal training.
The team takes pride in living its values of care for the learner and rigor in learning. A truly flat organization, the coaches work as autonomous self managed teams without any bosses or fixed working hours. Self development of the coaches is a part of their job description and the organization invests over 10 percent of its revenue in organizing formal and informal learning programs.
Vyakta’s steadfastness has delivered astounding results, learners at an individual level feel highly connected to their coaches, to the learning process and to their work-life.The company’s programs are designed with rigor, carefully capturing every nuance of client needs. Kishore elaborates, “During our pre-program conversations, the words of the participants are recorded, studied and analyzed threadbare to capture the stated and unstated needs of the learner.”
The company’s client list is long and reputed, some of the biggest names include Larsen & Toubro, Asian Paints, ICICI Bank, Sun Pharma, Glenmark, General Motors, General Mills Ltd and many others. The company has been associated with L&T’s Leadership Development Academy, and was also a part of the HR Gurukul initiative of General Motors. Going forward, Vyakta attempts to expand into Southeast Asian and other non-English speaking countries, and develop eLearning Platforms for individual learners. The energetic company is poised to present its signature services with even more effectiveness in coming years.