India's best workplaces of 2016: Empowered employees make happy customers at Oberoi

Rank: 8
The Oberoi Group
Founded: 1934
Employee strength: 4,000
Gender Ratio (F/M): 1:3.7
Rank 2015: 27

NEW DELHI: Having started out as a part of the preopening team at The Oberoi Rajvilas in Jaipur and having graduated as a management trainee from The Oberoi Centre of Learning and Development (OCLD), Ankush Mahajan has consistently risen up the ranks to work as a general manager at The Oberoi Udaivilas property in Udaipur.

By his own admission, Mahajan has not felt the need in his eighteen year career to draft a curriculum vitae. "It’s to do with the vision, mission and dharma of the Group” he says. "It’s a place where you get nurtured and you get constant one on one support.

Mahajan finds inspiration in chairman PRS Oberoi’s vision for the company. "He says we don’t want to be the biggest -- we want to be the best. Revenues and business figures aside, he is constantly asking us about the guests and whether they are happy. That’s foremost on his mind. It’s such a multi skilled workforce and you see each employee trying to constantly meet and exceed guest expectations. You see a sense of pride in the staff and they truly put customers and the brand first before themselves,” he says.

It’s these painstaking efforts and attention to detail to constantly match guest expectations that each staff member demonstrates that make luxury chain The Oberoi Group the most admired brand the world over. Readers of Travel Leisure USA voted the Oberoi Hotels & Resorts the ‘World’s best hotel brand’ in 2015. "We give people at all levels in our hotels tremendous freedom to do whatever they want to do to delight guests.

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No questions asked. And that creates a sense of ownership, a sense of pride. We get countless letters from guests on what people have done for them to make the experience special. That really comes from empowerment and ownership,” said managing director and CEO Vikram Oberoi.

Dharma may seem a vaunted description for work culture but VP-HR, KS Bakshi, says the concept sets in right at the hiring stage as the company uses tools and competency based interview questions to figure out those values in candidates. "It’s about each stakeholder taking pride in what he or she does. Our reward and recognition programmes are also built around those values and our policies promote that culture,” he says.

When the group had to take a hard call on shutting down the 51-year-old iconic Oberoi Delhi for renovation a year ago, it quietly started assessing each of its 400 employees in terms of their strengths, backgrounds, and family without letting the word out. "Had we told them we were shutting down, it would have caused a lot of anxiety and unrest. It was an exercise in harmony. We consciously slowed down on recruitments in other hotels to make space for our staff, and two months prior to 31st March, we gave employees a series of options based on their requirements,” said Bakshi. Oberoi adds: "We take great pride in saying everyone was taken care of.”

In a sector that battles high attrition rates and can be particularly challenging for women, Saima Masood, who works as a sous chef for bakery and pastry in The Trident at the Bandra Kurla Complex, Mumbai, has stuck around for eleven years because of the people around her. "The exposure and the opportunities that I got here made me stay back,” she says. Over the past year, the company has started offering six weekly offs in a month from four and has made changes in its variable pay plan for employees.

"The new structure is more aligned with individual and company performance. It’s more subjective and less top driven. We have brought changes in the grade structure and created some additional opportunities for people,” said Bakshi. The group is using OCLD not just a training and management school for new graduates and recruits but is also playing a major role in training existing hotel staff.

"We are conducting separate sessions for HR mangers and others to make them more equipped,” says Bakshi. In a sector where employee engagement correlates closely with customer engagement, Oberoi says the group’s values of trust and respect cut across hierarchies.

"Any meeting starts with guest experiences. We now get feedback from teams on an ongoing basis and continuously measure how we’re doing against that feedback. Situations in hotels are uncertain. But, we apply certain values consistently in the decisions we take. They form the foundation on which everything is built.” It seems the staff couldn't agree more.