The Hindu Business Line : CavinKare cares

At this university, the students are all employees of the company that set it up. And there are no absentees, because the courses are mandatory and linked to the periodic work appraisal.

The university is only one of Chennai-based FMCG company, CavinKare Pvt Ltd’s initiatives to make work more meaningful and pleasurable for its employees, says Oomen Abraham, General Manager, Corporate HR. In the face of attrition, employee engag ement is important.

“We did face a fair amount of attrition last year, at 34 per cent, mostly to the gain of telecom companies where the salaries are tripled,” says Abraham, who has been with CavinKare for nearly 15 years. “But there are many who want to come back, even with a cut in salary, for the flexibility and culture of freedom that they found at CavinKare.”

Other steps the company is taking seriously are organisational restructuring and job banding, salary restructuring and leadership and succession planning, he adds.

Explaining job banding, Abraham says bands will enable shifts in the job within the company. It often happens that even after several promotions, the nature of the job doesn’t change. Those looking for a shift to different functions, say, from Accounts to Marketing, can enrol for the optional courses at the CavinKare University and on clearing certain goals, attempt to cross over provided the other team will accept them, says Abraham.

The University, a Web portal designed by Chennai-based Mentor Learning Services, offers mandatory and optional courses. Every single employee of the company from a beginner to the Executive Director has to take a course that will earn them credits that are tied to work appraisals. A poor result may mean few rewards. Each person gets three months’ time to finish the course. The ‘homework’ and assignments are directly linked to the business results and there are internal and external audits of the progress achieved, says Abraham.

Each employee is supposed to take three mandatory courses in a period of nine months. Abraham’s own current project is raising the level of employee engagement for which he’s conducting the Q-12 survey.

“One of CavinKare’s core competencies is ‘Continuous Learning’. People will make a very significant impact on the business performance irrespective of the strides the organisation may make in process and technology improvements. To ensure high levels of employee engagement, capability and personal growth, we launched CavinKare University,” says Abraham.

The university offers employees flexibility to learn on the job. Employees can track their learning activities through the portal, monitor their individual learning plans and take stock of their progress. Mentor Learning Services has also provided the content for the portal.

To bring in the enjoyment, a lot of clubs for employees to bond over common interests and activities have been planned.

More Stories on : Education | Human Resources

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Succession planning

Finally it’s time to celebrate!

CavinKare cares

Building high performance teams

Whose job is it anyway?

Focus on what you can control