Author: Kanul Goenka

As one of the first and biggest department store chains in India, Shoppers Stop isn’t just a retail brand but a beacon for its peers and competitors alike. Shoppers Stop has featured among India’s Best Workplaces™ for Women 2022, and India’s Best Workplaces™ for Retail 2023. Shoppers Stop has numerous learning, development, and recognition programs for employees across levels, to align them with the strategic focus of providing world-class customer experience.

“I am not a commander giving orders to others but as a leader I give advice to others. This is a great place, because here everyone co-operates with each other & keeps one goal in mind to achieve – organization goal like a common people.” – in the words of a Team Leader, Customer Service Desk.

An important aspect of building trust is recognizing the efforts of our employees in real time. A pat on the back from a manager can go a long way in keeping people motivated and happy at work. With the idea to create something that appreciates great efforts and small achievements, and adding to the concept of Instant Rewards, they introduced the Happiness Cheque Book. While the Happiness Cheques are non-monetary, they are curated keeping in mind the thought of Reward and Appreciation.

This initiative appreciates employee efforts and extends the benefits to their loved ones who are an integral part of their lives.

A fair and transparent work environment goes a long way in creating an emotional connect with the organization. Employees at Shoppers Stop have strongly endorsed the impartial, unbiased, and family like workplace culture

An open, caring, and inclusive workplace culture

The foundation of their everyday communication is represented by ‘Dilsay’ – a bottoms up communications platform.

Being an action planning initiative, this platform is in tandem with Functional and HR Heads to facilitate engaging two-way communication. It is a structured mechanism to collect ideas, concerns, suggestions, and evaluate the same. Dilsay encourages managers to ‘listen’ and employees to share their ideas as well as their concerns. The purpose is to communicate to the people that their suggestions and opinions matter. Using this app, they identify the root cause of the underlying concern and work towards resolving the same.

The process of sharing ideas and concerns is kept simple. Employees can scan the QR code, which is available at various locations, fill in all the details, and submit their thoughts. After submission, these inputs are collated, sorted, and shared with the relevant SPOCs for further action. Employees get periodic updates about their inputs.  The ideas and concerns received through this platform and their progress is reviewed and presented to the CEO and the leadership team. To ensure that this becomes a continuous and consistent process, they also host monthly reviews, and the dashboard numbers are presented during the Management Committee Meetings.

Every quarter, the most impactful ideas are nominated by the jury to be a part of the Golden Mirror Awards. These ideas could be related to revenue generation, cost saving, process improvement, social responsibility, customer experience, or employee experience. Dilsay not only gives employees a voice but also makes them a part of defining the future of the organization. 

The Golden Mirror Awards has been a popular recognition program started in 2014. Held on a quarterly basis across India, the award is presented to employees at a regional and national level. Immaculate knowledge, pristine store management, and above all, providing a delightful experience to customers is what makes Shoppers Stop a trusted brand. The Golden Mirror Awards recognize the people who make all these things possible.

Another recognition program introduced is the peer-to-peer badges. The objective is to recognize outstanding work put in by employees across the organization. Whether it is to help a fellow employee in time of need or come up with a brilliant solution.

“I have seen many times my head of the family – my unit head & my HR always encourage the associates not like staff, but like family member. We are under one roof, recognizing the associates for their good work.” – says a Junior Store Officer.

Not the one to rest on past laurels, Shoppers Stop has introduced contemporary programs to keep up the ante on learning for the talented young leaders through workshops and coaching on Design Thinking, Executive Presence and many such other present-day themes. In partnership with Great Place To Work® and Great Manager Institute®, more than 200 people managers have undergone the Great Manager Certification Program. The certified managers are all set to become culture role-models for the people. The range of programs help amplify the associates’ learning, add value to their role, helping Shoppers Stop build a succession pipeline.

Every year, on December 12, Shoppers Stop celebrates the Retail Employee Day, dedicated to the customer-facing champions, where a host of engaging activities are planned for them.

One of the industry-first initiativesShoppers Stop introduced was how their employees identify as Customer Care Associates first, and not as their designation. This has helped the organization go devoid of the sentiment of being above one another within the organization. Right from the MD and CEO Venu Nair to the Department Managers, everyone identifies first as a Customer Care Associate. This stems from the feeling that in our hearts we are people who love serving the customers. “When we speak of an experience that we want to deliver to our customers it is Nothing But The Best. We work hard and leave no stone unturned to do it well. Our deep-rooted customer centric culture inspires our associates to be committed and go beyond what is expected.”- Venkatesh Raja, Chief Human Resources Officer.

With the pandemic, the importance of the safety and wellbeing has come to the forefront more than ever before. The Human Resources team at Shoppers Stop took up the responsibility of promoting an environment of calmness while also engaging the leadership to respond with timely, accurate, assertive, clear, and consistent communications from across all levels within the organization. Through SSConnects they safeguard people’s interests which strengthens the bonding and leads the Associates to reciprocate the trust and faith that Shoppers Stop has invested in them.

While society often looks at marriage or childbirth as a stalling period in women’s lives, Shoppers Stop, through the Second Innings program, has given women an opportunity to re-join the organization without skipping a beat. They extend job opportunities across verticals and offices to women and provide them a platform to restart their career with the organization. Women get assigned a workplace ‘buddy’ for a month from the existing team, to ease their journey as they transit back into their professional workplaces. The Women Engagement Committee introduced the 12 days a year Menstrual Leave and sanitary pad vending machines to help women take care of their health. Shoppers Stop has partnered with ProEves, a child services management agency. Employees can enrol their kids, aged 6 months to 6 years and to give working parents a sense of security, the organization also contributes towards the day-care expenses.

Shoppers Stop has made a signification contribution to PANKH – Wings of Destiny, which is an initiative by Trust for Retailers & Retail Associates of India (TRRAIN) and Youth 4 Jobs Foundation (Y4J). The initiative aims to train people with disabilities (PwD) and provide them employment opportunities in retail industry. The initiative thus aims to create sustainable livelihoods for PwD and promote inclusive growth in retail sector.  To sum it up, an inclusive workplace culture, where employees belong and contribute across the organization and leadership believes in putting people first and customers foremost. Since its inception, Shoppers Stop has paved the way for providing a world-class experience not only to its customers, but also treating employees with respect and integrity. By encouraging, an agile, innovative, and digital mindset among its associates, Shoppers Stop has built and sustained an immense amount of credibility. With the shared passion of breaching boundaries and providing endless possibilities to all its stakeholders, Shoppers Stop is ready to take on the challenges of the future, here and now.

Skills are the currency of the current multi-generational workforce. To be future-ready, nurturing talent through continuous upskilling and reskilling has become a critical focus for organizations and leaders since that keeps innovation alive and helps organizations to stay ahead of the curve. Learning at GlobalLogic has always been at the core of what they do for employees and therefore has been closely linked to their growth and career progression. There are various programs supporting and creating learning opportunities for employees across levels – including Learning Forums, Conclaves, Communities, Coaching interventions, Academies, Certifications, On the Job Learning and numerous cultural interventions that continuously help our employees towards their growth.

The cornerstone of GlobalLogic’s culture is the focus on developing people manager capabilities, as they are the flag bearers of the company’s open, inclusive, and flexible workplace culture. At GlobalLogic, the goal is to develop managers not only for a better performance on their present job but to lead the organization and get ready for the next level assignments.

To provide a steady and healthy talent pipeline, GlobalLogic has created programs that help them achieve these objectives.  This is done through a series of Management Development Programs:

The benefits from these progressive and inclusive programs can be seen:

To understand the role & job satisfaction of the employees after promotions, the ‘Career Advancement Survey’ is conducted annually – this year it covered 700 promoted employees. Based on the feedback, the Career Core team (L&D and HR) works in tandem with the Delivery team and helps create action plans to help employees build their careers further.

Journey with Great Place To Work

Great Place To Work® has been partnering with GlobalLogic in their culture journey since 2015. GlobalLogic has been recognized among India’s Top 25 Best Workplaces™in IT & IT-BPM 2022. The Trust Index™ Grand Mean of the organization has seen a significant improvement of 15% since 2020, with maximum increases on aspects of Fairness & Respect at the workplace – including impartiality showcased by managers, management reliability, right hiring & fitment, candid communication, demonstrated care and appreciation by management.

The commitment of the organization to its managerial development did not faze during the pandemic year of 2020, when GlobalLogic conducted the first phase of its People Managerial Capability Development program with Great Place To Work Close to 80 managers embarked on their journey of building High Trust High Performance teams through a 5-month intervention – comprising a structured workshop followed by creation and implementation of over 250 initiatives by the participants.

The focus areas included listening, caring, developing, and appreciating their teams. The intervention concluded with a measurement of impact based on feedback from teams of the managers who have undergone the program and a panel of the Business & HR leaders in the organization, followed by recognition and certification of successful managers. “The next phase of the intervention has been rolled out in 2022 where the focus is on `Developing Leaders of the Future’ in a fast growth and elevated environment”, says Rajesh Rai, Vice President- People Development, GlobalLogic. “GlobalLogic has always believed in growing its talent from within and giving our employees a platform to not only grow vertically but horizontally and in diverse ways. For our people, GlobalLogic has always been a place to build careers and that is why right from the middle management to the senior leadership levels, myriad interventions help our managers and leaders remain ahead of the curve. Our culture of agility, innovation and care ensures our people grow as the organization grows – we focus on impact and not spans, on nodes in a human network and not on hierarchies to deliver that impact. With these solid cultural principles, it’s always heartening to see how all of this translates into high engagement of our people, much above the market benchmarks, eventually building a high performance ‘People First’ workplace.”

GlobalLogic Academies

An Academy in GlobalLogic is a structured, long-term, community-driven, on-the-job learning program which enables organic growth of talent with a fast-track career progression model. The design & learning structure is an immersive learning experience, with high involvement & interactivity in an adaptive environment, using agile, scalable, and innovative models. Employees can explore the individual academy as each of these academies have their own learning feature.

• Curated course content, formalized processes and frameworks. 
• 150+ graduates per semester, 800+ associates trained per year.
• Two semesters every year – Spring (starts Apr) and Fall (Starts Oct).
• Selection based on performance and learning ability.
• Global Programs with a global audience and outlook – Online, Classroom, Assignment, Evaluation based curriculum.
• Badging and recognition of graduates.
• Standard process, enrolment, selection, graduation.
• Mature Partner Ecosystem (external) as they scale up.

Putting People First

A platform of GlobalLogic Citizens Club (GLCC) by and for the people has been established. Here the elected Members (chosen based on employee votes) get a unique opportunity to be the voice of GlobalLogic. The GLCC members are employee champions and represent people of GlobalLogic in important organizational matters, participation in leadership meetings based on focus areas/recommendations, policy changes, critical initiatives, decisions, policy implementations, location level decisions and more.

Culture of Gratitude & Appreciation

GlobalLogic has a 360-degree recognition platform called as “Kudos Recognition Drive” which offers a wide variety of recognition anchors. Post Covid, Kudos has been gamified and gone virtual on their internal platform called GLO – Thank You, Cheers to Peers, You Make a Difference, Walk the Talk, Pat on the Back, Rockstar Rookie. Employees achieving a milestone of Kudos in numbers are given a badge based on the counts of Kudos received – Silver, Gold, Diamond, and Platinum.

2022 saw over 2 lakhs of KUDOS exchanged among employees!

“Each employee gets recognized even for the smallest achievement related to a task or work at the management level and even at the internal team level.” – a young employee at GlobalLogic

An open, caring, and inclusive workplace culture

The icing on the cake is how the Employee Activity Club ensures fun at work while they learn and grow. The enthusiastic club volunteers are always game to engage, energize and entertain the employees. Around the year, there are theme parties, festival celebrations, talent events inviting individuals & their extended family members to enjoy and unwind. A highly inclusive team values the uniqueness of every individual. GlobalLogic has an integrated workforce of specially abled individuals, people from various ethnicities and races coming together to celebrate their passion and ideas. A transparent, collaborative, and supportive work environment helps bring the best ideas to the table.

Life at GlobalLogic is a mix of exceptional work, continuous learning and engaged workforce! One GlobalLogic family united by passion, trust, and empathy for each other.

The massive sales force of Alkem is led by leaders who demonstrate by action that people are essential to achieve the organizational goals. The Alkem Family is 17,000+ strong, epitomising a High Trust High Performance culture. 91% of employees say it is a Great Place To Work. The one reason that stands out regarding how it creates this environment, exquisitely expressed by an employee in their own words: “Alkem is a very beautiful company – takes good care of all the employees, teaches us to do work in a peaceful way & takes care of us like a family member.” It is this very authentic and heart-felt sense of belonging that’s earned Alkem the 31^st rank in India’s Best 100 Companies To Work For 2022.

How has the journey been?

Alkem’s journey in building one of the best places to work goes back to its inception. The founders Mr Samprada Singh and Mr Basudeo Singh laid the foundation of an organization which was not only meant to change the landscape of the Indian pharmaceutical industry, but also to build inspiring leadership models for the workforce. This is echoed even today by the current generation of leadership – Sandeep Singh, Managing Director – “Our people are vital to our success, and we continue to focus on building their capabilities and driving a high-performance culture. During the year, numerous training programmes were rolled out for upskilling and professional growth. We also provided multiple learning and development opportunities to develop future leaders and keep the talent pipeline flowing”. (Excerpts from Alkem’s Annual Report)

Continuous learning – at the heart of the success.

One of its most widely diversified flagship internal learning app – ALKEPEDIA provides continuous interactive learning opportunities in bite-sized format The ‘Ask the Expert’ platform has helped the field force to serve the customers at a rapid pace leading to delightful experiences. Video based on the job training (VBOJT) was initiated to further sharpen the communication related to the brands. The overall outcome of this coordinated effort was one of the most successful launches in the Chronic segment. Within a year of its launch, the brand became worth INR 20 crore.

In the words of Rajorshi Ganguli, President & Global Chief Human Resources Officer, “We believe that learning is an integral part of growth, and investment in learning is a strategic decision. To stay relevant, our L&D team and senior leaders co-create the capability-building process. Numerous programs both technical and behavioural, using various interesting pedagogies and relevant content, caters to all sections of employees to enable them to perform both current and future roles. Apart from this, we have mid to long-term education programmes for specific cohorts by tying up with reputed institutes and using MOOCs.”

An industry leadership initiative is Connect 2 Clinic – through this digital platform, any patient in any part of the country could consult a doctor from the convenience of their homes without any risk to their health. C2C is not only an easy-to-use telemedicine platform but also has evolved into a virtual clinic for practitioners, allows the doctors to stay in constant touch with the patients even post-consultation through various content initiatives.

How Alkem built on its people management capabilities to rise above in the new normal.

While their people practices drive a great employee experience, the leadership team needs to measure progress and give managers actionable data for continuous improvement on how they could best achieve the employee engagement while driving business goals, finding the right balance.

For this, Alkem partnered with Great Place To Work and Great Manager Institute® to introduce a learning & certification program for 200 senior leaders in the sales function.

Engage To Excel (E2E) Program, as they brand-named it, has 3 key levers – Connect – Develop – Inspire, a well-researched people management framework aimed at identifying and impacting key managerial styles and business outcomes. The entire program has been custom designed based on leadership interviews, team feedback and focus group discussions. The areas of focus are carved out to enhance the people manager capability in alignment with Alkem’s values, future business growth and employee aspirations.

The program has various phases including surveys, workshops, action planning and implementation of practices for managers, e-learning platform, culminating in certification as a Great People Manager. The participation and dedication in E2E from leadership – top to bottom, along with the L&D team has given the required momentum for managers to go through the 6-month detailed intervention – resulting in quantifiable behavioral changes. One of the participating managers, Nitin Kumar has this to say about the program – “Concept of CDI has given a new perspective of managing teams, it is practical and implementable. Meaningful and frequent conversation with my team is helping me to build a more connected and engaged team.”

Key Outcomes and Impact of the program and how is Alkem sustaining this

Working on areas like Appreciation between peers, Empowerment in team members for taking decisions, Transparency within team, Openness to receive feedback, Personal connect with team, has resulted in significant business results. The people managers who exceled in making an impact on their team’s engagement levels, performed 14% higher on sales target achievement and sales growth (refer graph representing cross-plot of manager’s business performance and Overall CDI score which refers to team feedback for managers on elements of the Great People Manager Framework – Connect-Develop-Inspire).

There is no additional investment, only the focused approach, combined with time and effort spent in connecting, developing, inspiring the team.

“My boss is always pushing me to break my own record every time. He never forgets to celebrate my success every time.”- Mr Tirthankar Dutta, DSM, Kolkata

“He has played a huge role in aligning the collective efforts of entire team into a firing rocket. We are now ready to accept the challenge of creating milestone achievements.”- Ankit Shah, GM, Sales and Marketing

“He is creating positive vibe within the team with transparency to take business to newer heights.”- Debmalya Banerjee DGM, Sales

The evolving practices and experiences are getting institutionalized across the organization by becoming part of their monthly business reviews, as more and more managers are getting imbibed into the active philosophy of being great people managers.