Maruti Suzuki relaxes its work rules for 2,000 engineers

New Delhi: Maruti Suzuki India Ltd is relaxing work rules for at least 2,000 engineers who will move from its Gurgaon facilities to its upcoming research centre at Rohtak, 82 km away, including allowing them to work a five-day week.

The move comes after the engineers expressed their apprehensions about the move, and may have also been prompted by the company’s desire to become and appear more employee friendly, especially after a protest by workers at its Manesar factory turned violent last year, resulting in the death of a human resources manager.

To be sure, the employees for whom the work rules have been eased are all engineers (those involved in last year’s protests were shop-floor workers, many of them temporary or on contract).

Maruti will allow the employees moving to Rohtak to work five-days a week, moving away from its six-days-a-week norm established almost 30 years ago. It will also provide them housing (in a campus) and pay them an extra Rs.4,000 a month. 

The company also claims to have studied the way utility-vehicle maker Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd shifted its research and development (R&D) base from Nasik to Mahindra Research Valley in Chennai so as to learn from it.

The Rohtak R&D centre is significant to Suzuki Motor Corp. which is betting on its Indian subsidiary to drive the next phase of growth.

Suzuki has pulled out of the US, faces stiff competition in Japan, and continues to be on the margins in Europe where car makers such as Volkswagen AG dominate the market.

The Indian R&D hub will be Suzuki’s first outside Japan and will drive the parent company’s business in emerging markets such as Africa, Latin America, West Asia, and India. It will also help the company kickstart its R&D project, which is running behind its original schedule (it was expected to open in mid-2012).

Some engineers were reluctant to shift to Rohtak, citing problems such as their wives’ jobs, or children’s schooling. They requested a five-day work week, a housing society, a school, and monetary compensation of Rs.4000 a month.

In January, the company formed a committee to look into these demands

“It was done pro-actively,” said C.V. Raman, Maruti Suzuki’s R&D head and executive officer (engineering). “I have been overseeing this operation personally. We have met each of 2,000 engineers over 20 odd meetings and (also met) their families.”

Raman and Maruti Suzuki’s chief operating officer (HR and administration) S.Y. Siddiqui are in charge of moving the entire R&D unit of the company to Rohtak.

Siddiqui denied that last year’s violence in any way influenced the relaxation of work rules.

And he added that the company is building housing societies for shop-floor workers too. Work on the first such should start in January, Siddiqui said.

Raman said the HR policy for the Rohtak unit has been finalized and that people would move there in phases over the next three to four years.

“We have studied Mahindra moving its R&D from Nasik to Chennai. We hired a consultant to do an independent study on the implications of the move. So, a lot of thought has gone into it,” he added.

The company will write to the Haryana government for providing land where a housing society for its employees can be built in Rohtak, which is the parliamentary constituency of Deepender Singh Hooda, the son of the state’s chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda. The Haryana government has tried to position the city as a education hub. An Indian Institute of Management (IIM) has been set up and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi has opened an extension centre in the city.

The company plans to run a bus service for employees who move to the Rohtak unit but continue to live in Gurgaon on Delhi. Engineers at the Rohtak R&D centre will work slightly longer than the current eight hours and 15 minutes that other Maruti employees do (but will work only five days a week).

Mahindra too had to consider some demands of its employees when it moved at least 600 people from Nasik to Mahindra Research Valley in Chennai, said Rajeshwar Tripathy, chief people’s officer (automotive and farm equipment sectors) at the company.

“We had to accept some of their demands, which were mostly logistical in nature, when they moved to Chennai. The biggest challenge in the process was to convince the families of our employees. Fundamentally, our country is not prepared for such moves neither physically nor socially,” Tripathy said in a telephone interview from Mumbai.

To compensate, Tripathy said, employees willing to make such shifts, “financial incentives are given, which (usually) do not have any logic but are important psychologically”.

Raman of Maruti said that his aim is to make the R&D centre a place where future models are developed for the parent. “The idea is to complement and enhance the work done in Hamamatsu (Suzuki’s main R&D centre). When we grow from here, we will be making all kinds of products for future growth markets of Suzuki,” he said.

“The work that is going to happen in Rohtak will be unparalleled in India.

 

 

AMIT KUMAR SINGH

PGDM 2ND