Human Capital

Creating an Empowered Workforce

Highlights FY 2020-21

Successfully delivered anytime-anywhere learning to over 27,000 visitors on the in-house designed platform for Spectrum, RIL’s annual learning event

50,000+

Freshers hired

75,000+

Jobs added to the economy

1.8 crore

Man-hours of training imparted

6,000+

employees of Network18 contributed a day’s salary to the Prime Minister Relief Fund under the #IndiaGives campaign

Reliance is India’s largest private sector employer and has more than 2,30,000 employees working in different businesses. It added over 75,000 jobs to the Indian economy during the challenging year. An employer of choice, Reliance strives to offer a fair, inclusive, emotionally satisfying and professionally enabling environment to its employees. The Company’s efforts got it featured on LinkedIn’s list of Top 25 workplaces in India.

Reliance has always put its people first, especially this year that has been fraught with uncertainties brought about by COVID-19. Reliance undertook several initiatives to ensure the physical and mental well-being of its employees during the year. The employees valued the support offered to them and RIL’s attrition number for the year reduced by less than half compared to the previous year.

Prioritising Employee Well-being

Reliance shifted to an agile working mode during COVID-19. Except for critical assets facing roles and front-line workers, workforce transited to work from home on account of safety. To keep them connected and motivated, the Company engaged with the employees regularly, albeit virtually. Other initiatives included:

  • Virtual onboarding of majority of new joiners to ensure social distancing and avoid travel
  • Employees earning below `30,000 per month were paid salaries in two tranches during the month during lockdown
  • Individual business units conducted Fun Fridays to connect and engage with employees
  • Major events including Townhalls, Leader Connects, People Manager Connects, Reliance Family Connects, Drishti Art and Essay Competition (organised by Reliance Foundation to bring together the children of its employees) Long Service Awards, Reward & Recognition Ceremonies, Sessions on Effective Listening and Building Habits and celebrations such as Independence Day, Diwali, Eid, Christmas, Mothers’ Day, Family Day and Republic Day were conducted virtually and went a long way in showing empathy and care

Ensuring Health and Safety

The Company spread awareness, formed COVID-19 task forces and control rooms, ensured symptom checks and rapid tests and set up isolation and treatment facilities for employees.

More than 3,50,000 employees and service partners undertook COVID-19 Symptom Checker Survey daily. Aggressive RT PCR and Antigen Testing for our workforce entering the premises helps to mitigate any spread in the workplace. Antibody tests are also conducted to identify workforce at less risk to work from office. Prophylactic medicines were provided to 43,000+ frontline and supply chain staff. The Company has now rolled out a vaccination drive for its eligible employees.

Periodic checks on employees’ morale reflected employees’ trust on management. 96% of the respondents said they have faith in the leadership to tide over the crisis, 94% had a favourable response on ‘employee safety measures’ and 92% employees felt they are well connected with their teams.

Robust Governance and Code of Conduct

All employees must abide by the Reliance Code of Conduct with an aim to ensure the Company, its operations and its people act ethically and with transparency at all times.

Decisions pertaining to employee Code of Conduct are overseen by the Board through an Ethics and Compliance Task Force comprising an Executive Director, a General Counsel, Group Controller and Group Company Secretary who guide and monitor the implementation of ethical business practices. The task force reviews complaints and incidents on a quarterly basis and reports them to the Audit Committee.

ISO 37001:2016 standard has been incorporated to effectively prevent, identify and respond to bribery risks.

A new e-learning module on Anti- Bribery Management System – ABMS, has been introduced as a mandatory training for all new joinees as well as for existing employees. This course aims to equip the employees with the required understanding and knowledge to effectively prevent, identify and respond to bribery risks. It also encourages employees to speak up and raise genuine concerns related to any actual or suspected unethical conduct or breach of law.

The Safety and Operational Management System matches the global standards of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and Competency Assurance System (CAS) to ensure safe and reliable operations. All of RIL’s plants have implemented certified OHS management systems as per the ISO standards.

Fostering Diversity and Inclusion, Nurturing People-first Culture

Reliance has identified five material issues to guide the continuous improvement of its human capital and strengthen inclusion and safety at the workplace. These are:

1 Attracting and retaining talent
2 Fostering
innovation
3 Diversity and
Inclusion
4 Health, safety and well-being
5 Labour management and anti-discrimination

1 Attracting and retaining talent

  • Reliance is committed to investing in people and helping them grow. It attracts the best talent and helps them carve rewarding careers through continuous learning and development and growth-linked opportunities.
  • A performance-based transparent remuneration policy encourages employees to work towards common goals. All eligible employees receive performance appraisals on regular basis.
  • Its values, led by the 3Ps – Purpose, Passion and Perseverance – bind the Reliance family together and contributed significantly to minimise turmoil during the pandemic
  • Reliance has a conscious hiring process that encourages a progressive and inclusive work culture.
  • Reliance hired talent from some of the leading institutions such as IIMs, XLRI, ISB, IITs, NITs, BITS and ICAI through the year.

1,400+

Differently abled talent works in the Reliance Group

Connecting, engaging and growing together

  • Reliance moved to remote onboarding, virtual projects, gamification, online learning modules and virtual assessments for offers during COVID.
  • Reliance Family Day which commemorates the birth anniversary of Founder Chairman, Shri Dhirubhai Ambani, saw more than 50,000 employees with their families come together to celebrate the occasion virtually.
  • The Reliance MyVoice portal offers a channel to take forward Shri Mukesh D. Ambani’s call ‘to create a place for the employees of Reliance to share their views, ideas, and inspirations with one another in their own voice’. The Reliance MyVoice portal had total impressions of 1.4 lakh as of March 31, 2021. More than 23,000 users participated in over 3,000 energising conversations on the platform.
  • R-world, an intranet single sign-on platform, which was launched in 2021, has raked up 65,000 visitors and over 4,00,000 visits within three months of its launch.
  • The Company hosted a set of videos on Resilience, Virtual Collaboration, Leading Self and Managing Stress, among others, to help employees and others cope with the pandemic. The series garnered 14,000 views internally and 13,000 views externally.
  • The Career Acceleration Programme saw 7,000+ participants competing in the last two years. Sapphire Coaching Programme, First Line Young Engineers at Reliance (FLYER), Stepup Programme, Speed Mentoring, Vision Boarding and Talent Reviews were other programmes that continued to groom talent.
  • The Employee Experience Platform, a dedicated digital ecosystem for employee feedback, used advanced analytics to systemically generate insights that help leaders understand employee aspirations as they design a future-fit organisation.

Continuous learning

Reliance fosters a culture of continuous learning and personal development for career growth. The Company’s development trainings ensured continued upskilling and reskilling so that talent could stay relevant through the pandemic.

  • More than 87,000 employees accessed digital learning content via LinkedIn. Over 19,000 employees upskilled themselves through Coursera and more than 50,000 employees accessed in-house learning platforms. The employees of the Hydrocarbon unit alone availed more than 3.5 lakh hours of digital learning.
  • Organisational capabilities for the future are being built through initiatives like Spectrum and Learning Challenge that focus on innovative self-learning modules, skill-based sessions and live leadership talks, and are open for all employees to participate, learn and upskill.
  • FY 2020-21 was focused on upskilling the Company’s oil and gas employees on capabilities such as incident investigation and data science and enhancing digital literacy in HR, audit, risk and governance teams.
  • The IT organisation was trained on cutting-edge technologies such as Angular, MongoDB and NodeJS. The Petrochemical teams undertook customer-centric sales trainings to cater to changing customer preferences and channels.
  • COVID awareness training was made available to all on-field employees across security, RBML retail outlets and asset-facing employees at manufacturing sites.

Going beyond for its people

  • Reliance has developed a maternity support programme with elements such as specific learning sessions, Employee Resource Group (ERG) for new parents, 182 days of maternity leave followed by six months of half day leave policy for new mothers, 84 days’ leave policy for adoptive parents and commissioning mothers respectively and five days of Paternity Leave. Reliance undertakes pro-active measures including 24*7 toll free helpline for women, child-care facility and selfdefense workshops.
  • In Reliance Group, 236 women availed maternity leave, of which 156 resumed duties in the same financial year and 3,251 men availed paternity leave, of which 3,019 resumed duties in the same financial year.
  • For the differently abled, Reliance has rolled out the ‘Saksham programme’ to provide them with employment opportunities at the Reliance Retail stores. Additionally, Reliance has assigned them designated parking spots.

2 Fostering innovation

At Reliance, innovation is fuelled by the hunger to sustain growth and improvements on a continuous and consistent basis. The Company nurtures an environment that encourages its people to think out of the box and share ideas and solutions to help the Company innovate and grow. Some of these initiatives include:

  • Jio LEAP provides people at Reliance access to global thought and innovation leaders. Since inception, 50 Jio LEAP events have been organised, including with 3 Nobel Laureates, 2 Olympians and 19 CEOs. In its digital avatar, Jio LEAP clips have garnered almost 85,000 views.
  • Mission Kurukshetra’ is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered digital platform where employees collaborate and submit innovative ideas to grow the Company. It was launched in 2014 and is now a treasure trove of almost 33,600 ideas that have the potential to create significant value for the organisation.

3 Diversity and Inclusion

Reliance believes in promoting a progressive and inclusive work culture that encourages everyone to grow. Its 5E framework fosters an inclusive workplace and stands for:

  • Educate: Sensitise and develop capabilities to foster an inclusive environment
  • Encourage: Visibly increase support of internal and external stakeholders
  • Enable: Support through infrastructure, practices and policies
  • Experience: Provide an inclusive experience to all employees; be allies and ambassadors
  • Effectiveness: Create, measure, monitor, report and benchmark Company-wide diversity initiatives continue to sensitise employees on ways to strengthen the Company’s inclusive culture. Several up-skilling initiatives have been incorporated as part of these engagements to nurture women talent and leadership. These include Jagriti and Pragati, professional and personal development programmes such as Flying Lesson and R-Aadya and a unique story sharing platform ‘Her Story’. Programmes such as ‘We Women Leader’ aim to develop managerial skills among women employees.

39,000+

Women employees of Reliance Group benefitted through several up-skilling initiatives

1,800+

Women employees benefitted through R-Aadya

All women ROs (petrol pumps) initiative has been implemented across the states of Rajasthan, Kerala, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. Reliance Retail has deployed more than 250 women as managers at their stores. These stores stand out in the industry on several parameters including safety, hygiene standards, discipline and working conditions.

4 Health, Safety and Well-being

Reliance’s goal of zero injuries and incidents remains the bedrock of its health and safety approach. Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) risks have been minimised through trainings and multiple line of controls. The Company also achieved significant reduction in the lost workday cases and process safety incidents. Its HSE performance continues to be in the top quartile amongst its peers. Externally Facilitated Gap Assessments (EFGAs) are conducted routinely across all manufacturing sites to identify gaps in the Operating Management System (OMS) and develop plans to bridge them. All of RIL’s plants have robust mechanisms for workers to engage in the OHS management system.

`592

Spent on health, safety and environment (HSE) initiatives

Employee well-being initiatives at Reliance include:

  • Reliance offers an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) which gives employees and family members 24x7 access to a range of online tools and services in the area of mental health and wellbeing. Services include confidential emotional support by counsellors through tie-ups with a dedicated service provider.
  • In addition, through JioHealthHub, employees also have access to the best doctors empaneled on the app. Tele-consultations provide access to a wide variety of specialists for every medical need
  • Calendarised events like everyday Yoga, weekly well-ness expert connects and consistent communication helped employees to include these activities into their routine and schedules. The activities were spread across the five aspects of R-Swasthya, the company’s holistic wellness framework – physical, mental, social, spiritual and financial.
  • Mental and Emotional well-being of the employees was in focus through campaigns like Here For You, Gratitude and Hope and 21 Days of Yoga Festival.

The Company has undertaken several measures with an aim to ensure the safety of its people:

  • A fully equipped and well-qualified HSE and Process Safety organisation at all locations
  • Competency Assurance System (CAS) for frontline staff that trains employees on safety aspects relevant to their roles
  • Behaviour-based safety programme designed to foster an incident-free culture
  • A Task Based Health Risk Assessment (TBHRA) that uses technology to map the health risks of employees vis-à-vis workplace hazards

5 Labour Management and Anti-Discrimination

Reliance follows the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) principles on Human Rights, Labour Practices, Environment and Anti-corruption. The Company’s operational units are materially compliant with local and national laws and are aligned to its ethics and human rights charter supported by a strong Code of Conduct and policy framework. Reliance follows the requirements of the Industrial Disputes Act, India, 1947 for issuing minimum notice period(s) related to significant operational changes. It also recognises employee unions and associations. Almost 100% of nonsupervisory permanent employees across manufacturing locations are covered under the collective bargaining agreements. Reliance Ethics and Compliance Task Force monitors and manages the Company’s related performance and comprises the Reliance Group Head of HR, General Counsel, Group Controller and Head of Fraud Risk Management.

During the reporting period, there were no known cases of child labour, forced labour, involuntary labour, sexual harassment and discriminatory employment. There is no difference in entry level remuneration between men and women recruited for the same cadre programme.

Focus Areas

  • Reliance aspires to constantly upskill its employees to adopt emerging technologies, fuel innovation and bring in greater efficiencies.
  • The Company is committed to creating opportunities for its women employees and offer the best working environment to attract and grow its women talent pool. It had set itself a target of having 15% women workforce across businesses. At present, women employees form 16.9% of the Company’s workforce at a Group level.
  • Reliance aims to be a leader in the management of HSE, adhering to the global standards and safety management systems. Currently, it is leveraging its expertise in data analytics to build a platform to deliver simplified and interrelated safety processes for its employees.
  • It is also embarking on a programme to build a healthcare system for its workforce that will be at par with global standards. It continues to provide the best facilities to help its employees tackle the ongoing COVID-19 onslaught with initiatives such as 24x7 emergency services, mental and physical well-being programmes and R- Swasthya.