The Effective Harmonisation Of Payroll Policies
Overview
The client was struggling to amicably resolve long-standing labour disputes with its workforce. Having extensive experience in labour negotiation and dispute resolution, AscentHR brokered a lasting, amicable solution that was mutually beneficial for both the employer and the employees.
Our Client
Our client is a large information technology corporation with multiple verticals, business units, and operations across regions and geographies.
AscentHR’s intervention solved the long-brewing labour issue and helped us rationalize and homogenize the policies successfully across our locations.
Challenges
A dispute about the rationalization of pay policies snowballed into a near catastrophic stand-off between the corporation and its workers, potentially costing incalculable losses in legal fees, disruption of business, and a near irreversible loss of reputation and market credibility for the corporation.
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The company could focus on what it did best, engineer growth, revenues, new acquisitions, and grow business. Instead, it was fruitlessly engaging in dispute management and redressal.
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The management’s vision and strategy could not be successfully translated and articulated into a shared aspiration that employees could instantly connect, and identify with.
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A central rift, long present between employees and management deepened with the proposed broad-based changes which were to be implemented without extensive consultation and buy-ins from employees.
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As the management’s strategy began to bear form and shape, long-festering employee grievance finally culminated into a lingering, but explosive stalemate and impasse.
Solution
The corporation’s attempt to introduce newly homogenized and uniform payroll policies, served as a lightning rod to the labour impasse.
AscentHR’s legal experts helped the client activate BATNA (the Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement) when employees initiated a strike and conciliation proceeding against the company’s board of directors, and top management.
AscentHR adopted a two-pronged approach of simultaneously educating both the employer and the employee about the benefits of policy rationalization and homogenization. We undertook a “what if” analysis which enabled us to provide knowledge about compensation and analysis and its impact on the organization.
Outcomes
The outcomes from the engagement were:
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Problem analysis: AscentHR undertook a root cause analysis with a focused investigation into labour compliance and labour relations. We effectively represented the corporation in our interaction with the labour department.
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Outreach efforts: We undertook extensive outreach programmes – educating employees about the impact of the new policies on their take-home salaries, across bands, roles, grades and designations.
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Trust-enhancing measures: Employee distrust was mitigated by providing them with comprehensive explanations and clarifications about the new salary structure and break up.
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Grievance redressal mechanism: AscentHR drafted, and set up a grievance redressal mechanism at the client’s location to pre-empt the possibility of discontented employees from being further influenced by external vested interests. We also setup independent dispute resolution bodies, which were employee managed and run, with minimal management intervention.
Conclusion
AscentHR helped the client to convince stakeholders spread across locations, to align to, and incorporate uniform policies that would introduce an element of standardization and homogeneity into their functioning.