Q1. What would be one piece of advice to younger self at the start of HR career and why?
A: One piece of advice would be an amalgamation of three advice.
You need to worry too much about your future as long as you have the following things in your life:
One, an unsaturable temperament for learning. Two, an attitude that HR is a business partner and not a mere cost center. And three, a manager who is making life tough for you, considers it as life itself, becoming your mentor.
So, these are the three pieces of advice I would like to share with my younger self at the beginning of my career.
Q2. What role does empathy play in effective HR leadership and how do you cultivate it within your team?
A. To begin with, empathy is important, and there are no two ways about it.
There’s no debate there. It isn’t any more important for HR than it is for other functions like finance, marketing, operations. In fact, any other business function requires human interactions.
The frequent cornering of the HR function on empathy has become too predictable. It is not as if HR can be more empathetic than the business ecosystem within which they are performing.
So, either don’t call HR a policing function or don’t expect them to be the empathy police. Having said that, empathy is a very important tool for HR professionals in terms of being able to design the workplace experience for the employees.
For example:
Do you draft policies to enable 98% of the employees who are earnest and are coming to your office to do the work of their life? Or do you want to draft them keeping the 2% in mind who are likely to earn or make use of those policies in a in a dysfunctional kind of a manner?
The task that you have for your team is actually to step into the shoes of the employees when they design frameworks and if that does not work then. Sometimes subjecting the team member to the same proposed framework hits home more often than not, so all in good faith.
It is important, not just important for HR but for everyone.
Q3. How to measure the impact and effectiveness of employee advocacy programs?
A. The infatuation with data can be a double-edged sword.
It is critical to measure the tangible benefits of any program, but it can be harmful in the long run if you overlook the intangible benefits.
Employee advocacy is no different in this respect. The tangibles are all like always. They’re easy to measure. Brand awareness, brand recall, social media reach, customer goodwill enhancement, number of candidate applications for jobs from non-head, hunting sources, employee referral contributions. There are a multitude of such tangible metrics that you can use to find out how your employee advocacy programs are hitting home.
Consider the intangibles, because sometimes these tangibles have an impact that we did not even realize or take into account. While measuring the impact, brand trust frameworks must be considered.
When talking about brand trust and loyalty, then there are the dark social channels which you are not privy to like the messenger groups whatever conversations happen there. There is no way unless until obviously you are scheming the system. There is no way you can find out how many mentions your program is getting so.
How do you find that out?
Employer advocacy leads to a lot of employee engagement benefits. Also, when your employees start to talk about you as a brand, then the employee engagement level has to be good. Otherwise, they will, whatever they say will be a very superficial kind of thing. So, with employee engagement, productivity enhancement comes in. With productivity, enhancement and employee engagement, employee retention comes in.
Revenue per employee goes, because there is a correlation established already between engaged employees and productivity, thereby declining infant attrition in your organization. So, all these things need to be taken care of. Don’t just get infatuated with tangibles, there are benefits of intangible also. And try and find a way to assess those.
Q.4 How to engage and empower employees during times of organizational change and foster a sense of ownership and commitment to that transformation?
A. Communication is central to building a successful organizational or change management transformation.
And it starts with communicating the need for change, the expected benefits of the upcoming change, communicating what will change and by when. Then comes the participation of the employees in the change.
How much?
See, if you perceive as an employee, if you perceive yourself as being at the mercy of the change event, then your engagement with the change would be very passive. In fact, you might also think of yourself as the victim of that change. It is important to take the employee inputs into the change agenda that this is what is changing- What are your thoughts?
And when you start seeking thoughts, there are three clear groups which are going to emerge. One would be the active deterrents who are actually looking at this change in a very unfriendly kind of a manner with a lot of hesitation and suspicion.
There would be that group which would be able to tap into the business benefit and business advantage that this change is bringing. And there would be a third group, which is your passive group, right? If you are inactive about it, and if you’re not thoughtful enough, then those folks who are suspicious about the change will influence the neutral folks.
So you need to take initiative and you need to make sure that the elements in the employee group which are actually embracing the change and ready to embrace the change, they are being brought into the conversation upfront and use those as your flag bearers of change so that the neutral group can be brought over to your site- the change champions. And when you communicate, make sure that you’re communicating through these change champions in equal measure when you’re designing posters, awareness campaigns and all that stuff. So do use them. Then comes the change implementation part.
So here it is important that you recognize and reward the groups which have actually embraced the change and started delivering results on the expected lines aligned with the business agenda. When you create such heroes, that’s when the following increases and your change actually starts moving at a fast, faster pace.
Once the change is done and dusted, it has become a part of your normal life. It is very important to build your own credibility. As an organization to go back to the employees and tell them what has the change achieved for you and be transparent about the good and the bad so that they trust you when the next change initiative comes in.
Q.5 As HR technology continues to advance, are there some ethical considerations that organizations should keep in mind while using- automation and AI in their HR processes?
A. The topmost concern is privacy and data protection.
The level of data access some of these latest interviewing platforms have. The employees’ health and behavioral patterns might be considered as an exacerbated concern because of AI, but it’s not a new concern by any means.
So, anyone who has tried to bring in personality traits into, say, a development Center for identifying your next level of frontline managers from your individual contributors, you would know of the concerns that the participants have, and that are going to play out in a bigger measure as AI takes over.
What were the concerns could be? What would the manager think about me based on my personality? Would they have access to everything that has been assessed? Will the confidentiality of my data be maintained? Will my manager take it as the absolute truth and then impact my career progression?
Even if the drawn of personality outline is not a true match to my real personality, who all will get to see it beyond my manager within the organization?
So, when you bring in artificial intelligence, these are the typical concerns.
AI interventions in HR processes should draw a clear line between behavioral estimation and passing a judgment. The line needs to be drawn. As long as that line is held sacrosanct, it can be a beneficial addition to the overall landscape.
You just need to look at some of the social media hearings that are happening in the US Senate. And one thing that you will realize is AI isn’t perfect, neither is it.
Above biases and elements of uncertainty, that can really be a deal breaker, it is best to start with automating the operational aspects of HR and leave the more human aspects and interactions to the professionals.
So, there is this ever-expanding space of AI. Do you think a chatbot, which is depending on historical data and natural language processing algorithms would be able to adjust to that landscape while drafting responses or interacting with individuals who identify in a certain manner? What objectives will they use?
It would be foolish to actually think of AI as a supplement.
In place of good HR practices, as long as it is being used as a tool at the hands of an expert surgeon, it can give excellent results.
Q 6. How to strike the right balance between leveraging automation to streamline HR processes and ensuring personalized employee experiences?
Because somewhere down the line, there’s always this competence or kind of competition going in between these two things.
How to enhance employee interactions without sacrificing the human connection?
A. Let me start with a disclaimer if an HR Professional feels that their employees can only provide candid, genuine feedback in an anonymous setup, stop thinking about AI and start worrying about the transparency and trust in your organization. Do not hide behind automation. It will never be a substitute for a heart-to-heart talk.
Let us list certain good areas where HR automation can really be of help. Think of the career page that your company website has. Think of how easy it is to apply for an open position.
At the root of this entire capability is an algorithm that is able to parse any form of a resume and auto populate the careers field, basically the application fields which are required. Very few organizations are able to do that brilliantly. So, it would be one space wherein you would be able to do a lot of great work if you bring in automation in a good measure.
Candidate analytics is the next piece populating candidate data. Once the candidate is onboard, you have made the offer and all that stuff. Automated offer letters, right? Automated background verification, triggers, analytics, annotation, this forecasting based on the various parameters that are there. Social media integration? Why not?
If you have an internal news board, you are able to integrate it with external social media with enough control in your hands on what to share and what not to share. Collecting feedback, gathering analytics from internal HR operational sources and creating HRIS.
HRIS is not only about the input for the HR team, not as a final output because HRMS will give you all these bar graphs and all those trends. The context needs to be put in by the HR professional. So, these are some of the great areas where HR automation can work brilliantly.
Some areas that are not recommended include- when you’re talking, planning your HR automation pieces, exit interviews. For that matter, any high impact touch points like birthday wishes, work anniversary wishes or life events counseling, leadership coaching, mentoring, personal development plans, performance improvement plans. There are various legalities also involved when you talk about performance improvement plans. So, it’s best actually limit hour automation in these fields.
A couple of mind blown kind of experiences with HR automation:
In the event of unfortunate event of hospitalization, the most frustrating part for an employee is the discharge process.
The discharge processes being estimated in the morning at around 10 or 11 and finally getting discharged at 10 or 11 in the night because bill settlements are pending, preapprovals are pending, all those things are pending. So brilliant implementation of HR automation was when an organization actually designed a countdown timer to discharge that employees could access and a real time update on where the bill settlements were, right. This is one brilliant piece where automation comes to the forefront.
Another implementation could be preapproval of a hospitalization claim based on certain medical consultations that were uploaded through the mobile phone camera. And the approval happened within 30 seconds. Automation deployed in the right areas can actually be a great game changer for human resource function.
But you have to be very mindful of it. You keep drawing that line again and again.
Q 7. What is the one literature or any book that can shape HR leadership journey and significantly impact way of thinking and way one takes their journey ahead?
A. There are two to help you counterbalance. It is very easy to get swayed by a work of literature and then start implementing it without actually knowing the other side.
Management philosophy has mostly been a Western concept. This is a game changing book by Laszlo Box Work Rules. He’s the Ex-VP of Google Human Resources. A study in how to break silos. A study in how to actually be an HR employee advocate, not employee advocacy, but how to be an employee advocate.
And because it is so besotted with the Google way of things, the other book piece of literature that would counterbalance this view and that is Business Sutras by Dev Dutt Patnaik.
So, there is the Indian way of doing things. There’s this jazzy Western way of doing things.
Try and find the middle path between these two because there are certain beautiful allegories drawn in the Dev Dutt book wherein, he talks about business being a yagna. And what are the things that go in? What are the things that come out of that process? I think it’s a fairly enlightening deal.
These two books basically create a philosophy for personal path. But just don’t go by the books read them, see what they’re doing, but over a period of time, work about and try and see how you can amalgamate these in your offering.
Closing Note
Manan’s invaluable insights and elimination on the strategic mindset of CHRO has truly inspired us. We are sure a lot of our listeners would have gotten some great pearls of wisdom.
And most importantly, there was the practicality of perspectives that really stood up. His support means the world to us, and we eagerly look forward to presenting more captivating stories with renowned HR leaders in the future.
Until our next exciting episode of the CHRO Mindset Podcast, take care and stay connected.
Thank you.