The country is going through major economic transformation and employability is a key factor towards making our demographic dividend, the young workforce, a significant competitive advantage. In this context, the National HRD Network (NHRDN) Mumbai Chapter, recently organised a Career Fest at Nehru Centre in Mumbai. The aim was to provide a common platform to bring together industry, academia and student community, with the intention of helping students to make informed career choices by having in-depth knowledge about the professions prevailing and also about the diverse sectors which are there. Two senior HR professionals with multifaceted expertise, Santanu Banerjee, Head HR, Aditya Birla Health Insurance and Hirak Bhattacharjee, Head - Sales HR and Legal, Birla Sun Life Insurance, shared some pertinent facets of their profession and took the students through HR models, giving them the essence in terms of what are the qualities that is required if you want to really become a successful HR professional
Santanu: There were several careers that all of you could have chosen-why not marketing, information technology, sales, finance, or operations.Some of you might be good with people or managing people, or people and people behaviour is of interest to you, or building the organisations culture, making judgement of who is right and who is wrong for the company, understanding the human mindset in an organisation, training people working on their learning architecture, or you love interacting with people.
I love working with people, I am a people’s person—more than fifty per cent of the crowd will say that anywhere you go. I am actually good with handling people, as if knowing people is not enough. Someone among you said that I have good judgement of people and their capabilities and know how to select the good from the bad and the bad from the ugly. Some - one said, I am an outgoing person and can quickly establish connect with people—are you a party animal?
What are the underlying feelings which you didn’t say—I am not good with numbers please spare me, finance is not my cup of tea and I will not be able to sell. I prefer a desk job as I am more analytical, I prefer a laptop to desktop. I will not be able to take the work pressure in sales. These are some of the unstated believes.
Santanu: HR is very different from working with people, knowing people—all this does not happen. HR has the least amount of say in inter - viewing people. The most amount of say rests with the function head—for whom you are recruiting the people. So, HR has become a partner in strategical execution. What do you mean by that? We had an HR conference few days back which was only on execution, why because CEOs and the leadership team are beautiful on strategy, excellent board room meetings happen year-after-year, month-after-month, day afterday, on what is good for the organisation. The ball drops when it comes to execution. An HR is that strategic partner, who will bridge that gap between strategy and execution.
Hirak: Most of the HR strategies which is there across the organisations, are known to each of the organisation, so it’s a public information. Then why is it that most of the organisations can’t copy it? Basically, because of the finesse and excellence, most of the organisations are able to do it—execute with excellence. And that’s the key of any organisation and that’s where HR comes into play in terms of how you execute, help and partner, in terms of strategy execution. That is how you build your capacity. Then you talk about how you become an expert in the way of how you build organisational efficiencies. Most of the organisations you see, grow very flabby—you develop so much of cost, you don’t create efficiency and then you go back into layoffs, cutting people, closing down branches and offices. That’s the last thing you would want to do. You need to have optimum capacity building in an organisation. That’s the first model as to how to capacitate the organisation by right strategic execution and creating right efficiencies.
Hirak: Next is that you need to be agile enough to understand the voice of the customers and your customers are your employees. Because, what happens when the organisation scales. In a vast organisation like ours, we are around 20,000 odd people—your ability to scale up becomes so high that sometimes you lose your agility to understand the voice of the employees at the bottommost level. You need to be enough agile to understand that because you need to work on employees contribution and engage with them faster. With around 20,000 employee strength how do you ensure that it seamlessly cuts across—you have strategy, cost and everything is fitting in terms of going to the last person and that’s when we are talking about building your capabilities within the organisation. That is how to build the managerial capabilities—each and every level of the organisation or the hierarchy of the organisation, is becoming capable to manage same thing—it percolates down. That’s the uniformity that gets created. And all this will finally become an agent of transformation-shaking processes to build the culture. All this becomes a culture.
Hirak: Each of you belong to a family, which is of different culture. Each of you have a culture and each of them are unique and that’s how each of the organisations are. Culture is the third pillar—it is not that these three pillars are silos which are going to stand on different pillars. There is a commonality and that’s why the structure is built accordingly. All your HR strategies, if you want to become an HR professional, will only work on these three principles. Nothing else works—how do you build capacity in the organisation, how do you build capability which is learning capability and skill building, and eventually the bottom-line is culture.
Santanu: HR should be the agent of change. Just like all of us come from different cultures—in different cultures different things are acceptable and some things are not acceptable. In an organisation we have to build a common culture and that requires a huge amount of change management. The entire business structures and business models are undergoing huge amount of transformation, especially in areas which are very HR centric. Service organisation, where everything is human resource, there is no expenses on plant, machinery or anything. HR is the only agent of change which can transform an organisation-what we described as agile-and can face the challenges of tomorrow. So, change is extremely important and HR has to be the agent of change.
Santanu: HR must be a true functional expert. In some places, where HR has not been so successful, HR has changed its job to non-technical. Everybody in the organisation understands HR, but everybody in the organisation do not understand finance or IT. But, you go to any functional manager they will say I know HR— but truth is they don’t. We have to make our subject matter and express it, and then people will start accepting you as functional experts.
Santanu: HR for long has been very silo function, often to the extent that what HR does and what the business does, there is little commonality. Business is going in one direction and HR is going in another direction. Earlier, I would not see many HR leaders becoming business leaders. But the world has changed and now I can keep giving examples where HR professionals have become business leaders.
Santanu: Understanding of business, understanding of finance, understanding of numbers, has become so very important. Even if it is an unstated belief that I am good with numbers or I am not good with numbers. If you are really not good with numbers, HR is not your space, because you really have to get into a dialogue with your CFO and head of operations. You will have to do number crunching which is superior to theirs, to prove them through data, through insights that whatever I am saying makes sense.
Hirak: Making people redundant and laying them off is the easiest and lousiest thing you can do. But, how you make a person productive— first and foremost is you need to understand the business, the nuances of the business, the cost efficiencies and all of it so well that you can then use your HR technical knowledge to plug it into the process. My maths teacher always used to say that whenever you make a mistake, first you understand the concept, then apply the formula, and then you will get at the solution. So, first and foremost is to understand the concepts of business.
Santanu: The first opportunity is HR Business Partner—a very abused term. I have never heard a finance business partner; I have never heard an information business partner. Why do we need to use this word business partner? Are we so divergent from our business that we have to repeatedly remind ourselves that we are a business partner? This is more of a HR generalist profile. HR business partner means an HR generalist, one who does recruitment, selection, employee life cycle management and one who basically helps meet the HR requirements of a business across the entire life cycle.
The competencies required: Solid understanding of business and ability to think. Should be a fast thinker because every solution that you will have to provide has to be unique, a source and solution, a compensation solution or a performance management solution. Every solution has to be unique, so you have to think on the think. You have to provide business solutions and not HR solutions, it’s important that whatever solutions you provide it should impact the business. Each problem that people will come up with will be unique—the business HR requirement, business HR delivery, business HR problems. So, you have to really think on it, there is no uniform common solution. In some of the businesses, the pressure is very high—a pressure cooker situation. So, the relationship between the boss and the subordinates and the peers, is not always congenial. This person needs to have a clear understanding of labour laws, labour compliances, how to handle people. Some of it will come through knowledge. So these are the competencies required for a HR generalist known as HR business partner.
Making people redundant and laying them off is the easiest and lousiest thing you can do. But, how you make a person productive— first and foremost is you need to understand the business, the nuances of the business, the cost efficiencies and all of it so well that you can then use your HR technical knowledge to plug it into the process Hirak Bhattacharjee, Head - Sales HR and Legal, Birla Sun Life Insurance
Hirak: Talking about skills sets, we need to be functional experts and that is where HR specialist comes in. An HR specialist if you see, spans across facets like you can become a recruiting specialist, which means you can become a sourcing person. Or you can become a compensation lead, where compensation can be your forte.
Hirak: Is a very abused term again in terms of everything that falls under OD. Everybody wants to do OD but understanding OD is very difficult.
Hirak: Earlier Industrial Relationship was a very niche and technical job, but subsequently when the service organisations came into play, when the economy opened up in 1991 and the services industry really grew and manufacturing did not grow-suddenly HR came into play as a profession. Today, HR has become a very important function and in context of service organisations, it is where it comes as HR legal and risk specialist. Today, most of the organisations are looking for people who can work on this particular part.
Gone are the days when recruitment need to be done by us and us only. There are recruitment process outsourcing companies, who do the recruitment on our behalf. So mass level hires, for example when a company requires about ten thousand employees in a period of 4-5 months—it’s impossible for an HR team in a company to complete the hiring process in a short period of time, so we employ Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) Santanu Banerjee, Head HR, Aditya Birla Health Insurance
Hirak: How do you use the analytics part, which is your big data. In an organisation which function is more productive? In the sales function, which geographies are more productive? How to create productive efficiencies? All this is now part of HRIS.
Santanu: HRIS is basically the repository where human resource data is kept. It where an interface is available to the employees to interact with that data base, to update their records, to do core HR activities like performance management and sometimes engagement. So, this has become the nerve centre, as you call of HR. All HR analytics, data, the key insights, design that defines the HR interventions are actually coming from human resource information systems.
Hirak: When you are working in an organisation, which has lot of scale, it is very pertinent and important to maintain the hygiene factors. That’s where HR operations and shared services become very critical.
Santanu: Human resource shared services, is nothing but HR operations made simple through two process - one is a voice process, so more often you see these days HR managers don’t accept calls. Now we have toll free number where employees can call and they can know everything related to their compensation, related to their any benefits, anything that they just want to know. That is the voice-based system. The second one is an internal based system, where the employee is anywhere on the globe, he is given a page of his own. For example, my name is Santanu and wherever I am, Aditya Birla Group has given me a page. If I log into my page I can access everything, right from who are my dependents, whom I have nominated for my provident fund, or who are my dependents who are nominated for medical claim to information like what was my rating three years back. Everything has been made simple through the process of shared services. Why it’s called shared services? Because more often than not, a number of companies are sharing this common pool of services, which is provided by an external vendor.
Hirak: These are areas which are going to be HR specialist’s core areas. You can chose as per your choice, what you want to become. But the core of this is that, if you want to become specialist in all these areas, the first and fore Hirak: These are areas which are going to be HR specialist’s core areas. You can chose as per your choice, what you want to become. But the core of this is that, if you want to become specialist in all these areas, the first and foremost is the generalist HR. When you become the head of HR, you don’t become a specialist, you have to understand all the functions of HR and you have to do some of these roles in some way or the other and also look in terms of HR business partner. And that would eventually take you to a leadership role in HR.
Hirak: Delivering results, meeting stakeholders, adapting to change, creating problem solving are some of the competencies required for this role. When you are hiring people you need to know in terms of what are the various laws and what happens is, when you are working specifically in various geographies, not only in the country but across the globe—suppose you are hiring for Sri Lanka or Nepal, Germany or wherever it is, you need to know in terms of what are the various labour laws there. When you are becoming Recruitment Specialist all this play in terms of your role. Hence, it is very pertinent that when you get into any kind of a role, you need to be in the depth of the role, the width can come over a period of time. But I think the most critical is to get into the depth of the role.
Santanu: Gone are the days when recruitment need to be done by us and us only. There are recruitment process outsourcing companies, who do the recruitment on our behalf. So mass level hires, for example, when a company requires about ten thousand employees in a period of 4-5 months—it’s impossible for an HR team in a company to complete the hiring process in a short period of time, so we employ Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO). How to define the governance matrix of the RPO? What will the RPO do? How do you ensure that the right kinds of candidates are flowing in? How do you ensure that the right sourcing funnel is been worked out? It’s a very different kind of skill. So recruitment specialist is not necessarily a person who interviews. Recruitment specialist is a person who knows about recruitment processes, so he can design recruitment processes in India or abroad.
Hirak: As you scale up an organisation, specifically an organisation where I belong to is insurance, where getting sales people is very difficult. Now what you do in terms of creating your employable pool. What happens is, when you go across in terms of hiring and hiring challenges, generally when the employable pool gets depleted, it is not the people who get depleted, there are so many graduates who are passing out, but are they employable in the context of your organisation and how do you create that? You don’t want to go back and start a finishing school. So we are working with colleges, various graduate and undergraduate colleges, in terms of how we can skill them. So that when they pass out, they become employable in our context. These are the things as a recruitment specialist, you need to concentrate on, as to how to create an employable pool. The first and foremost is the culture of hiring people, because if you don’t hire people with the right cultural integration, that’s when most organisations fail in terms of culture. That’s why recruitment becomes very critical for us.
Hirak: Compensation Lead is the backbone of the organisation. In terms of how do you define the compensation schedule is about again understanding the geographical nuances of wherever you are working. How do you fit the compensation? How do you ensure that you pay the right compensation to the right person? What are the type of compensation designs that you need to do? How do you keep people motivated? Everyone work for money, so how do you define what money motivates people? First and foremost is the sales person—how do you define his incentive schemes and that he stays motivated? So, that’s the basic job of a compensation specialist.
Hirak: Having learning specialist has also become important, because how to skill people, how to reskill people, consistently educate people to become and be contemporary of whatever is happening in the organisation, is very important. Learning specialist is becoming increasingly important because you need to consistently train and retrain people. Because, you are evolving in terms of your policies, processes, product, design and the way that sales practices have to be done. So that needs to consistently evolve and that is where learning specialists play a very big role. It is also a skill in terms of how do you train people.
Eventually if you have to become a successful HR professional, you need to have your personal competencies.
First is you need to be self-aware as to what is it that you have to deliver. Empathy: This is very important if want to make a career in HR, you need to be empathetic to people, you need to understand in terms of people’s needs.
How are we going to influence people—when you hire people you don’t decide, the functional people are deciding, but you need to influence that this person doesn’t fit into the culture and that is where social skills come into in terms of how you resolve and how you get into conflict management. If you want to pick up a career in HR, you need to understand how to resolve conflicts, get into a conflicting zone and come out of it.
That is self-control because HR is also a custodian of ethics. The ethical value, the culture—you need to protect the culture of the organisation and that is where your self regulation comes. Because you are dealing with recruitment vendors and shared services vendors, your personal integrity has to be of top quality. You are setting the culture of your organisation.
You need to be self-motivated because if you want your organisation to stay motivated by motivating the employees, you yourself have to be motivated first.
Santanu: Our group believes in taking people at a nascent stage in their career and then groom them. You will not find many lateral hires in our group because we take people at a very junior level and then groom them. So, normally as you move up your career, when you become a head of HR, you need to have exposure to all the facets of HR. So, we ensure that the person we take and the person who is going through our talent management philosophy, has the complete exposure to all facets of HR. In the grooming process, assessment happens and a person’s capability is analysed through tests, interviews and other mechanisms and then the role that is fit for the person is decided. A destination role is chalked out and the time that is needed to reach the destination role is given.
Hirak: The qualities which we clearly look in freshers are your ability and agility to learn and second is hard work. The appetite to learn and work hard has to be there consistently.
By Rajesh Rao
