How people initiatives help firms check attrition and boost employee morale

How people initiatives help firms check attrition and boost employee morale

NEW DELHI | BENGALURU: Bengaluru-based online jeweller BlueStone in April rolled out an upskilling support policy for its employees, offering financial assistance for completing their graduation or to get professional certification.

Under this scheme, employees who have been with BlueStone for approximately a year can receive Rs 12,000 per annum towards fees for part-time graduation courses or Open University courses. Those looking to get professional certification are offered up to Rs 50,000 towards the course fee. "The jewellery design sector in India is as yet still largely unorganised, and there are quite a few employees in our design and logistics departments and others, who will benefit by this financial assistance," said Atul Mohan, head of HR at the Ratan Tata-backed startup.

BlueStone is now working on a master list containing short-term certification courses recommended for employees. "The interest we've seen from employees has shown us that such policies make a real and tangible impact in driving morale. This initiative is part of our larger efforts to demonstrate to our team that we care for them," Mohan said. While BlueStone is looking to boost employee morale through its initiatives, it can hope to achieve much more in the long run as companies across sectors, including Citi, PepsiCo, Lemon Tree and Schneider Electric, have discovered.

Getting to Zero Attrition

A pool of high performers with nil attrition: That's what Citi achieved in four years through its policy that safeguards the performance ratings of women employees who go on maternity leave.

This India-specific initiative — started with an objective to help reduce potential biases that come in the way of providing women an objective rating for their work performance and encourages high performing women to return to work with enthusiasm — is now a part of the bank's DNA.

"This has been one of the most significant interventions in the past four years that has facilitated the retention of women employees in the bank," said Anuranjita Kumar, chief HR officer at Citi South Asia. Over the last 3-4 years, Citi has not lost a single woman on maternity leave to "not being rated fairly". "We ring-fenced ratings based on their last two years' performance. We are not making any concessions in performance," Kumar said.

This is a huge shift from 2012, wherein the policy was not in place and the bank had a significant percentage of women on maternity leave not coming back to work. Often, high performers got impacted. That was a pool of talent the ban talent the bank did not want to lose. "High potential women think differently. They tend to leave if they perceive they have not been treated fairly," Kumar said. The practice has helped the bank in retaining women especially at mid and senior levels.

Differently-Abled

Innovative people initiatives are a glue that make employees stick as The Lemon Tree Hotel Company discovered through its initiative to create a socially inclusive work environment. Nine years ago, the mid-market hotel chain started work on its policy to bring together people of different backgrounds, abilities and ethnicities.

It also wanted to see if it was feasible to hire persons with disabilities (PwDs) as regular employees. In the early stages, the company inducted such employees only in back-end roles like kitchen stewarding and housekeeping where direct guest interaction was minimal. This gave the company an opportunity to develop standard operating procedures and training modules for employees with disabilities (EwDs). It then extended the policy to restaurants. "Today, many of our guests are surprised and happy to be served by EwDs at our hotels and feel they too are contributing to nation-building. We get a lot of feedback about the excellent service provided by EwDs from the guest satisfaction tracking system and TripAdvisor," said Aradhana Lal, vice president for sustainability initiatives at Lemon Tree.

While it started off as an experimental programme, today 14%, or around 500 employees across the group's 29 hotels are differently-abled and 12%, or 400 people, are from economically/socially weak segments. The policy has helped Lemon Tree enhance both employee and customer satisfaction. "We can see a big impact in reputation building and strengthening of the brand," Lal said.

Closing Pay Gaps

Another initiative that became an agent of change was at global specialist in energy management and automation, Schneider Electric India. It does a thorough review of promotions and increments to ensure gender pay equity.

At the time of appraisal the company does a gender pay equity analysis and reviews the data to see if there is any imbalance in the payout and promotions. While Schneider strictly goes by performance, such an initiative helps in revealing unconscious bias. "Being an equal opportunity employer is our fundamental principle. It is our strong belief that for the same job and same competence we will pay equally irrespective of gender," said Rachna Mukherjee, chief HR officer at Schneider Electric India.

While the practice focuses on getting gender balance right, the programme extends to customised development, mentoring, sponsorship, coaching and longterm career planning. "People managers need to be trained on inclusive management and they are assessed on such attributes," Mukherjee said.

An 'Outside-In' Approach

About two years ago, PepsiCo launched an 'outside-in' perspective for employees through differentiated learning and capability building programmes.
Raman Singh, HR director at PepsiCo India, said it is working on interventions including formal mentoring, informal reverse mentoring, classroom learning with experts/leaders, and leadership development academies, for employees.

As part of this, a 1-12 masterclass series has become a key learning platform for the firm. It is focused on building perspectives on important and upcoming skills for the organisation like design, digital, operational excellence.

To ensure its future leaders have greater perspective to stay agile and innovative, PepsiCo is concentrating on developing its critical resources for the future through differentiated learning experiences. "In a period of rapid change and increasing complexity, the winners are going to be the people who can learn faster than rate of change and being aware of your ecosystems is a big step forward," Singh said.

Source | Economic Times | 22 July 2016

Regards

Pralhad Jadhav

Senior Manager @ Library

Khaitan & Co

Blog | http://pralhad-fyilibrarian.blogspot.in/

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