ICICI Prudential Life Insurance has created a new formula to drive profitability and growth in the organisation, an integrated geographic structure. This change from a vertical structure to a geographic structure, the company said, would not only bring in accountability and responsibility among its staff but also ownership for the geography, in terms of people, cost, profitability for the state, market share and the topline.
“We are trying to create an entrepreneur and a CEO in each geography. This would be a structure where the geography heads would responsibility for each state with complete responsibility and ownership for that region,” said Judhajit Das, chief (human resource), ICICI Prudential Life Insurance.
The company has divided states into various districts to have cluster heads who would be responsible for a set of districts. This would trickle down to the branch, eventually.
“So, at the branch level, you would have a branch head who would take overall responsibility. Holding branches accountable for performance, would give it more fillip, as the branch head would take ownership for new recruits and help them succeed,” added Das.
So has there been the change in profitability yet? Das refused to divulge details at this stage saying the work was in progress, as the company began working on it last year.
“People in ICICI Prudential would have to learn to do things differently. We knew how to grow fast. We wanted to add more people and branches. We thought we can also grow by making them more productive. When you follow a geographic structure, the person would take accountability,” added Das.
The company, in tinkering with its human resource strategies, said it had manage to stem early attrition. “Getting the right kind of people in the insurance industry is a challenge. Early attrition happens as people have not understood the job they are doing and what they actually wish to do. So, we spend time talking about this. This has helped us arrest early attrition,” he said.
The company had also increased investment and was getting into e-learning to reduce cost. It would bring a certification programme soon, for its employees.
“We are giving them the assets in e-learning. If they want to learn from it they can learn,” he added.
Till 2007, the company had 30,000 people on its rolls, the number has come down to 14,000, on Saturday. The company continues to do replacement hiring, as they believe that insurance was under penetrated and there was opportunity for profitable growth by serving our customers with the right products that meet their needs.
"Our headcount has been stable since the past two years and we expect it to remain so for some more time. The effort would be to increase employee productivity to deliver profitable growth," said Das. The frontline sales force constitutes about 80 per cent of the staff.
The company said its philosophy is to build talent and not to buy the same. “So, one of the things we had spoken about was, we were giving job security to everyone but they need to be mobile and fungible across functions. And we have been increasingly seeing more people moving from sales to operations and vice-versa,” added Das. High performing employees were also given the 'Tatva' award for exemplary customer service across the country.
ICICI Prudential Life also uses technology as an enabler in the way it deals with customers and employees. It has an active intranet facility for employees, where all the latest news updates about the company are regularly updated.
For consumers, they had started enabling technology tools such as having product information on tablets, so that it was easier for both the consumers to understand the products in a better manner and also aid the employees in selling.
