I Do Not Remember My Last Drawn Salary. But I Remember This.
Three companies. A decade. I cannot tell you the salary figures. But I can tell you exactly what was said in a hotel lobby in Chennai, and why it still shapes how I build teams today.
I was fortunate. The first decade of my career was spent across three companies that each had an immense focus on values and culture. This was before 2010; a time when, looking back, corporate culture in some places was genuinely different from what I see being built today. Not everywhere; but in the companies I was lucky enough to join.
It has been more than a decade since I left my last corporate job. I cannot tell you what my final salary was. I can tell you, almost word for word, six things that happened in those years; because those are the things that actually stayed.
My first organisation. We were joining at the Chennai headquarters, scheduled to spend two months there. We were put up in a very good hotel; better than we expected. The kind of hotel where the per-day rent exceeded my monthly HRA.
I remember the room rate was Rs 4,500 a night, which was staggering to me, especially since the room had a massive, completely non-functional decorative brass telescope pointing at a brick wall.
I remember thinking I should ask someone about this; it seemed like an expense that would surely come back to us somehow.
That sentence has not left me in twenty years. Frugality, when it is genuine, protects the company. But frugality that transfers the cost of business decisions onto employees is not frugality; it is something else entirely.
Every business unit had a dedicated line HR; not a shared service, not a process function. A person who was empowered enough to question business leaders. Not just listen to them; question them.
I was not happy with my manager. I was worried that my growth would be hampered if I remained in a situation where I was scared of the person above me. In most places, this is the kind of thing you say quietly to a colleague and then sit with. Here, I told my HR directly. Within a day of that conversation... after an honest understanding of the situation... my manager was changed.
Trust without teeth is a poster on a wall. This was trust with actual consequence. The system worked because the HR was genuinely empowered, not ceremonially consulted.
I am not sure why I still think about this. Maybe it does not matter.
There was an annual budget for a three-days, two-nights team outing. No agenda. No presentations. And honestly, no business objectives cloaked under the label of "offsite," which always just makes everyone feel like they are being tricked into working anyway. The explicit understanding was that the best team building happens when people are free to be with each other; and that mixing it with lectures, reviews, and structured sessions defeats the purpose entirely.
I have been to many "team building" events since. Most of them are business meetings with a nicer venue and drinks at the end. The team does not build; it just relocates. What I experienced in those early years was different because the intent was honest about what it was: time, freely given, for people to actually know each other.
These outings were never held on weekends.
It is a small thing. A single policy decision. But it signals something significant: the company understood that personal time belongs to the person, and that asking people to give up their weekends for company activities... regardless of how enjoyable those activities might be... is a cost that should should be acknowledged, not quietly assumed. The weekend is yours. The outing is ours. We will do the outing on our time, not yours.
Monthly skip-level meetings. Quarterly skip-skip meetings. A country head meeting, also regular. The structure was deliberate; and so was the format. These were not town halls where leaders spoke and employees listened. They were small-group conversations where employees could speak to leaders; and to an extent that, in retrospect, would be called questioning.
The country head participated. Not as a speaker. As a participant. That distinction is everything. A Townhall tells you what the company thinks. A small focused meeting tells the company what you think. Both are necessary. But only one of them builds the kind of trust that makes people stay.
I have seen many companies run ethnic days, Diwali rangoli competitions, Women's Day breakfasts. The new joiners are genuinely excited. The boardrooms are filled with people for whom it is business as usual; present physically, absent entirely.
In this organisation, the country head personally took the day. Visited each team. Walked to their desk. Encouraged them. Gave out awards with his own hands; not delegated, not represented by a plaque sent by courier, not acknowledged in a company-wide email. He was there. Because of that, we understood it mattered. Not because it was mandatory. Because the person who had the least time to be there chose to be there.
That is the difference between a practice and a culture. A practice is scheduled. A culture is chosen.
I do not know what my last drawn salary was. But I know exactly what those companies gave me; and I am still spending it.
The sense of belonging to those firms does not come from compensation or designation. It comes from six specific memories of being treated as someone whose home, family, time, voice, and growth actually mattered to the people running the organisation.
I will be honest: when I built my own ventures, I followed some of these and missed others. The ones I missed showed up later... in turnover, in energy, in the way people talked about work when they thought I was not listening. Culture is not what you intend. It is what you actually do; consistently, when nobody is watching, and when it costs you something to do it. :)