Rohan Murty, billionaire brother-in-law of UK PM Rishi Sunak and Narayana Murthy’s son, and founder-CEO of Soroco that aims to streamline the way teams perform, is working to make employees more productive. He believes that monitoring employees through various tools is not the way to do it.
Murty, the 39-year brother of UK PM Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata Murthy, does have his father, who built Infosys into one of India’s biggest companies, as inspiration. His company, Soroco, is on a mission to discover a way to help teams perform to their fullest. With offices in Boston, London and Bengaluru, Soroco works with a range of Fortune 500 companies across the globe. Murty also owns 1.45 per cent stake in Infosys.
Rohan Murty, a PhD from Harvard University and a Cornell University graduate in Computer Science, joined forces with Arjun Narayan, a post-graduate in Computer Science from MIT and George Nychis, a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, to create Soroco in 2014. Murty is also the founder of the Murty Classical Library of India.
EASING WORK ENVIRONMENT
In a Harvard Business Review article published last week, Murty said that ever since employees moved to a work from home regime, employers have been concerned that workers are not working as much as they should be. He said despite increased productivity, the concerns about employees under-performing have persisted. As a result, companies have unleashed a litany of tools to monitor work to “measure” productivity.
Murty said that such approaches only intensify the belief that management and teams are often at loggerheads. Murty called such approaches “oppressive” and added that it is more likely to “demoralise workers”, which could lead them to quit. These tools also often ignore the environment in which the employees are working.
“A “squeeze ‘em” approach that focuses on individual productivity is incomplete, lacks nuance, cannot scale, and does not reveal the full truth of how people get their work done and what ails them,” said Murty in the article co-authored with Shreyas Karanth, product manager at Soroco.
The duo elaborate that ‘empathy’ is key for insights into employee performances. They said that empathy can help management understand the point of view of the workers and reveal what is broken in the environment they are working in and how it can affect them. Instead of focussing on the individual, empathy focuses on the team and the environment in which people work. An empathic approach is bottom-up, inclusive and contextualised to teams’ local experiences.
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Employers, instead of deploying tools, can create a work graph – a digital map of how teams’ experiences work. Anonymising the users, aggregating users from a user to a team, making opt-in voluntary for users, eliminating information asymmetry, collective problem solving, and localising patterns and actions to each team must be followed while creating a work graph.
Rohan Murty also founded the Murty Classical Library of India, a continuation of the Clay Sanskrit Library, in 2010. The library aims to reintroduce great literary works of India from the past two millennia to a new generation. These works are translated to English, revamped with a contemporary book design, and new typefaces. It has works from languages including Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Pali, Panjabi, Persian, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu, which are also offered alongside the English versions.
Also read: Meet Akshata Murty, UK PM Rishi Sunak’s millionaire wife and Infosys' Narayana Murthy's daughter