Forming A Hybrid Strategy In Place: Carmistha Mitra
Learning has become a key lever for success in today’s dynamic business environment. And in order to succeed in this, it is absolutely imperative that the CLO embrace a more powerful and strategic role to create business impact.
And Axis Bank’s CLO Carmistha Mitra seems to be possessing all such qualities to be a renowned CLO, organisations should look up to. Bagging the Best CLO of the year award BW HR L&D Excellence Summit and Awards 2021, on the 31st of March, Mitra has proven it all.
When Carmistha started working on the strategy – she travelled length and breadth of the country, met people, took feedback, and understood the challenges and requirement at the ground level and across divisions of the Bank.
The outcome was a comprehensive L&D strategy that ensured driving of the CEO’s agenda and the Bank’s business performance around Growth, Profitability and Sustainability. The key actions of the strategy aims at enabling employees to provide a differentiated customer experience.
Over the last one year, she has been extensively focussing on shifting learning from an HR-driven agenda, to an organization agenda wherein learning becomes a habit owned by the employees. The strategy not only focuses on shaping the content required to drive organization capability, but also lays equal emphasis on developing the right kind of eco-system, putting in place the necessary infrastructure, and involving leadership across different levels in the organization to drive adoption of learning and shape the Bank’s culture.
Also, the learning imperatives are now a part of MD & CEO’s Balanced Scorecard, as well as an integral part of organization’s value system. Additionally, she continuously takes cues from the ground and craft interventions that are unsaid, but are critical for the success of the organization – taking into account both the business as well as employee needs.
As soon as lockdown was initiated, Mitra realized the need to launch an initiative that not only enhanced the employee morale but also empowered them to unlock their potential for self-transformation leading to business results. Thus, a program was crafted keeping a holistic approach in mind and covered elements of well-being related to the mind, body, heart and soul. The core elements of the program included sessions on mindfulness, positive psychology, health, and creativity. The initiative enabled and empowered the employees to be the best that they can. Carmistha also set up a learning council to review and monitor the progress of the L&D strategy.
This complete ecosystem approach significantly enhanced the reach and acceptance of learning in the organization leading to a substantial jump in learning hours/person. tHEY have already touched 1.5 million hours in 7 months, aiming to reach 52 learning hours/employee by the end of the year.
Creating a hybrid team to deliver on the strategy – Carmistha adopted a very unique approach to put in place a strong L&D team to deliver on the strategy. This approach included:
This led to transforming the L&D department into a leaner, agile, and more strategic team
Furthermore, Carmistha also feels it is her responsibility to contribute to the overall learning space by participating as a speaker in various industry sessions and forums.
Keep up the amazing work Carmistha!
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