What are the material issues the company has identified?

In its 2018-19 Sustainable Development Report HZL identified a range of material issues, such as water management, health and safety, local employment, energy and climate change. Among these, promoting employee development stands out as a key material issue for HZL.

Stakeholder engagement in accordance with the GRI Standards              

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) defines the Principle of Stakeholder Inclusiveness when identifying material issues (or a company’s most important impacts) as follows:

“The reporting organization shall identify its stakeholders, and explain how it has responded to their reasonable expectations and interests.”

Stakeholders must be consulted in the process of identifying a company’s most important impacts and their reasonable expectations and interests must be taken into account. This is an important cornerstone for CSR / sustainability reporting done responsibly.

Key stakeholder groups HZL engages with:

Stakeholder Group	Method of engagement
Employees	·      Intranet, in-house newsletters ·      Training programme ·      Town hall meetings between senior management and employees ·      Employee surveys (annual) ·      Suggestion scheme ·      Appraisal meetings ·      Suraksha Chaupals
Customers	·      Customer servicing and feedback collation ·      Marketing activities ·      Online engagement through Website ·      Biannual customer satisfaction survey ·      Customer query resolution ·      Tailor-made value propositions on customer demand
Suppliers	·      Contract negotiations, Supplier Code of Conduct, policies and standards ·      Supplier meetings ·      Supplier Sustainability assessment ·      Vendor due diligence ·      Pre-qualification meetings
Communities	·      Social contribution/CSR activities ·      Public hearings ·      Community impact assessment surveys ·      Complaints and grievances mechanisms
Government	·      Advocacy through trade and industry bodies ·      Close engagement with regulators, local administration, inspection bodies on a regular basis ·      Regulatory and legal compliance
Shareholders/Investors	·      Financial results declaration (quarterly) ·      Annual General Shareholders Meetings (annual) ·      Investor Relations events, one-on-one meetings ·      Disclosure tools, including Annual Reports, Sustainability Reports, website ·      Complaints and grievances

How stakeholder engagement was made to identify material issues

To identify and prioritise material topics HZL engaged with its stakeholders through various means, including one-to-one discussion, focus group discussion and an online survey. Approximately 851 stakeholders were consulted.

What actions were taken by HZL to promote employee development?

In its 2018-19 Sustainable Development Report HZL reports that it took the following actions for promoting employee development:

• Promoting on-the-job training
• In order to seamlessly integrate with the culture of the organisation, HZL’s young engineers and trainees undergo a robust and extensive 45-day induction programme. The purpose of the induction programme is to engage the millennials through paperless onboarding, online weekly assessments, merit-based posting allocations and live projects. To facilitate sharing of knowledge and learnings, an online knowledge portal has been developed. HZL’s people use the portal to post their success stories, the solutions they adopted for solving problems during critical situations and their overall learning and development at work.

• Implementing the Leadership Development Programme
• HZL’s ‘Leadership Development Programme’ (LDP) for Strategic Business Unit (SBU) Heads aims at developing potential business leaders. The programme offers a series of management and operational modules for the senior management. Spread over six to eight months, it covers aspects such as coaching, leadership, team building and problem-solving. HZL has identified over 400 candidates, who are being developed on a fast track growth path through various initiatives such as Internal Growth Workshops and the Accelerated Competency Tracking & Up Gradation Programme (ACT UP). In addition to this, 17 top level executives were identified as future leaders and went through customised coaching programmes in FY 2019.

• Providing life-skills training
• HZL believes that empowering employees with technical training alone, is insufficient if they have to truly grow and remain competitive. Hence, HZL lays emphasis on enhancing business acumen and other life-skills through various in-house programmes such as external residential training and onsite visits, among others. HZL collaborates with renowned training providers and chooses partners after detailed evaluation of the training content and delivery method.

Which GRI Standards and corresponding Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been addressed?

The GRI Standard addressed in this case is: Disclosure 404-2 Programs for upgrading employee skills and transition assistance programs

Disclosure 404-2 Programs for upgrading employee skills and transition assistance programs corresponds to:

• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
• Targets: 8.2, 8.5

 

78% of the world’s 250 largest companies report in accordance with the GRI Standards

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References:

1) This case study is based on published information by HZL, located at the link below. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses. However, we made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the report’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original, please revert to the original on the Global Reporting Initiative’s Sustainability Disclosure Database at the link:

http://database.globalreporting.org/

2) https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/gri-standards-download-center/

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