Building an agile, inclusive, entrepreneurial and high performing organisation
We take pride in our culture that promotes openness, transparency and recognition as cornerstones of performance. Driven by our core beliefs of empowerment, mutual respect and trust, we enable our people to truly have a sense of ownership at Marico, learning and developing as individuals, even as they grow the business.
We foster a positive and inclusive work environment for all our members irrespective of race, caste, religion, marital status, gender, sexual orientation, age, nationality, ethnicity, ability or any other personal characteristic. Our values reinforce our commitment to be an organisation ensuring equal opportunity, respect, dignity, fairness and human rights for all our members. We have put in place enabling infrastructure and work practices such as the parental support programme and flexible work arrangements, besides an increased focus on sensitising our members on unconscious biases and helping them break stereotypes.
Driving diversity
We have an enhanced workforce representation that straddles gender, and abilities, leading to diverse competencies. Driving thought diversity within our teams, we have welcomed members with diverse backgrounds – defined by education, the industry they have worked in, overall experience, employment models, and others.
Policy level initiatives
Infrastructure related initiatives
A value-driven culture
We believe membership is superior to employee-ship and hence consciously, all Mariconians are called ‘members’. This membership is built on our core beliefs of trust, transparency, care and concern, appreciation and teamwork. We help members fully embrace and live our values. A detailed Values Workshop for new members is an integral part of our induction process, and once a year, we host a Values Week, to celebrate our values through various initiatives. These include recognition for living our values and bringing to life our purpose of making a difference.
Member appreciation and recognition are key to demonstrating our values. We have rolled out our internal social recognition platform, Maricognize, to our members in Bangladesh, Egypt and South Africa, as well. Function-specific awards have also been set up on Maricognize to make the recognition process easier and effective. Long service recognition for ten and five years - Club X and High 5 respectively, has been instituted. Around 103 members were recognised in FY20.
This year on Values Week, over 30000 ‘I Value You’ cards were exchanged between members.
How we engaged with our members
Our regular engagement surveys give members a chance to share their views and provides us key insights for action.
Engagement Dipstick survey conducted right after the onset of COVID showed average engagement score of 96% in the first 4 weeks.
Our Values Survey conducted annually in Supply Chain and Operations gives us a glimpse of how our values are experienced across levels. The values index was at 93% in 2020 over 87% in 2019.
Leveraging technology to engage
‘My Voice’ is a conversational bot, which engages with the frontline sales members on a periodic basis. The average engagement across frontline sales is 77% for India. We extended ‘My Voice’ to our Bangladesh business as well, this year. The effective usage of technology helps deep dive and analyse member sentiment.
Digital transformation training
Building digital skills of our members is central to our agenda of building leaders of the future. With a nine-month long learning plan facilitated by external experts, teams have been tasked with digital experiments for their brands. They are learning various aspects of this dynamic environment, be it impact assessment in terms of media effectiveness, adoption of new techniques in trend-spotting, content planning or data-driven marketing approaches.
Fostering leadership capabilities of the future
With an open, empowering and non-hierarchical environment, developing distributed leadership capabilities across levels is crucial in fostering entrepreneurial spirit and a growth mindset. Members are encouraged to master ‘Leading Self’, ‘Leading Others’, and ‘Leading Business’ to be future ready.
Our ‘Lead with Impact’ series, especially designed for high
potential members, is customised for various segments,
workgroups and experience levels including budding young
leaders, seasoned leaders, and leaders transitioning across
roles. The series follows a blended learning approach over
a period of 9-12 months. It is a combination of self-paced
e-learning modules, face-to-face experiential learning, live
learning classes, assessments, readings, coaching, project
teamwork, online collaboration and sharing of best practices.
At Lead with Impact series in 2019
We follow a '10-20-70' model of leadership development
Of the current leadership team is home-grown talent
Retention of key talent
Young Board programme
We have set up a Young Board, which comprises young home-grown partner talent, nominated from across the business, who are expected to bring fresh and differentiated thinking. This helps provide a well-rounded perspective on the new opportunities that we want to pursue, to make Marico future ready. Each Young Board has a tenure of one year.
Our channels of learning
Marico Leaders as Teachers
This year, 22 of our leaders across locations went through a three-day facilitation skills workshop based on the ‘Accelerated Learning’ model. These certified leaders are now designing and conducting training programmes for their functions on induction topics such as new manager assimilation, Marico’s values and Code of Conduct, technical topics of HR analytics and insights, pumps and pumping systems and behavioural topics such as trust and collaboration, stakeholder management, communication with impact, time management, collaboration between teams and managing self.
There is also Anytime and Anywhere learning with BLINK, our internal smart, Machine Learning and Artificial Learning (AI) driven system that serves best-in-class content, basis the role and skills of the learner.
Capability building across functions
Sales capabilities: Leveraging advanced virtual learning technology for our frontline sales through Train the Trainer ‘Friday Learning’ sessions have helped make learning an ongoing process without the need for physical presence and without any loss of man days.
1800+ Distributor Sales Representatives (DSR) has been trained weekly by Territory Sales Executives/Officers, who have been trained through the ‘Train the Trainer’ programme.
Toolbox Talks: Technical self-learning in engineering and production through a library of short learning videos of 3-5 minutes
Gyaanshala: The corporate function teams identify specific topics outside the regular learning plan, the discussion sessions of which are conducted by internal trained facilitators
Our career management philosophy
Our career management philosophy is defined across four anchors of career growth through employability enhancement, leveraging members’ strengths, perspective building and skills and knowledge enhancement. We believe that while employability enhancement is the responsibility of the member, the organisation will create the right environment for career growth. Members are given exposure through critical projects and secondments, where their strengths are leveraged.
We believe performance is not equal to the potential of an individual, and hence we assess performance and potential separately. Our holistic potential identification process, the Personal Development Planning process, assesses member aspirations, drives meaningful career conversations that result in Individual Development Plans (IDPs), which are then tracked through check-ins. Check-ins are regular conversations between members and supervisors to review action/development plan to ensure progress and alignment. Coaching, in-time feedback and guidance from supervisors sharpen the plans and help course correct, when necessary.
Starting this year, members can also view their potential career trajectory for the next five years. This career visibility is derived post detailed career conversations, career guidance sessions and internal calibration through the talent review process.
Creating a future-ready talent pipeline
While deepening engagement with our external hiring partners, we have diversified our hiring sources to enhance hiring through referrals, internal job postings, rehires, and through alternate media such as social media and alumni groups.
TAREEF: We encourage members to refer professionals from their network and get rewarded for every successful referral. 36% of vacancies at the mid management level have been through referrals, resulting in faster hiring closures and direct cost savings.
Homecoming: We have a strong alumni network, which is a potential source of talent and referrals. Basis our re-hire policy, we have also welcomed several ex-Mariconians back into the Marico family.
Alternate hiring: We have leveraged job portals like Naukri, IIM Jobs and social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook, to reach out to prospective talent that is not actively seeking a job change. We have also reached out to them through institute alumni groups.
Of our mid-management talent are sourced through referrals and alternate hiring
Of the Managers and Partners pool include Ex-Mariconians who have re-joined
Campus talent
We have talented graduates from campuses across the country, who join us every year. Our key engagements include:
Operations Bootcamp
Under Operation Bootcamp, students from operations and supply chain interact with the Marico leadership to get in depth exposure to the supply chain function coupled with a virtual tour of Marico’s Perundurai factory.
Over the Wall
Our flagship campus challenge for business ideas that would create an impact, received an overwhelming response from over 1,400 students across 12 B-Schools this year. This challenge is part of Marico’s focus on nurturing and developing future leaders with the right guidance and support. This year, Season 7 has been featured in the list of Top 20 Prestigious B-School competitions of 2020 by the Employer Branding Consultant and Student Community Platform - Dare2Compete.
STAMP (Summer Training at Marico’s Pace)
The summer internship programme at Marico is one of the strongest sources of talent from premier business schools. It is indeed a matter of pride that some of our successful members had joined us as Summer Trainees and their contributions over the years, is a testimony to the success of our STAMP programme. With STAMP, students get to work on challenging and enriching live projects. We increased the number of interns by approximately 20% this year, compared to the previous year.
Ignite
Our Management Trainee Programme is aimed at inspiring the trainees to push the limits. They work with real life, strategic business issues affecting Marico and its stakeholders. The organisation places immense trust in their abilities and provides them with early responsibility and empowerment. Ignite executes Marico’s vision of putting the trainees through a journey that not only assesses them, but also enhances their skills and readies them for future challenges.
Graduate programmes
With an increased focus on bringing in talent from diverse backgrounds even at an entry level, we have started the Graduate Leadership programme, through which we hire Graduate Trainees from top institutes like Shri Ram College of Commerce, St. Stephens College and Lady Shri Ram College for Women, and provide them with cross-functional exposure for 12-18 months, before moving them into respective functional roles. We have also recruited graduate engineering interns from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. The internship will enable the students to get real world exposure and realise their true potential by working on high impact live projects.
In addition to these, we hire trainees for front-line sales from regional management institutes, who undergo 6-8 months of comprehensive field training before directly moving onto handling independent territories.
Fostering member wellness
Marico has taken significant strides in adopting and initiating the best-in-class practices for overall wellness of our members.
Physical wellness
A comprehensive medical check-up facility was set up at corporate locations. On-site nutritionist and a general physician consultation on a fortnightly basis were also included. In addition, Zumba and Yoga sessions were conducted. We tied-up with one of India’s leading healthcare app for remote consultation by a physician and a nutritionist. This has enabled members to avoid visiting clinics and hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Stepathlon
This year’s edition of the 75-day fitness challenge witnessed 335 members participating in 6 weekly challenges across various fitness activities.
Emotional wellness
The Marico Member Assistance Program (MAP) is a counselling service available for our members and their immediate family, completely free of cost, and with assured confidentiality. At the onset of COVID, we doubled down on the assistance programme and carried out focussed communication on the availability of an emotional wellness counselling service. In addition to this, we had sessions on parenting, mindfulness, mental health, lifestyle changes among others.
Well-being sessions
During the on-going pandemic, we have started a webinar series on important issues like coping with anxiety caused by COVID-19, how to deal with working from home, staying positive during social distancing, guiding children and teens, educating them about COVID-19, managing elders and family members, besides addressing mental health and others, during the crisis.
Community well-being
Members voluntarily contributed a day’s salary for the welfare of our front-line sales field force in view of the COVID-19 crisis. Our members also voluntarily contribute to the GiveIndia Foundation, with a matching contribution from Marico. We also celebrated Daan Utsav Week, where we contributed towards a variety of causes such as education, women empowerment, disabilities and others.
Financial wellness
We helped educate members on financial security and financial management through a video series along with a financial planning expert.