Idea Cellular - Making the Right Calls

Manu Kaushik
13 March 2016
Business Today

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Every year, Idea Cellular relocates almost 1,500 employees within the company. That's roughly 10 per cent of its permanent workforce. For any organisation, this kind of movement can be highly burdensome, but not at Idea, where it is planned well. A small proportion of these relocations, within cities or between two cities, are for filling up vacancies, but a vast majority, 90 per cent, have a different purpose.

"The intent is to bring freshness, to give people higher challenges, and to expose them to different teams, bosses and market conditions. We ensure that people keep adding value as they spend time in the organisation," says Vinay Razdan, the company's Chief Human Resources Officer. Every movement is thought through, discussed and planned.

Typically, people focus on vertical progression and rewards during performance appraisal. But Idea also focuses on career progression of employees. So, as during the performance appraisal discussion, the dialogue around career progression takes a back seat (the entire focus is on ratings), the company has c;reated a separate process to talk about career progression. Once a year, employees talk to managers about skills they would like to acquire or projects they would like to undertake. "The organisation has multiple job profiles. If an employee doesn't plan, he or she could get lost in the same job and same vertical for 10-15 years, which means he or she doesn't get an opportunity to broad-base skill sets by moving across verticals, locations and roles," says Razdan.

Razdan says human resources interventions in Idea Cellular are immune to market conditions. He says in 2008, when the economic downturn happened, and when most companies decided to put their programmes on hold, Idea continued its high-cost initiatives. "It’s an investment that you make in people. It takes years to build that trust," he says.

In order to c;reate a robust performance appraisal system, the company uses scientific tools even at the lowest level. In other organisations, says Razdan, such techniques are usually employed for top 5 per cent talent, as it's an intensive process.

"Most companies get three-four people around to discuss about an employee and take a call whether the person should be promoted. Not many companies have diagnostics available to them in which case studies, in-basket examples and various tools are used to assess competencies of a person in a scientific manner. Our performance management and career growth engine is completely transparent and objective. If an employee has talent, he does not have to worry about being on the right side of people in life," he says.

As a result, employee engagement at Idea has been impressive. For instance, in one of the employee engagement surveys conducted at the Aditya Birla Group, including Idea, a record number - 99.3 per cent - employees participated. "We picked a day and told people across the company [to participate]. The purpose was to test alignment. It was like a thousand-piece orchestra playing the same melody. We had record levels of participation," says Razdan.

Nevertheless, the high attrition rate over the past 12 months seems to be bothering the human resources department. In the past, the company has claimed to have the lowest attrition rates in the industry. But with the entry of Reliance Jio, which is building everything grounds up, poaching has shot up. "This year, the whole industry base has shifted. The kind of people we are losing to competition are not highly rated, though. We are losing average performers," he says.