HR Strategies and Practices of Unilever in India: A Study on Value Creation

Human Resource
Management

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY..................................................................................................................................3
A. HR strategies by Unilever for creating value..........................................................................3
B. Impact regional culture on HRM practices of Unilever in India............................................4
C. Employment model and organisational levers used by Unilever to create value...................5
D. Storey’s 27 points of difference for benchmarking HRM and Personnel Management in
India.............................................................................................................................................7
E. Importance of local culture in India for HR practices like hiring and firing..........................9
F. Differences in terms of employment laws when international HRM and domestic HRM. . .10
G. Recommendations regarding HRM practices to ensure organisational productivity in
Unilever.....................................................................................................................................10
CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................11
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................13

INTRODUCTION
Human resource management can be defined as the practice of managing people for
achievement of higher productivity and it involves functions like recruitment and selection,
employee onboarding, training and development, performance appraisal, managing employee
issues and administration, and also adopting motivational practices like employee engagement
for retaining the employees in the organisation. Human resources management is important in
the organisations for ensuring right quantity and quality of personnel that have to be place in the
workplace through strategies like workforce planning, talent acquisition, talent management and
talent retention (Cheng and Hackett, 2019). Unilever is a British multinational company
headquartered in London that specialises in retailing of consumer goods. The products that the
company sells includes food, energy drinks, cleaning agents, cheese, coffee, bottled water beauty
products, breakfast cereals, personal care items, consumer healthcare and pharmaceutical
products. The company is one of the leaders in soap manufacture and being one the leading
multinational company, it operates globally in more than 190 countries. It owns more than 400
brands and has the turnover of more than 54 billion euros. The presence if the company is quite
particular in Asian and African markets and majority of their human resources strategies are
devised accordingly for value creation in local, national and global contexts (Raj and Aithal,
2018). This report will study the HRM practices of Unilever in Asian markets and value creation
through HR strategies. The effect of regional and national culture on the practice of HRM will be
evaluates in context to India. A model of employment and organisational levers used by the
Unilever for value creation will be identified along with storey’s 27 points for benchmarking in
context to Indian operations. The important of local culture and HRM practice needs will be
overviewed along as per international subsidiary and the differences in employment laws will be
evaluated in context of international HRM changes local business systems and recommendations
will be provided.
MAIN BODY
A. HR strategies by Unilever for creating value
Unilever operates under the brand name Hindustan Unilever in the Asian country of India
and has created relevant strategies in regional context to add value and expand its operations in
the country. Human resources practices are very important to achieve the company targets and
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also to reinvent, renew and revitalise the organisational architecture (Palepu and Tahilyani,
2019). The value creation is achieved through strategic human resource management across all
the subsidiaries of the company across its operations through alignment of the core corporate and
business objectives of Unilever and integrating it with the human resource polices and strategies.
Strategic HRM is aimed at achievement of the long-term goals and are adopted and implemented
at global level. As per the concept of strategic human resource management, various models can
be adopted by organisations such as matching model, control-based model, resource based model
and integrative model. Unilever implements the resource-based model which defines the
efficiency of Unilever on the basis of the effectiveness of its capabilities and resources. The
resources of the company are devised into categories of finance, HR and technology. This model
emphasizes on achievement of company objectives and apply certain strategies through building
up skills and competencies of the employees which leads to competitive advantage. Unilever
applies the strategies of employee engagement, workforce diversity, effective talent acquisition
and international HRM for its companies in India (Ahmed, 2019). Employee engagement
increases the involvement of employees and increases the performance, cross cultural awareness,
better communication that leads employees in working efficiently, resulting in higher sales and
customer satisfaction. Workforce diversity is important as Unilever is a multinational corporation
thereby the portfolio of employees with various specialisations and skills that helps company in
creation of competitive advantage. It also makes the company environment highly innovative
and creative. The talent acquisition approach is applied in the company to ensure the right
candidates are selected for the right job positions, and tend to become high performing
employees. International HRM deals with for management of all the resources of the company
across the globe and for positioning employer branding and providing unanimous approach for
attracting best employees and raising the organisational performance (Sharma, 2019).
B. Impact regional culture on HRM practices of Unilever in India
When establishing and operating in India, Unilever has to apply international HRM
effectively and use strategic human resources practices along with considerations regarding the
regional and national culture, practices and policies. National culture encompasses certain
assumptions, beliefs, norms that are in the core of the society and the central issue for Unilever is
to identify the best fit between external environment and overall strategy and HRM polices
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