Shopper's Stop Limited - Securities and Exchange Board of India

Educational background of our employees
Education No of employees
Post-Graduate 286
Graduate and specialized courses 782
Under-Graduate 542
Total 1610
Employee Development Policy
Our Human Resource vision is to create an committed workforce through people enabling processes and
knowledge sharing practices based upon our value system.
We believe that learning and development is an integral part of business operations. Each of our
employees has training of subordinates and mentoring as a critical part of his KRAs. This enables us also
to share our learnings across the organization as well as bring in the SSL values to the employees.
We also focus on our top 100 associates under which the development needs of these employees are
tracked and a six monthly review conducted by the CCA, MD and CEO. We have annual assessment
centers for every level within the organization, including the top management. Under this, employees are
subject to certain tests and areas of development identified and focused on in the coming year, based on
the employee’s career plan. We also use these assessment centres to carry out promotions at all levels,
through a completely transparent process. The processes have been developed in-house along with
support provided by SHL (India) Pvt. Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of SHL Group (UK) , a leading
global player in competency and assessment centre technology.
35% of our job positions are filled from personnel within the organization through a process of scientific
selection based on assessment centers. This is mainly due to the reason that we strongly believe in
providing the associates with career paths within the Company through cross functional exposure and
role enhancement as part of the developmental process.
Training
Our corporate objective is to provide every associate with an average of 60 hours of training per annum
through internal and external resources.
All senior management members are required to contribute 12 days per annum towards training. This is
in addition to 45 trained and certified internal trainers who conduct training on an ongoing basis.
Providing training is one of the mandatory leadership competencies for promotion.
In order to support a learning culture, we provide at our discretion, reimbursement for fees for relevant
professional courses that eligible associates enroll in. Executive development is enhanced through
strategic tie-ups with management institutes such as IIM, Ahmedabad. We have tied up with City and
Guilds, UK, to provide a distance learning and certification program for Customer Care Associates who
have been identified as having potential to grow into supervisory roles.
International exposure is provided to associates with potential . On an average, annually about 50
associates get an opportunity to visit retail establishments in different parts of the world through the
International Group of Department Stores (IGDS). Internationally acclaimed professors are brought into
India to train SSL associates on strategic issues of retail management.
Compensation Policy
Our compensation policy reflects our continuing efforts to build a world class performance driven culture.
We benchmark ourselves on compensation externally through William Mercer (a compensation
consulting firm) biannually, and aspire to be on the upper quartile of our target segment, comprising of
FMCG companies and other retail companies and are currently at the 73 rd percentile.
Variable pay is an important component of total compensation, with all our associates covered under our
Profit Linked Reward Scheme (PLRS), linking individual performance and Company profitability. Almost
60% of Customer Care Associates earned PLRS in the year ended March 31, 2004. We also have
Employee Stock Option Plans (ESOPs). 44 employees held stock options under our ESOPs as on July
31, 2004.
We also have a non monetary reward scheme called ‘Jo Jeeta Woh Sikander’ which recognizes
excellence in work under various categories i.e. Best CCA, Supervisor, Store, etc. Winners in each
category are recognised through awards and ceremonies and are given individual prizes such as
Trophies and Gift Vouchers.
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