HUL, Marriott bag HR awards

MUMBAI: Hindustan Unilever (HUL) and Marriott India bagged the awards for HR Excellence conferred on them by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) on Monday. Speaking on the occasion, HUL executive director HR Leena Nair, said maintaining a legacy of building capable leadership, being obsessive about talent, focusing on consistent performance and aggressively building people capabilities are some of the thrust areas for HR at HUL.

“The thrill one gets is not solely from scale and the size of a business one handles, but also the complexity of the job,” added Ms Nair. While HR structure and processes were the focus areas for HUL, organisational culture and HR practices were the thrust areas for Marriott. Revenue manager Marriott Saurabh Prakash said touch points within the organisation and empowerment granted to associates encouraged them to perform consistently.

Apart from these companies sharing their unique HR practices, the focus of the conference remained on talent acquisition, retention and creating leaders. “We need to segment our employees similar to what is practised in marketing and then we need to retain high potential employees.

Another challenge is to retain and motivate plateauing employees by fighting negative stereotyping,” said ITC executive VP-corporate HR Anand Nayak. Companies across sectors that participated in the conference faced common HR challenges, the most significant being lack of people and talent availability in the right measure. The central point of all discussions remained on training, enhancing skills, retention and recruitment.

The summit threw light upon creating leaders for the industry and India, accelerating capability building, creating capacity for future, diversity and inclusion at workplace. Said IBM India global HR head Aquil Busrai: “With the rate at which we are growing, putting employees on the bench doesn’t make sense because the worst thing to happen is if people don’t feel productive.”