"Over the last two or three years, we have witnessed a more than 20 per cent turnover of employees annually," says SPL president N Bothra. "The resignations were mainly in the ranks of skilled technicians and marketing personnel."

Bothra continues, "Hiring new people to replace the old workers and training them costs the company more than retaining people in the first place."

SPL Ltd has adopted a multi-pronged strategy, which includes identifying individual employee potential, chalking out career growth plans for an employee based on the potential so determined, giving out performance-based rewards and incentives, and finally, conducting skill and attitude development training programmes.

"The central point of SPL's HR policy is identification of individual potential," says managing director Shreekant Somani. He explains that this is done by taking each employee through various job functions in different departments. When an employee is found more productive and to exhibit his natural talent in a particular department, he is assigned to that department and his career growth planned along the lines of that particular job function.

SPL also sends its employees on regular training sessions. "These involve both soft-skill development and hard-skill development," Bothra explains.

"The soft skills include interpersonal communication and attitudinal changes, among others; the hard skills include technical skills."

According to Bothra, SPL organises soft skill development training for its employees twice a year, while hard skill development training goes on throughout the year on a job-to-job basis. To identify the kind of training the employees need on an individual basis, SPL conducts skill need identification programmes. SPL has recently entered into a technical tie-up with the Italy based Leonardo Ceramica for manufacturing vitrified tiles.

The company also conducts a technical persons exchange programme with its Italian collaborator to provide the necessary technical training to its employees.

SPL employees are also motivated to bring out the best in them through the process of reward recognition. Under this programme fall cash incentives, gifts or citations for achieving pre-set targets. SPL has introduced reward recognition schemes in its marketing division and in all its factory units as well.

In the marketing division, the scheme works as a sales incentive; at the production level, it takes the form of a production incentive. The cash reward, in both cases, amounts to 20-25 per cent of the employee's annual salary.

Elaborating on the reasons that are responsible for the high employee turnover rate, Somani says that in the past few years, a number of new players have emerged in the tiles and ceramics market. These new plants are technologically more sophisticated and, hence, relatively more capital intensive than their older counterparts in the country.

"The new companies, which have already made huge investments on their plants, do not want to spend more money training novices," explains Somani.

"Instead, they prefer to take away already trained people from established units by luring them with a higher pay package."

Somani's revelation brings out the fact that there is quite a big gap between the supply and demand of skilled professionals in the tiles and ceramics industry. "Though our universities and engineering colleges have courses on tiles and ceramics technology, they are not up to the mark and teach only the traditional technologies," Somani says. He adds that the old processes have evolved unimaginably over the years, but the curricula have not met the test of time.

But Somani does not blame the educational institutions entirely. He points out instead that the Indian government, too, has never given due importance to the tiles and ceramics industry. "Look at the information and telecommunication industry today," he says. "More people are going for a career in IT as this sector has got much push from the government. As a result, it has flourished. Indonesia has put its emphasis on the ceramics industry and it has become a major export industry there. But in India, it is not and this could be one of the reasons why students are not very keen to take up a career in tiles and ceramics here."