She is the most popular lady at HCL with her own website on the company's Intranet. Called Natasha, her job profile is crucial: she is the team mascot for HCL's Employee HR Services group and communicates daily with each employee on what's happening within the company in a language they understand and in a format they can easily access.
J Kalyanaraman, vice president, human capital management of HCL Comnet, says Natasha has done wonders for the company. Her "personalised, non-official communication skills" have helped the company's HR drive to have an endearing face. Impersonal communication on HR policies can become a drag at times; Natasha has helped give it a humane touch.
Natasha is just a symbol of how a company can make intelligent use of information technology to improve employee morale. Consider HCL's Smart Service Desk -- an application available to all employees on their desktops. Kalyanaraman calls it an automated "trouble-ticketing tool".
Here's how it works. For any issue and transaction, the employees don't have to run to HR or finance or call them up, they can simply open a ticket in the Smart Service Desk and the process starts on its own.
The HR Services group has strict deadlines in place to ensure that the issues are taken care of within a stipulated time. Every week a service desk tracker is circulated to all employees showing the adherence or breaches. "There is no better way to foster accountability and transparency in operations," Kalyanaraman says.
The story does not end here. The employees can also use the service desk to raise tickets on the senior management. The service desk tracker analyses even the CEO's performance regarding his ability to respond to employees' queries.
The objective of such a system is to tell the senior management that it's their job to attend to employee issues fast so that the employees are free to do their job. Doesn't it undermine the authority of the middle management? Kalyanaraman says it is assumed that an employee is raising an issue with the senior management only when his immediate superior has failed to address his problem.
"It's in the company's culture to have an open-door policy. Employees are encouraged to do this since the system is kept strictly confidential," he says.
The process serves two objectives: it helps HCL to tell its employees that the company listens to and solves their problems faster than anybody else. The system has other benefits too in terms of cost.
As more and more people join the organisation, HCL does not have to increase the size of its HR department. The system can handle four times the number of queries from employees with the same number of people in the HR department.
The use of IT has also helped HCL reduce the role of the HR department in deployment of people. When they want extra people for a particular project, the line managers simply have to fill up their personnel requisition forms in the company's Intranet.
The system automatically tracks down the people available for a particular kind of job and informs the line managers. To ensure that the system works effectively, a weekly recruitment tracker is circulated to all the business heads on the status of positions opened by them. This reduces benching, improves cross-functional flexibility at all levels and cuts down bureaucracy.
Desktop Wallpaper is another HR initiative followed by HCL. All company employees across the world have common wallpaper on their desktops. One of the popular sections in this wallpaper is the weekly employee poll, in which questions related to various initiatives, strategies, new processes and so on are posed to employees. The results are shared next week on the wallpaper and actions are initiated to address the popular mandates.
Eighty per cent of the company's induction programme is done through the use of IT. HCL Comnet, for instance, has a special site for new entrants. Called the New Comnetian website, the site is a one-stop shop for all information the trainees need to get inducted in Comnet and constitutes the self-learning component of the induction programme.
Another of HCL's innovative communication initiatives is the monthly e-zines, which analyse and declare the performance of all operational teams every month. The data is collected based on pre-defined evaluation matrix, giving a unique platform for everyone to see how various teams are performing, what are the team and individual rankings in different categories and so on. "Transparency is the hallmark here," says Kalyanaraman.
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