Sanmar Group Chairman N Sankar announced the Employee of the Year awards for four senior Sanmar officials: P S Jayaraman, P Natarajan, Sarada Jagan and Bharath Reddy.
We reproduce below the complete text of Sankar’s speech and the citations read out.
“There are four more Employee of the Year Awards, which have not been announced so far. These are people from the senior most levels of the Sanmar Group, but the selection criteria are the same. If anything, as I mentioned last year, it is much tougher to get recognition for special performance at this level, since they have reached these levels of management in the group only by raising their performance bar very high, and clearing that bar requires a really extraordinary level of consistent performance during the year. I am sure you will agree that based on their records, these persons fully deserve this recognition.
The first recipient is P S Jayaraman, Managing Director of Chemplast. Managing Chemplast is one of the most complex tasks around in the group. It has the maximum number of external problems, because of its high visibility as the largest and only publicly quoted company in the group. Also being in the chemical industry it has a running engagement with the authorities on environmental control, and as if the authorities alone were not enough, you also have the politicians and the NGOs to take on. Then coming to managing the business itself – a violently cyclical commodity business with huge energy dependence. All in all, a very difficult business to manage. Compounding this of course is the fact that Chemplast is unfortunately a company that I am a little too familiar with, and take more interest in than I should. Jayaraman has been with the group for about 9 years. He joined us as Head of Finance of Chemplast, and was appointed Managing Director in 2000. In the last few years he has quietly but very competently taken control of the situation at the plants, in the market place, and in our external interfaces, and has been able to navigate the company through some very difficult situations. He has also visualised and launched a large capital intensive project to secure our raw material dependency, and is hopefully about to get final approvals for our long pending PVC project. He has established excellent equations with all the power centres that matter, and I am confident Chemplast is going to see some great years ahead under his stewardship. Jayaraman, please accept Sanmar’s and my appreciation and best wishes.
P S Jayaraman being honoured by N Sankar.
The next person to receive the award is akin to a cricketer who has scored a century on debut –
P Natarajan. Natarajan joined us at SEC less than two years ago and was appointed Managing Director in 2004. SEC is a very complex collection of about 12 businesses, each with its own problems and issues, 7 Joint Venture relationships to be maintained, and a collection of very capable, but very strong willed, individuals to manage. To top it all, he was in a worse situation than Jayaraman who had to deal with me – he succeeded Radhakrishnan, which you will all agree is an even more difficult task. In his very first year Natarajan has exceeded the expectations we had when we inducted him in terms of the speed with which he got his hands around the job. He has clearly pulled the SEC team around him, started on many new initiatives, and set the company on a high-growth, highsuccess path for the future. In his first year of stewardship SEC’s sales grew by 30% and its profits by 60%. The current year looks to be even better. Natarajan, please accept our warmest congratulations and best wishes. I only hope you don’t get to regret having raised the performance bar so high in your very first year.
P Natarajan receives his award from N Sankar.
The third recipient this year is the Sanmar Group’s Head of Human Resources, Sarada Jagan. Sarada’s record is so well known to all of you that I am sure many of you will be wondering why it took so long for this recognition. Sarada Jagan joined us in 1997 in the Human Resource function working for the group head B Natraj and took over direct responsibility in 2000. Given the large number of management personnel that we deal with, it was a tough job to start with. The first challenge that she faced was the unyielding insistence from me for cleaning up all the hard aspects of people management – our remuneration practices, our employment conditions, streamlining and standardisation of our perquisite package etc. Our insistence on absolute standardisation across the group, our adopting issues like cost to company far ahead of the market, introduction of state-of-the-art models of compensation, including our unique Deferred Value Incentive system - all these put tremendous pressure on her, but she came through magnificently, and today we have an HR administration that I think is among the best. Having forged a strong foundation on the hard issues, Sarada Jagan took up the more traditional soft issues of HR management such as training, employee satisfaction, position evaluation etc., to improve workplace atmosphere and satisfaction levels. The entry into businesses like Contract Research and API where the people issues are unique, as well as maintaining employment at the required levels in our traditional engineering businesses at a time when there was a huge drain to the Software, ERP and BPO sectors, were further
challenges that she negotiated very successfully. Thanks to her, Sanmar is now beginning to be recognised externally as a good place to work in, and I am very happy that we are able to recognise her in this forum today. Sarada, our warmest thanks and congratulations.
Sarada Jagan was another awardee.
The final recipient of the award this year is slightly different in that he is one of the few managers who don’t have a bottom line to be responsible for - Bharath Reddy. Bharath has managed Sanmar’s cricket foray for almost 25 years, with one of the shrewdest cricketing brains around. While there may not be a P & L account to show for his endeavours, I think the results of our team since he joined us speak for themselves – 9 league championships including a unique five on the trot currently, various other wins in championships like The Hindu Trophy, Buchibabu, etc., – all these have redounded to Chemplast and Sanmar’s credit. Since Sanmar does not do much advertising, our exploits on the cricket field do their bit to keep us in the public eye. Bharath’s unique talent has been in spotting fresh talent far ahead of others. Let me give you a few names. He spotted Harbhajan Singh and Mohanty two years before they made it to the national team. L Balaji is also one of his finds, and the list goes on and on. Bharath has been a truly loyal and faithful employee of Sanmar for almost a quarter century, and working for our success is second nature to him. His team building and management skills really work and have stood the test of time. It is through Bharath’s individual efforts that the IIT Chemplast cricket ground is recognised as one of the best in the country. Bharath, thank you for all your efforts and the excellent results you have produced for Chemplast and Sanmar.”
Bharath Reddy was named Employee of the Year for his excellent stewardship of the Sanmar cricket team.