IIPM is A World of Career
On what makes Ashok Leyland a deserving winner of the ‘Employer of Choice Award 2007’ for the manufacturing sector instituted by CNBC-TV18.Fighting the ‘war for talent’ and making the right HR decisions is what sets the company apart from the herd. Excerpts from the interview...
What are the main initiatives taken up by the company till date that makes it an employer of choice?
We have built a young technical talent pool by inducting around 350 engineers annually. Ashok Leyland is considered as a Day One recruiter in the top engineering colleges. In contrast to the industry, Ashok Leyland sees an annual turnover of only 1.5% of high potential personnel, thanks to an enabling, performance oriented culture. It has been further enhanced by the creation of the Young Executives (YEs) Forum for addressing aspirations of the 42% of Ashok Leyland’s executives below 35 years of age. The YEs forum is a platform to showcase their talent and innovative ideas. Another index of the changing climate is the very open, energetic and effective ‘bottom-up’ communication that occurs within the Company through a variety of channels- from the annual communication meetings where the top management interacts with employees in groups, to ‘soapbox’, an employee’s direct channel to the Managing Director.
The company has also initiated several employee engagement programmes like Improve – a company-wide employee project contest, BITES (Breaking thresholds by Involving Total Employees), RISE (Reward for Individual’s Search for Excellence) to recognise individual efforts at achieving excellence in any area of working as on date et al.
Investments in brand building advertising campaigns have also revolved around the employee-centric theme of ‘Passion for Engineering’. Then there are personal development plans through 360 degree competency assessment, Future Leader Development Programme and e-learning initiatives across the board, collaborative off-campus programmes (Ashok Leyland has a tie-up with BITS, Pilani for the BS and MS programmes).
Why is it becoming increasing important for companies to become employer of choice?
Primarily this is so because because because of the ever intensifying ‘War for talent’ as right talent is a scarce resource and today, attrition and re-training hidden costs are very high. Surely, hiring and honing key skills in your company is a competitive advantage today.
How does it help the company (not just in terms of hiring people but branding to the public at large) to be crowned as the best employer?
Surely, employee opinion helps build brands and reinforces share-holding value and our employees are our best ambassadors. So winning such an award creates positive word of mouth which translates into superior brand image and brand perception which in turn lends for attracting the right talent. It also helps in building employer branding initiatives at leading business schools adn therefore gives a higher pay-off from brand building advertising expenditures.
Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).
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