The Hindu Opportunities HR Conclave (held in Chennai on August 18) grappled with three topics that have come into sharp focus in the post-pandemic world — “employee wellness”, “talent retention” and “improving HR practices with new technologies”.
During the pandemic, employee wellness seemed to put most other considerations in the shade. Organisations were being put through a litmus test — how far would they go in assisting their employees deal with issues arising out of the pandemic? The global crisis turned out to be an inflexion point from where employee assistance programmes began to assume a different dimension, more holistic, more empathetic and more personalised.
This new idiom of caring was a leitmotif in ideas that came up during the session on employee engagement and well-being.
Vinay Kamath, senior associate editor, The Hindu BusinessLine, asked the panellists about the employment engagement initiative in their respective company that struck a strong chord with employees.
Swarna Sudha, head of Talent Development, Tata Consultancy Services spoke of engagement vibrancy index. “Built post-Covid”, the Index had health and well being as one of the cardinal parameters, she said.
She observed initiatives promoting health and well-being were being driven by two states, seemingly opposite but essentially complementary. One was the state of autonomy, and the other, collaboration. Here is an activity that illustrates this template. The company launched “Billion Steps Challenge”, open to employees and their families. Together with their family, the participating employee had to achieve a billion steps, she said.
Panel members who took part in the discussion on ‘Employee Engagement and Well Being’
Meghna Bhatt, AVP, HR, Tube Investment of India Ltd noted the HR team in the company had been working with every manager to ensure they saw engagement not as a concept, but a workable, everyday process. The department worked with all the 190 managers in the company. Following an exercise spanning eight months, every manager had an engagement scorecard. Meghna said the company’s managing director met with every manager who had a scorecard, and had a discussion. It communicated the idea that the leader had to reach out to subordinates to make engagement real.
Bharathan Prahalad, director and head of talent acquisition, Gigamon, India, revealed that engagement in his company had partly been defined by efforts to step out of the constraining influences of polices and processes. He remarked that polices and processes could be a box restricting expression. With the modern-day workplace being a converging point of different generations with wildly differing worldviews, policies and processes needed to have flexibility built into them. The work environment should be such that irrespective of the generation they belonged to — Baby Boomer, Gen X, Gen Y or Gen Z — they should feel happy about stepping into the office, with a TGIM (Thank God It’s Monday) mindset, Bharathan said.
The session “Retaining Talent”, moderated by Srihari Annaiah, head HR & IR, L&T Valves Limited, had the panellists discussing the impact of monetary and non-monetary incentives offered by companies.
The panelists of ‘Retaining Talent’
Satish Xavier, head, HR at G Square Housing, said his company put a premium on training line managers in leadership skills. Following this training, it put the onus on these line managers to retain the talent entrusted with them.
Ganapathy Subramanian, CHRO at Sundaram Home Finance Ltd, said building a strong organisational culture was primary as well as central to having a robust retention strategy.
Ravishankar, HR Advisor/Consultant, listed various initiatives that could be part of a retention strategy, including a quarterly review of salaries, flexible work hours and fostering growth in the employees.
The session ‘New technology trends and changes in HR landscape’, moderated by Subha Pandian, founder-director — AGUA, underlined how new technological tools helped eliminate human error in assessment of performance and attitude.
Charles Godwin, HR Leader and Public Speaker, Zoho spoke about the “unconventional hiring process” followed by the company with amazing results. Godwin noted that a good number — close to 35% — of Zoho’s employee base had not been to a college. The company started an initiative by picking a bunch of school and college dropouts and diploma students and trained them in what was relevant in the industry. The flexibility given to the leadership team to hire people brought in different talent. “A security guard at our office now sits next to the CEO and designs software,” said Godwin.
Prasad Poosarla, CTO at BI Worldwide India, highlighted algorithms that spell out whether a manager is equitable.
Aditya Narayan Mishra, managing director and CEO at CIEL, said technology had made it easy to understand talent and the kind of talent that would prove beneficial to an organisation. “Organisations are able to customise tools based on their requirements,” said Mishra.
Published - August 23, 2023 08:47 am IST
