Career Memoirs Trail by Ravikumar Pillai - part 18
The interval between career shifts is an unusually cool and detached experience. A time to unwind, float in an ethereal lightness and get recharged for the uncertainties and novelties ahead. I decided to make a fortnight’s visit to my hometown of Thiruvananthapuram, the serene and docile capital city of Kerala during the break between my resignation from SAIL and the expected joining at the new company.
Those were the days before the advent of the Internet and Google. So, I gathered whatever sketchy information I could get about my new employer - place and people of the prospective location. I was reassured by the company’s HR that a self-sufficient and safe township awaited me. Yet moving to the interior Hindi heartland, in the backdrop of the sketchy idea I had about the sectarianism, violence and disorderliness prevailing there did remain a concern in my mind. Was I making the right move or stepping into a world of stark uncertainties? Moving from the suave and modern Mumbai to the supposedly rustic heartland was frankly a troubling thought.
I was relieved at this juncture to get a call from the Kochi-based plantation giant, Harrisons Malayalam Limited, a legacy colonial rubber and tea estate company with the RPG Group. The call was a follow-up on my earlier interactions about a possible shift to the Group. This time, the Managing Director’s Office of the local company called me and said that on reference from the Group Head Office in Mumbai, the local boss would like to meet me to explore an opening with them. I went over to their corporate office, located in Willington Island, Kochi to have a face-to-face with the MD, S Samuel. He was a remarkable person. A homegrown executive of the Group, he had spent his career entirely in CEAT Tyres and grown with the company to reach the C-Suite level. He was handpicked by the Group to head the agri-business spread over plantations in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. They also were taking the initial steps to grow into lateral Agri-based value-added products like Tissue Culture, Floriculture and Seeds business.
They wanted to establish an HRD division under the overall umbrella of the Human Resources function. While day-to-day industrial relations, labour law matters and litigation, welfare administration and routine personnel administration kept the HR plate full, the company wanted to have an expert to focus on studying, enhancing and executing policies, programs and processes on HRD. They proposed to integrate the unit’s HRD practices into the Group canvas and to specifically address the pain points, challenges and opportunities in the organization and talent development, retention and rewards.
The holistic solution-focused HR value proposition appealed to me. In addition, I considered the new opportunity's personal and professional risk rewards better than moving to the operational HR role that the fertilizer unit in UP offered.
In life and career, one can't predict the twists and turns in store for us. Call it destiny, chance, luck, intuition or mere coincidence, certain events and outcomes determine our trajectory decisively and we are set on a path, never planned or prepared for.
Thus, though I was planning to take up a certain position in a company, I ended up accepting an offer from an altogether different industry and organization.
I joined the RPG Group as a Senior HRD Manager in their agri-business unit headquartered in Kochi. Over the next nearly two years, I went through novel experiences, newer challenges and plenty of learning opportunities. I shall mention a few highlights of my experience and the emotional and intellectual transformation that I experienced.
One of the critical issues for Harrison’s Malayalam Ltd (HML) was executive compensation. This gave me my first exposure to talent management and compensation strategies, benchmarking and competitiveness. At that time, it did not occur to me as prescient of the rather long global compensation management stint I was to take up later in the Gulf.
My Chief Executive asked me to carry out a sensitive, confidential compensation survey, benchmarking and redesign to address a key concern for the organization, the high executive turnover and a perceived lack of morale and motivation at operationally critical levels. I set about based on CEO directives and tapping the key leads and contacts from industry peers that I gathered to survey executive compensation best practices in the industry. The focus was on the comprehensive compensation packages for estate managers in leading competitors like Tata Tea, AVT and Brook Bond.
The world of Plantation Management was very specialized with an exclusive pool of talent in great demand and susceptible to poaching.
Retention strategies had to be carefully planned. Significant support for children’s education was a critical component of the salary package for executives. The nature of the plantation industry meant that operational leaders had to be often stationed at remote estates and children had to be mostly enrolled in the top-notch residential schools away from the estate locations. Hence, we zeroed in on significantly enhancing the child education allowance component of the total package to attract and retain key managers.
Similarly, social security, by way of attractive superannuation benefits was another piece of the total rewards jigsaw puzzle that had the power to attract and retain executive talent. The sock option program was relatively new in India then. The total package had to be redesigned to tap tax-saving provisions available in the Income Tax Law and rules. The federal budget and taxation provisions in India have always been tentative and unpredictable and varied from year to year. The tax liability and exemptions especially on perquisites were susceptible to unexpected changes. This aspect had to be built into the fine-tuning and review of the compensation structure.
The talent mix and career history of executives in the company varied but followed a general pattern. Ethics, accountability, teamwork and commitment to operational performance were factors that were leveraged to design a motivational compensation structure.
Over the years, my ability to design and review compensation packages has covered many industries, locations and functions. My initiation to the rationale, logic and art of designing effective compensation structures happened at HML.
I also spent considerable time on identifying, screening and recruiting fresh talent on campuses. I designed induction program modules for the cohorts joining the company. The central objective was to initiate the new joiners into the culture, values and corporate priorities of the company. Making them ready for a structured and assessment-oriented on-the-job assignment with minimum time spent on the frills and generalizations was the most important aspect of designing induction training.
One of the legacy practices in the plantation industry that attracted me was the extension assessment interviews. The shortlisted candidates were deputed to stay with an estate manager as a guest to the manager’s family for a period of four to five days, filled with visits and interactions with plantation activity centres.
Their socialization, etiquette, manners and emotional resilience were observed by the host Manager, whose observations and remarks were sent in confidence to the HRD. The final selection was done based on initial screening, interviews and the extension interview reports. This was more or less 360-degree feedback on the suitability and fitment of the recruit.
HML was at that time on a major diversification spree to take advantage of the new opportunities in agri-business. Tissue Culture, Floriculture, and Seeds business which were green shoots emerging in India were identified as potential new verticals for converting HML from a plantation company to a total agri-business company. Also, for the first time, the company had just launched a retail brand of tea, leaf and dust varieties, for the FMCG market.
I got an interesting and engaging opportunity to understand and contribute to the larger canvas of talent management from recruitment to compensation to talent development.
RPG Group itself was on a transformation journey at that time. HML was a key component in the overall mosaic of the comprehensive earnings and customer service canvas unfolding.
I went to Mumbai to attend the annual HRD Conference of the RPG Group. In the meeting, over three days, I was exposed to the unfolding plans and programs of the group on strategic Human Resources Management.
While in Mumbai, I called on my mentor and teacher in the MBA program, Dr. NK Singh, who was then the corporate HRD Head of the Aditya Birla Group. On his prompting, I went to Industry House, the corporate headquarters of the Group. They were sourcing key managers for the greenfield refinery that the group was setting up at Mangalore in South Canara, Karnataka. I had a one-to-one meeting with the Managing Director, Jagdish Mehta and later in the evening met with Bagrodia, a senior corporate executive considered very close to the Birla family.
By the time I left Mumbai at the end of the review meeting, I had with me the appointment letter to join Mangalore Refineries and Petrochemicals Ltd. (MRPL) as GM-P&A in charge of HR and Administration.
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