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Issue 1 | September 2014
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CONTENTS
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From the MD's Desk.........................................2
HR Best Practices ............................................3
Global Insights: Innovative HR...........................4
Quality of Life...................................................5
Work Matters ...................................................6
The Executive Life ............................................7
Success Story ...................................................8
FROM
THE MD’S
DESK
Dear Reader,
Greetings!
The month of September marks yet another major milestone for all of us at Sodexo India - the launch
of our newsletter Sodexo Engage, developed in association with Dun & Bradstreet, a leading provider
of international and Indian business information.
We at Sodexo recognise and commend the role that you have played in building the foundations
of success of your business. It has been our privilege to partner with you in this journey of meeting
the demands of an ever-changing landscape, while making it simple, reliable and cost effective.
Human resource management has witnessed a sea change over the years, with employee engagement
taking centre stage. It is with this objective that we bring to you our newsletter.
This Issue of Sodexo Engage covers the following sections:
¨
¨
HR Best Practices features an interaction with Mr. Sunjoy Dhaawan, VP - Human Resources DHL Express India on the HR practices in the company
Global Insights - Innovative HR features innovative people practices at technology giant
Google Inc
¨
Quality of Life discusses the concept of happiness at the workplace
¨
Work Matters section brings you face to face with Mr. Vijay Sinha, VP-HR, JSW Energy Ltd
¨
¨
The Executive Life gives the readers a peek into the life and career journey of Mr. Sujoy Banerjee,
President - Group HR & OD, McNally Bharat Engineering Company Ltd
Success Story presents a case study which discusses the story of how one of our clients benefitted
by the specialised solutions offered by Sodexo India.
I hope that you find this newsletter insightful and informative. I would also urge you to contribute
in the coming issues of this newsletter to make it a truly participative effort and a shared platform for the
business community.
Best Regards,
Rajiv Warrier
MD - Benefits & Rewards Services,
Sodexo SVC India Pvt. Ltd.
2
HR BEST
PRACTICES
Please tell us more about the
Certified International Specialist (CIS) program.
CIS is the backbone of most of the training that we provide at
DHL Express. It takes an employee through a structured
learning route, starting from his Induction into the company
and function to cross functional learning and in-depth
knowledge about various functions. The winning edge
however, is the unique delivery model of this training which is
done in-house by our managers who have attended Trainthe-Trainer programs and get certified after clearing a test. CIS
is compulsory for all employees and CIM is compulsory for all
supervisors and managers.
What are the key initiatives that focus on
enhancing the HR team's capabilities at DHL?
Mr Sunjoy Dhaawan
VP - Human Resources,
DHL Express India
Recently, DHL was named as one of the 'Best Employers' in
India by Aon Hewitt. What are your key HR best practices
that make you an Employer of Choice?
DHL was ranked amongst the Top 20 companies in India this year
both by Aon Hewitt & Great Place to Work Institute, thereby making
us truly an Employer of Choice. Our people practices are driven by
our guiding principle of Respect & Results. We are a performancedriven company, but we don't seek to drive results by compromising
on respect for people. Our initiatives, policies and processes are made
keeping the employee centricity in mind and we empower our
managers to take decisions with both heart and guts. We advocate a
healthy work-life balance so that managers and leaders are fit-to-lead
and ensure that their people have a Best day every day. Being in the
service sector, we believe that only a happy employee can make
customers happy by delivering good quality service.
What are your key leadership development initiatives that
help nurture leaders from within the organisation?
We have robust managerial & leadership development initiatives
within DHL. Almost 80% of our new positions are filled by people
from within the organisation. We follow the development principle of
70-20-10, wherein 70% of the learning happens on-the-job, 20%
through classroom training and 10% through assigned projects.
We have programs like Certified International Specialist (CIS) and
Certified International Manager (CIM) which are the cornerstones of
classroom learning and CIS has specialised modules on each function,
to give in-depth knowledge & training. We also conduct competencybased interviewing skills training for our people managers so that they
can recruit the right people.
It is critical for HR to continuously upgrade its own skills so as
to provide critical support to business and address employee
needs & expectations. We have specific modules in CIS for
HR and have recently introduced a new program only for HR
staff called CIP (Certified International Professional). Apart
from this, the functional specialists in Compensation &
Benefits or Employee Relations or Talent Acquisition go
through specific need-based trainings.
Given DHL's diverse workforce, what are the
challenges faced and how do you counter them?
Becoming a great place to work or employer of choice is a
continuous journey. We constantly try to improve ourselves
based on feedback received through the annual Employee
Opinion survey. We empower our people after equipping
them fully to do their jobs and make business decisions.
Please share some of the best practices employed
in the areas of Performance Management and
Rewards & Recognition.
At DHL we benchmark our salary and benefits every year
through the compensation survey and ensure that we reward
our people in line with the changing markets. We believe in
paying for performance and rewarding our employees for
results. This is achieved through different variable incentive
plans in all functions and not just Sales, CS or Operations.
One of the exemplary practices that we have in DHL is that all
employees in managerial and leadership roles carry the KPI of
active leadership & employee engagement, and not just HR.
Further, all employees are responsible for having a transit time
or operational efficiency above 95%, and not just operations.
This makes all employees work together as one and team
spirit never takes a backseat.
3
GLOBAL INSIGHTS:
INNOVATIVE HR
HR @ Google Inc:
Find them, Grow them,
Keep them
Technology giant Google Inc, with over 40,000 employees
worldwide, has earned a reputation of being amongst the
most attractive employers globally. Google believes that
Mission, Transparency and Voice – the three components of
its culture, create a virtuous cycle of attraction, community,
engagement and innovation.
Besides innovative offices such as the ski gondolas in the
Zurich office, a pub-like meeting room in Dublin and sidewalk
cafe in Istanbul; it is the people-centric HR practices that set
the company apart. Google's success as amongst the best
employers can be attributed to its people management
practices which are a result of its use of people analytics.
Re-inventing HR using people analytics
Google follows a data-centric approach to create work
environments to help employees to live healthier and more
productive lives. Its HR practices are also driven by data,
analytics and science. Project Oxygen, which was launched to
identify what successful Google managers do, measured key
management behaviours using data mined from
performance appraisals, employee surveys, nominations for
top manager awards and other sources. The people analytics
team identified eight key behaviours demonstrated by the
company's most effective managers. Google taught these
traits in training programs and performance review sessions
with individual employees.
Project Oxygen - What successful Google managers do?
§ Be a good coach
§ Empower the team;
not micromanage
§ Express interest in
team member's success
& personal well-being
§ Be productive
& results-oriented
§ Be a good communicator
& listen to the team
§ Help employees with
career development
§ Have a clear vision
& strategy for the team
§ Have key technical skills
so you can advise the team
Insights-driven people related policies is also mirrored in an
engineering-to-product management rotation program
introduced, which was an outcome of Googlegeist,
Google's annual employee survey, where it solicits feedback
on hundreds of issues and then enlists volunteer employee
teams across the company to solve the most critical
problems.
Open Culture & Transparency
Google's culture emphasises on openness and transparency,
and therefore trust in employees. At TGIF, Google's weekly
all-hands meetings, Googlers (as the employees of Google
are called) ask questions directly to the top leadership and
senior executives. To promote transparency, the results of
Googlegeist are put up on the intranet.
Empowering Employees
Empowered employees create a more engaged, dedicated
and innovative workforce. Google's 'Bureaucracy Busters'
program is designed to reduce internal red tape and make the
administrative processes more efficient. Employees have to
post their bureaucracy-cutting suggestions on an internal site
and vote for the ones they found most promising; the most
popular suggestions win.
A Corporate Culture that fosters innovation
At Google, innovation and employee focus go hand in hand.
Google's “20% time/Innovation Time Off”, which allowed
the Google engineers to spend 20% of their work week on
projects that interest them, had led to the development of
Google products such as Gmail, AdSense, GTalk, Google Sky,
Orkut and Google News.
To quote CEO & Co-Founder Larry Page from an interview
to Fortune “My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in
the company has great opportunities, and that they feel
they're having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the
good of society.” This best sums up the people-centric
approach in driving innovation at Google.
4
QUALITY
OF LIFE
Happiness
at the Workplace
Symptoms of an unhappy employee
It doesn't take a psychologist or a scientist to identify symptoms of an
unhappy employee, rather constant observation of some visible and
clear markers in an employee's behaviour would tell if someone is
unhappy at office. Observing the body language of employees - Are
they smiling? Are they engaged in conversation with co-workers? –
would indicate those subtle signs of the employees' state of
happiness.
An app to monitor staff's mood
MoodApp is an iPad application developed by Atlassian, an Australian
software company to monitor employees' mood. On their way out,
employees mark their responses on iPads, placed near the exit, to
questions on different aspects about their workday, which enables
the company to respond and adapt immediately if there is a problem
brewing.
Here's how you can boost happiness at work
Happiness, it can arguably be said, is a bigger motivator than money.
However, when devising strategies, companies focus more on
revenues and customers, while employee happiness usually takes a
backseat. Traditionally, employers have not considered happiness to
be an essential workplace priority, and have failed to realise that a
happy workforce can change a company's fortune. However,
increasingly organisations are starting to acknowledge the strong
correlation between low workplace happiness and poor financial
performance.
Why measure workplace happiness?
Fostering workplace happiness is a win-win situation for both
employers and employees. When employees are happy, they are
more creative and productive, less likely to leave, less absent and
have lesser conflicts at work, leading to higher productivity and
ultimately better customer service. It is important for an organisation
to demonstrate that it cares, as a happy office can enhance
employees' commitment. It also enables and encourages them to put
in that additional effort, energy and enthusiasm towards work.
Whereas, unhappy employees display lower productivity, tend to
spread negativity among fellow employees, and can potentially hurt
the company's bottom line.
Cultivating a healthy and happy workforce, full of engaged
employees, is not a walk in the park, but neither is it rocket science.
To start with, companies should acknowledge that happiness is the
secret ingredient to be added to its HR strategy and the most critical
aspect lies in understanding what motivates people. But driving
happiness is not the organisation's responsibility alone; employees
too need to consciously take steps to be happy at work.
End note
Happy employees stay with the organisation for a longer period as
they associate their happiness and belongingness with the firm. They
become ambassadors for the company and send out positive
messages to the community, which directly enhances the employer
brand. Consequently, companies employing happy workers have
happier customers too. Moreover, people are also more successful
and happy in their personal lives when they find life inside and outside
of work rewarding and fulfilling. Thus, happiness may just be the key
to success for both employee and employer.
SYMPTOMS OF AN UNHAPPY EMPLOYEE
EMPLOYERS: BOOST YOUR EMPLOYEES' HAPPINESS
§ Arriving late - Leaving early
§ Acknowledge employees' successes
§ Procrastination
§ Give employees opportunities to share ideas
§ Avoiding co-workers
§ Encourage employees to take vacations
§ Taking excessive leaves
§ Avoid micro-management
§ Consistently checking watch
§ Offer flexibility in work schedule
§ Verbally expressing unhappiness
§ Hire managers with good interpersonal skills
5
WORK
MATTERS
opportunities for inter-department as well as inter-plant
locations. This helps our employees to get exposure to a
new function or a new location. We organise senior
management meeting every four months at each plant
location by turn. The intervention known as “United Forward
Business Meet” is attended by our CEO and other senior
executives where some high-potential employees are also
invited to attend.
Please tell us about the JSW Energy Centre of
Excellence (JSWECE), and its importance in the
context of your organisation's Human Capital
goals.
Mr Vijay Sinha,
VP - HR, JSW Energy Ltd.
What are some of the key HR challenges in the
power sector and those specific to your company?
Power sector operates in regulated environment and the
plants are mostly situated in remote locations. Limited
availability of talent pool to deal with regulatory aspects;
dearth of people with techno-commercial outlook and
leadership abilities to steer the plant operations are some of
the challenges facing the sector. Since growth of the
workforce is inextricably linked to the sectoral growth, the
slowdown in the last 3-4 years restricted growth
opportunities for the people. Managing career aspirations of
the employees is turning out to be one of the biggest
challenges.
What are JSW Energy's initiatives to encourage its
employees to continuously innovate?
Freedom at work is essential to encourage creativity and
create a culture of innovation. We empower our employees
at different levels in the organisation, which builds ownership
and motivates them to excel. Initiatives like
'Srijan' provide a platform to present new ideas before the
senior management and identify projects for implementation.
We also harness creative ideas of employees by circulating
organisation-wide mails on any specific issues/challenges
and invite their suggestions. The five best ideas are presented
before the senior management for implementation and are
also recommended for reward & recognition.
What are your company's best practices to boost
employee motivation and engagement?
We have introduced job rotation policies to provide
JSWECE is currently focusing on building capability across our
different plant locations. The team from JSWECE finalises the
training needs after discussion with the HODs and imparts
technical training through its own faculties or external trainers
as per the need. It runs short term programmes on different
technical aspects and 300 MW simulators at its centre in
Vijayanagar (Karnataka). The centre also runs training
programmes which are attended by employees from various
other power companies.
As an HR leader with over 20 years of experience
across various industries, please share some cross
industry HR best practices for our readers.
While the people processes more or less remain the same
across industries, people are vastly different in their approach
& thinking as we move across the sector. It is important to
bridge the gap between their minds so that they work in
harmony and build synergy. In view of this, we designed
interventions & communication exercises which brought
people together, which helped us create a Profitable,
Harmonious & Vibrant workplace in SAIL. Irrespective of the
nature of business, collaboration with employees & their
wholehearted involvement is key to success.
Adopting an unconventional method to recruit highly skilled
talent in Animation made us believe that relevant skill exists
even beyond the realms of that industry for which one is
looking for the skilled manpower. We were unsuccessful in
our search for good painters with requisite software skills to
work in a digital space despite visits to several animation
colleges. So we decided to hire children of billboard artistes &
traditional painters who had inherited painting skill and trained
them on required software after hiring them. They turned
out to be outstanding talent later on and did exceedingly well
in their career. To conclude, success of any function depends
on the ability of a leader to build a good team.
6
THE
EXECUTIVE
LIFE
AWARDS & ACCOLADES
¨
Awarded "HR Thought Leader - Change & Transformation Award" by World HRD Congress
in Mumbai (Jun-13)
¨
Awarded "CHRO of The Year" Award by ET Now in Talent & HR Leadership Conference Awards
in Mumbai (Feb-13)
¨
Awarded "HR Leadership Award" by Institute of Public Enterprises in Global HR Excellence Award
as part of World HRD Congress in Mumbai (Feb-13)
¨
Awarded "HR Professional of the Year Award" in the India Human Capital Awards in Delhi (Dec-12)
¨
Awarded "HR Leadership Award" in the Asia Pacific HRM Congress 2012 in Bengaluru (Sep-12)
¨
Recipient of HR Leadership & Inspiration Award by Bengal Chamber of Commerce & Industry
and EIILM (Feb-12)
Mr Sujoy Banerjee
President - Group HR & OD, McNally Bharat Engineering Company Ltd.
Professional Journey
First job: Tata Motors (TELCO)
¨ Past associations: Dunlop India, ICI India, Philips India, BOC
India, Organon India & Eveready Industries India
Managing Stress at Work
¨
¨
Manage Time More Effectively - Create a balanced time
schedule, not over-committing oneself, proper prioritisation
of tasks, defining milestones by breaking down tasks and by
delegation of responsibility.
¨
Improving the Emotional Intelligence - Realise when you
are stressed, stay connected to your internal emotional
experience, develop the capacity to meet challenges with
humour, recognise and effectively use non-verbal cues and
body language and resolve conflicts positively.
¨
Improve Communication - Share information with team
members to reduce uncertainty about their jobs and futures,
clearly define employees' roles and responsibilities and make
communication friendly and efficient.
Leadership Style
My leadership style is a combination of Goal Orientation &
People Orientation. I am quite goal obsessive but without losing
focus on the human elements of working in a team. While I live
by the committed deadlines of the set objectives, I achieve them
through team work.
An Important Leadership Lesson Learnt
To get the “emotional buy in” of the team members. In order to
inspire someone to pursue a particular goal with passion &
commitment, a leader has to get the “emotional buy in” for the
goal, i.e. when the individual takes personal ownership for
achieving the goal. This can only happen if he/she is able to see
the “Why” of the goal and not just the “What”. The individual
must be able to identify that in the achievement of the goal also
lies the fulfillment of a personal goal. By having this understanding
& appreciation, the individual pursues the goal with passion.
¨
¨
Be organised
Plan ahead
Prioritise your tasks
Favourite Book - The Mahabharata
It has taught me the dynamics of complex human relationships
and how to manage them.
Favourite Gadget - My iPad
On Time Management
¨
Favourite Holiday Destination - London & Salzburg
¨
¨
¨
Avoid overload
Be flexible
Have a vision
Spending Quality Time
I love playing Golf with friends on weekends. Besides spending
time with my wife & son, watching movies or attending cultural
events, I also enjoy catching up with close friends and their
families.
Most Followed Blog - http://clarions.weebly.com/blogs
(My son’s Blog)
Most Admired Leader - Swami Vivekananda. His philosophy
of life and his teachings have always inspired me.
Favourite Inspirational Quote - “Arise. Awake! And stop not
until the goal is reached”.
Advice to Young Leaders - Pursue your goals & targets with
passion and commitment but with heart and ethics.
7
SUCCESS
STORY
Delivering Solutions that
encourage high performance
One of the largest Insurance companies in India spread across
1450+ cities.
A market leader and professionally driven with market share of over
70%. The Customer was looking for innovative solutions to
motivate their employees for higher performance.
Solution by Sodexo:
Meal Benefit Solution supported
by Customized Network
¨
¨
¨
The Results
For almost 3 years now, Employees are really happy with
Sodexo Meal Solution offered greater choice,
flexibility and motivation to the Employees.
the service and to get vouchers of the amount that has
been adjusted year on year for inflation. Employees are
Integrated Web ordering Solution was
designed that offered great convenience
of ordering online to over 2250 offices spread
across 1450+ cities across India.
using these vouchers for getting healthy meals and are
really motivated to
performance.
Over the years,
Sodexo customized the Affiliate
Network based on the choice of
outlets given by the employees,
in over 1000 cities, many of
them remote towns and
distant locations.
With an aim to enhance employee
performance and productivity, the client
offered variable Meal voucher amount to the
employees. The eligibility was based on the on
time office attendance and certain
performance parameters for the month.
This really motivated the employees to do their
best to get added meal benefits every month,
and this served the organisation’s purpose well.
Sodexo received monthly orders from the client
offices across India with diverse requirements based on
employee eligibility. Sodexo personalized and
customized all the voucher booklets with the individual
employee's name to suit the requirements. Sodexo also
integrated its ordering system with the client's systems for
seamless process and smooth delivery.
give their best
this program has really
met the aspirations of the
employees and expectations
of the management for better
employee engagement and
performance.
Our Network:
1,500 locations
across India
Sodexo Benefits and Rewards Services can be
implemented in various innovative ways to recognize
employees and partners for their contribution e.g.
Employee Benefits, Performance Incentives, Gifting
on Festivals, Birthdays & Anniversary, Channel Partner
Incentives, Consumer Promotions and much more.
The above is one example of a win-win solution for
all the stakeholders.
Disclaimer: The content for this newsletter has been provided by Dun & Bradstreet Information Services India Pvt. Ltd. (D&B India) in collaboration with Sodexo SVC India and the intellectual property rights rest with both D&B India and Sodexo SVC India. The information in this newsletter is compiled from various sources including company announcements, media reports and other secondary sources. While D&B India and Sodexo SVC India endeavor to ensure accuracy of information contained in this publication, they do not accept any responsibility for any loss or damage to any person resulting from reliance on it.
Sodexo SVC India Pvt. Ltd.
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