Maritza Poza-Grise, VP, Human Resources, DuPont
Maritza Poza-Grise is on her ?first of many trips? to India. India is a country she has read about in detail, but got to experience for the first time, she elaborates. A DuPont employee for 28 years and an engineer academically, Poza-Grise is gentle and keen to read out her lessons on India?s civilisation, people, democracy, the utterly amazing IT revolution, etc, if one really wants to know. But her best is reserved for her favourite subject ?
human power.
After serving departments as varied as industrial chemicals business to a manufacturing unit and now HR, it?s essential for Poza-Grise to know every employee and the department he or she is part of in any country where the company operates. ?For me, any country is a way for me to read its people and learn from them. The trip to India thus becomes all the more happening. People here are lessons in themselves,? she points out. The maiden India trip of Poza-Grise, VP, HR, DuPont, is largely restricted to the company?s India offices at Hyderabad and Gurgaon. The company is employing a huge number of people across all organisational layers. ?The dynamics of recruiting people is changing all across. One needs to have the right minds with all keenness to focus on the job and deliver. At least, in the case of India, we are placed comfortably,? she says, adding, ?DuPont is a company with very low attrition rate globally. The rate in India ? a buzzing market with a young workforce with temptations from all over ? stands at a single digit. I would say, it?s still okay.?
Currently, DuPont employs about 750 people in the country (in DuPont and other subsidiary companies) and provides indirect employment to another 2,500. In India, the company has been growing at an annual average of 25% for the past five years. In 2007, its sales here exceeded $439 million with its largest business platforms being the agriculture and nutrition segment, followed by performance materials, coatings and colour technologies, safety and protection, and electronics and communication technologies.
The company is working on its first research and development centre in Hyderabad, which is expected to accommodate more than 300 scientists and other employees in the initial phase. And this is what brings Poza-Grise to India. For her, language skills and the flexibility and interest towards learning something new everyday make any Indian a good manager. The country is the right place to pack vacancies at all of DuPont?s organisational layers ? local, regional and global. ?And that?s the reason we are depending big on India to man our Knowledge Center here. Employing local workforce largely, the centre will have about 300 scientists and engineers in its first year of operation. The number is expected to double in the next three to five years. They will work closely with more than 5,000 scientists of DuPont located around the world,? she says.
In Hyderabad, she met a scientist who had decided to move back to India after years of working in the US. ?I hope he likes the company and the home country as a workplace. May be then, he would call his former work pals and friends ? people from my home country ? to come and work here,? she says.
According to Poza-Grise, in the changing human resource dynamics, the solutions to challenges like attrition and rising unhappiness quotient among employees could be addressed with the troika of performance partnership, workforce planning and employee engagement. And DuPont is one company that has been following this strategy religiously. ?Today, employees need to be clear on what is expected of them. Employers, on the other hand, have to move beyond just staffing. They must build workplaces where employees would like their friends to join. For us, all these make good business sense,? says Poza-Grise.
