How the Aditya Birla group became a Top 20 employer in Asia

Employee co-operation, initiative, innovation and empowerment are the critical pillars that support and strengthen the organisational edifice. Successful organisations grow fast and stand tall through the creation and proper maintenance of a high performance workplace.

Most organisations have some organisational structure, but often neglect — through ignorance — these very pillars.

Implementing appropriate work and job systems and employee skills management is the key to promoting the right organisational culture while simultaneously aligning with current business needs and achieving action plans.

Introduction
HR initiatives enable organisations to allocate necessary people resources that eventually sum up to customer satisfaction and better business performance.

Here’s how. The first step towards meeting and exceeding customer expectation is hiring the right people whose skills and mind-set are aligned with organisational objectives.

Team-building exercises include formation of teams, defining team functions and determining team success criteria. This is essential for fostering cooperation amongst employees.

Good HR practices include employee participation in workplace decision-making, which provides them a sense of belonging and enhances motivation levels. Empowering employees also fosters leadership and innovative thinking in them. HR initiatives would be incomplete without a robust performance management system in place to measure individual as well as team performance. Finally, a mechanism offering compensation, recognition and rewards to deserving employees acts as the ultimate motivator for all employees.

The first, and most significant step, is to develop a work systems design that includes job enlargement, job rotation and job enrichment, concluding with job design combined with other elements.

Industry perspectives
The Tata group
The HR initiatives at the Tata group include steps taken to retain and motivate talent. According to Satish Pradhan, executive VP (group human resources), heading the core team that defines and implements HR strategies across all Tata companies, the three key things for the group’s companies are attracting, retaining and developing talent. They aim to achieve this through implementing the following steps:
1 Providing challenging jobs to
employees
2 Rewarding good performance
3 Offering competitive
 remuneration
4 Investing in employee development

The Tata group provides a framework, a structure and an environment, but how much they invest in themselves determines whether the employees add value to themselves.

This new approach makes available opportunities that enable employees to add value to themselves, unlike the approach adopted a couple of decades ago, where organisations took charge of the employees’ life by determining and taking care of all their needs.

Santrupt Misra (director, Aditya Birla Management Corp)
The AV Birla group and the HR team under the leadership of Santrupt Misra won the No 1 slot in the Hewitt Best Employer Survey-2007. The group also ranks among the Top 20 employers in Asia. The HR system at the AV Birla group is built on the foundation of a meritocracy. The HR initiatives are categorised under three main heads:
1 Learning and re-learning
2 performance management
3 Organisational renewal

Gyanodaya, the group’s learning centre, facilitates the first category. It enables the transfer of best practices across group companies honing the group’s competitive edge. Aditya Disha, the group’s intranet, provides employees access to the training calendar that consists of a combination of classroom, outreach and e-learning programmes.

Conclusion
While work systems and job design, along with skills acquisition and sharing, form the core ingredients of a high performance workplace, they would be worthless if they did not promote co-operation, initiative, empowerment, innovation and a thriving organisational culture.

Suresh Lulla is the managing director of Qimpro Consultants, founder of the BestPrax Club, and chairman of the IMC Quality Awards Committee. In 2005, he was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award by the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, in recognition of his outstanding achievements in Management Consultancy.