HR Priorities In The Covid-19 ERA

HR is one of the most impacted business functions by the uncertainties unleashed by the Covid-19 pandemic. HR priorities have changed with the primary focus now being employee wellbeing. So how do organisations ensure employee wellbeing while maintaining alignment with the organisational goals? To answer this crucial question, NHRDN conducted a webinar titled, “What shifts would you see in HR”, where a panel of HR experts including Gangapriya Chakraverti, Director, India Service Center, Ford Business Solutions; Anuradha Razdan, Executive Director HR, HUL, VPHR, South Asia, Uniliver and Amitav Mukherji, Head Corporate HR, ITC limited, were chatted up by Keerthana Shashi Shekar, Assistant Manager Human Resources, Herbalife Nutrition and NHRDN volunteer, on the changing trends in HR since the Covid-19 pandemic. Corporate Citizen brings you excerpts from this riveting session

“Successful CHROs will have to have the ability to tap into eclectic expert knowledge bases and be able to construct and synergise these to make a compelling piece of work in any area”

- Amitav Mukherji

Keerthana Shashi Shekar: What are some of your priorities as an HR leader? What are employee expectations from HR?

Amitav Mukherji : At ITC we believe that the dynamism and success of an enterprise are driven by the inspiration the vision provides, the values that drive thought and action and the vitality of its operating system. The reason I am saying this it is from here that HR priorities follow. If I look at the current circumstances, I think articulating, communicating and reinforcing the company’s vision is the priority. I think there is never a more opportune time than in a crisis to be able to articulate what a company’s vision is and to rally troops around that vision. I think the second most important priority would be values. These are the times when values typically get tested. I think ensuring HR systems and policies are consistent with the values of the enterprise is a priority for me and the HR system. Respect for people, customer focus, and nation orientation are some of our values and it is reflected in our ability to be able to service our consumers with essential products in this times of crisis and to be able to do so while maintaining the highest standards of safety and risk mitigation measures, being able to help the community around our units in consistency with our espoused values of being nation oriented, and helping disadvantaged sections of society with our products, these are certainly some priorities which have driven our agenda in HR.

We are in an environment which is unprecedented, therefore explaining and bringing to life a culture of frugality and resourcefulness is very important requirements from all of us in the HR function and leaders in general in our company. The other part would be encouraging innovation. Any crisis also throws up opportunities for businesses to look at how they review consumers, how they look at their product portfolio, so I think innovation is a key priority. From the point of view of employees, the main expectations they have of HR would be psychological comfort. Stability of employment and stability of income is very important expectations from employees. Safety and risk mitigation measures are also a critical requirement. The last expectation is the distinctive proposition the employer has to offer to the employee.

Gangapriya Chakraverti : I think the pandemic has got us to pivot to some very basic things. As an HR person, I would say that our top priority is really the safety, health and wellbeing of our employees and this has been brought to light much more starkly in recent times. Particularly, when people are anxious about this pandemic, giving them the assurance that they can be in the safety of their homes or if they are coming in to the office, that they can be assured of very high levels of safety protocols that will be put into place, that will minimise or reduce all kinds of risks that we have of contracting the infection. Employees need that reassurance. This care can come in many ways, such as assuring them that their employment is in place, their incomes are protected, and that the company has the reserves to overcome the challenges that the coronavirus has passed on us. I think the long term focus continues to be that we need a highly engaged, motivated and capable workforce. The ambitions of the organisation are in no way impacted. We need to help the organisation by being our best selves and having a workforce that is capable of delivering and making up for what we have lost in these few months.

As for the employee experience, in the short term, the primary concern would be whether the business would be able to come out of this in good shape, so there is a lot of communication that is happening which talks about the state of the business to employees on a fairly regular basis, which is really about providing assurance, and showing that everything is getting back to normal, however abnormal the situation around us maybe. It is about giving them the sense that we are trying to be business as usual as far as possible given the constraints. Employees too are now increasingly thinking about what the new normal will look like, and how it is going to be when they get back to the office. There is increasing curiosity, anxiety and also openness about what this new normal would look like.

Anuradha Razdan : I feel a lot of resonance with what Gangapriya and Amitav have said. If I have to sum up what the focus of me and my team have been over the last few months, it’s really been on lives and livelihoods. The first thing is the health and safety of our people and the slew of actions we have taken since early March. Since then, we have taken a host of actions for the health and safety of our employees and their families. When it comes to livelihoods, we were very responsible and took an early commitment to protect not just our employees but also our ecosystem of 230,000 people in India from sudden drops in pay. That gave our eco-system a lot of assurance. That has gone a long way in keeping morale and engagement high. Now that we are past the immediate disruption that we saw in the months of March and April, the focus is very much back to growth and what it means to make sure that business operations continue without any obstructions. If we look at the long term, there is a lot that we are learning and planning ahead for what it means for the business and our workforce and what the workplace of the future will look like, given the scale of change that we have all experienced.

Keerthana: As per the NHRDN research, the HR leader of the future is authentic and has a human-centric approach. He has sharp strategic business acumen and is a transformation catalyst. He builds mastery of technology and analytics, leverages expanded domain boundar i es and builds expertise as a culture architect. What according to you will be the key characteristics of future CHROs if they have to be successful?

Amitav : I think that there are a lot of opinions about this. I would depend on the research material available. NHRDN has undertaken a research project in this area and spoken to over 80 CHROs to understand what could be the expectations and capabilities of CHROs going ahead. Six key things emerge. The first one has been enduring as a requirement of any CHRO and that is the understanding and appreciation of business strategy and business acumen. How is value created in any organisation, what can HR do to accelerate or strengthen those value creation elements, what could be done to amplify competitive advantage in a firm, etc. are all critical components of this skill. I think the other dimension which is emerging as an important characteristic of any CHRO would be the ability to leverage learnings from other disciplines. HR has always borrowed from labour economics, sociology, and psychology but we are also seeing a requirement now to look at behavioural economics, consumer behaviour and marketing especially when it is becoming so critical to communicate to employees and prospective employees about the positioning of a firm and what it stands for. Successful CHROs will have to have the ability to tap into eclectic expert knowledge bases and be able to construct and synergise these to make a compelling piece of work in any area. The third dimension is about architecting the culture, and I think that as the traditional role of the HR head has been to be an employee champion but it’s also equally important that HR facilitates a culture change when it is required that companies need to pivot. The fourth point that emerged was being a transformation catalyst. We are looking at situations where business strategy really needs to change and certain capabilities need to be added at a fairly rapid pace, so what can HR leaders do to enable organisations to make this immediate and quick change when the situation so demands? Apart from an internal appreciation of what the business demands, an external orientation of what is happening in the environment becomes extremely critical and therefore to play the role of transformation catalyst with the dual capability of having business acumen and an awareness of the external environment is really fundamental to be able to do that successfully.

The fifth dimension is really about building technology and analytics mastery. I think with data sciences, there is a tremendous amount of information available to be able to take well-informed people decisions. Is the CHRO able to harvest this information, analyse it, address privacy concerns of employees and is he able to ensure that this data feeds into HR strategy becomes an extremely critical requirement going ahead of a CHRO. Lastly, I would say that at the heart of all these changes is whether the CHRO is human centered and authentic. I think on the last dimension, the CHRO has to be an exemplar and walk the talk in terms of authenticity and human connectedness. I would summarise these as the key characteristics of CHROs well borne out by the research done by NHRDN recently.

“Previously, we were restricted to a classroom which could accommodate maybe 25 people. Today, you can bring in 100+ people in a virtual session for a training. We are moving to a virtual platform, we have been able to reach out to many people”

- Gangapriya Chakraverti

Keerthana: The NHRDN research highlighted the rankings of eight key HR shifts, pre and post-COVID. Here, two of the areas have some interesting values. One is the wellness, emotional health and psychological safety. It was ranked No. 7 pre-Covid and right now it is ranked at No. 3. It is also the most fast-tracked HR shift. Another interesting shift is the focus on continuous upskilling, reskilling and reinvention. It was ranked No.1 pre-Covid and is also ranked No. 1 post- Covid. How does the pandemic accelerate focus on continuous upskilling, reskilling and reinvention? Which is the top HR shift pre and post-Covid and what are the HR interventions made by your organisation to fast track this HR shift?

Gangapriya : It’s very interesting that focus on learning and upskilling has continued to be the top priority for HR pre and post-Covid and it is no surprise at all because, at the end of the day, all employees have to ensure that they have the necessary skillset and knowledge. The expectation is that people show up with the best capabilities that they possess. To that effect, companies continue to focus on learning activities. The world is changing fast. Technology is changing, circumstances are changing, and geopolitics is also getting impacted. In all of this, the only thing that will keep employees and companies relevant is access to the right kind of skillset. At Ford, I would say that the pandemic has been an opportunity for us to look at new ways of delivering training. Previously, we were restricted to a classroom which could accommodate maybe 25 people. Today, you can bring in 100+ people in a virtual session for a training. We are moving to a virtual platform, we have been able to reach out to many people. This reach has meant that people are exposed to new trainers, it also means that your peers in the learning room could be very diverse. This move to using virtual platforms is also ensuring that the learning team is getting more comfortable with technology, they are working on training programmes which were only meant to be face to face, and they have been able to convert it to a virtual environment.

For example, design thinking was thought to be training which could only be given face to face, but it has been successfully converted to a virtual training module where you can do prototyping without physical parts with digital tools. I think it has also pushed the learning team to look at different ways in which they can convert the training curriculum to online. Another thing we have noticed is that due to work from home, employees now have a little more time on their hands, because they don’t have to commute, so they can invest time in training, so attendance in our training programmes has shot through the roof, and it has become much easier because employees now have some flexibility in terms of when they participate and how they participate. The focus remains the same, but it is the new methods which enrich our ability to deliver and ability to receive training, which is what we are seeing through this pandemic.

“When it comes to livelihoods, we were very responsible and took an early commitment to protect not just our employees but also our ecosystem of 230,000 people in India from sudden drops in pay”

- Anuradha Razdan

Keerthana: As per the NHRDN research, we have seen that 50% of the respondents of our survey post- COVID have revisited health and wellness policies. What makes wellness, emotional health and psychological safety the most fast-tracked HR shift compared to the others? Are your employees talking more about fatigue now? Also, can you share one initiative which is made by your organisation in the last three months related to wellness?

Anuradha : Everything that we have known, about the way we live and the way we work, has been thrown asunder by this pandemic in the last few months. Everything that we took for granted has shifted. We are having to learn new ways to do things, whether it is managing households, simple things like sourcing groceries, and learning to work in a new context in a new surrounding which is unfamiliar for most people. A quote doing the rounds is that ‘we are all in the same storm but we are not in the same boat’. There are many of us who have seen challenges of a very different order. Someone who has a disability or is looking after people who are vulnerable will have very different challenges from others. In this context, wellbeing jumping to the top of the list is not really a surprise. So what are we doing about it?

First and foremost, we really amped up the number of listening posts for our employees to tell us how they are thinking and how they are feeling about the smallest things. Employee town halls, leader huddles, peer to peer buddy systems have been put in place. We are working in much shorter time impact cycles. We were doing pulse checks initially every other week and now every month. About two weeks into this new way of working, we started seeing wellbeing and wellness come up as an issue at different levels. The first thing we did is invest in the extended leadership of our organisation, the top 200 leaders, and worked with them to think about how they want to lead their teams. We have also built an internal tool called a wellbeing quotient, which allows you to take a survey with 10-15 questions which focus on all aspects of your wellbeing, and it throws up a score which allows you to reflect on which part of your work and life effectiveness you can do better at and then we encourage line managers and employees to have a very open conversation. We also did a simple thing based on one of the points of feedback that our employees gave us. They were saying that the chairs and equipment they have at home was not ergonomically designed to spend long stretches of time. So we found a way to send people their office chairs. This simple act has gotten me more positive feedback from employees than many other bigger things.