Voted as a best employer for the second year in a row, Allstate India says Covid-19 drove the point home about the importance of employee well-being, and how the entire ecosystem benefits from it
Chetan Garga, VP and MD (left) and Monarch Limaye, chief HR officer
Image: Nishant Ratnakar for Forbes India
Allstate India has been voted as Best Employer for the second year in a row, and Chetan Garga, vice president and managing director, is thrilled about it. “We have realised and changed a few things at our end to get to this position,” he says. “We have become more employee-centric, and take an employee-first approach in all that we do. And the Covid-19 pandemic has driven home this point, in no small measure. If we think more about our employees’ situation, we will be a much more effective organisation. And the wholeecosystem also benefits from this.”
When the pandemic hit, Allstate India employees—about 6,000 people worked out of two centres, in Pune and Bengaluru—were working on desktops, in two shifts. When everyone shifted to work from home, the company realised that some of the employees did not even have internet connections at home, and were staying as paying guests, in shared accommodations. The company initially started shipping desktops to its employees, and then shipped laptops, UPSes, and internet dongles. More than 50 percent of the workforce, which is now spread across the country, continues to work from remote locations.
Monarch Limaye, CHRO at Allstate India—it is a subsidiary of and business services arm for insurance firm Allstate Corporation in the US—adds that although the past two years have been challenging in many ways, “the most challenging aspect has been to show employees that we care”, when everything has moved to a virtual world. Engaging with new employees who have joined within this period was another significant challenge. “We have been fast to learn. Where assimilation of new employees is concerned, two or three things have come to the fore. One is digitalisation: How to use and take the support of platforms and structures to communicate more, and bring out our core values, along with mentoring and buddy networks.”
The last two years have also seen a shift in the nature and requirement of HR functions, whether it be new ways of continuing with existing process, or innovating new ones. “A lot of business-as-usual HR functions have been transformed rapidly, with digitalisation as the focus,” says Limaye. “We have created more bandwidth for employees and managers by taking away some rudimentary tasks and HR processes into the realm of AI-powered tools. We have taken a whole lot of initiatives in the past two years, which have brought in more efficiency and visualisation into our processes, so that we can virtually work in an efficient way.”
(This story appears in the 11 March, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)