Upbeat in Adverse Times
To reignite its passion to innovate, Tata Steel takes to the Himalayas. The steelmaker has introduced a 15-day adventure trip to the world’s highest peaks as part of its training programme for management trainees and lateral entrants. Bachendri Pal, the first Indian woman to summit Mount Everest in 1984, leads the transformative journey for new entrants.
In the midst of the global commodity crisis, the HR department at Tata Steel ( TSL) is actively work-
ing towards keeping employees cheerful and motivated. Among the recently introduced perks are employee-friendly initiatives like five-day weeks, 26-week maternity leave, satellite working for spouse, and 10-day honeymoon packages for newly married employees. The company also offers a five-night holiday package for each staffer annually at 10 per cent of the billed cost, which includes hotel stay and food.
“Welfare, wellness, and development of employees form the DNA of Tata Steel, and it is visible through the pioneering people practices and policies that govern us. We strive to build a work environment that focuses on creating an engaged, diversified, productive and healthy workforce,” says T.V. Narendran, Managing Director, Tata Steel, India & South-East Asia.
TSL has 36,000 employees in India alone. That number rises to 80,000 if you include employees in Europe, Thailand, and Singapore. Its India unit has 2,000 women working in steelmaking facilities. “There are governmental restrictions on working hours of women employees inside factories and underground mines. The number will go up if we get permissions from the respective state governments,” says Suresh Dutt Tripathi, Vice President - Human Resource Management, TSL.
Keeping up with fast changing technology and products is a major challenge for manufacturing companies. Digitisation knocks off a large part of jobs in factories and allied facilities. Tripathi informs that TSL re-skilled its employees and workers to adapt to the changing environment. “We have a team for digital value acceleration. It handles the internal resources and aligns them with digital technology. It is not that people move out because of the advent of new technology, but skills. People will change the skill to stay relevant in the company,” Tripathi of TSL adds.
Though acquiring tech talent is easy, for TSL attracting management talent has been difficult. Its human resources team runs campaigns in management institutes to change students’ perceptions about working in a manufacturing company, gives opportunities to select students to attend its leadership and career opportunity programmes.
“We have introduced learning initiatives to bridge the functional skill gaps, and to identify candidates for focused learning in line with future needs,” says Suresh Tripathi. TSL has tie-ups with institutes such as IIT Kharagpur and IIT Delhi for courses, including PhD. Mentoring starts from the management level and continues till the senior executive level with an intention to make succession easier in crucial roles.
The group invests in improving its managerial and technical capabilities through the internal development of its own employees across Europe, India, and South-east Asia. The idea is to create a pool of experts in different technical areas. Apart from creating specialists, the HR policy also focuses on managerial learning. TSL introduced ‘On-the-Job Learning’ for executives through crossfunctional assignments for enriching their roles in the company.
As part of its global talent management initiatives, TSL allows movement of executives between Tata Steel India, Tata Steel Europe, NatSteel and Tata Steel Thailand to enable cross pollination of ideas and practices, apart from providing executives with global experience. ~