For the third year running, Gemcon Group has been named Best Employer at the national HR summit in Dhaka — an award judged not on what a company says about its people, but on what its people say about it.
The assessment runs on an anonymous survey of employees across every operating company, weighted against pay data, promotion records, safety incidents and retention. Gemcon entered eleven businesses and 12,000 employees into the process. The panel singled out three things: the group's internal promotion rate, its safety record on the engineering sites, and the fact that the estate schools and clinics in Panchagarh are funded as operating cost rather than charity.
We build people, people build our business
That line has been on the wall of the Dhanmondi office since the eighties, and it is a commitment before it is a slogan. Sixty-two per cent of the group's management roles were filled internally last year. The average tenure across the retail network is nine years — in a sector where two is common.
An employer of choice is not one that pays the most. It is one where the person who joined as a machine operator can see the path to running the plant, and believes it.
The work behind this year's result was unglamorous. A single grading structure replaced the eleven that had grown up division by division. Parental leave was standardised at group level rather than left to each company. Every site now runs a monthly safety stand-down that stops production, and the incident reports from those sessions go to the board unedited.
What comes next
- A group-wide apprenticeship intake of 200 places across the engineering and manufacturing businesses.
- Mental health provision extended from the head office to every operating site by the end of 2026.
- A published pay-band structure, so an employee can see the range of the job above theirs before applying for it.
The award is welcome. The survey underneath it is more useful — it tells us, in our own employees' words, which of the eleven businesses is furthest from the standard the other ten already meet.