Physical environment is the key to innovation and creating a thought provoking workspace: Chetna Gogia

Q 1- What is the value of Wellness of your workforce?

At PayU India, the largest online payments processor in the country, we believe in keeping our employees first and consider their wellness as the top most priority. We understand that in today’s day and time our workplace has a vital role to play in our wellness. It is a fact that healthy employees are more engaged & productive, therefore want our employees to be fit & happy, contributing more towards themselves & the organization.

Keeping this in mind we have defined our wellness programs broadly in three categories – Physical wellness, Mental Wellness and Financial Wellness:

Physical Wellness –

In order to ensure our employees are fit and healthy and have no threat from health ailments, we conduct multiple activities including;

* Fitness challenges like Marathon, circuit training, etc.

* Sports tournaments like Cricket, Table Tennis, etc.

Mental Wellness –

To ensure that our employees are stress free, harassment free and have a healthy work life balance, we offer the following:

* Flexi work timing, telecommuting, so that employees can maintain a healthy balance between family & work

* Laying down policies on workplace harassment, whistleblowing, encouraging open door policy

Financial Wellness-

We aim at reducing our employee’s financial liabilities and ensure they are paid at par with the industry standards.

* To ensure our employees are financially well off, we do compensation benchmarking to determine market rate for each position depending upon skill set & experience

* Besides, we also offer tax-saving components like Car lease & many other allowances like Newspaper, Mobile handset, etc.

* We also provide free Medical Insurance to employees including their spouse and kids and offer discounts on Parental Insurance.

Additionally, we have Express Relaxation therapy across locations to provide quick massage to employees like foot reflexology, back-neck-shoulder massage, head massage, etc. We have a Homeopathic doctor visiting our office providing free consultation & medication to employees. We have also partnered with vendors to organize health check-up camps, yoga & meditation session, Zumba, fitness challenges, etc.

To understand what our employees expect from us we also run an anonymous survey to garner their feedback & response and have picked up couple of wellness initiatives in the recent past basis their feedback and are looking at incorporating more.

Q 2- What is the importance of an inspiring workplace?

Office spaces makes a lot of difference to the quality of work. At PayU, we have spacious, colourful and vibrant work stations for all our employees to ensure there is enough room for their ideas to flow creatively. Moreover, our global relations provides the employees an opportunity to learn from our global counterparts and enhance their skills and capabilities. Physical environment is the key for innovation and creating a thought to provoking workspace. An inspiring workplace is critical to keep the employees motivated and retain them. We believe that an inspiring work surrounding helps one think better and out of the box.

Q 3- Can we leave an important decision as hiring on a Robot?

When it comes to hiring we believe in evaluating the person not based on his/her background but by giving them a platform to showcase their skills. Hiring is one the most crucial aspect for any company and it ideally should involve face-to-face engagement to make a prospective employee comfortable and also understanding their skill sets.

Q 4 - What are the challenges of working with instant gratification seeking and ever increasing millennials?

Millennials are very important for a work place since they represent a major part of the workforce. The new generation wants a constant flow of feedback, they want to know how they have done a job and how can they improve. Regular feedback makes any employee more productive and efficient and we believe in encouraging this behaviour.

Millennials are full of ideas and have the urge to do things better. Providing them with a conducive atmosphere to work helps us not only come-up with the best possible products and services, their experience also helps us understand the market we want to cater to.

Q 5- How should a futuristic CHRO Look like?

The scope of a CHRO is massive. They have to think ahead of their CEO. They need to be the hands and legs of a CEO and convey to the employees what the company expects from them. Talent management is the key task which defines how a company performs, therefore a CHRO should be well versed with the industry, technology and keep an eye out for the right kind of talent

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Q- What are the best social media practices to hire the right kind of talent for your organization?

LinkedIn has proved be one of the most helpful tool to identify the right candidates for most of our job opening. They help with the relevant information on the skill, connections, education and experience of a person. However, as mentioned earlier, we always ensure we meet the candidates to understand their skillsets better before we make any offer.

Q- Tell us a few techniques to retain talent in your organization.

We care for our employees and believe in retaining each one of them. In order to ensure we understand what our employees expect from the company, we have adopted a 360-degree approach where we encourage managers to communicate with their teams regularly to understand their expectations. We also use technology to gauge our employee’s expectations and understand their thought processes. We conduct mood analysis and with the help of AI we understand what the employee is thinking about the company. The use of AI has also helped us increase the percentage of people coming forth about the issues they are facing. This helps us work towards making a conducive work environment.

At PayU, we believe is making work comfortable and thus we offer flexible working hours to our employees so that they can make the most of their time and be more productive. Our friendly relocation facility allows the employees to easily change their city and continue to work with us. We have numerous other policies to ensure our employee have good work-life balance.

Q- What are you doing for new mothers who are coming back to work? How are you making work easier for them with motherhood on the side?

Juggling life between motherhood and work is not an easy task. And we understand that this may take a toll on new mothers. We ensure new mothers coming back to work don’t get overwhelmed when they resume their duty and have a comfortable transition back to the work life. We also provide work from home policy and flexible working hour which helps them be more productive without getting in the way of their new routine.