Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd. - Driving Change Through Internal Communication

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HINDUSTAN PETROLEUM CORPORATION LTD.: DRIVING CHANGE THROUGH INTERNAL COMMUNICATION

CASE ANALYSIS

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SUBJECT: COM501 CORPORATE COMMUNICATION

SUBMITTED TO: PROF. SUDHIR PANDEY

BY: DISHA TULSANI

ROLL NO.: AU1814052

DATE: 1ST NOVEMBER 2018

Q 1. What is HPCL approach to employee communication?

HPCL i.e. Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited was a fortune global 500 company in the year 2010. The company had more than 11000 employees and annual revenues of more than $23 billion. HPCL, to narrow down the gap between them and their employees sought to integrate them into the transformation project and to engage them personally in the goal of making it work.  They enlisted employees in the process of structured conversation regarding the future vision of the company. The leaders cultivated various ways to improve internal communication between their employees. The leaders recruited employees throughout the organization to participate in a series of “vision workshops”. The vision workshops was the part of a broad initiative called ACE project (Achieving Continuous Excellence), was initiated in 2003. Mainly 14 people from within the company were selected by the executives to become the workshop coaches, who eventually led hundreds of sessions and reached several thousand employees in a process. In the later years these workshops focused on refining, refining, updating and implementing the visions and plans that emerged from the first phase.

Each workshop had 20 participants and it mostly lasted for 3 days. In the workshops, employees were now able to offer their own opinions and insights on current state and future course of the company. During this process, the workshop coaches acted as a lubricants in further smoothening the discussions among the participants. Coaches invited participants to discuss their personal vision i.e. the goals that they planned for their families and for themselves. This practice helped to promote trust and increased cooperated interaction among workshop participants. It also prepared them for the next segment of workshop in which they developed and explored their visions for HPCL organization.

The company focused on transactional communication which is the simple process of sharing the information. And transformational communication where they talk about their own aspirations, employees aspirations with the company. Their internal channels of communication broadly classified as two-way communications. It included Webcasts by CMD, Expanded corporate intranet, community blog and CMD blog, vision workshops and one-to-one interactions.

One of their important medium of two way communication was MyHPCL. It was the company’s intranet portal. ‘eCare’ and ‘Coin Your Idea’ were two such intranet portals used by HPCL. HPCL executives also preferred one-to-one way of communication apart from using the technology. Listen to employee directly and face-to-face, all this to provide informal way of communication and to improve the quality of relationship among employees and with the management.

Q 2. How was the company vision created?

The company’s vision was mainly recognized and finalized during the employees’ workshop which was conducted by HPCL to fill up the gap between themselves and their employees. For this the participants had to analyze the company at different levels. HPCL started a new strategy of dividing their operations into several strategic business units (SBUs), and further dividing some SBUs into regional units. A few situations noted, mentioned that the coach would lead participants through exercises resulting in one vision document which would apply to their regional office and another would apply to their SBU, and a third one would apply to HPCL as a whole.

The input generated from the workshops resulted in identifying several items and placing them in the document of vision statement. There were a few times when these vision statements generated by the participants were featured in targets for growth, profitability and market share of the company.

It was surprisingly noticed that the vision statements which came out were same irrespective of the level from where they came, i.e., senior management or junior level. For instance, four out of five points were same for the senior as well as for junior level. The most surprising thing was when their union leaders said, “We want our company to be global.” Where the top management did not even include the word “global” in their vision statement. This suggested that these people made a better vision statement than the top management people! Other patterns noticed were broad based. The participants and the employees thought their company to be an energy company rather than petroleum company.