Interview Highlights:
Q1. If you could travel back in time and give one piece of advice to your younger self when you first started your career in HR, what would it be and why?
A. I would tell my younger self quite a few things, but maybe a couple of things that I would definitely tell that younger Samit, building a lot of genuine and wider relationships is extremely important and you need to start early to be successful in life later.
I would definitely ask the young Samit to build that network of genuine people because that’s what would help him in future.
The second one is- if you are building a new leadership or HR, specifically an HR career, you need to be a little less sensitive. Many times, people get too sensitive and in HR for example, you have to have a little bit of thick skinniness.
The way I put it, you need to be able to absorb a lot of things that get thrown at you, assimilate it and find the right solution. But if you don’t react, I think you will keep doing the right things. Things will clear by themselves, and he will be very successful.
Q2. How your career got shaped as you went through the trajectory. And would love to know a little more stories about how things panned out for you.
Looking back, what is one decision or risk you took in your career that significantly impacted your growth as a CHRO?
A. It’s a combination of what I would have done and a lot of luck.
But specifically, if I have to say what I feel looking back what would have helped me is that I was always a little bit of a risk taker. I would never be very comfortable in my comfort zone.
If you mentioned that I spent 15 years at Infosys. It was a very large, growing company, but not more than two, 2 1/2 years, maximum three years, I would have done a role there. Every two years I would look for something new and reach up to my bosses and do something which I would not have done before that.
For example, just like 2 1/2 years into my HR career.
I got an opportunity for a very specific reason to move to the US and lead HR initially for the East Coast and then eventually for the whole of the North Americas for Infosys and no clue about what the US is. That was the first time I was going and supposed to lead a lot of HR there, but I took it. I absolutely took it.
Similarly, I took more risks later moving into from the tech world to the KPO BPO world which Infosys had as Progeon. Not too many people would have gone into that sector within Infosys because that was not supposed to be sought after. But I took it, I moved there.
But all these steps I feel have really helped me to become a more holistic HR professional understanding various parts of business which obviously has helped me over the years.
Q3. Let’s talk about some examples of workplace culture transformation that you have led and the key factors that contributed to its success, might include collaboration with senior leadership when it comes to aligning organizational values or creating a strong company-wide culture.
A. I think today HR leaders have to play the role extremely well to build cultures because they are really the curators of the culture. But HR leaders cannot do that alone. They will need to take the whole company together and definitely the CEO and the top leadership.
Too much to the culture and I was absolutely fortunate to have got some great leaders to work with. And the specific example I wanted to take is my partnership with my CEO Anjan Nahiri at Birlasoft.
A superb guy, a superb guy in terms of not only the sales and business. But an organization builder who understood the value of culture and people. And I was able to build a great rapport with my CEO Anjan. And we together worked to build a culture which really helped Birlasoft grow over those five years that we spent time in a fairly small company which really didn’t have much of a culture that one could want to strongly relate to.
I think we were able to co-create the culture with a lot of leadership and specific values. We were together, all our leaders, and our people created our mission, vision and values. I was really the facilitator, Anjan devising a lot. Then DK came in, he was a CEO post Ranjan, we all work like a team and as a team working together to create that culture, I think which bonded the whole company and we were able to merge and with a larger company and more than two times our workforce into a newer build of which is a public company.
Make the right changes in the culture to make the new culture appreciated by the larger build and that make the integration so much successful.
I think that to me was one of the biggest achievements I would say of my HR career and that won’t have happened unless I could foster that relationship with my CEO.
Nowadays CEO- CHRO relationships are talked about that’s so very important, and we continue to do the same in Navikenz. Navikenz is a young company, but we put the people right at the center of what we’re trying to build. So, taking people along, understanding what they would like the culture to be, what they would not like the culture to be and then building the culture along those lines, then make your practices.
Practices aligned to the culture that you’re trying to build. The values that you’re talking about and promoting because if these things are not aligned, people see through, and it doesn’t create an impact. Finally, it’s all about creating an impact through culture.
So the values aligning the culture and people buying through the practices and what happens on a day-to-day basis is so very important and I think I was very fortunate to have been part of that.
In Birlasoft’s history where we created some absolutely wonderful culture that people came together to create gel and created so much value for all our stakeholders at that point in time and which continues even now.
The organization was very fortunate to have you leading the people function out there and I still remember engaged, challenger, dependable, right? I still carry the challenger value as a badge of honor.
I was speaking to some senior leaders out there a few weeks back and I told them that once the challenger, always a challenger. So absolutely that is one value that I’ve carried along and it has helped me change the status quo.
Never agree with the easiest path. Those are amazing days and I truly appreciate how everybody, including you, the leadership pulled it off.
Q 4. Let’s talk a little more about how AI is shaping workplaces. Talk to us about the fact that as a co-founder of an AI focused organization, how do you see AI transforming the future of work? Second, what opportunities do you believe it presents for HR professionals and employees?
A. I’m really, really excited about what AI can do. And we are just hoping there’s the top potential of AI. In fact, really our elevator pitch at Navikenz is AI will change your world.
Interesting, but only 5% of. What AI can do to your company is not to you. Neither do I know. However, we work together to unlock what it can do because we have the right frameworks, people, processes and technology.
Very limited work has happened and ChatGTP generative AI is opening up your opportunities but everybody’s still thinking about AI can do better. But specifically, if you ask me, I strongly believe AI will change the way we work. It’s already started doing that just by basic automation.
People are also talking about how you don’t even have to do coding in future because everything will be- you just have to drag and drop, and you can create your own stuff. So, I think this productivity to automation is 1 big area.
The second one, which to me is a big powerful tool for HR to use AI and contribute to an organization is the whole bit of informed decision making with data and specifically people did and it is not just the HR people who can use that that insights that AI can provide, but they can take it and democratize it by talking it to the people who need that data on a day-to-day basis to take those decisions.
And AI is throwing up so many such opportunities and just on the people front itself, right when a manager is hiring, if he or she knows, based on various parameters the kind of person he is, he would be successful in that job. And the person that he is hiring, he or she is hiring has those traits. If AI could directly start giving him those insights, the decisions would be so much better.
Today I think in 1/2 an hour 45-minute, people just take some calls, but there’s so many data available over the people about the roles and the jobs which can be used by AI to really help the hiring manager to take a call which will help him.
I think things will change and then the big thing about the employee experience. The whole thing of personalization of various solutions, whether it’s for customers, also for employees, the learning element, the performance elements, all that can be so much personalized for our people within the companies using right AI tools.
I think HR professionals, if they start using AI, they will be able to become much more strategic. The kind of data and insights AI will enable them, not too many people are on their own able to analyze that kind of data.
It’s time to upgrade what HR professionals contribute to the organization. I know that’s what HR is expected to do today. If you go and talk to any CEO, any business leader, they’ll say that ‘we don’t get the right people.’ If we, if I had the right people, I could grow 2X- 3X.
But given that HR and HR heads are becoming extremely important to business, and they would need to free themselves up from all the mundane and operational activities. And get more strategic and AI will help them get there.
They can also enhance the experience of their people by getting the right AI power tools, which will personalize what people want, what employees want? Enhance employee experience.
If HR can start providing more data in the hands of the employees to do their job, regarding the performance, engagement of people to the managers, if the sentiment analysis and predictive analysis in terms of what’s happening with the people and who should be spoken to, I think that’ll have a tremendous impact of what HR would be adding at the at the right levels.
And then finally, I feel the whole thing about learning and development and upskilling, not only making people more technology savvy and AI savvy, but also because that’s important for them to use some of these tools. But also getting them AI enabled tools which will personalize the learning for the employees. I think that’s again something HR can definitely play a big role and employees should be constantly looking to skill themselves.
If they are on top of AI, if they know how to use AI more effectively and get those skills, they’ll be more successful, and the organization will develop. They should build skills around innovation and creativity. Those are again extremely important.
And I think broadly I would say looking at the skills, looking at using these tools and being open for the changes that they would need to bring to themselves and to their teams using these newer technologies which are coming in.
Q5. How AI can be leveraged to improve talent acquisition, employee retention or employee development strategies within your organization.
A. When I was in the in my previous organization previous to previous and those days, we didn’t have AI, but I would ask my team recruitment team to go and search what our customers are having, or our competition is having.
Being in IT and services consulting firm, it was very useful because if I’m working with customer X, if you understand what they themselves are hiring, I’ll be able to build that skill upfront early. So today AI provides a lot of that technology.
If I can parse all the data which is publicly available to all my competition and all my clients about the kind of roles that they are looking for the skills they’re hiring for, I think it is going to be of tremendous value to my business.
And as HR if I am able to build on those skills either internally through learning or through hiring then I’ll be the smartest guy who will be there in front of the customer and would be able to get the right kind of work done for them, add so much value to them. I think that is one even before hiring the stuff that AI can do.
But just on the hiring front, I think that this tremendous ability of AI. Job descriptions only tell a little thing but if through all the historical data that you’ve got, if you’re able to find out what it was, what kind of people either internally or outside were successful. And there are so, so many ways we can find it- LinkedIn data, how the person has grown, how they have, what kind of how long they have been with organizations, etc.
There’s so much of public data available, if you can use all that to find what are the key characteristics of internally and externally for somebody to be successful with these kind of job roles, and then try and find out the candidates that we are sourcing and how does that match happen, I think our hiring success will be so much more, so much more and AI is slowly starting to play a role there so that otherwise there’s so many of mistakes that we make during hiring.
There is no fault of the candidate because they may come from a different culture, their orientation may be different and we do so much of disservice to that candidate who joins us and then is a misfit and similarly to the organization, so much of money and time gets wasted hiring those kinds of people.
So, I think in recruitment we have a big ability of how AI can find us the right candidate even by video analysis and many other analysis that AI is starting to do now during interviews. So, I think that is one big area.
I believe AI will play more and more role on the engagement side and I used this in my previous company. We used to find that there’s no predictive analysis of how engaged people were who are likely to leave.
And what we introduced is we introduced an AI based tool to do milestone-based engagement service- short service and then through that we were able to find out how the mood of this individual is changing over a period of time and then relate it with the others in the group. We created some kind of alert to the HR partner so that they would get this message early and they would engage with these people.
We also started to bring in information of what’s happening with that skill outside. So, we would also know proactively that these are people with these kinds of roles and these kinds of skills which probably are in huge demand.
And if we find that there is some kind of an disengagement on front, early we were building that engagement and where our SLA was to connect with these people in 48 hours and then work with them to find the issues and challenges that they were facing and who create the right solution to engage that individual and people with similar skills or in the team. So, the solution also happened to them.
I think in engagement if you’re able to track engagement of people on an ongoing basis bringing in other data from other sources and AI providing the right insight to people who can make an impact their job partner or the senior business leaders in those teams which is what I had done in the previous company.
We were able to do this for digital organization and in a non-technological company digital organization was very important because we are trying to become digital. But the attrition was very high, engagement levels were not that great because it was not traditionally a technology company. It was more of a telecom company.
I think that needed the insights and then how HR strategically connected with the business. People tried to give them insights and trying to tell them what they should be doing, made it a strategic and definitely added value by engage and enhancing retention of this extremely critical digital talent that we are.
I have absolutely used AI in engagement in my previous companies and I see it has tremendously powerful role in recruitment and it’s already playing a big role in customizing learning.
We all know there are enough tools available in the market. They will be based on your role, based on your level of performance feedback and learning agenda that you and your manager work out, the tool will start recommending courses. So, I think it is exactly like Netflix would do. I think that’s again taking off in a big way. All the core areas of HR, recruitment, retention, learning is all getting covered.
The other one is about career development. In career development internally jobs after a particular time at least for larger companies’ jobs, alerts are sent to individual for internal job. You don’t have to go and figure out from thousands of jobs in a company which is 200- 300 thousand people company, there’s so many jobs that are available. So, you don’t have to find a job outside, you can find it internally. And AI today is able to match many things without destabilizing the manager and the team. You will need to spend some time there and add some value there. You could start getting the right alerts.
AI is being a bit Interesting, yes. Very interesting. I’m totally blown away by the proportion with which AI is changing the entire HR as a function and I guess this is just the start. There’s so much to look forward to.
Q6. There is a bit of a dichotomy in how one should make a decision. On one side of the spectrum, you have a lot of these modern AI based technologies and then on the other side of the spectrum, we’re talking about the human touch that brings in empathy and meaning into relationships or providing that human centric approach.
So how should CHROs strike a balance between streamlining efficiency, using AI, driving innovation versus taking the human centric approach?
A. I strongly believe that human element is so much required. It cannot be just AI which would drive everything. In fact, I don’t know whether this is what our mission statement as a company navigates.
We believe that future is going to be digital, and it is going to be through AI and what Navikenz does is enables human enterprise with artificial intelligence because human enterprise is absolutely the strongest, you cannot beat it and AI only is an enabler.
I strongly believe even in HR and everything else AI needs a lot of hand holding and the biggest one which we didn’t discuss is about the biases. And we know that we spoke about recruitment and the use of AI- it has backfired with a few companies which tried because they didn’t put the human element in it.
Amazon hiring had a lot of biases. They started hiring only males because some analysis of past data showed that males are successful in a given role and AI started generating that kind of solutions and suggestions.
I think the biases need to be tackled up front and that’s where human beings and our own knowledge as a job professionals to come in and make the right changes in technology to bring in the right nuances because technology is really based on what it picks up like in AI- picks up what is outside, what is outside may not be right all the time.
Therefore, you need somebody to think that through. So that to me the biases are critical to be managed upfront and that’s what people can do.
Secondly HRs specifically have extremely difficult jobs. You need to balance the business requirement with the people requirement and that’s where if you just go by data sometimes something may make sense.
For example, during COVID, he knows some of the more genuine companies ensured that they did not file people right. Then we made a few changes to it, but some or the others were not that smart and pathetic.
I think it’s all about using the right sensitivities because finally organizations are here for over and are going to be here for a long period of time. It is just not here and now.
So, human beings, the emotions, these are not what AI is able to replicate yet. I’m not sure whether it will ever be able to replicate the kind of emotions human beings have and some of these sensitivities that we carry. And I think that’s where HR has to be the first frontier of that in any organization.
The tremendous amount of use and emotional intelligence that HR professionals have is extremely important to work along with this technology and AI as we jointly create value for the company.
Q7. Give us an example of literature or a book or a documentary, it could be anything that shaped your leadership journey.
A. One book and one concept which really helped me and probably aligned with my values was Servant Leadership. It was really a transformative book. It introduced the concepts of leadership through serving others.
I really loved reading it because I think it moves from this top-down approach which I think was there for many years and probably exists in some companies.
The Servant Leadership as a concept emphasized the value for empathy which goes to the previous question of AI. When we talked about the importance of empathy, active listening and commitment to the success of the other person, the people that you lead those people that you need and their well-being, their growth, their development is so very important for the overall success of the team and the organization.
I think I love that book. I believe that with the concept of serving leadership, we can achieve higher levels of people engagement, satisfaction and absolutely better organizational success.
Closing Note
Samit’s shared the great insights on AI and human Capital Management. We are sure that everyone would have taken lot of insights from your experience and expertise that he shared.
To all our amazing listeners, thank you for reading the snippets of the CHRO Mindset Podcast. We hope you have found this episode insightful for your HR journey.
Stay tuned, lots of exciting discussions coming up in the weeks to come!