Experiential holidays is the new trend, and New Age travellers are opting for holidays for adventure, hobbies and education... Let's meet Padmini Misra, Senior Vice President and Global Head - HR, Cox & Kings (India), who has had a fulfilling journey from the hospitality industry to ITeS to retail to travel trade
Padmini Misra's journey of growth has been a remarkable one, having begun as a frontline service provider to becoming senior vice president in different companies for the past 12 years. Born in the UK, brought up in a small town in West Bengal, she has spent most of her life in New Delhi. She is a student of Delhi Public School and graduate from IHMCT & AN, New Delhi. She has more than three decades of experience in the service industry, having led Business Operations, Projects, Learning & Development and HR in Hospitality, ITeS, Retail and Travel Trade.
Corporate Citizen spoke to Padmini Misra on her journey from a frontline hospitality service staff to Senior Vice President and Global Head HR, Cox & Kings (India) Limited.
I was in the hotel business for 17 years and that's where I moved from operations to learning and development. It's a choice that I made because transferring knowledge has always been close to my heart. After the Taj, I have been with three service industries namely ITeS, Retail and Travel Trade. I was in the first team when GE started its BPO business as GECIS and then in Spectramind which later got acquired by Wipro. In the eight years that I spent in this space, I had the experience of setting up every aspect of HR right from scratch and I learnt a lot. I then joined Aditya Birla Group in their new venture of Super Markets and Hyper Markets. For the last six-and-a-half years I have been in Cox & Kings Group and handle HR and Admin for the Group.
It's been with in the service industry, so the industry stayed the same. What changed were the service lines or product offerings. The continuum is that these are all service companies, where it's more about B to C, not B to B, whether it was hotel rooms and food and hospitality, or knowledge processing, or vegetables, sugar, butter, dairy and groceries and now, holidays!
I can't think of another better life than this one. In the hotel world, it was out on the stage. In a restaurant, a customer could be a celebrity or a politician, an Amitabh Bachchan or Indira Gandhi, or it could be someone like you or me. But, whoever they are, for me they are my customers. Whereas actually as my career progressed, I went behind the scenes from being in the front. But I don't think that really matters because there's always a customer. It could be an external customer, or in HR and Learning and Development it's an internal customer. The customer is always a customer, you're a service provider. Today as HR or Admin I'm providing service to the internal customer, to the staff and employees of the organisation and I'm not actually interacting with external customers who are commercially paying for the service. But it's the same.
Well, external is more satisfying because you get an instant feedback, it is either appreciation or complaint. It's instant gratification. With internal, it's taken for granted because you are anyway supposed to do it so we don't have to come and thank you that you did this, because you're paid to do it. Then in the case of an external customer the feedback is more instant, it's moment to moment. With internal, you don't get so much feedback. You may get more criticism internally but appreciation is hard to get.
'The industry stayed the same. What changed were the service lines or product offerings. The continuum is that these are all service companies, where it's more about B to C, not B to B, whether it was hotel rooms and food and hospitality, or knowledge processing, or vegetables, sugar, butter, dairy and groceries and now holidays!'
My CEO at GE left and started his own venture and I joined it. I don't think my risks were as high as his. But the experience was incredible because I have always worked with the best of organisations, MNCs and eminent companies like the Tata Group, the Birla Group or Cox & Kings which is also a globally listed company. This one time in these 33 years of my career I took a risk leaving a very sound, established organisation and joined a start-up called Spectramind under the leadership of my CEO, whose ability and leadership was extremely high. In turn he trusted my capabilities and together as a team we were able to create a wonderful company. However, typically, it's not expected that one would leave a GE job. So in hindsight it was a risk, but it was worth the satisfaction. It was somewhere around the middle of my career, so you can say it was a mid-life experience.
No, I don't think anyone would agree that he or she is a superwoman or a superman. Those are comic-book ideas for little children. But I would give equal weightage to the individual who makes it for himself or herself, and to the organisation because the organisation gives you the ability to do things that maybe in a smaller set-up you would not be able to.
I personally haven't faced any gender issues and I have even worked night shifts. Seven years of my career I only did night shifts. However, gender challenges are a reality and the world over, whether at home or in the workplace or society, there is still a very big gap in terms of gender diversity. A lot is happening today and it's good that people are looking at it, and some people are strongly voicing the need to bring in more diversity sensitisation, but the fact of the matter is it's not gone away. It's just that it may change in its sophistication and change in the way it is exhibited. But, it very much continues to be in the system so we can't deny it. In C & K we take special care to ensure that there is no differentiation between genders.
Yes, of course. Luckily for me, the owner-promoter is a woman herself. When the owner is a woman you can imagine the company will be far more sensitive to women. But, even if that were not so, in the other companies that I have worked in, I have been fortunate enough to be in an environment where we have certainly ensured that we take care of our women colleagues. In C & K, we provide flexible timing opportunity if there is requirement, we provide extended maternity support if there is need, and in any other way without jeopardising the overall performance and productivity of the company. If we can make allowances for our women colleagues we certainly would do so.
It has to be a professional relationship. When either party starts fudging the line, it creates that amount of emotional strife. There's always maturity in remembering which side of the court you're playing on, instead of confusing it because ultimately one or the other will be a victim of that confusion.
Fantastically, because we're a very pro-technology company and our director herself is very keen on technology. Cox and Kings is probably one of the front runners in using and developing technology in the travel world. For us, it will be more about travel technology to help us provide more efficient services. So there's a difference between an e-com company and a retail company. Cox & Kings is both. Traditionally Cox and Kings is a retail company which means that you have stores, you have staff, and you have sales-direct interaction. Our main business is retail. We have 11 of our own branches across India, and we have 150 franchise outlets. You can come to any of the franchise outlets or to our retail counters and buy our products, holidays or travel. But we also have an e-com company, called EzeeGo1.com. It is a complete travel portal. We have a mix of both and we're very smartly and efficiently using technology to bring in a big advantage. Even for support functions, we're using technology. If a consumer wants to buy a product directly, he will go to our e-com portal. If the consumer wants to come and have an interaction with the staff, talk, discuss, he can do that too.
'I don't think anyone would agree that he or she is a superwoman or a superman. Those are comic-book ideas for little children. But I would give equal weightage to the individual who makes it for himself or herself, and to the organisation because the organisation gives you the ability to do things that maybe in a smaller setup you would not be able to'
One of the things-and I won't say it's recent or it's a discovery I've made-but generally speaking, one of the things that is happening is, people are moving from pure luxury and decadent holidays to adventurous and experiential holidays. Earlier if you thought of a holiday you would think of going and only staying in luxury, doing nothing, just sleeping around. Nowadays people are looking at adventure holidays. They go trekking, they go rafting, and they go mountain climbing. They do a lot of activity. It's not like I'll go there and hang around and sleep and eat. It's more of experiential holidays, where I experience, and I do things myself, I cook my own food, I go for a mountain trek, that is more than just a normal holiday.
Well, it's not only about adventure, but even otherwise, every year or two, I would say, there's a destination popularity movement. For example, in 2014-15, there was a lot of movement towards Eastern Europe, so Uzbekistan, Africa, Turkey. Egypt, because of their political problems went down, but otherwise Egypt was very hot in 2012- 13. But, 2014-15 has been much more of Eastern Europe and the usual, USA, Far-East and the Middle-East would anyway continue. In the last four-five years the trend towards Africa has also grown, the safaris, Kenya wildlife parks. So if I look at the last five to seven years, it's been more towards Eastern Europe and Africa.
Misra recently visited a reputed management college in Pune and in sharing her experience with the students she re-emphasised that it's all about having the correct attitude. "Your attitude determines your success. More than almost any other factor, your perspective on the current situation affects your ability to get work done. If you wish to be successful, make sure you build on your positive attitude. The more positive your attitude, the more you can get done."
To substantiate her belief she shared that in the formative days of her career she handled every task given to her right from serving tables, making beds, etc, with the same pride and enthusiasm as the jobs that need to be done by her today. There is no job that is high or low, big or small, since every experience only teaches us one new thing and it's with all our experiences that we become that much more capable and richer. She emphasised, "Attitude for me has four key areas: Authenticity, Integrity, Quality & Team work."
She shared that working in leadership positions for global corporations in the service industry had given her opportunities to work closely with industry leaders and participate in strategic decisions with substantial revenue impact. The majority of her engagements in the last 33 years have been with start-ups - either by way of establishing a new function or a company. She has led projects in both hotels and IT/ITeS in India, Romania, Singapore, Germany and USA.
She said, "This experience has expanded my appreciation of the diverse nuances of business beyond the boundaries of HR. My inherent quest to gain business knowledge and convert it into high end customer experience through suitable training and development platforms has enabled me to manage operations whenever required, especially in the Food & Beverage domain in both Hotels and Retail and ITeS. As a strategic adviser to business, I have developed a broad spectrum of HR, leadership and organisational skills and competencies. More specifically, I have been responsible for defining strategic human capital agenda, talent management, CXO level hiring, development, coordination and communication of HR strategy, differentiated reward strategy, diversity programmes, management of culture, effective management of complex and large system changes, leadership development and organisation development."
"I have built entire teams from scratch more than once, and mastered the art of achieving commercial outcomes through HR strategy at all levels of hierarchy," she added.
Cooking is a very big stress buster for me and the other is my spiritual practice. I actively practice Nichiren Diashonin's Buddhism and am a member of the Soka Gakkai organisation. I personally think it's important to have a balance in terms of your physical, mental and spiritual pursuits. For the physical side I invest an hour and a half every morning in some form of activity like yoga and strength training.
CSR, is very important and Cox and Kings is very keenly involved in CSR. The dominant area in which we work is, he support that in a big way and NGOs which are working with PETA.
New packages will always be there. Within the business, if you're not continuously bringing in new products, you'll become irrelevant. The competition is always cut-throat and you can't keep going back to the market with yesterday's product. Within the organisation, new product development is an integral part. Acquiring companies is also another area that our key promoters are involved in. Otherwise it's more about digging deeper and having stronger roots so that whatever be the business risks, you're less impacted by them.
Very much! Travel is a luxury industry. It is not critical to daily living. You will only travel if business requires you to, and only if you can make money on it. But when recession happens, 80 percent of the community which is leisure travel will not travel because they have limited funds which they will not waste on a holiday. So, it's a very fragile industry which gets affected easily. We keep on looking at providing more reasonably priced travel to closer and cheaper destinations so people can still get a break, they will still come and buy something from us and it will be within their means to do so.
By Chaitraly Deshmukh
