From Traditional To Strategic: HR's Proactive Turn

Savi Khanna Jan 24, 2024

What is your vision for HR profession, and what transformative role can it play in the success of a company?

HR is witnessing a huge shift from being a cost centre and support function to a strategic business partner to companies. It is moving from traditional administrative/operational work to having a more proactive, business-oriented approach. This transition needs the HR function and HR professionals to play a transformative role by focusing on business goals, embracing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for a dynamic and innovative workforce, help companies be more agile and take steps for employee well-being to foster a positive work culture.

How did you get interested in the HR field, and what have been some major milestones in your journey?

Ever since my first job as a software engineer, I realised that human capital is the single biggest factor in success or failure of an organisation. This observation played a crucial role in me developing interest in HR and choosing this as a profession. It’s been 9 years in the field of HR so far and the journey has been nothing less that amazing.

During this period there were many learnings and many milestones. However, the most satisfying has been to build HR systems and processes for a company from ground up. Satisfying because efforts put in translated into a 6x growth in headcount and 7x growth in revenue in a span of 7 years.

How should HR professionals themselves envision their contribution to the world of work?

In the current times, HR’s vision should be the larger vision rather than being limited to the department. I believe that every HR professional should aim at creating sustainable change, which can foster better employee experience, and contribute to organisation’s growth and development. Sustainable so that actions are relevant not just long term but across teams and organisation wide.

Kindly share some path-breaking initiatives by your team in brief.

Some of the initiatives undertaken have been:

Automation and Digitisation: Introduction of HRIS and automating many of the operational HR tasks through these digitisation efforts.
Employee well-being: Health is wealth, especially in the current times, hence, the well-being initiative focused on not just offering health care but a health partner who could keep a track of physical and mental well-being of the employees through regular follow-ups and health checks.
Interventions to identify and create a value system in the organisation: This was an interesting project undertaken to select top 5 organisational identifiers, which various activities could get aligned to, for instance, recruitment and performance management.