Reliance Industries (RIL), India’s most valuable listed company, has re-jigged its human resource (HR)

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strategy and is paying handsome rewards, including 100 per cent bonus, to its employees as boom time returns.

Top RIL officials told Financial Chronicle that the company had also decided to lift the freeze on promotions and increments this year.

The company has paid its exploration and production (E&P) staff a handsome bonus following the successful ramping up of output from the Krishna Godavari basin.

While most senior E&P employees received around 100 per cent of their annual compensation as production bonus, some others got 75 per cent, and the remaining 50 per cent. Most employees were paid the bonus in four instalments, spread over the past few months.

“This has been a double bonanza for the E&P division staff,” said a senior RIL official.

The company has hired international compensation consultants Hewitt Associates to do a benchmarking study of the top 100 E&P companies worldwide to determine industry average compensation levels.

“In areas where we need the most experience, we paid compensation that would put us in the top 75 of the companies studied by Hewitt, while in others we may choose not to pay above the average levels,” said the official.

An email sent to RIL did not elicit a reply and a company spokesperson said they would not comment on personnel matters.

In 2009-10, RIL’s employee costs went down to Rs 2,350 crore from Rs 2,398 crore in the previous year. The freeze on promotions and increments had led to considerable de-motivation among RIL staff who felt they should be rewarded in tune with the improving financial performance of the company.

“The business transformation initiative that we have embarked upon is singularly going to be the most significant project that Reliance would have ever undertaken in its organisational history. Most of the transformation agenda is around and strongly interlinked with people, practices and processes. The mandate is to build a world class HR organisation with benchmark processes and systems around performance management, rewards and recognition, competency and capability building, and succession planning among others,” said RIL in its latest annual report.

The company has also put in place a central shared services organisation for HR where global best practices are integrated.

RIL has been producing natural gas continuously for a year with 100 per cent uptime. In December 2009, it also completed a successful assessment of the design capacity of the KG-D6 deepwater gas production facilities with a flow rate of 80 million standard cubic metres per day (mscmd). By completing design capacity tests, RIL is in a position to boost production from around 60 mscmd, equity analysts who are tracking the company said.

RIL recently told analysts that it had signed gas supply and purchase agreements with more than 50 customers for an aggregate supply of 60 mscmd.

For the year ended March 2010, RIL reported revenues of Rs 12,649 crore and operating profit of Rs 5,413 crore from its oil and gas business. The operating profit from exploration and production of oil and gas is almost matching the Rs 6,011 crore operating profit that RIL’s core refining and marketing business brought in during 2009-10. In fact, though RIL got only 5.5 per cent of its revenues from the oil and gas business, it contributed more than a quarter of its operating profit.