The Himalaya Drug Company by and large has maintained its growth pattern even during the slowdown that affected the pharma and Ayurveda sectors in general. In an interview with Pharmabiz.com, B N Nagaraj, vice president, Human Resources, The Himalaya Drug Company said, "The general slowdown has not affected us and there have been no retrenchments as a part of the cost-cutting exercise."

While the biggest challenge for Human Resources professionals in pharma-Ayurveda sector is to attract, retain and keep employees motivated all the time. Himalaya achieves this with its compensation package on par with industries in the country; with good rewarding systems based on well developed performance appraisal process, freedom to express, good communication system, challenging assignments, fast track growth for potential employees, keeping the organisation structure as flat as possible, cross functional teams, involvement of people in decision / policy making, mentoring etc to retain the workforce.

The human resources policy at the company is committed to create a congenial working atmosphere, which facilitates the overall development of the individual and the organisation by providing continuous learning opportunities, thereby achieving the individual and organisational goals.

The company has a performance-linked model for its employees where each individual sets his goals / key result areas for the year in the beginning of the year, which is evaluated at the end of the financial year. "Based on the results achieved, employees will be rewarded. Every employee is assessed by his immediate superior and further by his departmental head on a one to one interaction session to know and understand the strength and the areas of improvement required, informed Nagaraj.

On the company's hiring plans for the current year, Nagaraj informed, "We are not planning to increase our manpower strength except for replacement vacancies and may be very few additions in new divisions like Consumer Products Division and R & D Centre."

Coming to the attrition rates in pharma-Ayurveda industry, Nagaraj said, "We will not be able to comment on the general attrition rates in pharma-Ayurveda industry. However, attrition rate at Himalaya is between 10 and 11 per cent, which is well within the industry average. The attrition rate is only at the executive level and this is due to pursuing further studies or getting jobs outside Karnataka. Attrition rate at workforce level is nil."

According to Nagaraj, getting the right candidate is always a challenging task. Qualified manpower is available in this sector like B.Pharm, M.Pharm, M.Sc, Ph.D, and others. However, when it comes to people with critical skills with right attitude, it is always challenging to source candidates.

Himalaya retains its workforce by giving freedom to its employees to experiment. This includes freedom to decision-making and empowering employees in their respective areas.

So far the company has not found it difficult to hire research scientists. There are no instances on record where while attracting top-notch talent candidates preferred to work abroad than in India.

Training programmes have been a critical segment for the company where depending upon the identified training needs, programmes are organised for employees in both technical and non-technical areas. "We evolve a training calendar and also identify individual training needs and based on the need, we organise training programmes."

These programmes are purely based on the need and the identified area of development of an employee. "We hire professionals from reputed consulting houses and Institutes to conduct training programmes and also whenever we have expertise In-house, the same will be conducted by in-house faculties," said Nagaraj.

On the recent trend on the Knowledge Management front, which is gaining strength in the information technology (IT) sector, Nagaraj pointed out that the pharmaceutical industry sector is the next highest employer of knowledge workers after IT. Hence, knowledge management has always a key issue in pharma sector in its own way. "If we look at the employees in R & D, quality assurance, manufacturing, product development, marketing, human resources, etc., all of them belong to the category of knowledge workers and hiring, training and retaining such employees are given utmost importance in the Pharma Sector since a long time. However, with the buzz word "Knowledge Management", catching up, we may have to look at this in a new perspective," he added.