Experts Share Insights On Building Resilient Workforce

On July 30th, 2024, the 9th Edition of the BW People HR Excellence Summit & Awards was held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Bengaluru. This prestigious event, themed "Unlocking the Future of HR," brought together industry leaders and HR professionals to explore cutting-edge trends and challenges in human resources. One of the key highlights of the summit was a panel discussion titled "Employee Engagement and Retention in the Modern Era."

The session was chaired by Sunil Chemmankotil, Country Manager for Adecco India, who provided insightful guidance and moderation throughout the discussion. The panel featured distinguished speakers who shared their expertise and perspectives on the evolving landscape of employee engagement were ,Ankur Poddar - Head of HR Consumer Business & Lead for Culture & HR Operations at Lenovo, Seema Unni - Head of HR at Fidelity Investments, Santana Ramakrishnan - CHRO of Carl Zeiss India (Bangalore).

Ankur Poddar, Head HR Consumer Business & Lead-Culture & HR Operations, Lenovo highlighted “ With increased no.of GenZ workforce and data says about 35 percent of workforce would be GenZ by 2025 and they crave for flexibility, and very essential for them is to maintain work life balance and which correlates to flexibility in a certain way and when it comes to hybrid employees it means that they are also connected to the office, so we suggest managers to call their entire team at least twice a week, and for remotely working employees we have clear connects which are diligently followed for people who are working remotely there is a sense of social isolation researchers have confirmed that so we try to engage them in different communities like travelling, photography etc.”

Santana Ramakrishnan, CHRO, Carl Zeiss India (Bangalore) said “In India we have the entire value chain from manufacturing, sales and services, support, R&D, tech, digital services, we run through the entire value chain for us at no point we had one approach that works for every cohort of employees whether it is in the content of communication or the style of communication for example technology and sales employees have different requirements when it comes to engagement. What works for us in this domain is giving people value proposition of working in the company”.

Seema Unni, Head HR, Fidelity Investments, expressed “When it comes to diversity and inclusion its quite interesting yet challenging aspects of our job as there is no one answer that can service all our needs. In financial services value proposition is what customers are obsessed about and also when we are protecting the financial aspirations of the customers we have to understand each customer pretty differently and our customer base is so diverse, we are global capability center in India but when it comes to the entire spectrum of businesses within fidelity its all about the diverse customer base so customer inclusion strategies is where we start and then we come to an employee inclusion strategy.