Case Of Gail India: Increasing Creativity And Innovation Of Employees

1.1 GAIL is a public sector company engaged in the business of gas transmission and distribution, gas processing for liquid hydrocarbon production and petrochemicals. In 1998, in the context of the changing environment, it assigned to itself a vision statement -"Be the Dominant Natural Gas Company with Significant Global Presence Integrated in Energy and Petrochemicals".

1.2 In the current business environment in India, where the market forces have started playing a dominant role and the economy is opening up, GAIL needs to gear up itself to be able to survive and compete well with its competitors. With the dismantling of APM and entry of the world majors, the Indian petroleum sector has created an ambience where GAIL has to be proactive to be competitive in business on sustainable basis. Also, the benchmarks and standards have to be of global dimensions to achieve its vision of globalization in energy and petrochemical sectors. Accordingly, GAIL has embarked on transforming the organization to meet its goals as enshrined in the vision and even more. Various initiatives to achieve the objectives have been undertaken such as structural changes like organisational design, business process reengineering, benchmarking, strategy formulation which are in various stages of implementation.

1.3 The endeavor of the company, therefore, is to inculcate a participative work culture in the organization, which is conducive to the phase of transition through the emergent changing scenario. The work ethics ought to support horizontal cooperation as also vertical integration in each function, whether in the corporate office or in the work stations, and, therefore, adequate emphasis is required to be laid in enlisting participation of all the employees towards achieving this goal. The thrust towards participation lies in establishing common shared goals and objectives and their percolation to the grass root level so as to encourage total participation of all concerned for an all round development of the company.

1.4 In order to make the process of transformation smooth, fast and effective, GAIL recognizes that individual innovation, creativity and initiative would be crucial determining factors, which would require to be channelized in an organized way backed by appropriate incentives in an environment in which each employee would be encouraged and motivated to put forward his suggestion for achieving organisational excellence. In the light of what has been stated above, and the fact that the existing suggestion scheme has been perceived to be not sensitive enough to attract qualitative suggestions from the employees to bring about tangible improvements in the functioning of the company, a need has been felt to review the suggestion scheme currently prevailing in GAIL and make it more effective and broad based in tune with the best practices prevailing within India so that all the employees of the company are motivated to come up with suggestions for improvements in all spheres of work in GAIL and inculcate a spirit of proactive collaboration with the company's objectives and goals.

1.5 Accordingly, a revised and more comprehensive suggestion scheme has been formulated which, it is hoped, would provide immediate impetus to the employees to start the process of thinking and come up, within a reasonably short span of time, with suggestions for bringing about all round development and progress of the company.

2.1 The revised scheme, as enunciated in the succeeding paragraph, encompasses, inter-alia, the following:-

- Direct submission of suggestion through GAIL Intranet;

- Global viewing to bring about more transparency;

- Immediate monetary reward of Rs. 2000/- and an appreciation letter on acceptance of a suggestion for consideration;

- Time bound evaluation of the suggestions and declaration of results;

- Liberal monetary rewards where tangible monetary savings are established and accepted - enhancement of the ceiling of the amount of reward to Rs. 1,00,000/-;

- Ceremonial presentation of cheque, CMD's trophy, and a merit certificate for the best suggestion(s); and

- Endorsement of a copy of the merit certificate in the personal file and ACR of the employee for the relevant year.

3.1 The objectives of the suggestion scheme are:

1. To provide a comprehensive scheme