Tata Steel is a steel company, right? To Atrayee Sanyal, the company’s Vice President of Human Resource Management, Tata Steel isn’t just a steel company. It is also a large mining firm, the largest engineering & projects entity and the one with the biggest IT & digital teams in the sector, she says.
Not to forget the many other businesses related to materials and services, she adds. Perhaps, that’s why the company—founded 115 years ago—scored high on ‘Growth and Learning Opportunities’ in the latest BT-Taggd Best Companies to Work For in India study. “There are so many opportunities [for employees] and therefore probably you have... [such high scores],” says Sanyal, a Tata Steel veteran of nearly 15 years. “If they [the employees] want to be in the steel business, whether it is manufacturing, procurement, digital supply chain, e-commerce, new materials, durables or even R&D, the opportunities are huge within the company,” she says.
However, managing 35,000 employees with a median age of around 40 years is no easy task, given the last couple of years when the pandemic forced companies and their HR chiefs to put in place a completely new strategy in terms of work culture and environment.
Interestingly, around a year ago, Tata Steel launched an internal AI-based platform that allowed employees to upload their profile—something on the lines of LinkedIn—and also apply for various projects within the company. It is like an internal gig-working platform where people can experience any kind of career within the company, says Sanyal, adding that over time the platform will become more intelligent and even suggest mentors and showcase the progress of employees.
Another parameter on which the company scored high was ‘Flexibility at work’, which many companies have been forced to adopt in the last couple of years. But Tata Steel, Sanyal says, embarked on the journey much before the pandemic struck. “As a diverse company having all kinds of people, we started working on very forward-looking policies around 4-5 years back. We had things like satellite working, sabbaticals, directed learning leaves, mothers’ leaves, paternity leaves. We even had transgender leave for parental requirements and menstrual leave for women that they are authorised to take on their own terms out of their sick leaves. Women can even travel with their children and maids if they want to,” says Sanyal, an alumna of Calcutta University and INSEAD.
The foundation that was laid around 4-5 years ago enabled the company to put in place two working models—a flexible working model and the absolute work from home model—with flexibility built into each of them.
Further, the company also identified around 200-500 roles that could be managed from anywhere and office space was given up. What’s interesting is that parts of the office space vacated were used to build digital twins of blast furnaces and other processes so that people did not actually have to go to the plant to operate these. Some space was also converted into hot desks and employees could just book a place through an app.
But with the worst phase of the pandemic probably behind us, would Tata Steel announce that everyone has to come back to office? “The answer is a big no. We have decided that we will be flexible for good,” says Sanyal. “It continues as it is so the flexibility remains on whether you want to come to office [or not].” She adds that it would be announced that offices were “open to accept the people who come”; who won’t come into office “would depend on the team and the function that they belong to. So, it is customised flexibility left on business needs. There will be no one-size-fits-all policy in the company anymore.”
This assumes significance as women constitute 7 per cent of the total workforce at Tata Steel, with the company focussing a lot on inclusion and diversity issues. It has also put in place policies specifically aimed at the LGBTQ community and people with disabilities. Tata Steel also has policies for the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) community. “Our journey on diversity started somewhere in 2015-16 and today we have reached a stage where employees know what LGBTQ is and they say they don’t have any issue if we hire them. We already have 38 transgenders working in the company and 70 more are in the process of joining,” says Sanyal.
It is often said that details matter and the finer details matter all the more. As part of its commitment towards diversity and inclusion, Tata Steel replaced the word ‘spouse’ with ‘partner’ for availing medical or even PF benefits—thereby enhancing the quantum of benefits available for the LGBTQ community. The progress can be corroborated by the fact that the HR department no longer needs to drive diversity as it has spread like “wildfire” within the company, says Sanyal.
The company may well have put in place many policies much before the pandemic forced the world and companies to change but there was no dearth of learning from the global virus attack. “The biggest learning has been that flexibility gives the best results. We had our historic best performance financially in the two years of Covid-19 and with almost 80-100 per cent of our white-collared workforce at any point of time working from home. Flexibility gives the best empowerment and empowerment gives the best results. That has been the complete learning over the pandemic period,” says Sanyal.
@ashishrukhaiyar