Compensation Benchmarking in Seed Industry

Seed industry is a dynamic, innovative, internationally competitive, research based industry producing high performance, high quality seeds and planting materials. It is human resource intensive industry where high caliber manpower is required to grow.

The major challenges to technical team are to increase productivity, develop newer production techniques and technologies, technologies in the areas of seed development that would ensure good yield even under constraints of water and land, matching of seed with fertilizer, water management and evolving pre-harvesting techniques under different soil conditions.

A study of compensation structure of seed industry is conducted with an objective of designing a uniform, stable, competitive compensation structure for their employees and to rationalize their compensation policy. It is a descriptive empirical study of the pattern of salary structure in the seed industry vis-a-vis Clinet Seeds. Survey is done through structured salary format to collect data from employees working in 20 different companies in seed industry.

Compensation Benchmarking in Seed Industry
Findings indicate that there has been a high variance in the compensation of different positions of the line function in the industry. Overall, the MNCs are the good pay masters. However, certain Indian companies have matched their compensation to the best in the industry.

Private seed companies are spending more than10-12% of their turnover in R&D. Hence, R&D hub has been created by the organizations to strengthen their research activities by recruiting employees as Research Officers/Associates & Scientists to ensure R&D in companies.

To provide quality seeds and wide variety of crops companies are spending heavily on compensation of Breeders. In order to improve the distribution network to supply seeds within the short span of 25 days during the season, companies have not only appointed marketing and sales team but also have Field Assistants to accelerate collection process. The compensation is a major factor not only to retain the talent but also to motivate employees improves the overall output of the organizations in seed industry.