CXO Conversation
“If your engagement survey needs an explainer, it is measuring reading comprehension.”
Chief Human Resources Officer, Girija Industries
Twenty-four years in manufacturing HR, a five-year wage settlement across seven plants without a stoppage, and a blunt assessment of why corporate people programmes do not survive contact with a factory.
Transcript
- ClubCXO
- Why do corporate HR programmes fail in industrial businesses?
- Vikram Shetty
- Because they are written for four hundred people in a head office and then announced to eighteen thousand who are not. The design work is real and it is done for the wrong population. Then the rollout is treated as a communication problem.
- ClubCXO
- You settled seven unionised plants for five years without a stoppage.
- Vikram Shetty
- The negotiation starts about four years before anybody sits at the table. By the time you are in the room, you are collecting on trust you either built or did not. People imagine the settlement is won in the room. The room is where you find out.
- ClubCXO
- What did contract labour cost you?
- Vikram Shetty
- A decade of skill formation. It is cheaper every single year and then one day you look for a line supervisor with fifteen years of process knowledge and there is nobody, because you stopped making them in 2012.