Q1. Now with the pandemic at our back, such radical technologies are coming into the ecosystem, whether it’s ChatGPT or AI. How do you think the role of HR has changed in current times?
A. I think that’s a very interesting question and a lot has changed in the last five years. The ever-changing technology as mentioned about ChatGPT, AI, ML, robotics and everything.
With the change in the way we work or the way this pandemic forced us to start working in a different kind of format which has changed for us for HR as a function.
I think a couple of things which come to my mind is- one is that at least now at a workplace we are run going through those times where we have multiple generations.
Your or employees who belong to multiple generations as part of a group or as a part of a team. So, whether it is Gen Z, Gen X, Millennials and being part of cohesive team. It’s a task for somebody in HR to be able to manage the expectations, to keep these set of people motivated because they’ve actually belonged to different generations and different things motivate different people.
What motivates A? A baby boomer or a Gen C or a GenX doesn’t really know what motivate A millennial. So that’s one challenge where we constantly as an HR have to be on our toes and also continuously keep looking at ways to motivate and engaging people is big change which has come up.
The second thing is that how do you is the changing landscape of technology? How do you keep yourself abreast of how things have changed or how things are changing. Whether starting from AI, ML, blockchain, metaverse and ChatGPT and whole lot of things.
There are times where these bubbles come up and then they burst. But you have to realize that when do you pick up that bubble and how? How far do you run with that?
“Be able to run and keep pace with this fast-changing technology to provide an enhanced employee experience, better insights or advisory to your business stakeholders because that’s important as part of your HR.”
The third thing which comes to my mind is essentially the changing of the type of the way we work or the future of work in HR or the hybrid work where a lot of us are working partially from home, freshly from the office. There are some companies who are completely working from the office, some working completely from home. Now, how do you keep your employees?
“Stay connected, keep them engaged, keep them glued to what is the vision, what is the culture of the organization? Because if you’ re not meeting them on a very regular basis, it poses a challenge.”
Q2. Let’s shift gears from these disruptive changes and delve into how organizations effectively should manage employee engagement during times of change or uncertainty.
A. I would say that’s a very pertinent question because I myself have gone through 2 MNCs in my career. Being part of entities, which got acquired by another organization, I have personally experienced them both as an employee, as an HR.
So, I can provide that perspective from both angles.
I think first we need to understand that typically when a business gets acquired, it gets acquired for the product or services which they are providing to the OR they are offering as a company. And the acquiring company always sees the potential of the product or that services which is being offered and based on that the company gets acquired and importantly it’s the set of employees who are either providing those services or are involved in production of those products or marketing of those products or whatever that mechanism is.
“It’s very important to keep the employees engaged because invariably if you pick up any merger and acquisition it would never happen that a company got acquired and the entire employee strength was replaced. The employee strength remains the same but what is important is how you keep them engaged and from my experience, the most critical aspect of that engagement is clear communication.”
Communication is not only when an acquisition is announced or during the acquisition is announced. It’s a long-term process. It has to run through months and quarters even after the acquisition has happened because it’s a long trail till people start feeling comfortable in the newly acquired entity or newly merged entity or newly formed entity.
Open and consistent communication is important but more important is what do we communicate. One thing which my experience tells me is clearly communicating the business reason why this merger or acquisition is happening.
Thats very, very important because when you clearly articulate that this is the reason why this business is being acquired or is being sold to another company and this is how it’s going to impact or help the this business grow in terms of revenue, financials and this is how you as employees are going to make that impact it. It’s a big game changer. Because when they see that this there is a strong reason why this change is happening. People relate to it.
And the second important aspect is that in any acquisition, the first thing any employee is concerned about is what will happen to my job. Is it being I am going to lose my job? Am I going to lose my prospect of getting promotion? But how is it going to shape my career? How is it going to change my employee benefits or my salaries.
These are very, very simple and basic questions as long as we were able to answer those questions in the manner I think it, it helped us. It’s at times the employees may not be always looking for answers which they want to hear. But they are looking for an answer- hey, as part of this acquisition, this is what is possible. This is what is not possible because that’s how the deal is structured.
At least you are transparent but not addressing that question completely because it may have an element of response which the employee’s not ready to hear.
I think the other aspect- when this change is to be driven, first your leaders and managers have to be informed because first you have to communicate the change to your leaders and managers and address their queries and questions. Once they are convinced and satisfied, they are able to relay the information back to their teams, which is when we went to the employees.
Because having a one town hall where all leaders, managers and employees communicated one information or one news it’s a disaster. Typically, if a colleague or an employee gets to know about an exchange, their immediate reaction is going to their manager and ask for clarification and if the manager is equally clueless then you’ve lost the game.
And one last thing I will say, and this was more around how do you communicate with your colleagues. When you are merging or getting acquired, as HR you have to work collaboratively with the other companies HR and making sure that there is as much as protection of the employee, benefits of harmonization of policies, harmonization of your scales, grades, titles.
So if HR does a good job of that harmonization and communicates back to the employees that, hey if you were a band X in the previous organization, you are actually now a band Y which is an equivalent to the new organization. You haven’t lost it. The employee gets that satisfaction.
Q3. It’s very important for HR leaders to ensure that they are up on their toes when it comes to strategic decision making.
We’d love to know what are the most significant challenges and opportunities that you foresee in the field of HR analytics. How can organizations effectively navigate and leverage HR analytics to strategic decision making and improve their overall HR effectiveness?
A. I think talking about the challenges in the field of HR analytics- all of us understand that the most important ingredient of any kind of analytics is data.
And in this case, it’s the HR data which is sensitive in nature. Now that data could be your hiring data, performance, compensation, demographics, engagement results, employee turnover, leaves data. The list is endless. The first aspect is the availability of this data in a consistent, reliable and complete form is a challenge. That’s a big challenge right now.
And I’m talking from my experience that even I’m not talking about small companies, but some of the large organizations run into that challenge right now. Why is it a challenge?
At times what happens is that the data is being captured, but it is not complete, which means that we only started capturing that data, let’s say about one year ago. If you want to do a historical analysis and you don’t have too much historical data to do your analysis on or do your prediction based on that, it is incomplete or not available in a form where it can be coherent for somebody to analyze it.
I think availability and quality of data are key challenges. Now with data being available, the second thing is how secure your data is because it is sensitive information. Aren’t there enough security measures, access controls, encryption in place or not.
If your HR data analytics is done by a developer or your technology intervention is done by a developer, you don’t want your data to be seen by somebody who’s not from HR.
So, encryption of data is also very important and then I think in some of the geographies, some of the data protection laws are far more stringent than few others. So that’s why all this becomes very, very, very important. Now with your data being available and secure, the third thing that comes to the play is who uses that data. HR uses the data.
Till now most of our focus as HR professionals, whether it during our B school, whether during our trainings and the organizations around how do you address the human side of a conversation, be on the softer aspects, soft skills, sensitive conversations but it is increasingly becoming important for HR to be comfortable and understand the data part of it.
Now if as an HR professional, you should know how to read the data, how to interpret it, how to visualize the data and how that data can be over and two in the form of a story which you can use and insight to present your stakeholder so that they can make an informed decision.
HR role should have at least a basic understanding and basic intent to understand this. I think the last piece is the integration of data. Data is spread across different tools and applications. At times it is in spreadsheets. If the data has to be analyzed, it has to be created, it has to be brought together in some kind of data hub or a single repository from where the data can be extracted, and the analysis can be done.
HR analytics has a very strong capability to allow organizations to make decisions. Now whether it is hiring decisions, promotion decisions, about what kind of policies are working and not working, what kind of benefits are being used by employees, not used by employees.
I think the journey to HR analytics starts by addressing what problem you are trying to solve. Suppose I want to know 10 benefits which I am offering to an employee.
If you have to find the answer to that, you will need to have data related to those 10 benefits that are being offered, the benefits which are being used by your employees. Once you have that data then you can start analyzing it and slicing and dicing it. Maybe it may change from country to country, it may change from the age group of the employees. Some age groups may be using one, the other age group may not be using the other one. So, if you want to do that, then it’s only when you have the data that you can make that assessment or you can make that decision right.
When it comes to your hiring needs, if you want to assess how good has been for a particular skill with the next kind of experience. Now if your application tracking system or if your talent acquisition tools are not capturing that kind of data, then you cannot do that assessment and you will continue to make the same mistakes if that kind of hiring is not serving the purpose.
Another example is if you see what kind of people, let’s say when people join in and after that they go through the onboarding or induction and before they get on to the production floor, what kind of people who have a higher performance trajectory and how do I link it with what kind of people are being hired or which B schools or which colleges or which geographies or which locations.
If you don’t have the data, then you can’t compare it, you can’t analyze it. I think the opportunities are immense, but again, the starting point is availability of the data.
Q4. Let’s now shift our focus to the challenges and opportunities in HR technology. We would love to know your perspectives on how organizations can leverage HR technology to HR practices and processes
A. Whether you have to drive an efficiency or an automation, HR is involved in lot of repetitive and manual processes and if those can be automated and digitized, to an extent some consultative part of an HR advisor job is done.
For example, if an employee reaches out to me to say, “hey, can you tell me in my global transfer policy, will my parents be covered, really my household goods be covered as part of the, as part of the relocation of goods.” Now I will have to go back and look into my policy because I don’t of course.
Now if those are currently being automated in the form of bots, answering those questions where you have a chat bot, where you put a punch in a question, the bot goes back in the background, scans the policy, extracts the relevant information and boom! Here you give the answer.
Efficiency and automation go hand in hand for your employee experience whether it is an employee service portal or a manager self-service portal. Those are just helping the employees perform very basic transactions on their own whether it is a manager change or a cost center change or an enrollment into a benefit.
If I want to generate a letter for my loan application with the bank, if HR technology is available, of course that makes my life easier.
On one hand where you use HR technology, but on the other hand as I talk about the bot where you have an advanced version. You don’t have to take those five steps and go into the HR portal and get the information or apply for a leave. You go to a bot and say, “Hey apply 2 days of planned leave for me on 15th and 16th June” and the bot goes back into your time tracking system, applies that and come back said “OK, hey done.”
It is also getting extended to our learning and development environment. I think all of us know the way we learn has completely changed from the way it used to be.
When I think about 5-6 years ago, when most of our training used to be instructor led and then we used to have something like a CBT is like computer-based training. Now I think the concept of instructor led training has been completely vanishing where bite sized learning modules are available on your mobile or your device or your iPad. Anytime, anywhere which you want to use.
As I said, technology has immense potential. I mean, it depends on how organizations pick that up and use it.
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Q5. It will be of immense interest to aspiring HR leaders and folks who have just started their journey in the HR function. Any tips or advice for HR professionals who are looking to build effective relationships with their HR leaders or their senior leaders and stakeholders in their organization?
A. I think three- four points which I have tried and practiced. These have worked well as an HR professional.
It is very important for us to understand the business, what the business which we are in is. If you are supporting an IT organization, you should know what the business of that IT organization is. Or even if you’re supporting let’s say a sales organization or a marketing organization or a finance organization, what are the goals, what are the vision mission of that organization.
For example, if the organization is on a growth path, you as an HR will have a different role to play because you will be partnering with your business on how to do your strength, how do you increase the employee strength if that’s what the requirement is. How do you sharpen your acquisition machinery How do you bring people on board, how your L&D or talent development team works in preparing them for the roles which they have been hired for?
Similarly, business HR will have to work on assimilating employees into larger teams. The focus is very different because the vision, the trajectory is different, the approach is different.
On the other hand, let’s say if it’s a gritty growth kind of a scenario then as in HR you have to understand that because if there is cost pressure then how can HR participate or partner with the business to identify cost saving opportunities. How can we do more with less? How can you support the organization in achieving that particular objective?
The other thing, again, I think is communication. Very, very critical. Very, very critical.
As an HR professional, if you have to build your repo, you will only be able to do it if you are talking to your stakeholders regularly and it takes time for the repo to get built. Our conversations should not be restricted to only times when it is performance appraisal times or when it’s an increment time or when it is a promotion time. It has to be throughout the year.
The role of HR is changing from more of a control to facilitate or to support and enable.
I would suggest if you had a growth trajectory, why don’t you go and start hiring people from B schools and then eventually grow them so that you can also show them growth and eventually you can build that pipeline of strong people over a period of time.
I’m just giving an example.
If you have that kind of understanding and if you are able to give that insight, you build credibility. But that only happens if you’re talking to your leaders. If you only talk to them three times a year, Sorry! You lost the game, right?
Another very important and my personal experiences how do you adapt yourself to the way your leader communicates? Some leaders will like e-mail communication, they will talk to respond back to you. Some people may not be so prompt with e-mail. So, you should be able to identify that, be able to comfort it, be comfortable to pick up the phone and talk to them and get things done. That’s very important. That builds trust. That adds to the credibility.
The other very important aspect involves dealing with and handling sensitive and confidential information, and the demonstration of integrity.
How do we handle that piece of information and at the same time you are able to communicate that if there is sensitive information you have to maintain confidentiality because it should not become a talk of the town right.
There have been situations long back in the past where some of the business leaders did kind of, I would say divulge some critical or some sensitive information and of course HR had a role to play. So, HR was taken to task that how can you have, how can your business leader divulge the sensitive information so demonstrating integrity not only yourself but to be able to guide and advise your leaders to do that.
“And the last is as I state as a very famous phrase was that “You have got a seat on the table.”What I typically, at least in my guidance to my team is that you have got a seat at the table. It does not really matter what your band is or grade. If you are a senior manager and your business stakeholder is a vice president, it does not matter. Your job is to advise the business to do what is right and what is wrong.”
Don’t get confused or don’t get impressed or don’t get flustered by the fact that how do I tell this to him because he’s a vice president. At the end of the day, he and you are both employees of the organization. What you are trying to do is for the benefit of the organization, for the benefit of the employees which you support, for the benefit of the business. And if you need to go and correct somebody, you have my support, and the organization will support you. And thankfully till now it has worked.
So, I think these are a few things which come to my mind and for somebody who wants to know how to build credibility or how to build a rapport with the stakeholders.
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Q6. For having discussed building effective relationships with stakeholders, let’s now turn to the power of influential literature. Can you share a book that has greatly influenced your leadership journey and inspired your approach to HR as a function?
A. The book which I read almost 10 years ago, I think is a book by Dave Wolrich and Wayne Brockbank, The HR Value proposition.
It talks about various aspects of handling your business realities, your stakeholders which are those HR practices which add value. How do you build an HR strategy? What is the role of HR professionals?
I think that book has really made an impact and it’s a good book with a lot of actionable within. And if anybody wants to kind of pick it up, I will say go and read through because it has not only the insights from these two authors but also has some really good actionable, where you can go and kind of action them and kind of implement the learning.
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Closing Note
We thank Amit Mohla for sharing their invaluable insights and shedding light on the strategic mindset of CHROs. His expertise and vision are truly inspiring.
Thank you for reading and joining us on this journey to uncover the secrets behind shaping modern workplaces. We appreciate your continued support and look forward to bringing you more captivating discussions with renowned HR leaders in the future.
Until next time, take care and we’ll bring you on another exciting episode of the CHRO Mindset Podcast.