PEOPLE AND CULTURE

TRANSFORMING TO UNLEASH PEOPLE’S POTENTIAL

The Group has been featured in the Top 10 Happiest Workplaces by Business World from over 100 nominations. The Group has also been awarded the Best Employer in India by Kincentric.

At Vedanta Limited, we are empowering people by providing them with a work environment to thrive and grow. We are ensuring this with dedicated efforts around workplace transformation, a key pillar of our ESG purpose and framework. We are implementing pioneering initiatives around health and safety and promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. We are creating an ecosystem of equal opportunities in employment and development, and recognition to keep them motivated and incentivised. Our transformational approach is beginning to unlock the potential of our workforce and is driving long‑term benefits for the organisation by enabling a rich mix of skills, experience and diverse perspectives.

Promoting diversity, equity and inclusion

Diversity and inclusion are at the core of our people strategy. It is our constant endeavour to promote gender parity and inclusivity across all levels, from the senior leadership and decision-making bodies to SBUs and enabling functions. This is manifest in our unique talent pool, which includes people from diverse geographies, minorities, ethnicities and cultures. We also strive continuously to reinforce our position as an equal opportunity employer.

We are fostering an LGBTQ+-friendly workplace and ensuring their inclusion by identification of roles, sensitisation, creation of infrastructure and onboarding talent. As of now, there are 25 transgender employees engaged in operations as well as enabling functions.

Adopting a 3-tier approach

We have launched a sensitisation drive targeting gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, region, and other dimensions of overall diversity, equity and inclusion. It is structured around a 3-tier approach, covering CXOs, managers and front-end supervisors. We have tied up with external experts and our target is to cover 2,000+ managers and 300+ CXOs in the first phase of this exercise.

Ensuring regional diversity

Our V-Engage initiative is aligned with our efforts of promoting regional diversity within the organisation. It targets onboarding talent from under-represented and underprivileged sections, with a special focus on the Northern and North-Eastern regions of the country.

Professional leadership and collective decisionmaking

As a professionally managed company, Vedanta Limited has a well-structured management framework, with a Management Committee (ManCom) as a collective decision-making body at both Company and business levels. The businesses are further independently led and run in a federated manner by their respective CEOs.

Recognising excellence and rewarding meritocracy

We are fully cognisant of the importance of keeping our people motivated and passionate to drive the organisation’s long-term success. We have accordingly adopted a well-defined methodology to reward the efforts of our people and business partners. Our best-in-class and globally benchmarked people practices, as well as reward programmes, keep them inspired and incentivised to deliver their best.

They also receive recognition from our Management and Board for going the extra mile to support the business. These include the Chairman Individual Awards, Chairman Award for Business Partners, Leadership Excellence Award, Sustainability Award, and the Chairman’s Discretionary Award.

High-performing employees are rewarded through incentive schemes, development programmes and compensation re-structuring practices. During FY 2023, we introduced stock options for all our young campus hires as well. Our appraisal and remuneration programmes further encompass an ESG component, which correlates employee performance to safety, sustainability and carbon footprint reduction. Our best-in-class and globally-benchmarked people practices, as well as our reward programmes, help keep them inspired and incentivised to deliver their best.

Attracting and retaining best-in-class talent

Our human resource (HR) policies are designed to attract and retain the best global talent and subject matter experts. We take pride in our truly global work culture and our diverse workforce. We currently have some of the finest minds from over 30 nationalities working with us. Our robust global leadership is helping us steer our journey intothe next phase of our value-accretive growth. Their track record in leading a set of high-potential growth projects is an asset we value and cherish.

Hiring programmes and processes

As part of our overarching initiative of onboarding talent from esteemed Indian and global institutions, we are in the process of hiring 2,000 bright minds. We have adopted a multi-pronged strategy as part of this process, involving hiring quality talent focussing on diversity (gender, geography and category) and offering competitive compensation at campus along with stock options.

We continue to hire top-notch talent for our flagship programmes: Vedanta Leadership Development Program (VLDP), Rank Holder Chartered Accountants, Cost Accountants, Specialists (Analysts, Data Scientists, Mining and Exploration ESG), Management Trainees (MT), Engineer Trainees (GETs), among others.

Through ACT-UP (Accelerated Tracking and Upgradation Process), our flagship in-house talent development programme, we identify and nurture high performers, and develop leaders across all talent segments in the organisation. Building on Management ACT-UP, our focus in FY 2023 was on developing a robust second-inline leadership.

With our Emerging Leaders Programme, we have identified and elevated 130 leaders to deputy CXO roles at the group and SBU levels. Of these, 25% are women – a clear endorsement of our gender diversity focus. The selected leaders have been assigned senior leaders as anchors from across Vedanta Limited. As the next steps, a customised hybrid programme has been designed in association with premier B-Schools like IIM Bangalore and ISB Hyderabad. It is based on various gaps and themes that emerged from the assessments and will help make the young talent future-ready.

During the fiscal under review, we curated ACT-UP for projects, mining and commercial/marketing verticals, leading to the identification of 200+ young leaders. The fresh perspective brought in by talent from line functions was leveraged by providing interested employees with an opportunity to switch functions through unique talent development initiatives, such as non-HR to HR.

Ensuring seamless induction for campus hires

Our campus hiring emphasises excellence, gender diversity, upliftment of minority communities and adequate representation of all regions and demographics in India. We have in place a well-defined and structured system that ensures smooth and seamless induction of talent hired from campuses.

Group Induction Programme - YUVA (Young Upcoming Vedanta Achievers)

Through this programme, we welcomed 200+ campus hires from top B-Schools of the country and across the globe during the year. Through business and functional sessions held as part of the exclusively designed 4-day programme, stalwarts of Vedanta Limited and the industry shared insights, leadership advice, and their experiences with the youths. Further, the new joinees got an opportunity to understand Vedanta’s DNA and design principles, key pillars, group overview, growth story and key people practices through the CXO sessions. They were also given a glimpse of our daily operations through visits to our state-of-the-art business units in HZL and flagship CSR facilities, where they got first‑hand experience of what we do for the people and planet.

V-Excel (Exemplary Campus Emerging Leaders)

This programme, complementing YUVA, provides each new hire with a single digitally-driven platform that helps steer their performance with the right anchoring, continuous engagement, learning and recognition through measurable KPIs at an early stage in their careers.

Harnessing digital power to enhance people experience

At Vedanta Limited, we are continually working towards scaling the experience of our people by leveraging digitalisation and automation.