InterGlobe has recently been awarded as the Best employer by Aon Hewitt and ranks 17th in the top 25 Best Workplace. Harish K. Gandhi, Group Head HR, InterGlobe Enterprises talks about company's HR policies and employee engagement programs. (Edited Excerpts)

InterGlobe has been declared one of the best companies to work for in India year after year. What has been the strategy?

These awards are the direct outcome of engaged employees. This depends on having right building blocks around employee experiences on empowerment, transparency,job clarity, work culture, growth opportunities and learning. It has been our conscious effort to create an employee engagement proposition best-in-class. We offer a value-driven and performance culture that helps in building pride among employees.

Being a young organisation, we have learned to respond to the challenges of offering the millennial workforcetheir space and flexibility to help meet their personal and professional aspirations. We firmly believe in hiring young professionals for their attitude and cultural fit and not for their domain knowledge.

How many jobs have you created for the women workforce? Are there any policies to ensure their safety and provide a good atmosphere?

At InterGlobe, we constantly strive to create a work environment that is inclusive in more than mere gender, age and physical boundaries. We are an equal opportunity employer and take great pride in it.

At the time of hiring, our focus is on merit, attitude and values as opposed to gender. Our jobs are open to the right talent irrespective of gender. Having said that, ensuring gender diversity is a focal point in the recruitment agenda for InterGlobe. Our airline business: InterGlobe Aviation employs an all women cabin crew. In addition, our businesses have broken gender stereotypes by hiring women in what previously used to be considered traditional male bastion jobs like aircraftmaintenance, transport drivers and construction management at sites.

Our belief is that our policies and practices are aligned to strengthen our company culture. We focus on creating a secure workplace for our employees: men and women alike. We offer several policies around work flexibility, parental leave, work from home and anti-sexual harassment that apply to all our employees, irrespective of gender and age.

What policies do you adopt to retain the best talent in the industry?

We believe in value based talent hiring. We provide stimulating assignments and learning opportunitiesfor our employees. Our professional certification program is one such initiative at InterGlobe where employees are encouraged to nominate themselves for their development requirements.

We also have a unique internal job posting program that focuses on seamless movement of talent across businesses and functions. The standout feature of this policy is that employees are not required to inform their managers when they apply for internal movements. Furthermore, if selected for the role, employees have to be relieved within 45 days of the offer being made. This is a way of avoiding talent hoarding and provisioning choices for employees to experience diverse businesses within the same group.

We offer an empowering culture and trusting environment and seamless accessibility to our leadership for guidance and mentoring. This open door policy clearly signals employees that the company is backing them in all their decisions. Our key focus is to reward efforts of employees and not just their success.

Work flexibility is gaining popularity across the globe. How do you keep the employees engaged?

Almost 75 percent of our workforce is millennial and we appreciate their need for flexibility at work in the way our people think, innovate and operate is at the core of our people agenda.

We provide employees with seamless talent movements through internal job postings to ensure that they learn continuously. Along with this, we offer a flat organisational structure, flexible work hours, work from home and career breaks to our employees. All these efforts help us to address the flexibility needs of employees. 

Are there any disruptive HR policies that you have recently adopted?

We have done away with the traditional bell curve for normalization of performance ratings. We have flattened the organisational structure which helps in addressing the need of faster execution of decisions and flexibility needed by millennials.

In addition, we have incorporated chatbots and artificial intelligence in our system to deal with employee issues. Embracing technology for operational tasks like on-boarding and queries have reduced the chances of human error, standardized processes and ensured universal employee experiences.