How WABAG’s HR Policies Helped Grow From Rs 200 Cr to Rs 2100+ Cr and 180 to 2000 Employees

Starting its Indian operations with a 6-member team in 1996-97 as a 100% owned subsidiary of its European parent, WABAG went through a Management buyout and is now a listed company. In a conversation with All Things Talent, S.Varadarajan, Director & Chief Growth Officer, VA Tech WABAG talks about the Company’s entrepreneurial, friendly, and open work culture. 

Can you explain the growth of the company since the buyout from the perspective of talent?

In September 2005, when we did the management buyout, the WABAG India team size was around 180+ people. Today, we have over 2000 water professionals. This is the scaling up that we did between 2005 to 2022 in terms of talent acquisition. If we look at the growth of human talent from a competency point of view, since 2005, it is humongous.

Initially, in 1997, we were a German subsidiary (Balcke Durr), dealing with only industrial customers like Reliance, Mitsubishi, Haldia Petrochemicals, etc. When we became an Austrian subsidiary (VA Tech) in 2000, we started dealing with only municipal projects. We saw this as an advantage to deal with both Industrial and Municipal projects and soon in India, we became a total water solution provider, a competency none of the other subsidiaries within the WABAG Group had at that time.  

The challenge we faced when we executed our first 100 Cr project prior to Management Buyout was very different from the 200 Million USD project that we executed for Petronas in 2019. It has been a tremendous learning experience for our human talent and the journey has been exciting.

Today, we are one of the top three companies globally from the point of view of technology offering as published by GWI, London. This is a very creditable achievement. We have also learned to handle very tough customers, in tough geographies with tougher technical expectations in the last 17 years.

Recently in the last few years, we have also developed commercial competency to do challenging projects under the PPP model.   We are like a “One Stop Shop” for Water treatment from where we started as a Water Treatment Division with a six-member team in 1996-97. 

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Buyouts and reverse acquisitions in 2005 and 2007 were nascent ideas. Did you face any issues from existing employees during that time? Can you recount your experience and strategies used to deal with issues then?

When the Management Buyout happened, some section of our employees felt we are now an Indian company from being part of a multinational. In 2006, when we came up with our Top 4 goals, acquiring a European company (in order to address the Middle East market) and targeting to become a 1000 Cr company were part of it.

We were a 200 crore turnover Indian company in 2005 and we bought the erstwhile European parent, which was two and half times of our size in Nov 2007. The reporting relationship between the CEO and CFO got reversed and one can understand the emotional aspect of this.  Our strategic mantra adopted at this time was “Reunification of WABAG”.  We did not want to give a feeling of acquisition by an Indian company.

In India, we created four SBUs in 2007, post-acquisition. The presence of a venture capitalist in WABAG as a shareholder (ICICI) and the strong vision made us grow the India organisation 6x in 5 years. This enabled greater respect for WABAG India in the Group. The strong 6500+ plant references, the 125+ patents, the R&D Centres, the developed markets, experienced talent, etc that came along with the acquisition of the parent,  facilitated the brand image and enabled the growth of the Company.

We established an International Engineering Centre in Pune to cater to our international projects from India and to provide engineering support to our European entities to make them competitive (India being a low-cost country).  Under our “One WABAG” platform, all three clusters collaborate seamlessly to bid for larger jobs and execute them collectively. 

When the Management Buyout happened, some section of our employees felt we are now an Indian company from being part of a multinational. In 2006, when we came up with our Top 4 goals, acquiring a European company (in order to address the Middle East market) and targeting to become a 1000 Cr company were part of it.

While tech and business are the obvious components that came with the buyout from the global company, were there any good people/HR practices that were implemented by the then-parent company? What were those and did those HR policies help you in India?

There were big differences in culture between the countries in Central/Western Europe vs Eastern Europe. But in common, there is high dignity of labour in all these countries.  No job is looked down upon. The aspect of “discipline” was seen in every aspect of their culture. Similarly, there are wonderful aspects of culture in India too.  Hence, it was mutual learning from the culture of both sides.   

In terms of HR practices, I think we had some very good practices in India and some of them were picked up by our European team later. Our GET (Graduate Engineering Trainee) Program, our Leadership Development programs, and our employee engagement activities like Family Day, Kids day, Open House, and Year End Presentation is much appreciated by our European team where the employees interact with the top management directly.  WABAG Romania instituted “WABAG Academy” for leadership development on a similar model and identified 20 young talents and some of them are playing crucial roles working closely with top management in Romania.   

Today, we have a workforce of around 2000 people and as of March 2022, the total turnover is Rs 2,170.87 Crores.

What are the top skills in demand for the company? What would you say to job seekers about the opportunities arising in this business segment?

If you would ask this question to the talent acquisition team, they would say the “process engineers” or “marketing engineers” or “project managers”. These are some top skills in demand in the company. However, I would say leadership talent is the most important talent, though functional competency is no less important for business.

WABAG offers challenging assignments and growth paths for leadership talent and technical talent in more than 25 countries.

Could you put the various HR initiatives in context? How are each of these initiatives established and how are they helping the company?

Leadership Development: I think over the last 25 years, we designed and developed almost 5-6 leadership excellence programs. Within the first two years of joining one batch of GETs, we identify the Extra Milers. We have a Young Entrepreneur Programme (YEP) for those with 5-7 years of experience. The talents identified under this program go through an MBA program in top institutions in India with WABAG’s sponsorship. We have ELP and LEX leadership excellence programs for the next age groups. Recently, we have introduced Hi-Pot as another program for seniors. Our current CFO of the group is a young talent from the Hi-Pot Program. We groom these leadership talents for our succession planning.

L&D Initiatives: 

I. One is classroom training and the other is training and grooming talent on the job. Today, we have a platform in India for grooming young project managers, construction managers, and engineering managers. We are collaborating with a good educational institution for classroom training.

II. We took training to work sites and combined business with L&D initiatives. We selected 35- 40 engineers, trained the trainer, and sent them to sites where they would train the entire team and spend a few hours conducting technical audits

What is the typical investment outlay in the HR Tech or HR programs of the company? What is its business impact?

Our biggest investment is making the senior management time available for the youngest executives and engineers for grooming them. We do provide PG courses in good management institutes like Great Lakes and SP Jain, or bring external faculty from IIMs and XLRI to our campus for training as part of management development programs. We also sponsor our employees to study abroad in some of the good institutions.

However, I believe that “on-the-job” training and good mentorship by seniors is the most important thing (this will contribute to 75% of the development of an individual). In terms of “HR Tech”, we have recently migrated to a new HRMS software with all modules integrated.

Could you talk about your most successful HR initiative?

I would say that the most successful initiative is the “One WABAG” initiative. We went for an organisational realignment in 2015 where from an “SBU & MDU” model we went to the “Cluster model”.  The promoters of the company were running the organisation as SBU Heads too. We formed three Clusters; each had multiple geographies under it and appointed Cluster level leadership.  Through this, succession planning for the CEO and CFO (promoters) happened at the Group level.  The realignment created multiple senior roles at Cluster leadership and the leadership at the SBU level hitherto got a higher role in the combined one WABAG organisation. 

One other initiative I want to mention is we went for a strength-based approach to our training. Normally, classroom training focuses on picking up deficiencies and trying to organise training on that. We reversed it. We identified the top five strengths of each individual through a tool called “Strengths Finder” and we went to a one-on-one coaching & strength workshop for them, which was well received.

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How important is employer branding for the company and what initiatives were taken in those directions?

One of the initiatives is the social media for branding led by our Global Business Development team where we have specific strategies in place for keeping our external stakeholders updated on the latest happenings. Our website gets updated regularly and is updated with the latest information to help visitors with their desired data. 

Our GET program is another medium of connecting to various institutions to exchange information about the company. This is also an opportunity for the aspirants to interact with senior leaders of WABAG. As part of institutional and industrial partnerships, we do associate with various institutional events as sponsors. For lateral entries, our HR Team has various subscriptions to reach out to potential talents.  

As one of the leading technology providers across the globe, our experts are being invited to share their expertise in various institutional and educational forums. We do conduct free webinars on various topics with the help of our technology experts.   

Author: 
Subramanian Varadarajan is on the board of VA Tech Wabag Ltd. and a Member of The Institute of Cost & Works Accountants of India and a Member of The Institute of Company Secretaries of India.