Current job markets are upbeat across the textile value chain as more and more job avenues are opening up. Progressive organisations have come to acknowledge that the historically sluggish growth in salaries as compared to other market segments, is keeping good talent away. This has been aggravated by inflationary markets and a disproportionate balance of expected skills and experiences in the job market.
Our HR philosophy is simple. Keep them happy. HR should play a more prominent and demonstrative role in building an organisation. Issues like ensuring right recruitment and employee fitment, developing people's competence, maintaining transparency in dealing with people and adopting fair review and reward mechanisms are majorly stressed upon, what is that which makes you walk the extra mile to keep your employees happy? For us, these contribute to the top HR policies and are classified as: Work with ethics policy, employee support policy, self-development policy, policy on integration (employee engagement) and rewards and recognition policy.
Our Meet the CEO policy allows anyone and everyone, including workers, to meet the CEO with any agenda, every single day, between a stipulated time. The agenda is concluded the same day. Under the Senior Workers as Mentors scheme, newly recruited staff supervisors are placed under senior workers who teach them trade practices before they move on to take charge of their respective shifts.
With staff strength of more than 900 employees, we follow some steps to retain the talent. These include: Recruiting the right people; planning their career; improving their supervisory and managerial abilities; providing employees with constant feedback about clear and meaningful goals; driving employee engagement and development activities; continuously measuring and improving retention strategies to keep them effective.
Training is too important to be left out to the training department alone. Having an independent training centre facilitates the process of training and it needs to be a collaborative function. Individual management functions are giving way to formation of teams with shared responsibilities.
Training function can be decentralised, involving the departments requesting the skills, with the HR department which plays the role of resource provider and the candidates themselves as the key stakeholders. No training can be effective till the candidate believes in it. The first measure to upgrade is to make candidates ready to do so. It is said commonly that well-begun is half done. A few measures to equip staff with latest skillsets revolve around technical and functional training and periodic retraining. Making the line manager responsible as mentor in the above training team is the best approach. We follow this methodology. Any specific skillset required but not available in-house can be met through third party experiences conducted either in-house or by deputing teams to external programmes. These days, there are a variety of tools and techniques available for training. Right from classical classrooms training with audio-visuals to virtual training stimulations are available.
Annual raise is a function of individual performances and the overall performance of the organisation. Currently, we are in the process of doing away with the yearly appraisal process and adopt continuous feedback and reward mechanisms.
Incentives are used for multiple reasons such as to increase productivity, retain employees, attract good talent, reward high achievers, even thank employees for achieving their goals and to encourage team work.
We have classified the following incentives: Compensation incentives that include financial rewards on attainment of targets; recognition incentives include actions such as thanking employees, praising them, presenting employees with a certificate of achievement, or announcing an accomplishment at a company meeting; rewards incentives include items such as gifts, monetary rewards, service award presents, and items such as gift certificates.
An example is the employee referral awards that we use to encourage employees to refer job candidates. Appreciation incentives include such happenings as company parties and celebrations, company-paid family activity events, ice cream socials, birthday celebrations, sporting events, paid group lunches, and sponsored sports teams.
