Strategic HR management
The challenge:
Our client is one of India’s major players in the steel sector with manufacturing units, processing plants, and sales depots all across the country. In the tentative climate of the sector in recent years, our client started facing high employee attrition amongst the blue collar and contract workers and high incidences of workplace accidents. Additionally, there were delays in meeting project deadlines, which resulted in complaints from customers. The organization, therefore, sought to understand satisfaction and engagement levels across all employee bands from officers and associates to contract workers, as well as their various locations: corporate office, manufacturing units and sales depots. The results from this initiative enabled the organization diagnose the pulse of the workforce, and helped the leadership address areas of strength and development.
Our approach:
We started with Focused Group Discussions with senior management, plant heads and human resources to understand the issues. Face-to-face discussions were also conducted with union members across all locations to gauge attitudes on the shop floor.
Cerebrus decided the best approach was confidential questionnaires that incorporated indices, demographics, and parameters across all job bands and roles as well as specific issues unique to each category. For instance, we added an appreciative inquiry for the officers’ category to understand factors that inspired achievement.
The instrument was made available in four languages, covering a variety of distinct parameters. The questionnaire was deployed simultaneously across all locations, through all 3 work shifts, over a period of two weeks and the entire population of 2,000 employees participated. Finally, for employees who were absent or at sales depots, the ‘on-site’ tool was made available online.
The resolution:
Analysis in the form of Satisfaction and Engagement Indices and Agreement and Disagreement levels was provided for the entire organization, and then drilled down to level-wise, and location-specific data. The appreciative section for officers and open-ended section included in the survey were analyzed to qualitatively support the results of quantitative analyses. Cerebrus studied the inputs from 1900+ employees in the form of qualitative aspect and highlighted the major strengths/concerns emerging out of the response. Teamwork emerged as the major strength and safety issues turned out to be the main concern.
Cerebrus worked with HR to facilitate effective measures and action steps to enhance the core strengths and revive areas of development for all stakeholders. We also streamlined the roll out of various HR initiatives across corporate function and all locations to uniformly build a better work culture for all employees. Finally, the leadership also set a budget to foster employee engagement exercises and boost employee satisfaction. Attrition dropped, employees felt valued, HR was able to instill a supportive work culture.