Highlights FY 2021-22

TOTAL WORKFORCE STRENGTH FOR FY 2021-22

A 21 Day Campaign to Mark International Day of Happiness

The Company launched a 21-day campaign on the International Day of Happiness for the Reliance Family. The campaign was curated to encourage employees and their families to develop healthy habits focusing on mental, physical, financial, social, and spiritual wellness. More than 2000 employees joined this initiative, where a new activity was shared every day and participants were encouraged to socialise and share the learnings of their experience with others through various platforms.

Reliance Retail has implemented measures to provide a safe and healthy workplace and access to benefits. With the onset of the pandemic, the Company moved to a remote working environment and offered employees with benefits of location flexibility, extended maternity leaves, guidance on accessing doctors on the Reliance network and coordination for hospitalisation and medicines among many other initiatives. It extended its well-being benefits to all employees to ensure their physical and mental well-being. As part of this, several webinars were conducted for employees on Empathy, Physical well-being, Mental health and Behavioural and Mental adjustments to remote working models. Structured communication around vaccination ensured eligible employees register themselves and their family members for vaccinations through the government app – CoWIN or Aarogya Setu as applicable and follow the mandated process.

In FY 2021-22, key initiatives undertaken to promote health and well-being across the Company included:

• Providing psychological and financial support through emergency assistance or additional insurance coverage on a case-to-case basis
• Scaling internal counselling capabilities with external partners, giving employees time offs and breaks for mental well- being and self-care
• Setting up adequate IT infrastructure support to enable employees to work-from- home efficiently
• Launch of ‘Project Sakhi’ shaped by three key pillars – Women Safety and Hygiene, 24*7 Outreach and Career Progression to reinforce safety, hygiene and well-being of women store employees
• One tap ‘StreeShakti’ WhatsApp group created for the safety and well-being of women employees at the stores through which updates are shared on the group regularly

Diversity and Inclusion

Reliance’s philosophy of 'We Care' has helped it draw talent who not only bring expertise and experience to the Company but also have shared values. It takes pride in its diverse workforce that transcends nationalities, cultures, genders, abilities, generations, and experiences.

Reliance strives to build a conducive environment where each employee has the chance to participate, contribute and grow while tapping its rich and diversified human capital to realise its aspirations and build a long-term competitive edge. Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) at Reliance is incorporated into the Company’s people strategy and focuses on three key dimensions of gender, ability, and generation.

The Reliance Group’s Diversity & Inclusion (DEI) Charter was launched by Ms Isha Ambani, affirming Reliance’s unwavering commitment to the values of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. The Company follows a 5E framework (Educate, Encourage, Enable, Experience and Effectiveness) to support a more inclusive workplace for all. Group D&I efforts focused on demonstrating “intended inclusivity” and further strengthening the culture of allyship through interventions such as inclusive leadership program, inspiring leader connects, created various platforms for employees to connect/share and learn and a Group D&I Portal to showcase the One Reliance Inclusion Story to all and ensuring people can access information relevant to them based on their life stage and career stage.

Reliance Retail has adopted a top-down approach to demonstrate the spirit of inclusion & diversity. As a starting point, more than 200 senior leaders have been sensitised on ‘Unconscious Biases’, which often serve as impediments to building an inclusive workplace. Reliance Retail has implemented two significant flagship programmes, ‘Jagriti’ and ‘Pragati’, to enable women employees to grow to managerial roles at stores. These programmes are designed to empower women employees to overcome their mental barriers and inhibitions and generate belief in their abilities to become managers and successfully lead stores and teams. Select women employees were put through various training programmes and promoted as store and department managers to encourage more women to take on leadership roles and boost gender diversity. Currently, there are over 370 stores led by women managers, of which the Grocery business has 204 women- led stores, followed by Trends with 76. There has been a perceptible and definitive improvement in hygiene, discipline and working conditions at these stores.

Reliance Retail has gone a step further. Its ‘Sahakari Bhandar’ has employed close to 100 differently- abled boys and girls under the programme ‘Saksham’, transforming their lives right from training to employment and then engagement. There are exclusive rewards & recognition programmes designed for them at the workplace as well as cultural activities to ensure their continued engagement.

'HerCircle'

A first-of-its-kind digital networking platform launched by Smt. Nita Ambani aims to accelerate women’s empowerment and strengthen the bonds of sisterhood globally. It offers women from all over the world a joyful and safe space for interaction, engagement, collaboration and an extended mutual support group.

Empowering Women at Reliance through R-Aadya

Approach: R-Aadya is a gender inclusion programme which firmly believes that each gender has a unique set of realities and ways of knowing and understanding the world. The initiative focuses on gender specific needs and challenges; and through a set of development interventions aims at addressing the specific personal life stages and career stage needs of women employees in partnership with all the stakeholders.

Impact: The programme reached out to nearly 5,000 employees resulting in a allyship in the organisation with an increased awareness on inclusion, equality, equity and diversity.

Talent Management

Onboarding the right talent and investing in their growth is key to Reliance’s people strategy. The Company seeks out and develops high-potential employees, providing them with accelerated learning and development opportunities.

Talent Development has always remained a key enabler for achieving business and talent outcomes. The Company focuses on four key areas to promote the culture of continuous improvement and development among the employees.

Building future readiness and talent sustainability

Reliance aspires to be a global leader in the energy and materials space, sustaining the leadership position of O2C, and achieving Net Zero. The Company operates in a highly volatile and disruptive industry scenario which requires sharp focus on building capabilities across the value chain. Therefore, upskilling for future-readiness is a critical business imperative.

Reliance’s key initiatives:

A. Upskilling for new-age technologies, power skills and domain knowledge

During the year, the Company launched several deep skilling initiatives to develop and strengthen digital and data skills of its employees both at an organisation level as well as for specific focus groups. These include training for specialised skills to enhance Digital, Data and Design Thinking capabilities among employees.

The ‘Power Skills of Future’ initiative aims at developing critical behavioural skills. Immersive mini simulations on ten future skills were launched during the year, benefiting more than 3,500 employees.

Reliance also launched ‘Learning Challenge’, an innovative effort to develop critical power skills. The challenge witnessed participation from over 12,500 employees.

Based on business needs, 177 future domain skills have been identified across the organisation, 64% of which are addressed through relevant initiatives. Some of the training initiatives include IWCF and BOSIET HUET (E&P), Techno-Commercial Expertise in Procurement Risk Management, Business Acumen, Export Import management (P&C), Value-Based Selling, Customer Centricity and Business Risk Management (Petchem).

Further, continuous learning is at the centre of all the talent development interventions at Reliance Retail. The intent is to inspire a pull-based learning culture in which employees are provided with multiple opportunities and mediums to learn. The learning strategy has been defined as per the role-based employee lifecycle from new role readiness programmes to next role readiness programmes.

The objective for defining a structured capability development strategy is two-fold:

• Encourage people’s productivity by creating a sustainable learning environment within the organisation.
• Enable employees to learn the knowledge and skill they need to excel in their position using digital tools and technology.

Healing while learning through powerful business stories

Approach: The Petchem Academy launched a monthly initiative 'Story Sutra' to cover a business story by employees. Till date, 7 episodes have been successfully concluded with participation by more than 1,000 employees. Every episode received average participant rating of more than 4.6 on the scale of 5.

Impact:

• Uplifting and changing employees’ mood.
• Improving the information retention up to 22 times more by weaving it through stories instead of sharing the facts alone.
• Improving decision making of the employees.

Employee Development Journey... in the flow of work & life

Learning agenda is no more Push-based, its Pull based. It is employee-centric and meets the organisation's talent needs!

Nurturing Talent through the Career Acceleration Programme (CAP)

Approach: Reliance’s CAP initiative is designed to identify high potential employees. The programme is a journey of learning and self-reflection with preparatory assistance and access to previous CAPs.

B. Talent reviews and succession planning

Reliance emphasises robust succession planning to identify high potential talent and prepare them for critical leadership positions. Sustained efforts were taken to ensure that high calibre employees led critical roles within the organisation.

Building leaders of tomorrow

The Company follows a structured and comprehensive leadership development approach that focuses on building and empowering leaders at all levels. Some of the interventions undertaken include:

• Career Acceleration Programme (CAP), the Company's flagship leadership development programme, which identifies high potential talent through rigorous evaluation and supports their development to fast- track their growth.
• Step-Up, a development programme aims at building transitional leadership capability for First Level, Senior Level and Group Leader roles. The programme was redesigned as an end-to-end digital learning journey for the participants.
• R-Aadya the leadership programme, seeks to address the unique challenges women leaders face and build a more inclusive environment.
• The First Line Young Engineers at Reliance (FLYER) programme seeks to build commercial and business acumen among engineering talent to groom them as effective technical leaders.

Nurturing young talent

Reliance emphasises young talent and offers entry-level programmes at prominent institutions, enabling fresh graduates from campuses to join the organisation and contribute to its expansive ecosystem. Reliance continues to nurture talent through entry-level programmes, with hiring efforts ramped up in FY 2021-22:

• Graduate Engineer Trainee (GET) programme for engineering talent.
• Reliance Emerging Leaders Programme (RELP) for management graduates.

The young talent undergoes a careful selection process and a unique gamified orientation into the world of Reliance. They are mentored by senior leaders and experts, and are involved in live projects to develop their capabilities to prepare them for future leadership roles.

• Base Camp is responsible for onboarding all new hires at Reliance to quickly acclimatise them to the Company’s culture and equip them with the necessary tools for smooth transitioning. The flagship programme under Base Camp is the Discover Reliance session that is offered both as a virtual session and self-paced learning module. During FY 2021-22, 100% of the newly joined employees have completed all the trainings.
• Reliance deploys a structured role and skill-based approach for building people manager capabilities. This includes interventions for first-time, asset facing and experienced people managers. Over 2,200 unique people managers were benefitted through 800+ trainings during the year.
• The Company’s initiative ‘Ascender’ focuses on key behavioural skills such as communication, prioritisation, and planning. They are offered both as self-learning paths and instructor led sessions. During the fiscal, over 10,000 participants were covered through this initiative.
• Reliance Retail has developed a strong managerial talent pool in its Grocery Business stores through its Flagship ‘Graduate Store Trainee Programme.’ The programme allows final-year students to strengthen their managerial skills through the ‘earn-while-you-learn’ scheme, which consists of blended learning tools spread over nine months and includes e-learning courses, on-the-job trainings, job shadowing, and specially designed projects. The initiative launched in 2019, presently employs over 200 persons and is further looking to hire at least 800 trainees next year. Additionally, Reliance Retail is committed to providing employment opportunities across India with a special focus on Tier 2, 3 and 4 towns over and above the metro cities.
• Reliance's initiative 'The Ultimate Pitch' has been a huge success in nurturing entrepreneurial thinking and innovation among India’s youth. The initiative's 7th season was hosted in a 3D virtual setup, witnessing 15,200+ student registrations and 1,600+ ideas across 350+ B-School campuses.

Fostering talent in the virtual ecosystem

To ensure the continued development of talent in the face of changing realities, all the initiatives seamlessly operated in the virtual mode of delivery, with the focus of efforts pinned on holistic development and well-being.

• In line with its philosophy of nurturing a digitally enabled learning value chain, Reliance leverages both internally and externally curated content to deliver an excellent learner experience. The Company has partnered with the world’s best learning content partners to meet the requirements of effective learning. In FY 2021-22, employees from the Hydrocarbons division consumed more than 2.4 lakh hours of digital learning content across various platforms:
• LinkedIn Learning - Over 1,09,000 employees are actively engaged in developing micro- skills via the platform across the company
• Coursera - Over 26,000 employees are deep-skilling through intense learning journeys to build skill proficiency via this medium
• Learnet – Over 51,000 employees are active on the social learning platform and are committed to blogging, sharing, and learning via the platform

HR and L&D Key Parameters

* RIL in this context only includes India operations.

** Consolidated data for the Group includes RIL, Jio, Retail, Media and Malaysia operations.

# Voluntary separations exclude death, retirement and other involuntary separations.

Reliance is committed to talent management and investing in people. The Company recognises that it can play a fundamental role in providing skill building opportunities to the young or unskilled workforce. Reliance takes immense pride in developing skillsets relevant for India and Indians in evolving economic models. This is reflected in the 2.2+ Crore person-hours of training imparted during the reporting year. The Company has a substantial workforce that is under the age of 30 (representing 55.2%), and in the consumer facing businesses the Company also provides job opportunities to the employees in the Non-Supervisory category (over 50% as shown in the graphs below). Nonetheless, there are factors which contribute to separations and the Company recognises that these are inevitable and monitors them as an important matrix for employee retention.

For RIL, the most common reasons for the voluntary separations have been identified as – diverse career advancement opportunities available in the market, pursuing higher education, and relocating to areas closer to home.

In the digital services business voluntary separations was primarily driven by specific frontline non-supervisory roles pertaining to sales and service.

Retail employs a young staff, typically in the twenties. With reopening of the economy, multiple opportunities opened up for young employees, enabling them to explore new sectors and workforce models. Retail implemented significant engagement programs to secure critical talent. Retail’s people practices have allowed it to get certified by the Great Place to Work Institute as one of the Top 100 Best Workplaces in the country.

Employees by Skill Breakdown

Digitally enabled people transformation

Reliance is building a world-class digitally enabled platform, aptly named PeopleFirst, that places ‘people at the centre’.

PeopleFirst aims to provide a highly personalised and curated employee experience to help people find their purpose and passion at work, and reinforces growth and well-being. It has simplified employee services and brought them to the fingertips of each employee, no matter their location or role.

The platform acts as a world-class real time integrated performance management system, with wide customisation choices by business and workforce, linking individual performance to business outcomes, feedback from primary and agile project teams and many more features.

In the near future, the Company will have visibility on employee skills, automated, dynamic and individual career maps for each employee, and integrated learning needs with personal aspirations.

PeopleFirst will facilitate swifter adoption of 'future of work' practices and seamless access to all infrastructure and benefits.

Fostering employee centric innovation platform

The spirit of innovation is central to Reliance's credo. The core element of the organisation’s DNA is Innovation which enables the Company to add value to all its stakeholders. Be it inspiring the first generation of retail investors in India, setting up the world’s largest grassroots refinery, or ushering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Reliance’s disruptive innovations continue to fulfil the aspirations of millions of Indians.

Innovation within the Company endeavours to catalyse ‘integrated innovation-led exponential growth’. Reliance leverages cutting-edge digital technologies to develop and deploy relevant programmes that empower all its stakeholders and foster a culture of innovation.

• Mission Kurukshetra (MK) aspires to equip all members of Reliance with new-age tools to innovate, thereby democratising creativity and resourcefulness. It is an interactive digital platform through which ideas, big or small, are submitted, refined, and executed to create a lasting positive impact. Through MK, human capital practice hands- on creative problem solving and climb the upskilling ladder.
  Launched in 2014, MK is now a treasure trove of more than 35,700 path-breaking ideas that have the potential to springboard the organisation. 2,775 new ideas were submitted in FY 2021-22 under MK.
• Having pledged to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2035, Reliance is well on course to help decarbonise India’s growing economy and make the human experience more pleasant for all through its New Energy business.
  Reliance’s New Energy Council (NEC) has been set up to guide the science, technology, and innovation vision and to construct pathways to sustainability. Global thought-leaders and new energy pioneers will join forces with the Company to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels and leverage technology to drive innovation-led growth in India. The NEC comprises leading lights in sustainability such as Dr. Alan Finkel (Special Adviser to the Australian Government on Low Emissions Technologies & Former Chief Scientist, Australia), Dr. David Milstein (Professorial Chair at Weizmann Institute of Science & Founder of Molecular Design Centre, Israel), Dr. Geoffrey Maitland (Professor at Imperial College London, Founder Qatar Carbonates and Carbon Storage Research Centre), Mr. Henrik Stiesdal (Professor at Technical University of Denmark’s Department of Wind Energy), Dr. Martin Green (Professor at University of New South Wales, Australia), Dr. Rachid Yazami (Entrepreneur, former Professor & Principal Scientist at NTU Singapore), and Dr. Robert Armstrong (Professor of Chemical Engineering and Director, MIT Energy Initiative, USA). The Company is committed to furthering the Hon'ble Prime Minister’s goal of reaching 450 GW of renewable energy by the end of this decade and ensuring that the post-pandemic recovery is green and equitable.

Labour management and human rights

Reliance adheres to the principles of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) in human rights, labour practices, environmental protection, and anti-corruption. The Company’s operational units comply with local and national regulations. Further, the Company’s Values and Behaviours, and the Code of Conduct provide necessary policy and operating framework for execution of its strategic vision. The collective bargaining agreements encompass nearly all non-supervisory permanent employees across all manufacturing facilities.

There were zero occurrences of child labour, forced labour, involuntary labour, sexual harassment, or discriminatory employment throughout the reporting period. Men and women selected for the same cadre programme receive equal pay at the entry-level.

Business ethics, integrity and transparency

Reliance has robust governance and Code of Conduct policies for its human capital. The Company’s Board level Human Resources, Nomination and Remuneration Committee periodically reviews and evaluates overall human resources and associated policies from time to time. Further, the decisions relating to the employee Code of Conduct are monitored through Ethics and Compliance Task Force (ECTF), which consists of an Executive Director, General Counsel, Group Controller, and Group Company Secretary. This Task Force evaluates incidents of suspected or actual violations of the Code of Conduct and reports them to the Audit Committee every quarter. In addition to this, Reliance has mandatory e-learning courses, which aim to equip its employees with the required understanding and knowledge to effectively conduct its business in an ethical manner and prevent, identify, and respond to violations.

Grievance redressal mechanism

To deal with concerns of ethics, non-compliance, and violations of its Code of Conduct, Reliance has established a vigil mechanism and a whistle blower policy for its employees and directors. The whistle-blower can make a protected disclosure through an e-mail or dedicated telephone line or a letter to the ECTF or to the Chairman of the Audit Committee. RIL’s Code of Conduct, Vigil mechanism and Whistle blower policy form the foundation of the Company’s commitment towards ethical conduct at all levels

Employee volunteering

Several studies indicate that employee volunteering instils a sense of purpose amongst employees and has the potential to increase productivity and higher workplace morale. Throughout the year, Reliance organised numerous employee volunteering activities to provide them with a meaningful and gratifying experience. These activities saw increased participation of employees from all levels across the Company. The Reliance Foundation organised the engagements to promote various causes through partner NGOs around the country.

Our recognitions

• Reliance has been recognised with the Great Place to Work® certification from the Great Place to Work® Institute, based on their Trust Index© assessment. This is the second time that Reliance has been Great Place to Work— Certified™. RIL was also one among 15 organisations that featured in their ‘India’s Best Employers Among Nation Builders List-2021’.
• Reliance has been featured in LinkedIn's Top Companies list of 2022. The Company has achieved this feat for the 6th time in a row.
• Reliance is ranked #52 globally in the Forbes “World’s Best Employers 2021” list, making it the top-most Indian Company on the list.
• Reliance Foundation and Jio won two awards for their Diversity & Inclusion initiatives at the 3rd D&I Summit & Awards.