There are some good times in everyone’s life but then there are some not so good times that we remember the most. It’s important to learn from bad experiences but it is far more important to live with happy experiences and talk about them so that somewhere, someone exactly like you can say, “It will happen one day!”
“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door”. This is exactly what I was trying to do during my second year of graduation. After giving multiple interviews for summer internship and getting rejected in most of them, Pantaloons of Aditya Birla Group gave me an internship opportunity which introduced me to a whole new world. Pantaloons is recognized as India’s Most Trusted Fashion retailer in the brand equity survey of The Economic Times 2016-17. It is evident, from the large customer base that Pantaloons has, that the brand caters to a very big section of our society and the kind of impact this brand creates.
I interned at Pantaloons, Karol Bagh, for two months during my second year of graduation. I observed retail business on first hand basis and I got to know that it is the employees who make the business successful. Every salesman and saleswoman work day and night so that we, the customers, have a delightful shopping experience.
I realized how selfless their job is and how grateful we people should be towards them. They do a plethora of physical tasks in a day which include taking in inventory, stocking up the shelves, helping people with every little problem they face during their visit and many more.
While visiting a store, when we stumble upon the perfectly kept stack of clothes, do we ever realize how hard it can be for people to reset it 100 times a day? We generally don’t. While interning at Pantaloons, I reached out to as many people as I could and talked about these little things that can create big differences at retail stores.
The way these people take care of their customers, Aditya Birla Group takes care of its employees. It is the company’s efforts that reflect upon the employee’s work which in turn drives the sales of the company. Every employee of the store treats every other employee with utmost dignity and respect. They also have an annual employee enhancement program called ‘Saksham’ where the company evaluates the employees on a fixed set of parameters and then train them for better roles within the organization. There is also a practice of rewarding one employee every week for his/her outstanding performance which gives motivation to every other employee.
ABG created an impact in my life. I learned something from each and every person I worked with at Pantaloons. Someone taught me to work hard and someone made me realize the importance of little things in life. I observed that a mere bowl of sweets can make people happy and here we are, worrying and crying over every little thing that goes wrong. It’s never wrong to wish for great things to happen. We all should work every day towards making our lives better but at the same time, it is also important to enjoy and live what we have when we have it.
Aditya Birla Group works towards the larger goal of changing lives and creating impact. It teaches us the value of togetherness and respect. It motivates us to try to achieve our goals in life, to work hard towards them. It tells us to work at ground level and work for the root cause of every problem we face and challenge ourselves every day. It is because of the vision and efforts that the company puts forward for its people that many MBA students like me dream to work for ABG.