The Hindu Business Line : Small measures that go a long way

Tesco HSC’s HR best practices are built on five requirements that its people emphasise all the time: the need to have an interesting job, the opportunity to get on, a manager who supports them, to be treated with trust and respect and to make their work simple minus all the hierarchy of a large organisation.

“These are not new things but it’s about staying focussed on them and building our action plans based on these requirements,” explains Sudeesh Venkatesh, Head of HR, Tesco HSC.

‘Interesting’ job profiles

Employees in the tech sector in India now increasingly demand ‘interesting’ job profiles. The employee is keen to work at the higher end of the value chain, i.e., move up from coding and testing to design and requirement specification.

In the last three-four years, Tesco HSC has consciously moved the work counter up in response to the demand from their employees. The company that started off with just IT services, is now involved in the design of stores. “This also provides our employees an opportunity to get on,” says Sudeesh. Tech workers are also looking at opportunities to innovate and do things differently. Tesco HSC conducted an Innovation Summit where employees could come up with suggestions on ‘things that could make business better.’ This was a ‘no constraints, no blue sky thinking’ exercise that received 108 entries.

Support structure

Employees at Tesco, as in any fast-growing sector, constantly look for support from their managers. “People became managers here even before they are ready to take on the responsibility,” says Sudeesh.

Investment in managers by way of training sessions and leadership development programmes is critical. Tesco HSC has achieved this through its situation leadership programmes and mentoring opportunities for new managers to connect with the senior members of the company or with external executive coaches. IT companies are also realising that for career development, employees need to criss-cross the organisation map. For instance, employees can choose any one of these four paths for growth: project manager, domain specialist, tech architect or a testing and process specialist.

At Tesco HSC, these are not mutually exclusive paths, but areas that people can cut across and grow, with support from the organisation. “We provide all employees with a framework of all the skills, competencies and the training required to make these moves and support them when they decide to move.”

Exit interviews provided the seed for the fourth employee requirement at Tesco HSC: the importance of trust and respect towards employees.

“Though most people who quit give reasons such as the need to relocate, or compensation, you’ll find that the decision to quit was actually taken six-nine months before when he or she was treated disrespectfully or when there was a breach of trust.”

This trend, he realised, had to be plugged at the point of origin rather than regretting it when the employee decides to exit the company. Thus was born Tesco’s Values Workshop where the CEO teaches managers to ask more than tell, praise more than criticise, celebrate success and take care of their people so that they take care of the customers.

Greater accessibility

The fifth employee requirement is all about making work simple.

What Tesco HSC is trying to do is build simple HR systems so that employees get their answers at their desktops and don’t have to waste time running around for information. Apart from these five focus areas where the company is trying to make a difference, Tesco HSC has formed the Staff Action Groups and Rapid Action Teams that help HR make decisions in all employee-related matters.

This practice comes with two advantages: one, decisions are no longer seen as an HR initiative, and second, though employee involvement may slow down the decision-making process, the company gains because of the concurrence from all departments and, therefore, ease of implementation, says the HR chief.

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Small measures that go a long way