IndianOil is India's flagship national oil company with its business interests straddling the entire hydrocarbon value chain - from refining, pipeline transportation and marketing of petroleum products to exploration and production of crude oil and gas, marketing of natural gas and petrochemicals. With over 34,000- strong workforce, IndianOil has been helping to meet the country's energy demands for over half a century, ranking at the 98
th position in 2011 in the Fortune 'Global 500' listing.
IndianOil is one of the four PSUs to get the coveted Maharatna status. With Maharatna status, the company now enjoys power to form joint venture and strategic alliances and special purpose vehicles (
SPV). However, with enhanced power also comes responsibility. To leverage the potential of Maharatna status, IndianOil has build up organisational capabilities - a critical responsibility of HR of the company.
IndianOil aims to see itself as a strong 'Employer Brand' with a defined set of Employee Value Propositions
(EVP). These challenges are not unique to IndianOil; other organisations working in this business environment are facing the same set of challenges and devising their own HR strategies. To evaluate the performance of the IOCians, and engagement surveys have been institutionalised which are conducted once in three years. The scores on different drives of Engagement Survey is analysed and areas of improvements are identified. Corrective actions are taken on the basis of the survey. IndianOil also started participating in third party benchmarking exercises.
IndianOil is among the first PSUs to implement an online performance management system (
e-PMS) in 2005-06. Value addition by way of introduction of mandatory KRAs and standardisation of roles has helped to stabilise the process, and ensured better consistency. The targets and goal setting process has matured over the years and as a result of clear expectations from a role, better accountability has happened in both line as well as support functions. The system also provides feedback to the appraisee on the assessment made by the appraiser and reviewing officers on his performance on KPIs. The system also provides for feedback counselling by the reviewing officer.
A major initiative in the performance management system has been the transparency. The performance scores obtained by the officers are communicated to all. The officers are also given opportunity to represent their cases, if they are not happy with the score. Each such representation is analysed and reviewed in detail by the reviewing and counter-signing officials and the result is communicated to each representing officers with stipulated time.
At IndianOil, a cross functional team of senior officials started working on a corporate promotion policy, to support the new career paths. The new policy has become a necessity, as distortions have taken place in the organisational structure with bulge in the middle management and reduction in working hand.
In order to design the new promotion policy, roles have been identified, which can be manned by other than professionally qualified officials. A conscious call has been taken to rationalise the entry-level recruitment practices and recruit non-professionals with good credentials and experience to man those positions. There will be a separate career path for this group. A faster career path has been planned for professionally qualified officers, so that they can take the roles of ED early in their career. They will have a longer stint at the leadership positions and can also take up board positions.
With IndianOil's emphasis on 'growing its own timber', most of its top management personnel, including Board Members, have risen from within. IndianOil has also provided leadership positions to the industry as well, with several CEOs in PSUs and private enterprises being former IOCians. In the past three years, IndianOil has taken several key initiatives to align its people capabilities with the corporation's business strategies.
In 2010-11, IndianOil had embarked on the journey to institutionalise the process of succession planning across divisions. The initiative has been carved out into a well-defined project in association with a globally reputed consultant. The performance module has transformed from being only performance oriented to performance and potential oriented. This indeed has strengthened the leadership bench strength of the organisation.
Initially, the competency module is reviewed to identify the pivotal roles and strengthen leadership for next level challenges. The leadership roles are then evaluated by the following competencies:
STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP
- Relationship Leadership
- Talent Leadership
- Change Leadership
- Business Results Leadership
- Operations Leadership
- Content Leadership
- Customer Leadership
Based on the above exercise, competency mapping of all top management level officers
(Dy. General Managers, General Managers and Executive Directors) is being done by using the performance-potential matrix.
The government has recommended Performance Related Pay (PRP) to be made an integral part of the compensation package with the intent to progressively make it a major component of the executive compensation. PRP is directly linked to the profits of the company and performance of the officers. PRP has proved to be a tool for identifying superior performance and rewarding the same based on well-defined measures and has enabled the organisation to define a performance bell curve. This has ensured that the most challenging feature mandated by Department of Public Enterprises
(DPE) as a prerequisite for disbursement of PRP has been followed in letter and spirit.
Besides defining the objectives, introducing a transparent module and a committed PMS for a year's performance evaluation, the planning module is also well designed through a Career Path Model (CPM). The CPM, which was first formulated in 1980s, has just been revisited. A number of changes have been incorporated in the new career path model keeping in view our expansion in new business areas, aspiration of GenY IOCians, who have recently joined the workforce. From implementation point of view, the rigidity in the previous career path has been rectified.
It has been made flexible and emphasis has been given on achieving cumulative experience over repetitive experience. The new career path has also taken into account the emerging social contract. The officers have been made responsible for maintaining their career path for their own growth. IndianOil is considered as an ideal employer. It not only extends best in class remuneration packages, but also opportunities for overall development to the employees, which creates a unique value proposition for its employees. As a result of this, attrition in IndianOil has always been very low.
