"Success Through Loyalty And Stability”

He was advised by his trusted mentor during his campus placement, to stay put in his first job for at least three years and gain experience, before moving to some other company for better prospective. But Bobby Kuriakose has added a zero to that three and is now working for over thirty years in the same company. He joined Forbes Marshall, as Management Trainee through campus and has risen today to become the Director-HR of the company. He stresses that it was all because of his sheer hard work, loyalty and reliance on stability. In an exclusive interview with Corporate Citizen, he takes us through his three decades of career journey, lessons learnt and what is in store for an HR professional in near future as a practice

“You should have a very clear thought process with regard to employee’s sense of purpose, employee’s sense of opportunity, employee’s sense of success, employee’s sense of well-being and employee’s sense of leadership”

Corporate Citizen: Tell us about your education and how you started your career journey in the human resource management (HRM) field?

Bobby Kuriakose : My schooling happened in Kerala and I studied in Sainik School, in Trivandrum. I studied there from the age of 10, until I completed my schooling. Then I did my graduation in science, from Sacred Heart College in Cochin. At that particular time, I was involved in a lot of extracurricular activities and one of the areas I was involved with was an association called All India Catholic University Federation. One of the priests who was involved with the Federation, told me and a friend of mine to go to Pune, where there are quite a few number of opportunities for advance learning and so on. That’s how I landed in Pune.

Initially, in the year 1987, I joined for Masters in Social Work (MSW) degree programme, at Karve Institute of Social Service. At that particular point in time, for my casework, I was sent to the city’s Regional Mental Hospital, Yerawada and also to Yerawada Prison. While I was doing my case work, I found a lot of connect with the mental patients and the prisoners at the two places, which gave me a kind of a feeling that I have a basic orientation for facilitation, as well as convincing skills.

I had my project guide, Mrs. Rashmi Tamuly, who was a professor at Karve Institute and she was the one who told me to meet her husband, Mr Tamuly, who was senior HR professional at that time. So, when I met Mr Tamuly, he advised me to do post-graduation programme in Human Resource Management (HRM), which was an upcoming field at that time. During that period around 1987-88, HRM was Personnel Management. I was looking for the right institute and at that time Pune had only three institutes for HRM programme, Institute of Management Development and Research (IMDR), Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (SIBM) and MBA programme at Pune University (PUMBA).

I got through the entrance exam of SIBM, got admission and my life started thereon. Fortunately, I fell into the right hands—from day one I was with Professor M.S. Pillai and he has always been my friend, philosopher and guide. Late Professor M.S. Pillai was the lead faculty at SIBM at that time and who later served as the visionary Founder Director of Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development (SCMHRD). After my second year at the institute, (Col) A. Balasubramanian Sir, also joined.

After I completed my HRM programme at SIBM and when I was passing out from campus, it was the time when Professor Pillai told me that he happened to meet a company personnel from Forbes Marshall, from where I had an offer. He had told them that I will join them and I will be there for at least three years period. I was a bit shocked as it was a relatively small organisation with around 25 crores turnover at that time. I was initially reluctant and was thinking as to why should I take that job, as I had other options too. But, Pillai Sir insisted that I join Forbes Marshall.

Today Forbes Marshall is a multinational company with Indian roots and multiple factories across the world, including one in the UK. The Company has really grown over the last 30 years. I joined Forbes Marshall and life continued and that’s how my career started in the HR field. Though it was more about right connect but I think I took the right decision at the right time. Even though 30 years have passed now at Forbes Marshall, not even a single day I have got up in the morning and thought, why should I be going to the office today-it has never happened.

I joined Forbes Marshall, as a Management Trainee through campus placement. Four of us joined together, of which two are still continuing, Satyadeo Purohit, who is the Marketing Director and myself. Initially, I was put on the work of handling the shop floor related Industrial Relations (IR) and administration activities. At that time through the process of Time Office Management, we were introducing people systems and standalone HRMS, and computers were coming into the field. It was in 1990 when I was involved with all these activities. In 1992, I was transferred to the new factory, which was starting in Pimpri, near Pune city. The first factory I was working in, was at Kasarwadi. So, working at the new factory in Pimpri, was a good exposure—I was setting up the HR processes and had the opportunity to work with Mrs Rati Forbes, daughter-in-law of the Forbes family. We worked together for almost around 20 years and thereafter, Rati shifted her focus into social entrepreneurship.

So, after setting up the HR processes at the Forbes Marshall, in Pimpri, in 1997, I took over the Head of HR role. It has been now almost over 20 years and now I am Director-HR, and also part of the senior management team.

"I have a strong belief that every human being can change and it is all about how we assist the person in that change which decides the success of that change”

CC: What were the challenges you faced in the initial days of your career and how did you overcome them?

Yes, I did face challenges-you are passing out of an institute with a lot of theoretical knowledge, but there are challenges when you are putting that knowledge into operations. At that particular point in time, IR was very strong in Pune with a lot of trade union activities involved. There were a lot of trade unions and our company also had a union with external affiliation. So, basically, it did give me a lot of challenges, because what you learnt and what you wanted to implement—there was a lot of push back coming from the unionised category of members. Forbes Marshall after starting operations in 1958 in Pune, had already crossed around 30 years. Though the top management was very much in favour of new initiatives in HR, at the implementation time you had push backs at the ground level. So, a lot of facilitation, patience, conviction, was necessary for implementing each process starting with the Performance Management system and then going forward.

The aha moment came in 2005, when Forbes Marshall was rated by Great Place to Work Institute Inc. survey, as one of the best workplaces in India we were in the top twenty-five. Since then till date, practically every year when we have participated, we have been in one of the certified best workplaces in India.

CC: How important is HR’s role in making the best company to work for?

You have to have an extremely strong senior leadership orientation, where one should strongly believe that people are the ones who are going to run the business. And here in Forbes Marshall, there is a great philosophy that “If you take care of the people, people will take care of your business”. So, if you ask the Forbes family, what comes first to them, profit or people, they will definitely say people. Being a highly people-oriented organisation with a lot of social connect and social commitments, has helped them greatly.

Second is the philosophy which we have always followed. We have always believed that the line managers are the real HR Managers. So, when you have the Line Managers being the HR managers, and you give them the power over their own people, they do a much better and efficient job compared to HR managing the people part of it. When many people with experience from other organisations, come into my team, they are in for a shock and ask as to why here HR is not so powerful. But, when they align with the line managers and see, how powerful they are with respect to people initiatives, that’s the time they realise that the model works very well. So, these two factors are the critical things and rest was all the process improvement and engagement activities we have been doing—it’s gradually moving into people experience.

CC: Over the three decades of your career journey in the HR field, what are the major changes you have seen in the HRM practice?

When I joined, it was all about ensuring the basic tools to be provided for people to work. So, the person was supposed to have a desk and chair—at that time computers were just coming in, so ensuring they have a workstation and basic facilities like a canteen and other things was essential.

Over a period of next eight to ten years, those things got stabilised in India and we gradually moved to the next level. Now when the basic things are provided to the people, we thought let’s look at what is basically required from point of view of making them more productive and efficient. Then we came out with all the Japanese System Improvements like Kaizen, 5S, productivity improvement tools and so on. All of these came and the focus was more on ensuring productivity improvement and efficiency improvement.

From there, when these processes stabilised, most of the good organisations started looking at, as to how can you sustain this by ensuring people are happy at work and then we moved into employee engagement.

Employee engagement is all about answering three questions - What do I get? What do I give? and Do I belong? This is the simplest definition I have seen—if these three questions are addressed properly, you are having a highly engaged employee, otherwise, there will be partially engaged or totally disengaged employee also.

In the last two-three years, I have started telling my team, move away from employee engagement, because when you are talking about employee engagement, you are basically talking about working from a paradigm of considering the organisation as an extremely efficient instrument for performance. Then you tend to act from a paradigm of not working with people, but working on people. When you talk about working on people, you are thinking that they are machines and we talk about things like changing the mindset of people etc. It cannot work like that. So, now you need to consider an organisation as a purposive community and when you do that, what typically happens is that you are introducing programmes based on an employee life cycle. And not like what to do in recruitment, what to do in performance management, what to do in Rewards and Recognition etc because those kinds of approaches have limited implications in today’s environment.

Now, what we are moving into is, we have started talking to people about employee experiences, especially to millennials. Every experience, even a small experience of an email they receive or a poster they read, the interaction they have with a colleague or a subordinate or a boss, everything counts. So, we should be moving away from that employee’s lifecycle experience, onto something which is going to be now purely based on the entire experiences that an individual undergoes, while he/she is associated with the organisation and that is going to decide their tenure of stay and not the Organisational Development (OD) interventions that you are going to have in the organisation. I can see that clear movement happening now and companies are yet to realise it. We have already initiated a few things, but that’s going to be the future.

"Data analytics, as well as intelligence tools which are available, they have to be considered as tools for your decision making and you should never become a slave to it”

CC: You have seen the evolving role of HR. It is also becoming more data-driven process. How important it has become for those who are aspiring to jump into the HR field, to get equipped with digital HR skills?

My take on this is slightly different. Everywhere you go, nowadays people talk about HR analytics, HR intelligence and so on. The mistake that many of them do is, they gradually start applying it and using it, and then they become a slave to it. What you should always understand is that all of these are tools and techniques which are available for you, to be an efficient HR professional. The moment you become a slave to it—it’s just like money, unless you manage money, you become a slave to it.

Similarly, HR technology which is available, they are extremely important from a decision making point of view. However, what I always see is a higher level of trust on data, which many times make people to lose their ability to apply their common sense. It is all about applying your common sense, mixing it with authentic data and taking the right kind of decisions. If you don’t mix both, you can end up with very wrong kind of decision- making. So, data analytics, as well as intelligence tools which are available, they have to be considered as tools for your decision making and you should never become a slave to it.

CC: The HR role now has become a specialist role. Is there any place for HR to play a generalist role in an organisation?

I have a very strong notion that going forward HR activities in many organisations are going to be based on skill sets with people process and organisations, and in the long term may not have HR professionals on their payrolls. There will be HR skill clubs of people with great HR skills available as specialist service providers for the organisations. Among these youngsters, if somebody is good in organisational development, if somebody is good in organisational engagement, or if somebody is good in industrial relations and labour laws—that set of people will come together and form their own guild and that guild is going to be available to you when needed.

You engage with this team of HR experts and they sort out your issues and withdraw once the issue is sorted out. The long term relationships and engagement requirements will be handled by the concerned line manager. So, when that moves in, it will be all about specialised skills and the generalist role which I am seeing today would slowly start fading away. One of them can choose to be a part of such a guild and say next six months I am going to work 24x7 without any break and after that, for the next six months, I want to be on my own. So, I will be taking a holiday, travelling around the world and coming back and re-joining. That flexibility is an indication because today’s millennials are extremely conscious about their personal time and they would align with it. From organisations’ point of view, you don’t have a long term liability of that particular individual from a salary, or cost, or value addition factor. So, that’s going to be the near future according to me for the HR profession.

“Employee engagement is all about answering three questions - What do I get? What do I give? and Do I belong? If these three questions are addressed properly, you are having a highly engaged employee”

CC: An HR has to understand the millennial mindset, but are HR’s preparing themselves to understand the next “Gen Z” generation, who are going to be the next wave of human resource to join the organisations?

Right now a lot of organisations are facing this issue of overall accountability of the organisations remaining with Gen-X. Responsibility of executing that accountability or the decisions remain with Gen-Y. The implementation part is to be done with the help of millennials. You have a 22-year-old youngster who is running around and executing things, what a 35-45 year old is planning, while a 50-year-old is accountable for the entire function.

Just like me—I am a Gen-X, I have younger managers in my team who are in their early forties, who are accountable and have a team of MBAs who are running around and executing. I do see a pattern there with respect to their expectation levels, behaviour, mindset, flexibility and so on. So, it does become a big issue from the point of view of ensuring there is a free flow of communication.

Things to be kept in mind is about the transparency how you communicate with the team, with respect to the entire flow of any authority is concerned and ensure that they are kept challenged. If you take care of a few things, I think this issue can be basically addressed.

One is, you should have a very clear thought process with regard to employee’s sense of purpose, employee’s sense of opportunity, employee’s sense of success, employee’s sense of well-being and employee’s sense of leadership. Success should not be considered as a factor, because many a time you consider success to be a factor, but to be successful is also a process. The moment you consider success as a process, the entire alignment of reward and recognition goes to a totally different perspective. So, sense of purpose, opportunity, success, well-being and leadership, if these five things are done in a fair manner to anyone within the organisation, then these issues with respect to all the generations mentioned till now, they can be handled very efficiently by the organisations.

I believe in the expert opinion of 20 per cent Past-focused companies, 70 per cent Presentfocused companies and around 15 per cent Future-focused. So, it is a matter of you deciding, whether you want to belong to the “rest”, the “best” or the “next” group. In the “Rest” are organisations that follow, what the rest of the world follows. “Best” is, you benchmark against all the best practices and you setup your own processes. “Next” is, the trendsetters, who will set new trends that the Best and the Rest follow. The choice is yours, what exactly that you want to follow.

CC: Talking about new trends of working, are the organisations and the HRs ready for flexi-time or work-from-home demand?

We are a hardcore engineering and manufacturing organisation and when we implemented flexi-time, it was my first assignment as a trainee in 1992. Forbes Marshal was the first company in India to implement flexi-time in 1992. It’s working fine even now because we knew thirty years back how the world is going to move forward. Many manufacturing companies are coming to us and learning from us, how to efficiently implement flexi-time work. Those days, it took off the entire absenteeism issue and entire issues with regard to people performance-lot of things got addressed because it was new. Even our union had doubts as to how it will be possible.

Our factories open from 6 am until 7 pm. You can come and go out as per your convenience but see that at the end of the week you put 47 hours and 30 minutes of work. It is working perfectly fine. Only a portion of our members who work in shifts have limitation in using flexible time which is a considerably small number. Our R&D team are on 24-hour flexible time, they can come in and go out any time they like. So, it’s all about the mindset you have. If you have a feeling that if you give flexi-time you will lose control, with such thought processes as an HR professional, you will tend to lose the game.

CC: Millennials want fast results, they don’t stay for long time in one organisation and go job-hopping for better opportunities. So, how does one find a solution around this issue of high attrition?

Again it is all about the mindset you have. I have a millennial at home, our only son. Currently, he is overseas for his Master’s degree in Engineering Management at the University of Southern California. His room many times looks like a warzone and is a mess, but if I or my wife arranges his room, his immediate reaction is that he can’t find a thing. I see the same mindset among millennials, in the office. there tables which are typically very messy and look unorganised, but they know where each of their things is. Earlier we had a system, when we used to say “Method in the madness”, today they like the madness. They want a workplace which is very flexible without any boundaries and within those boundaries, they are willing to find their own rhythm. So, the moment an organisation provides a relatively flexible and non-boundary workplace, allowing them to define their own workplace and their own discipline in the way they should be doing things, they will stay with you. If you go with the order of boundaries, structure and so on, and not give the operational freedom to keep their room the way they want, they will not stay with you. Always remember, people will stay with you when you are able to clearly explain why they exist as a part of your team.

“You have to have an extremely strong senior leadership orientation, where one should strongly believe that people are the ones who are going to run the business”

CC: Some of the astute lessons you have learnt during your long stint as an HR professional in your career till now?

One is, never take any system or process for granted, Second, whatever happens, don’t do things which are unethical, which will disturb your core, because the moment your core is disturbed, you lose your focus on how you need to go ahead. Thirdly, never believe in the policy of Machiavellian concept of “ends will justify the means”. If you focus on that, you may grow very fast, but when you turn back you will not find anybody behind you. So, always be inclusive in involving people, ensuring everybody is aligned with you. Fourth, I have a strong belief that every human being can change and it is all about how we assist the person in that change which decides the success of that change.

The last is, it is important that you always remain grounded because otherwise you may start feeling that the world is revolving around you. There’s a saying that, “Thadeshe Poojyathe Raja… Vidhwan Sarvathra Poojyathe”. A king is respected in his kingdom whereas the learned is respected wherever he goes. Many HR professionals think that they are kings in their own kingdom and that everything is revolving around them, they are in command and so on. But you should be a learned person which makes you grounded and then you receive respect from all around.

CC: How do you maintain a work-life balance in out of your tight work schedule and responsibilities?

I get up at 4:30 in the morning and I have my prayers, go for my walk, then typically I prepare my own breakfast. I am relatively independent because of the Sainik School training I had. I leave for work at around 8 am and I come back home by around 7:30 pm, that’s my typical daily schedule. One thing that I have always followed for the last thirty years, is that once I am back at home, I don’t look at work unless there is a critical emergency. I will open my mail only if there’s an emergency. Between 8 pm to 7 am, it’s my family time with my wife and my son though typical HR roles make you break these norms many times.