Last month, Rajiv Gulati, the managing director the Rs 155-crore Eli Lilly and Company (India), was meeting a bunch of employees who had just been promoted from territory managers to supervisors. He began with a seemingly irrelevant question: "How many of you have children?" To those whose hands went up in the affirmative, he had another question: "How have they affected you as an individual?"
"Oh! My son has become the centre of my universe," said one. "My daughter needs a lot of attention and care," said another. "I feel a greater sense of responsibility towards my children," said a third

Gulati smiled, as if he had got the answers to all his questions. "So treat your territory managers as you would treat your children," he said. That's just one way in which Eli Lilly India (ELI) emphasises a sense of care for its 517 employees in India. And, so far, supervisors haven't let the organisation down. As a rule, the boss - the supervisor - meets every fresh recruit or transferred territory manager at the railway station. The supervisor also arranges accommodation and a place to eat, if needed. Some even go to the extent of making arrangements for laundry and ironing of clothes in a conscious effort to make the move into a new city as smooth as possible.

So critical is employee care to the Eli Lilly organisation that it reads the minds of its staff through the Voice of Employee (VoE) survey every couple of years. In India, this practice has been adopted as a broader survey called the 'Health of the Organisation'. Consider how seriously ELI takes these surveys. Three consecutive surveys in 1995, 1998 and 2001 had concluded that managing work and personal life was becoming a major challenge. Especially for the sales and marketing team (which accounts for 450 of the 517 employees). The industry norm was six working days a week. So ELI decided to give at least two Saturdays off every month. It was a tricky call - each representative calls on at least 10 doctors every day. Says ELI's HR head Suresh Tiwari: "It meant loss of business, but we still went ahead with it because it was in the best interest of the employees and their families."

Besides, the company allowed its employees one week's paternity leave. And though ELI always had 30 days of privilege leave (PL) annually, nobody could ever utilise them due to excessive work pressure. So ELI made it mandatory to avail at least 15 days of PL every year. Gulati hopes that next year's survey would show the health of the organisation in a better light.

A few other factors make ELI a great place to work. One, it gives equal growth opportunity to generalists as much as specialists. Two, it gives high emphasis to employee involvement.

Globally, ELI's parent Eli Lilly Inc. depends heavily on cross-functional movements to make the organisation equally attractive for specialists and generalists. And ELI has borrowed this concept in its entirety. HR head Tiwari is actually a career salesman while the finance head Sudhanshu R. Kamat was entrusted with the task of implementing the company-wide ERP system, normally the job of the chief technology officer.

In most cases, a cross-functional movement works well, but sometimes it can backfire.
Recently, one of ELI's brightest sales persons was shifted to training where he did phenomenally well. However, when a few years later, the organisation shifted him to brand management, it proved to be quite a struggle for the employee. So, eventually, he was moved back to training. "At Lilly, we take risks with people. The organisation brings out the best of hidden talents," says Kamat.

CEOSPEAK Rajiv Gulati How much time do you devote to HR and employee care? I can't sell. I can't discover, and I can't manufacture anything. So that (HR) is my job. I have to keep them (the employees) motivated so that they are happy in their workplace and perform better. India is a source of talent and best practices for Lilly worldwide. How many of your HR policies are homegrown? Almost 50%. We prefer to be a transparent and open organisation. And that holds true across all subsidiaries. Voice of Employee (VOE) is a system feedback by which we hear what employees feel... about the organisation. Our interventions are based on employee feedback. I speak with everybody every quarter and update them on what is happening in Lilly India, its performance and... in Lilly Inc. Besides, stock options are given free of cost to Lilly employees.... How else does Lilly make itself attractive to the brightest minds? By the very selection process, we ensure that we select the brightest and most ambitious people. After a rigorous two years in the field they... (can) move across functions. They could be handling operations, the supply chain, HR, training or IT. Very few organisations would invest so much in grooming people.... Besides, (employees) get... an opportunity to work in any of the Lilly subsidiaries.

But cross-functional movement is not the only area where ELI takes risks. It even encourages initiatives that could make or break the company. For instance, for one year, ELI tried its hand at the generics business. It was an attempt to outdo Indian pharma companies at their own game and also hasten its own growth in the process. But the project failed miserably and ELI eventually sold its four generic brands to Nicholas Piramal. There were, however, no scapegoats. ELI simply went on to strengthen its patented products business. "So long as they learn from mistakes, people shouldn't be scared of making mistakes," says Gulati.

Of late, ELI has discovered an interesting way to bring in greater transparency in measuring performance - something that had rankled employees in the past. "Three years ago, there was a black box. People didn't know how they will be evaluated and promoted," says Gulati. So, now, instead of a one-point assessment by the superior, ELI has committees of employees which assess the competency of colleagues for promotion. A talent assessment committee (TAC) is constituted every year by taking one person from each of the eleven departments to decide on promotions. The committee decides on the basis of a presentation made by the boss of the department. For middle and senior managers, a management committee led by Gulati himself, and comprising the heads of finance, HR and marketing takes the decision. Even transfers are vetted by this committee.

Such employee involvement extends to other areas as well. For instance, at ELI, sales and marketing is as much a responsibility of other functions as it is of the sales and marketing department. Therefore, the top management personally meets 200 of its most important customers. For this, ELI's director (sales & marketing) Sandeep Sahney hands out a list of 20 customers every month to each member of the senior management team.

ELI recently introduced one of parent Eli Lilly's interventions - a technical competency model (TCM) - to help those employees who want to develop deep technical expertise and also want to progress in their specialised function. TCM was introduced after it was debated heavily in the cross-functional teams set up to assess the pros and cons of the model.

It isn't just intellectual growth that ELI emphasises - there are monetary benefits too. The company's stock option plan is already a big hit. In the past, Eli Lilly has given out 100 shares to all its employees worldwide free of cost. Last year, some employees made as much as Rs 14 lakh each when they sold their shares. That's a good way of taking care of one's employees.