Aditya Birla Group rejigs HR policy to retain talent

Ramsurya Mamidenna
Hindustan Times
22 June 2015

Restructuring to promote young leaders, tap gender diversity in wake of staff drain to e-commerce cos

Mumbai: The Aditya Birla Group has embarked upon a major human resource (HR) restructuring programme that will promote young leadership, build on existing gender diversity across group companies and make people management more interactive at the $40-billion conglomerate.

The group has elevated young professionals to top posts; Ashish Dixit, 45, is the business head at Madura Garments and Pinky Mehta, 47, has been appointed chief financial officer at Aditya Birla Nuvo, one of the first woman CFOs at a listed company.

"This will encourage other employees and promote development of talent which is one of the main features of the HR transformation project that we have started," group HR director Santrupt Misra told HT.

The Mumbai-based conglomerate which has close to 120,000 employees from over 40 nationalities, is building a five-year HR strategy for the first time which will give a stronger fillip to group brand, talent development, leadership development and succession planning.

"I am not overly concerned with the challenges from e-commerce firms. For me the greater challenge is to address multi generational aspirations," said Misra. "The average age in the group at the management level is 38 years and for all employees it's 37 years. We are not discriminating on the basis of age and we realised we needed to give them larger responsibilities early on in life. If we successfully do that it will be more attractive for other employees," he added.

E-commerce firms have proved to be a headache for HR heads of large companies in India as they have been largely successful in pulling young employees, enticing them with challenging roles and substantial compensation packages with stock options. "I have also lost many young bright people. You cannot stop this trend. You have to think of how best to address such a flow," he said.

The Aditya Birla Group is implementing a 7-10% rise in salaries across companies in July. HR firms have pegged the average salary hike in the 8-10% range citing improving business confidence and softer inflation.