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Continued...
Our Talent Management Culture
Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla has said that
the broad philosophy of the company as an
employer is to empower and to enrich, and
as part of that there are a couple of things.
First, there is the trust. Our people must
trust the organisation that they work for
without any doubt and in any situation.
In one of Aditya Vikram Birla's speeches,
he said that the most important lesson in
management that he learned from his grandfather
was that major investments should be made
in the selection, training, and building
up of people. He said that his grandfather
also taught him to have full trust and confidence
in the people; "Your men will be as
loyal to you as you are to them."
The second important thing is that we practice
meritocracy. Our people must understand
that they will have the opportunity to excel
and grow in our company as long as they
have merit. They must not be afraid or feel
lost in their quest or pursuit for excellence
and career advancement.
Finally, our diversified business groups
offer wide career opportunities for our
people in various locations around the world
— whether they want to try our business
process outsourcing in Canada, or to work
in Australia in the mines, or even to head
our strategy function in the world's largest
rolling company in Atlanta. In short, our
people can enjoy these opportunities within
the same company without having to move
from one company to another. Where can you
find such varied and diversified areas of
business all under the same roof?
Our legendary leader, Aditya Vikram Birla,
had shared that his grandfather taught him
that ordinary people can give extraordinary
results if they are given the right opportunity.
We have to train people by delegating authority
to them. We must let our people make mistakes
in the process. It is only through making
these mistakes that they learn bitter lessons
the hard way. This is where the strongest
leaders are built.
His view is that we must have the forbearance,
fortitude, patience, and a big heart to bear
the losses in training our people. He said
that opportunities must be given to people
for them to perform. We must not hesitate
to give away our authority to our people.
We must be open to delegating authority, but
we must be responsible to ensure that our
people are ready to accept delegation and
empowerment.
He shared that when he came back from the
United States, his father gave him an industrial
mill to work on his own without any help from
the Group. He said that his father had the
vision and the guts to delegate that huge
responsibility to him because his father had
trust in him. But he made innumerable mistakes
in the process. So the training was worth
all the mistakes he had made.
To stay focused on our people's career development
and growth, we ensure that we stay closely
engaged with our employees by aligning employee
needs and business interests. This undivided
attention has helped us tremendously in developing
and implementing our best-in-class people
practices. Across 25 countries, our human
resource processes are replicated seamlessly
with strong orientation in various aspects
such as continuous personal and professional
growth, values-driven work culture, quality
of life, feeling of ownership, just to name
a few.
Chairman Birla has said that the criticality
of the human element is today more pronounced
than ever before. Undeniably, what sparks
and sustains the success of an enterprise
are its people. This is the universal truth.
It is no different in India. Leadership is
all about the following beliefs:
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Plugging
into the minds and hearts of people
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Rallying
them around to a compelling and exciting
vision of the future
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Upping
the quality of imagination of the
organisation
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Encouraging
a spirit of intellectual ferment and
constructive dissent so that people
are not bound by the status quo, and
mavericks are given space and free
play
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Building
the highest levels of empathy, without
compromising on fairness and running
a popularity contest
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This
is the path we pursue to muster the emotional
and intellectual equity of our 100,000 workforce,
spanning 25 countries, belonging to 25 nationalities
across six continents.
We are a meritocracy where talent automatically
bubbles to the top. We work to make space
for new ideas and encourage the spirit of
experimentation. Champions of good ideas
have every chance to try them out. Our people
systems are aligned to foster excellence,
empower and enrich people, recognise creativity
and innovation, and reward performance.
People with a good track record and people
with a passion to perform are steered onto
a growth trajectory.
Maybe we could attribute our being voted the
Best Employer in India and among the top 20
in Asia by The Hewitt-Economic Times and The
Wall Street Journal study to this ascendancy
that we give to our people. To get to the
top has been tough. Staying at the top is
going to be even tougher. We realise that
we have to work much harder to make our people
process development-oriented and even more
sensitive to our people's career aspirations.
Hence we are personally involved with business
leaders and other leaders within the organisation
to use this achievement to bring a sharper
focus on our employees and employee engagement.
Our guess is that this is germane to leadership
across geographies.
The key issue that leaders have to grapple
with is implementing mergers and acquisitions
successfully so that they are seamless. A
coming together of two companies is not about
balance sheets coming together, or distribution
channels coming together. It is, at the end
of the day, about people coming together,
their hearts and minds coming together, and
their values and cultures coalescing.
The process is full of anxiety, uncertainty,
and silent suffering. Often top management
is oblivious to these emotions. Unfortunately,
many do not care or lose sleep over it. The
softer aspects of mergers are neglected. To
sail successfully through the transition phase,
leaders need to be sensitised to these issues.
As we look ahead, we believe the War for Talent
will intensify and that could become a major
speed breaker. There is acute competition
rather than a scramble for inducing and retaining
people with competencies relevant for a globalising
corporation.
When a company globalises, its internal demographics
transform into a sociocultural potpourri.
There is inherent instability. Corporations
that embark on this growth trajectory face
churn and uncertainty amid change. On such
a journey success will come to those corporations
where the leadership is unifying and value-driven.
Our Talent Management Programs
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As
a hugely diversified and vast business group,
we have the capability to offer a wide variety
of job opportunities including challenges,
circumstances, and different lifestyles from
global and regional perspectives spread across
a few time zones. To sustain this buffet of
offerings to our employees, our company has
built an aggressive growth plan with structured
processes that provide sufficient flexibility
for employees' individual creativity and innovation.
By this we mean that our company's strength
has been built on the high quality of our
employee talent. This is the positive outcome
of allowing our employees the freedom to charter
their own chosen career path across the varied
business groups in the wide spread of countries
all within the same company. We can safely
say that we really spoil our employees!
Touching on our structured processes, our
focus has been on internal recruitment scheme,
global mobility policy, talent management,
job analysis and evaluation, and continuous
learning opportunity. These areas of our focus
have demonstrated that we can now deliver
the right quality of talent required of our
intense diversified business around the world.
We streamline these processes regularly to
ensure that they are kept updated with the
changing times and changing expectations of
our employees, both new and old.
In addition to these areas, we are also serious
about employee engagement. What we do is to
monitor this element closely at all levels
across our business groups through our biennial
organisation health study (OHS), which is
headed by our Chairman. He is personally involved
in the OHS because any actions that are recorded
from the results of the OHS must be followed
through promptly until closure.
Employees are aware of our management's serious
commitment in the OHS, so they take this opportunity
anonymously to express their opinions and
ideas and offer suggestions and comments freely
and without fear on a range of issues. As
an illustration, almost 15,600 employees participated
in our last OHS in 2006, which tells us that
our employees are interested in sharing their
feedback and views with our management. In
this study, our employees told us that they
had a positive perception that our company
is serious about enhancing their competence
levels and ensuring that they remain employable
based on our focus on learning.
Sixty-seven per cent of the respondents in
this study said that they would recommend
our company to their friends who are looking
for a meaningful career, whereas 69 per cent
of them shared that they would like to remain
in the same business two years from time of
the study. Further, 71 per cent confessed
that they had received sufficient training
for them to perform well in their roles.
That is why it is so critical that we consider
all our employees as Group resources in our
continuous and relentless effort to enhance
our image as the employer of choice. This
also helps our employees to have a sense of
belonging to our company besides having them
create the bonding and closeness among themselves.
The positive results from our OHS validate
that our employees are happy working in our
company, which helps to ensure that there
is continuity of their services across the
various business groups.
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On
employee engagement efforts, we launched the
Aditya Birla Awards for Outstanding Achievement
in 1996 to recognise outstanding performance
and excellence among employees from the various
business groups across a wide geographical
span. The interesting thing about this recognition
is that a number of group-wide competitions
are held in conjunction with recognition such
as Vision 2015, Oh! Not So Smart, and the
Aditya Birla Group value leader poll. They
are open to all employees.
Another of our talent management efforts to
keep employee engagement active and interactive
is through our common portal where every employee
can access information about our company.
This portal also provides job opportunities
in our company at the various levels, business
groups, and locations. In this way, our employees
have equal access and opportunity to such
information. This helps to encourage healthy
internal communication among employees across
all business groups in our company.
We also enjoy putting little personal touches
in some of our recognition events. For example,
we celebrated our recent recognition as the
Best Employer in India and one of the top
employers in 2007 in Asia6 by sending
a token of appreciation to the 20,000 management
cadre employees — a commemorative Cross
pen with the Chairman's signature and an inscription
that read "A Moment to Cherish —
2007."
In all our locations we celebrated with a
specially composed song titled "We are
the best" together with an audio-visual
presentation. This is an excellent example
where we ensure that every employee understood
that he or she had made significant contribution
to the company's recent recognition in India
and in Asia — 2007 was a great year for
us!
Over the last five years, we have built several
categories of our talent management programs
integrating all these areas effectively:
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Recruitment
and staffing
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Nurturing
talent
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Performance
management
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Opportunities
for learning
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Rewards
and recognition |
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People
processes across the company
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Work
life balance |
In
terms of recruitment and staffing, our approach
is a multi-pronged one. At the Group level,
we determine and establish the policies
and leave the execution of these policies
to the locations and business groups. To
ensure that there is complete synchronisation
and consistency in the policy implementation
at the ground level, our recruitment and
staffing process requires for senior level
potential recruits to meet with the Chairman
before formal employment offers are made
to these individuals. This also ensures
that these potential recruits are a good
fit to our company values.
Information
on job openings and opportunities are open
to all employees and communicated through
our intranet common portal; therefore, they
compete with external applicants in our
transparent recruitment process where we
stress meritocracy and competence. We believe
that this is the right approach to drive
home the point to our employees and potential
employees that we only hire the best and
the brightest, and that there is equal competition
and equal opportunity in our recruitment
process.
Our
hiring process does not just stop after
the candidates are hired. We make sure that
our commitments made during the hiring process
are honoured and delivered as we said we
would. Our HR partner, immediate supervisors
of these new recruits, department heads,
and peers all have important roles to play
in the employee on-boarding process.
The
key thing is to ensure that our new recruits
feel welcome and are smoothly transitioned
into our corporate culture so that they
become productive as soon as possible. We
have also learned that including the families
of these new recruits helps to ease the
assimilation and transition process.
However,
we are also mindful of the new challenges
ahead where it is now commonplace for our
company to be merging and acquiring other
companies. This is where we need to create
innovative ideas as new job roles and performance
metrics occur as a result of these mergers
and acquisitions.
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