With more and more CEOs across the globe talking about the changing business dynamics in a rapidly-evolving new world order, HR leaders also need to change. But are they changing fast enough? This was the topic of a spirited discussion at a recent NHRDN’s Human Capital Conclave
Former US President John F Kennedy once said,"Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." Until recently HR debates in India rarely touched on future emerging trends in the global HR domain. Most debates focused on a few standard topics such as talent management, talent retention, engagement, building culture, building a leadership pipeline and so on.
But with growing realization that the world is changing faster than ever before and that change has become the 'new normal', the focus of these debates has also started changing. One such held recently in Gurgaon--as part of the National Human Resource Development Network's 4th Human Capital Conclave 2016 -- witnessed a high-powered panel discussion, lasting about 90 minutes, which delved deep into the million dollar question: What role will HR play in this constantly changing and ever- evolving workplace?
It also touched upon other allied questions: How well equipped are our organisations to navigate the transformative changes and emerge with a competitive edge? How sweeping global forces are reshaping workplaces in India? Is the increasing focus on organisation design, leadership and company culture, and the steady rise of analytics and digitization heralding a new era for HR? The panellists also discussed the role millennials are playing in this evolving New World Order, operating under the influence of disruptive forces (like People Analytics, Digital HR, the Internet, etc) which are mandating change not only at the workplace but also in the way work is done.
Chaired by Deloitte's Senior Director (Human Capital Global Leader), Jeff Schwartz, the theme of this highly engaging discussion was titled, “Business leaders on the changing role of HR in the rapidly evolving New World." The panel consisted of three top CEOs from the corporate world including Hitesh Oberoi, MD & CEO of Info Edge; Ashish Bhandari, CEO of GE Oil & Gas (South Asia); and Sumit Mitra, MD, Central Business Services of the British Telecom (BT) Group. Over 200 HR leaders attended the session.
In his opening remarks, Jeff observed that while the world is changing and business leaders are changing, nobody talks as to how this change is taking place, what challenges we face, are we in sync with this change, and whether each one of us is changing fast enough. To find out, he laid out a set of questions. “I first want the three panellist CEOs to give us an understanding of how their business landscape is changing and then answer the following questions:
Ashish Bhandari: My company, US multinational major GE is in all aspects of infrastructure that you can think of. Recently we won an order to put up a locomotives plant in Bihar. The project involves building 1000 locomotives over ten years in Bihar, setting up a factory in Bihar's Marhowrah. While 100 locomotives will be imported, the rest will be manufactured here as part of Prime Minister Modi's Make in India initiative. The problem we are facing right now in Bihar is rather unique. It is all about multiplicity of functions over there. The Marhowrah project involves a cost of about Rs.2,052 crores and apart from creating thousands of jobs, it would also give a fillip to local ancillary industries that will be required to service this huge locomotive plant.
Since everybody there wants to make profit and becoming local will help our own growth, we've tried to get into the weeds. But getting anything done in Bihar is not easy. Here everything you do requires multiple functions, multiple geographies and multiple points to come together to deliver things. It's not a 'command and control' kind of situation where somebody sitting there says, go and do this, and it gets done.Everyone works in a matrix, says how do I get out of it? But that's the reality of the world you work in. It's a whole flatter world and information is not easily available, but what you do with the information makes all the difference-all of these play out in the real world and challenge us to do more. I tell my colleagues in GE that it's like a 100-year-old banyan tree where you have a million roots coming out of it but you don't know which is the primary trunk that's giving life. You have got no one single root, no single trunk, and no eco-system where you try and do things well by yourself.
Hitesh Oberoi: For us, the world has been a very different place ever since 2008 happened when we had a dream run as a company. The influence continues to run, as besides owning India's largest job provider company, Naukri.com, we also own other internet properties like Jeevansathi.com, Shiksha.com, Naukrigulf.com and 91acre. com and have stakes in many other internet businesses. We've also invested in Zomato, the online restaurant search providing company. So, for us, we have a dream run since 2008 and then, of course we had, like everybody else, a very tough time for a couple of years and then things looked like as if we're back on track and started doing well again. In the interim there suddenly was a of sort rush for private equity and venture capital money which came into this country in a big way. Most of them were focused on investing in engineering and technology start-ups. We all know how, for the last four years, Flip-kart's name appears in the Economic Times almost every day.So, suddenly we saw, from no action to massive action, very uncertain environment, very volatile environment and again things seem to have changed in the last six months and now there is a talk of things slowing down, funds drying up, the world not being the same ever again and stuff like that. So, again, it has become a very volatile and uncertain environment. The one thing that worries us also is the fear of the dotcom bust -- which we've seen and weathered with our new brands like Jeevansaathi.com and 99 acres.com, to name a few. The other thing which worries us is about our space.Like everyone else, we're also cautious about technological disruptions. Incidentally, Naukri is today regarded as India's largest job search site and is now about 19 years old. There was actually no Google when we started. That was the first major disruption we faced in our industry. Then there was Facebook. That was another disruption in our space, and then there was Mobile. Every five years, we have something or the other happening which disrupts our business. So, like we disrupted the offline space some 20 years ago, we also have somebody or the other disrupting our space every five years. We don't know where the next disruption is coming from, probably it will come from one of these startups which have been getting funded well in the past couple of years, but we don't know who they are and what they will look like. These are some of the things we worry about in our space.
Sumit Mitra: We have entirely different sort of problems in the telecom space. If you look back to around 2008-2009, BT as a company had a 1.6 billion write off. The global financial crisis of 2008 had resulted in the near-collapse of our group. So, it is better to understand how we started off from that loss of 1.6 billion than from a company which started in 1860. It was a big challenge for us, we had to change and transform the way we operated across the globe. In the last six years, we had to take out around five and half billion pounds net cost of our business and that was a difficult thing. So, from a business challenge perspective, we've evolved as a business significantly. We've moved into the television space. Who would ever know that British Telecom, which is fundamentally a telecom company, now has BT Sports which is a very popular TV channel? We have our own platform. We're having BT TV. We're delivering broadband. But our challenge now is very different. Number one is bugging in the regulatory space. In UK, because of its regulator, the Ofcom, which manages the broadcast and telecom space, we're losing around 400 million pounds revenue a year.We're incurring this huge loss because of regulation every year. So, if we have to stay flat, we have to increase our business to the tune of 400 million pounds every year. On top of that, the new data laws that will govern big data privacy and security, which will be operational in 2018, will also have a huge impact on how we manage our global workforce. And, finally, I'll quote from the chairman of my company. I asked him very recently, now that we've transformed our business since 2008 and our share prices have gone up eight and a half times, how would you mark us? You know, we're in broadband, we're in IT, we're in telecom, sports, mobile, wi-fi, retail wireless services and so many other areas, how would you mark us? He said, "six and a half out of ten." I was very, very surprised. I asked, "Why would you do that?" He said, our biggest challenge is, how do we improve our consumer experience in the consumer space and in the BT business space? "We badly need to improve that and unless we get to a 7-1/2 or 8 out of 10 in customer expectation and customer satisfaction, we can't rate ourselves among the top companies of the world.This is because our business is customer experience-based, so we are never going to get nine out of ten." So, our biggest business challenge in the next two years, as I see it is, how do we improve our customer intimacy and improve our customer experience, especially in the consumer market. In our broadband, in our telephone line, telecom space, how do we improve the experience of our customers who are using the technology for the first time? Who were the traditional BT customers in the last 20 years? That's our biggest challenge.
Ashish Bhandari: I'll answer this question in two parts. The first relates to the war for talent for GE wherein, for example, if you want a sales person in a traditional role, today you'll find him easily in India, relative to, say, five-six years ago. But there is a big risk if we leave it at that. At GE, we've been trying to bring in industrial internet in digital format in a really, really big way.We're putting in billions of dollars in trying to create a digital part of GE which would be the world's first industrial operating system. We want to be among the leaders in the fast-growing "industrial internet of things" market. Our aim is to help organisations in industries such as aviation, healthcare, energy and transportation deal with the vast amount of data being generated as sensors are attached to everything from medical equipment to aircraft engines. In October- November last year, I went to attend a course in leadership at GE's Crotonville training centre in New York. It's a wonderful place, where 90% of managers who go there for the course have worked for GE all through their lives. But this time around, when I went there, I found that 30% of the class was new. Many of them had worked for less than 12 months, but everybody was an expert in IT or technology, and was bringing technology into data analytics and data sciences.
In our broadband, in our telephone line, telecom space, how do we improve the experience of our customers who are using the technology for the first time? Who were the traditional BT customers in the last 20 years? That's our biggest challenge- Sumit Mitra
No wonder, I came back from that training completely shaken. I realised, if I didn't change, my role as CEO would be gone in a very short time! That was a real wake up moment for me and I'm now trying to learn about technology from an information point of view. So, war for talent is massive in GE as we're competing with all the dotcoms of the world. We've put up a massive technology centre in San Ramon in California where we're hiring. In its ads for candidates, you'll see how GE is making fun of itself in this war for talent.
The second part of my answer is more fundamental because when we hire people, many a time we realise that we're not getting the best. Yet we try to upgrade their skills by providing them top-class training and then to retain talent, we offer them programs like HealthAhead (which is GE's global wellbeing program), Women's Network (which is meant to accelerate women's advancement through sharing information about best practices, experiences and leadership development, to name a few) and Work from Home (which gives employees freedom to work from anywhere) and a variety of things which obviously creates a lot of good strain on the organisation.
Hitesh Oberoi:Ashish is right when he says we don't wear a tie to work but we have to compete with companies whose CEOs wear shorts to work (laughs)! We've been in the talent space -- in the sense that our Naukri platform, having 55% market share, is currently used by nearly 60,000 companies to hire people every year. We've been seeing what is happening not just with us, but with a lot of other companies over the years. So, from the talent stand point, I don't think, things are as bad as they were from 2003 to 2007-08 when India was actually growing at 9-9.5% per annum and nobody was able to hire people, irrespective of which sector, which space, which market and which business you were in because the market was such. HR bosses of companies used to tell us in Bangalore that guys were resigning by sending just an SMS and do not turn up for work the next day, they would abscond and would have four to five job offers at any point in time.These guys, company bosses would tell us, were very, very rude. These were the things that HR managers used to complain all the time. In fact, they used to ask us that we should not keep their career sketches in our database, and that we must black-list them be-cause they deserve to suffer. The situation is not as bad today, because India has slowed down a bit as it is not growing at 9.5% and war for talent is not so acute. More people are available today. We just have to look around for them. But the situation is very bad in some pockets. There are sectors and industries which are hot. In our space, for example, it is impossible to hire people and you were lucky to retain them till about six months ago because everybody was hiring. It was almost impossible to get good talent. Even today, as I speak, it is very hard to get people in big data and people analytics which is a very hot skill, very, very hot. Three years ago, it was very difficult to get mobile developers when smart phones became the rage and everybody wanted to build an app. It is still very hard to get mobile developers today.You go through these phases where some skills are hot and there is shortage of resources and people are not available with those skills and there is war for talent. This can apply to management too. Suddenly if a company starts expanding aggressively, you may find that middle managers are not available, or if the economy opens up and enters into new markets, it realises that there is no talent available. You go through all these phases, but in a country like India, it is not so difficult because we have so many people graduating , entering the workforce every year. Every three to four years, the situation tends to correct itself. But yes, you'll always have pockets where people are very, very hard to get.
Sumit Mitra: Again, I'll set the context. About three and half year ago, we had about 300 employees in India from a BT Group perspective. Today we have 8,000 people. We have had a significant growth over the last few years and there is changing dynamics in the labour and talent market. One of the key things for us is: It's not the same in every domain. The work we do here ranges from contract management to legal and commercial type work to project management to technical jobs, and we also do contact centre-type work. What we have noticed -- and this is my personal view -- is that the biggest challenge is at the contact centre which is service-based and where we serve people who are serving our elite customers. In India people are unable to connect with the purpose of the company, as to why they want to connect with the company. And people are still moving for a little pay rise to enhance their careers and that's a big challenge.But do I have the same problem in the finance area? No, I don't. I have CAs who want to stick around and be with us. Our biggest challenge at the moment is: How to stay along? How to stick to a company and gain understanding in a mutual symbiotic relationship that we have with organisations and employees? And, what we are doing about it? Money is no longer a big issue for people. The environment they work in is. The issue is their experience with the first line managers they are dealing with; whether they are working for a sustainable company; is that company doing enough for the society. These have become key issues in the talent business.
People will always be a challenge. You will not be able to attract the best people all the time. Sometimes you have to go by what you have and get the best out of them - ROHIT OBEROI
Ashish Bhandari: As I've progressed in my career, HR is the one function for which my respect has gone up tremendously. I respect what the role brings about as you change the way we evaluate people, the way you work in a matrix, the way you drive skills through the system, getting absolutely new functions to come in and all of that. However, a good HR person should have is the empathy of things, especially in the Indian context. It is one function that people look to, for many a thing. If your car is not coming on time, if the food is not right at the cafeteria, if you're not getting promotion, whatever, HR becomes the catch-all for any of these. An HR manager has to first fulfil the fundamentals by getting the vibe of the organisation, the connect and then empathy with the team.
Hitesh Oberoi: In a company like ours, where things change pretty rapidly, people's skills also get outdated very easily. What you are known for today may not be required five to seven years down the line. Jawa, for instance, was a hot skill 15 years ago, today it is not. HR is the custodian of talent, people and company's culture which have a very important role to play in attracting and retaining people in organisation , keeping them motivated and engaged, empowering them, getting them to perform better than expected or more than what you expect otherwise. HR, in our kind of business environment has to help in developing people's skills because skills get outdated very fast. How do you keep people current and relevant? It's even more important in smaller or mid-size organisation where there aren't very many opportunities to keep people around and develop them. In large organisation , it is very easy to keep people moving around between businesses, bring people across geographies and so on, but it is just not always possible in small organisation . So, how can you help develop people as the industry changes? That's an important area where HR can play an important role. The other is culture, which is key, and which also depends on how the top management functions. But HR has to play the role of facilitator, enabler and custodian so that companies have the right kind of culture which enables them to attract and retain the best of talent. People will always be a challenge. You will not be able to attract the best people all the time. Sometimes you have to go by what you have and get the best out of them.
Sumit Mitra: If we could look back and see how HR has evolved in the last 100 years, up to the 1930s and 40s, HR was a very admin-type function, writing contracts for people, then it kind of moved into practices in terms of how we hire, train and retain people. In the last five to ten years we are talking about HR as a business partner: How do you understand and impact the strategy of the business? But the modern challenge is, how do you do outside it –that's a big challenge for HR. How do you understand the business context? How do you communicate with the government? How do you benchmark against other organisation ? How do you add value back into the business? It's no longer an inward-facing function where you say I would put in practices in place. The important thing is the practices you run within your organisation are very much dependant on the outside in-view.Because the world is changing so much and so fast, it is important for HR to have a very outward view, understand the market trends, stakeholders, the ecosystem they are playing in and bring back the impact and business strategy that's driving it. One more thing, because you are an HR person, it doesn't mean that you have to remain an HR forever. You need to get out and work in the business domain to understand it better and that gives you a far more knowledgeable way to understand and connect with the business.
By PRADEEP MATHUR
