Employee Engagement in the Eve of Christmas

The startup organizations have once again done the magic in engaging the employees on the Christmas Eve. They have become a real Santa Clause for their employees showering bonuses and gifts in an innovative manner. The charisma of Non-Monetary Rewards is being clearly reflected from the engagement initiatives offered to their employees.  The basket of rewards has been filled with foreign trips, paid vacations with family, additional leaves to outbound activities and camp fires etc.

Some of the prominent startup organizations taking a lead in these initiatives are CodeNation, Wingify, Shop-Clues, MyDala, Wego, Roadrunnr, JoyByNature, Onetimejobs and BiteClub.

ShopClues, an online shopping portal has gifted leaves for more than 20 days to their employees along with an announcement of alternative week-offs on Saturdays starting from 2016.

Wego, one the top travel portal use to throw Christmas parties and play secret Santa at office, but this year a top 15 employees have been offered for a foreign trip to Phuket(Thailand) for 3nights- 4days.

Onetimejobs, a Bangalore based startup has sponsored a family vacation to Ooty for their employees.

Code-Nation, technology based startup has come up with a 3 day out bound activity in Dandeli, which is known for river rafting.

Wingify, a Delhi based travel oriented search engine took their employees along with their family for a vacation.

BiteClub, an platform to order lunch and dinner in corporate and residential areas of Gurgaon has come up with an innovative idea of Food Walk. The employees will be taken to all the renowned places for food joints at old Delhi such as Parathe Wale Galli, Annapurna Bhandar, Sitaram Bazaar etc.

These are simple signs of acknowledgement of the organizations towards the effort that the employees have put in making the ventures a successful one. Such gestures of engaging the employees lead to a greater team bonding, increasing the balance between their work and personal life and thereby boosting the morale of the employees and talent retention.

Best HR Practices from Godrej

Godrej consumer products ltd has been voted as the one the best places to work according to 'Aon Hewitt Best Employers 2015' survey. The organization has mastered them in talent management. Some of the eminent practices that Godrej follows are mentioned below.

LOUD programme: It is a unique campus engagement program targeted at the students from leading business school.  Live Out Ur Dream (LOUD) program gives an opportunity to the students to realize their personal dreams which would have been inside them and did not get an chance to materialize due to some constraints. This program is run during the summer internship period of the business schools where the students who win will get a sponsorship of Rs. 1.5 lack to turn their dreams into reality through continuous mentorship support from senior executives of Godrej followed by pre-placement offer. This program aims to find the hidden leadership qualities among the potential students.

100 leaders programme: In this innovative initiative, top 100 employees are identified across the organisation having the leadership potential in them. These employees are differentiated, trained and their careers are tracked for their grooming in the leadership roles in future.

Careers 2.0: This is a unique opportunity for women who are willing to come back to restart their corporate life after a break for whatever reasons may it be. This program gives potential women a second career having a minimum of two years of experience in any function of management. They are assigned for live business projects across functions and sectors initially from 3 to 6 months. It can be a part time or even full time. During this project period, guide or the co-owner will support the project trainee as well as the trainee will be under the mentorship of a senior leader.

Bedhadak Bolo: This practice encourages the employee to speak up and express their views and opinion frankly and fearlessly without any hesitation. This practice has enabled many employees to come forward and bring changes which lead to meaningful innovations in product, services and processes making the company shine. When any employee raises its voice for a betterment of the organizational policies and processes, other employee also feel encouraged and come out with relevant innovative solutions. This creates a culture of openness and transparency.

Agile working Culture:  Godrej offers flexible options to work from home with part time working opportunities too. In fact the Godrej is one the exceptional Indian company having a policy of paternity leave of up to 2 weeks. All area sales managers will be entitled for 5 days working for two weeks in a month.

Godrej Fellows Program: Under this HR practice, 12 to 15 people, under 30 years of age is being handpicked by Godrej who possess exceptional innovative proposals that will help the company to progress. The organisation would provide learning opportunity, financial resources and mentorship under senior leaders who can bring positive change to the company.

Employee Engagement at Day 1 by Startup Companies

Those days are gone when the HR representatives use to spend whole day in explaining the company rules, regulations and policies by giving long power point presentation and few videos. The response towards such practice was not engaging enough for the new hires.

Hence the startup organizations have come up with innovative pre-induction and on boarding practices which starts engaging the employees from day 1. Even some organizations have started to engage even before the induction.

Some of the innovative engaging induction practices are shared below.

Simplilearn, an online learning and training platform provider has introduced a 30 day “Free Look Period” from the date of joining. During this period and new hire is allowed to continue or leave the organisation without any obligations based on their understanding of the company culture and process. During this free 30 period the new hire gets to understand the role, organisation culture and challenging aspects of the work. This opportunity gives a new employee to evaluate a perfect cultural fit with the organisation.

FreshMenu, an online meal delivery company based out of Bangalore has an induction program called “Food For Thought” where some of the new hires can get in touch with the senior executives directly from day 1 and participate in small projects based on their area of interest. Even food tasting sessions by employees on new menus are a regular practice at FreshMenu. In fact the new joinees have an opportunity to meet the chefs, witness the food preparation and packing done. They are even allowed to dive into the key process and share their keen observations on the same. Not only this, the new hires are allowed to accompany the delivery staff and interact with the customers.

Free Charge, a recharge app company, have come out with a Post Offer Candidate Engagement Program which begins from 4 to 8 weeks before the joining date of the new hire. During this time, a buddy is assigned whose responsibility is to engage the new joinee by interacting with them, making them aware of the company culture, the expectations from the organisation etc. Even laptops are sent to the new hires before joining with meet and greet sessions with the hiring managers.

Gozoop, an IT based organisation where the new employees are welcomed with surprise gifts such as hand-crafted stationery, stuffed toy or apparels followed by cupcakes. During their induction, they are engaged in group activities such as short film making to make their induction a memorable one.

ZopNow, an online grocery organisation gives an opportunity to all senior hires to visit the ware houses and stores for a process review. This gives a new hire to have a clear understanding and match their expectations from the organisation.

Urban Ladder, an online based furniture store has chalked out an induction program where every new joinee gets an opportunity to attend, handle and manage calls from customer and even spends two days on delivery/ shipment of the products.

Employee Wellness Scheme for Border Security Force (BSF)

It was observed that Border police force of India who are suppose to ensure the security of the borders of India are increasingly becoming unfit and suffering from obesity which became a cause of concern. 7 to 8 BSF commandos are losing their life due to cardiac failure. It was seen that there is a lack of awareness among the personnel to a large extent. This has been causing an adverse effect on the morale of the police force.

Hence an employee wellness scheme has been launched for the BSF personnel. Those who will maintain the required ideal weight will be transferred to the work location as per their choice. Secondly they will also receive a cash reward to maintain the ideal weight. Not only this, a recommendation will be also included in their Annual Confidential Report which will help them to get promoted to the next rank. The scheme is applicable for those employees who are overweight by 20 percent of their ideal weight.

Several measures have been taken to help the BSF personnel to implement the wellness scheme such as availability of high fiber based meals in the canteen, removal of non vegetarian food from dinner to lunch, taking away of oily and fried items from the canteen menu.

This initiative has boosted up the moral of the BSF commandos to a large extent. It has been seen that many personnel have started running, exercising, maintaining a proper diet due to in last 10 months, more than 250 employees have been able to qualify and succeed in achieving the desired weight . This is surely a new motivation linked incentive based employee wellness scheme.

Talent Management – The KPMG way

KPMG, a professional service company, being one of the reputed auditors in India is facing tough competition in talent management from its competitors Ernst & Young, PwC and Deloitte. In order to survive in the market with the best talents, the organisation is revamping its talent management policies concentrating in engaging its employees.

KPMG has come out with the following talent management practices to beat the talent war.

"Higher Purpose"- The employees of KPMG are motivated to share their experience and stories dealing with business and community. In order to encourage more participation, contest has been launched where everybody will be entitled for a paid holiday if at least 5000 stories are submitted. Every staff will get a copy of a book where top 100 stories will be published.

This practice has more to it. Town halls have been conducted where business leaders have shared their inspirational journey with the staffs. A video has been circulated among the employees seeking to share their work which is making a difference in the organisation. These best practices of employees have been framed on a poster given by the HR team. An overwhelming response from 40000 employees has been received.

"Connect" – For promoting mentoring and hand holding culture in the organisation, small groups of employees have been formed to get connected with other employees across the organisation.

No Ratings in Appraisal – The system of giving ratings to the employees in the performance appraisal process has been abandoned for a change. It has been replaced by immediate feedback system from the reporting managers. The top performers will get exceptional hikes as bonus to retain the best talents.

People Management Leaders Policy (PML) – It is a work life balance policy focusing on the welfare of the employees. For example, promotion of recreational club activities such as subsidized sporting activities including yoga, golf and tennis. This will result into lesser absenteeism, and effective utilization of leaves. A “Respect for Leave” campaign instills in KPMG employees the understanding to value and utilize their leave.

Job Rotation: The new recruit from campus will undergo a job rotation where they will be put into various business lines assessing their area of interest and performance.

“Leaders Engaging Leaders” – Top 60 managers will be identified who will be mentored by the top management leaders such as the board of directors, and national managing partners. The managers will shadow the top leaders understanding various lessons for managing better business.

Social Service: The employees will be encouraged to participate in various social causes such as mentoring students, helping build homes, supporting disaster relief efforts, sports-related coaching for children, educational and cultural activities as well as tree planting drives. This participation of employees will give a different meaning to their work life.

Internal Surveys: Two surveys will be conducted annually for the employees to identify the engagement levels. The first survey will aim at finding out the engagement level of the employees and the second one in analyzing the satisfaction levels in the benefits which are being availed to the employees.

Mums at Work Program – under this program young mother will undergo regular health checkups, stress management workshops and talks on parenting will be offered.

Retention Initiative for the Blue-Collar Big Basket Staffs

More than 1500 blue-collar employees work with the BigBasket.com, an online grocery start up organisation. Majority of these employees are designated as warehouse employees or delivery boys who comes from outside the city, generally from northern and eastern part of India or people from near-by villages. These employees have a limited expectation from their job such a safe and hygienic workplace, clean drinking water and timely salary. The average salary for these employees is Rs.11000 which makes it difficult for them to survive and save money for their family. Hence they switch over to rivals even for a hike of Rs.500 to Rs.1000. Hence the attrition among this level of employees is the highest.

In order to manage the retention of these blue collar employees, Big Basket has come up with a free housing and accommodation facility. In that case, these employees would be saving a big amount from their salary which they can send to their family. These housing facilities would be near to their workplace which reduces their daily transpiration cost too leading to further avenue for savings. The accommodations have been made in dormitory style and some shared apartments with facility of washrooms and clean drinking water.  Not only this, Big Basket also conducts frequent education sessions for these employees. In fact the organisation has a strong focus on sexual harassment since many women employees are working in the warehouse division.

These facilities of free housing, clean drinking water, frequent education sessions helps Big Basket to retain their talents and also improve the productivity thereby controlling the competition among the rivals like Grofers and PepperTap who looks out for the same category of talents in the market.

TCS Engaging the Employees at Distress due to Chennai Flood

In India, 15% of the total IT population resides at Chennai and TCS has more than 60000 employees at the same place who have been hit by the devastating flood. In order to engage the employees in such distressful condition, TCS has decided to take the following measures:

• Interest Free Salary Advance – A fund of Rs.1100 crore has been specifically for this purpose.
• Direct Financial Support to Employees whose houses have been damaged in the natural calamity
• Cash Advances from Rs. 1 lakh to maximum of 3 months equivalent gross salary  
• Reimbursement of medical and hospitalization expense (over and above the company medical insurance)
• Free transport facility by bus for all employees since commuting to office had become a challenge after the flood
• Free Medical camps, counseling facility for all employees to overcome such distressful situation.
• For Support staff, additional Ex-gratia grant of one month’s salary up to a maximum of Rs. 15,000.

Many organizations support their employees during the happy hours, but real heart touching engagement takes place when the support is provided during the odd hours. TCS has exactly done the same to help their employees to recover financially and emotionally and get back on their feet quickly.

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“R-VOICE” – Employee Engagement Program from Reliance

Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) has evolved with a unique initiative to engage their employees called, “R-VOICE”. It is a radio engagement program for the employees to share their opinions, suggest and view the best practices within the organisation. This initiative will be a platform to understand the employees’ better, sort out the grey areas, get a clear picture about their thought and feeling about the current organizational practices. In the current month, “Manager Best Practices” theme is running through R-Voice, where the employees can listen and learn the best practices adopted by some of the managers across the organisation.

This brands Reliance as “a listening organisation”. The R- Voice initiative falls under the parent program called “Celebrate Careers” which aims at recognizing the best practices, achievements of their employees, rewarding them leading to celebration of life at work.

The trend of engaging employees through the radio medium started few years back at Infosys called as “INFY Radio” which featured the interview of the Co-Founder N R Narayana Murthy when he first retired from the company.

Now even companies like Accenture and Flipkart has a similar kind of employee engagement initiative.

Accenture has an internal radio channel the leaders’ share their conversation with the select employees, helping them to get a answer to their queries and even posing thoughtful questions to them.

Flipkart does it in a bigger way. Studio 34 is the Flipkart new podcast channel which showcases the achievements of the employees, highlight leadership interviews with contemporary music. In fact many celebrity interviews have been also featured such as with Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar, former India cricketer Rahul Dravid, cricket coach P Vishwanath etc.

This unique initiative attracts, motivates and engages employees leading to talent retention because of the meaningful insights derived from across all levels of organisation. The medium of Radio in employee engagement is infotainment way to engage the employees through music and at the same time to helps them to assimilate the messages and that’s why it has been proved a much more effective communication mode than emails, fliers or posters. 

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SPEED HIRING – Unique SELECTION PRACTICE by startup organizations

Speed Hiring is a selection practice where a candidate is filtered out in 12 minutes by going through a Cognitive Ability Speed Test (CAST) which consists of 50 objective questions on English grammar, percentage, ratios and basic reasoning. Offer letters are handed over to the candidates who are successfully tested on their cognitive skills.

Many start up organisations such as Ola, Snapdeal, Quikr, Foodpanda are rapidly accepting this unique practice of this new hiring tool developed by CoCubes Technologies. This helps the HR’s to recruit at a faster rate without losing the potential candidates since it is believed that the top performers do not wait for the offers when there is a delay in the hiring process.

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Employee Retention at Reliance by Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP)

Reliance Capital, a leader in the financial services industry begins the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) for selected employees for 150 crore as a Retention Scheme. The ESOP’s would be granted to 250 employees of Reliance Capital and other business units such as Reliance Capital Asset Management, Reliance Commercial Finance, Reliance Life Insurance, Reliance Securities and Reliance General Insurance.

This ESOP facility would provide a long term wealth creation opportunity to the employees and help in rewarding and retaining the key talents in the organisation. Moreover, it helps to develop a sense of ownership among the employees too. This initiative is a part of Reliance Capital's Rewards Programme incentivizing the key employees for their contribution in the growth of the organisation. This program is aimed at recognizing the superior performance by top contributors in the organisation.

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“Workation” – A Unique way of Employee Engagement by MindTickle

MindTickle, an online training company came up with a unique concept of engaging the employees called as Workation. A workation is a practice where the employees are taken for a vacation while doing the regular work activities side by side. Although the employees might be in an exotic location yet need to attend meetings etc.

Recently MindTickle took the entire team for a Workation(Work + Vacation) to a hill station called McLeodganj(suburb of Dharmashala, Himachal Pradesh) for 10 days with their families, kids. The temporary exotic office was covered with snow clad mountains, open restaurants, temple with an option to sit and work at place of choice by the employees. The typical itineraries were trekking from 6AM to 8AM followed by work from 9AM to 3PM and then full fledge fun with the family and colleagues

Most importantly, the official objectives of each team were pre-decided before they left and then the teams were left free to do their job. It was seen that the productivity increased by 3 times, the mental health status improved, the faces were glowing with smiles and laughter at work with a stress free work environment. 

Work life balance initiative at Flipkart – The Best in Class

Flipkart is the first E-Commerce company in India who has taken several initiatives to maintain a work life balance for their employees. Looking at the workforce demographics where 35% of the employees are new married couples with an average age of 29 years at Flipkart, the organisation has launched a new Child Care Policy where four reputed crèches have been tied up under the Daycare Support Program. Flipkart employees are allowed to enroll their children upto 4 years in any of these crèches and avail a discount of 50% on the fee. The four crèches that has been selected for providing the facility for Flipkart employees is based on the facilities and convenience of location. These crèches are WeCare, Klay, Vivero, and YKROK.

Recently Flipkart also introduced 6 months PAID maternity leave in addition to the 4 months of flexible working hours. Not only this, if required a 1 year career break without pay. Even the expectant mothers are also entitled to receive Rs.600 as their daily transport allowance for 2 months before going on maternity leave. Even dedicated parking spot for two months before and after delivery is facilitated. Other benefits are Baby shower and Gift Basket loaded with goodies

In addition to this, the organisation also has started the Adoption Assistance Program where employees are paid adoption leave with Rs. 50000 as adoption allowance to cover the legal and regulatory costs incurred during the adoption process. The maternity leave options are same in case of the adoption process also. Moreover, the adoptive fathers will be granted a PAID Leave of 6 weeks under this program. As an add on this policy, an unpaid leave for upto 3 months will also be available with an assurance of continuity on the same job.

These policies are aimed to attract,motivate and retain more quality talents ensuring total engagement of employees.

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Engaging the (PWD’s) People with Disabilities Employees – Challenge for Indian Organisations

In India 8551 are disabled employees (PWD), out of which 35.85% are women. The surprising fact is that only 10 companies are sensitive to this issue who are hiring these PWD’s out of which 8 companies belong to public sector. The general perception about the PWD’s is that they are unqualified and not productive, which restricts the Indian organizations to recruit more number of PWD’s. Majority of the companies do not have written policies on PWD employment.

The highest numbers of PWD employees are recruited by State Bank of India with 2692 employees. Among the private sector in India, TCS and Wipro are the biggest recruiters of such talents. Wipro has more than 500 PWD employees in many main stream roles such as consulting, testing, marketing, leadership and HR.

Some of the other prominent employers in private sector in India who hire PWD employees

• Vindhya E Infomedia Pvt Ltd, Bengaluru: 95 % of the employees are from PWD category managing the data management, data entry, data processing, conversion jobs. 
• Titan Industries: It has 4% PWD work force. Titan arranges for special competency mapping, training sessions to the supervisors as well as peer level staff to sensitize them about working with talent with disabilities. 
• Lemon Tree Hotels: 400 PWD employees, comprising of 13% of its total manpower. The PWD employees consist of speech and hearing impairment, orthopedically handicapped and even with down symptoms.  In fact one visually impaired employee is working in the corporate office as a part of the President and Executive Director’s team. Employees are spread across the supervisory roles, management roles, semi-skilled in F&B Services and unskilled in Kitchen Services.
• Shakti Masala: 200 physically and mentally challenged employees working at different levels
• Devyani International(Largest Franchisee of Pizza Hut & KFC)- 200 PWD’s with hearing impairment recruited in all departments starting from dough making, pizza making, delivery, cash handling and record keeping.
• ITC: 90 PWD’s with orthopedic impairment, hearing impairment, visual impairment and cerebral palsy for secretarial role, desk jobs, sales and reservations.

These organizations feel that such talents are more engaged to their jobs, exhibit more sense of loyalty with low absenteeism and are good at their performance level.

The efforts which organisations need to take to engage the employees with disabilities are :

• Involvement of Top Management
• Sound and supportive HR Policies
• Efforts to create an inclusive environment to support PWD staff among other employees
• Collaboration with NGO’s to update their skills regularly
• Modifications in the infrastructure to support the PWD employees

Employment Exchanges get transformed to National Career Counseling Centers (NCCC)

Currently there are 978 employment exchanges in India, out of which 100 would be transformed into National Career Counseling Centers (NCCC). The role of these counseling centers would be

• Identify the skill wise demand in across various in India and abroad and supply of Jobseekers
• Help in finding out the right opportunities for the job seekers depending on their skills and area of interest
• Counsel the job seekers about various roles available and their prospects in respective industries by making them to undergo psychometric and skill assessment tests

This is a unique initiative from the Govt of India as a part of "Make in India and Skill India” drive catering to four crore job seekers. A national portal will also be set up which will be a rich warehouse of career counseling content in multiple languages. Moreover,  job seekers get various information about job fairs and campus placements taking place in various parts of the country from this portal.

Through this job skill mapping and identifying the right job fit for the job seekers, these National Career Counseling Centers (NCCC) will engage the prospective candidates and make them available to the right organizations. 

Top IT companies starts using algorithmic tools and programs to detect the attrition rate

Reputed IT companies HCL, INFOSYS, TCS have started using algorithmic tools and programs that can predict the attrition rate for the future. In fact it can also detect if a candidate who is being interviewed will be a sustainable one or not. These predictions are made possible by collecting a series of data from the employees or candidates during the interview or in the course of employment.

Organizations have been gathering a lot of data with regards to the socio economic background from the candidates that are being used by the HR department by application of analytics in talent resourcing stages. Wipro is one of such employer to use such a tool.

HCL uses certain factors such as leave applications and searches for job profiles to track the prospective employees to quit. A 75% positive correlation between a prediction using analytics have been proved successful as of now.

From this trend it clearly reflects that the HR function is moving towards data-driven decision-making rather than gut-based decision-making.

“Shubh-Labh”- A unique employee engagement initiative at Reliance

It was found that many employees are unaware of the benefits of that Reliance Industries Limited offers to their employees. Hence two virtual animated cartoon characters called  'Shubh' and 'Labh' are created who will reach out to more than one lakh employees working at Reliance promoting and informing about the various benefits that the employees are entitled to. They are inclined to engage the employees through simple animated dialogues.

Through a common email id shubh.labh@ril.com, RIL aims to reach out every employee explaining the total rewards and benefits that the company offers besides the monetary compensation.

For example a vital program for RIL employees such REFERS (Reliance Employee and Family Emergency Response Service), which all employees and their families can take recourse to during any kind of emergency, medical or otherwise, which Shubh and Labh have been communicating to employees over the last month.

Not only this, some of the other benefits which the employees were unaware of or were not popular among the employees are health check-ups for employee and spouse, an emergency hotline that they can depend on anytime-anywhere, domestic and international education assistance, maternity, paternity and adoption leave; and post-retirement medical insurance medical and accident insurance.

RIL believes that such innovative methods will help in engaging the employees for a long run in the organisation.