How ATG Tires is discarding its primitive HR practices

ATG Tires, an off-highway tire manufacturing company, which was initially a family-owned business seems to be doing all the right things. It came under the Yokohama Group when its promoter sold its stakes in 2016. Since then, changes have started to happen. New and progressive HR reforms were proposed and the organisation started working towards the same.

The ‘One ATG’ plan was implemented with the sole aim of bringing all ATG entities under one umbrella.

One of the major changes that took place under this plan was in the performance management system, with the introduction of the performance review and enhancement programme (PREP).

Earlier, the Company was following the conventional financial performance-driven KRA, using the performance scorecard system. At that time, the performance of individuals was measured only in accordance with the manner in which their performance impacted the business directly. But now, with the PREP programme in the picture, the organisation has added two more dimensions to it—team building and self-building or building oneself.

“In the period 2017-2020 our main focus will be on promoting meritocracy and enhancing performance. With the introduction of PREP, ‘team building’, ‘building oneself’ and ‘contributing to the business’, will all be given weightage during performance review,” says Rajeev Singh, CHRO, ATG Tires.

According to Singh, the new PREP programme gives a different type of psychological message to the people. Earlier, there was an element of fear, but now that the organisation also talks about enhancing performance, it gives out a positive message.

A major shift that the PREP programme has triggered is in bringing together all the entities of ATG. “Whether it is India, America, Europe or Israel, PREP runs on the same and common guidelines for all,” shares Singh.

Alongside the PREP initiative, ATG also launched another supporting programme called ‘manager as coach’. As part of this, various workshops were held to train managers to have coaching conversations with their teams while giving feedback.

ATG Tires’ Rewards 2.0 programme aims to reach out to the bottom level of the pyramid and give them their share of rewards and incentives.

“Earlier, incentive schemes and bonuses were restricted to some senior-level roles and selected people. But now, with Reward 2.0, we are also reaching the bottom of the hierarchy. Our new philosophy is that people should grow when the company grows,” explains Singh.

In the Rewards 2.0 programme, managers are also involved in the allocation of incentives and rewards to their teams. As the organisation’s main focus is on transparency, the performance ratings and incentive metrics are shared with everyone.

Development of a leadership pipeline is also linked to the PREP programme. The organisation provides different kinds of training to different people. Leveraging technology, ATG Tires introduced e-learning, where micro-learning methods are used to train people.

For the middle management people, organisations have identified some programmes in sales learning and other functions. “For instance, in manufacturing, it is very important to create a bridge between the sales and production teams. The production team should realise the pain of a salesperson when deliveries are not made on time, while a sales personnel should understand the difficulty of the production team when they bring last-minute orders,” suggests Singh.

When the company is moving towards a progressive HR system, how can digitisation of HR processes be left behind? With its digital drive, called the HR1, ATG Tires has digitised most of its employee lifecycle processes.

“I believe we should leverage technology wherever we can. I want to make the HR processes paperless. This is also our main focus till 2020,” reveals Singh.

It is time for all the traditional organisations, which continue to stick to their conventional and outdated HR practices, to learn from ATG and take a step forward in the right direction.