Crucial Success Skills Forged Through My Journey
In all my 20 years of experience cultivating strategic and result oriented leadership skills has been at the helm in my career graph. I would always wish to take the example of Aurobindo Realty and how I could create a startup organization right from the scratch with 5 employees in 2016 to close to 5000 by December 2022 for which I was awarded the top most HR leader award at the world HRD congress in Mumbai. For a person who was only handling Human Resources for Pharma / Clinical Research and healthcare, Real estate was a new thing entirely for me. I could quickly make inroads in getting quality talent and giving the best benefits, creating a world-class culture and providing for trainings. I started with getting the CEO and the critical talent in various department and rest as they say is history.
Creating world class commercial spaces for a company which has no prior real estate experience has been phenomenal. I was strategically involved in the business and also ramping up to setup the precast plant with relevant workers who worked on this technology was challenging and that was quickly addresses with doing a thorough research on competitor companies doing precast and tapped talent from certain geographic locations and with this an entire precast plant with 250 workers was setup in no time. The same technology was being used for commercial towers construction and the project was completed within the stipulated period of time. All could only happen through convincing the management and ensuring I got their buy in before going ahead to act which required a lot of influencing.
Crafting Creative Opportunities from Every Challenge
Any professional working facing challenges and my story has been nothing less. One challenge I faced was when acquiring port employees at Kakinada when Aurobindo realty took over the Kakinada ports from GMR and acquiring employees from GMR to Aurobindo realty has been quite a challenge as their culture and compensation has different than what we had. Numerous discussions with their old employer and convincing my management was a big task and sometimes it felt that this might not happen but the business was critical and this had to be done at any cost. I did a comparative analysis on both the compensation paid and wherein the fact was the employees were not given any raise in their previous organization which again was a challenge to benchmark them as per market standard.
I had to get back to the drawing board and convince the management to give them the benefits on par with their current employer and a market correction was effected based on the data shared and which was made applicable for the first year and the next year was as per the performance based policy. With this the inhibitions in the minds of the acquiring employees vanished and we could ensure business continuity. This act with the management approval of supporting them went a long way and wiped away doubts which started to fill and the acquiring employees never felt they joined a new company at all.
My Impact
Tangible impact of my work was during the covid time and how as a company I could create value with the employees and the promoters. I ensured to work towards protecting the employees apart from their statutory compensations which they would receive in case of any fatalities. I had come up with an internal employee compensation policy which benefitted close to 7 families who lost their dear ones and who were our employees. On an average a person would only get about 15 to 20 lacs if you take Term life and all other statutory coverages combined. For Covid deaths a policy was formulated wherein the management too contributes equivalent amount of the statutory compensation due to the bereaved employee. For example if a statutory amount as received from statutory is 20 lacs , the management contribution is equivalent. For non covid deaths apart from the statutory compensation it was
- 1 -11 lacs CTC – 10 lacs.
- 12 – 24 lacs CTC – Amt paid on the actual yearly CTC of employee.
- 25 lacs and above - 25 lacs.
This created a social bond in the organization and word spread that employees are well protected, and no one wanted to leave as the organization took care of them. All this did not happen in a jiffy, this went through many board room discussions, convincing and eventually setting this policy rolled out. The CEO and other senior members were pleasantly surprised, and I was recognized in front of all my employees for taking this initiative of protecting the employees working for the organization.
Scaling New Heights in Personal and Professional Triumphs
Success for me is creating value through one’s efforts and whereby ensuring you make a difference in your stakeholders / employees. An innate ability of influencing people to come together for a common purpose defines success. Creating a long standing organization from the scratch was not easy and success doesn’t happen over night nor with smart work. I had to spend many months doing extensive research on the peer organization's, its benefits and policies for me to come out with a ground breaking policy. Culturally I had to change the setup from a traditional driven organization to a professionally driven one.
The mindset change was important. Budgets started flowing in and the ROI was realized building world class projects. Also the employees were trained both internally and externally and made the organization talent ready. We had to up the game and be on the big league of real estate players and for this benchmarking was key for us. I benchmarked close to 5 big real estate firms and we bettered the policies given by them vis a vis us for us to attract and retain talent.
The Synergy Between My Path and Recognition Values
For someone who has created an entire company (Aurobindo Realty) with People, Processes and Policies right from the scratch and ensuring its continuity and was able to successfully influence stakeholders in ensuring the best possible support is provided to employees and which went a long way in making strides in the real estate space. I have been able to make a difference in ensuring that the organization is built on values and lives strong in inculcating the same to others. I was awarded with the CHRO of the year award in 2022 for my contributions in expanding an making a big organization and sustaining it for close to five years and was also given the Top most HR leader award for my contributions in the massive setup. From attracting quality talent to training employees and working towards protecting them was my main forte and I was always passionate in building the same through continuous efforts and improvement. What you give is what you get and this was driven well through the entire organization. Setting up infra mining and ports businesses on the sidelines has been great learning personally for me.