Ask Kristyl Pais Bhesania at TATA-AIA how tough it is to attract and retain talent and pat comes the reply: “It’s not a challenge at all.” The insurance firm’s senior vice-president & head, Human Resources takes pride in being an employer of choice. “We have a homecoming initiative as well as talent aspire to join us today. We have 16,000 followers on our Linkedin’s career page which is growing rapidly.”
The insurer revels in its people-centric high-performance work culture. “We have a robust talent management process to identify, assess and develop top talent for leadership roles. An annual talent conclave to facilitate career and individual development conversations between top talent and their supervisors… our top talent gets enrolled as members of the ‘Good Club’ which is our talent club,” she says.
The company has what’s called “SPEED” (Superior Performance Execution Excellence and Delivery) to fast-track frontline employees from the support and operations functions to provide development and career progression opportunities for the talent employees. You have also have an active “mentoring” approach.
“Our executive committee members are active mentors and invest significant time to develop and prepare ‘ready now’ successors for key roles.” That’s not something you see in a lot many companies in India wherein seniors breathe rarefied air! “At TATA AIA, we believe every employee is a star with a unique shine. The name of the game is to identify these stars, shape and groom them so that they believe in themselves, outperform with shining colours making us proud.”
Tata-AIA also leverages on the high impact learning and development interventions from the AIA Group for employees. This approach covers offline, online and blended learning and the strategy is to provide differentiated training programmes for employees based on the function in which they are in and the responsibilities which they handle. “Priority is to ensure that the development is relevant to their roles and also help them to achieve their personal and professional goals.”
As to how TATA-AIA attracts its talent, “preference is given to internal talent given that we have robust talent management framework to develop our employees. We all have a unique referral programme, source talent from social media and job portals and encourage diversity hiring apart from campus hiring”.
The firm did not reveal its attrition level, but claims it is one of the lowest in the industry. The strategy is pre-emptive in nature. “We have been able to retain our top talent with very focused HR interventions. “That’s ensured a high-employee engagement experience resulting in ring fencing our key talent and reducing our overall attrition,” says Bhesania.
raghu@businessworld.in
BW Reporters
Raghu Mohan is an award-winning senior journalist with 22 years of experience. He has worked for BW Businessworld since December 2006, and is currently its Deputy Editor. His area of expertise is banking – commercial, investment, and the regulatory. Previous stints include those at The Financial Express and Business India.
