Rewards management
The context:
Our client is a Global diversified Technology and Manufacturing leader. It has presence in India through 6 separate entities across multiple locations like Pune, Gurgaon, Chennai, Bangalore, Dehradun, and Savli. Across most of these manufacturing locations, the shop floor operators had not formed a union. The organization wished to continue the trend and hence had implemented multiple benefit schemes and career progression options to narrow the perceived gap between the management cadre and shop floor operators.
In line with the company’s global mandate, the organization needed to obtain market data to enable taking informed decisions regarding increments to ensure continued industry competitiveness. The client also wanted to obtain knowledge of some of the best market practices across locations to devise their own Benefit policies for the shop floor operators.
In this context, the company retained Cerebrus to help them obtain and analyze the market information pertaining to compensation, applicable benefits and work practices for the shop floor operators and recommend them on the increment decisions.
Our approach:
Cerebrus partnered with the client to conduct a comprehensive Compensation and Benefits Survey for the Shop- Floor Operators across 3 locations, i.e Pune, Gurgaon and Dehradun. Each of the locations had separate entities in differing business verticals. As a result of this, the demographics of shopfloor operators varied significantly - with qualifications ranging from SSC/HSC, ITI, and Diploma accompanied with a wide range of experience profiles depending on the vintage of the entity.
We conducted the study with a qualification-cum-tenure based approach with emphasis on ITI qualification and Diploma qualification as these were the most common qualification across the entities. While identifying the Job Profiles, we tried to keep it same across locations to ensure uniformity and internal parity while doing the analysis.
We identified relevant comparator groups across each location on the basis of industry/sector of operation, vintage of organizations and location proximity to the client. More than 80 companies across locations were approached by Cerebrus for participation, of which 60 companies participated in the study.
This entire process was completed in four weeks including meeting comparator organizations, data analysis and report generation as per the client’s internal processes and requirements.
The outcome:
As a part of the output, Cerebrus provided perspective on the industry, location, specific challenges for the companies, recent developments in the market, benefit practices etc. This included highlights of the various challenges with respect to the shop floor operators related to availability of skilled labour, presence of unionized set-ups in neighboring industries, remote locations issues, etc.
Based on the survey results, the client’s corporate benefits team internally recommended creation of industry best practices in the areas of Leave Management, Medical Benefits to Employees, etc.
The survey findings supported the proposal that was prepared by the corporate HR team for annual merit increments and market corrections to bring in the compensation levels in the organization aligned to the market. Based on the positive impact of this study, the client retained Cerebrus to do this exercise in the subsequent two years as well.