Fuelling Integrity Within The Organisation
A Seasoned HR professional with well over a decade of experience in setting up HR processes in Indian and MNC start-ups, Girish Menon, VP-HR, Swiggy is a pretty renowned name in managing stakeholders in matrix organisations, anchoring strategic initiatives like re-structuring, aligning HR practices to drive profitability, driving key people practices, etc.
Menon has always been keen and receptive to the concerns of all the staff members, irrespective of their position, and relates an anecdote to emphasize the same actively. He has led a couple of large interventions during the last one year with Swiggy, where one of them was the organic restructuring of the organization. This entailed looking at overall functional interplay, realigning teams to key organizational goals, studying spans of control, driving automation to reduce cost, centralizing functions for greater efficiency. He believes that HR as a function embraces the change much faster than others as its felt by the largest stakeholder group i.e. employees.
“As a function, we are still not progressive enough and need to be more agile and open to learning from other streams. For example; the whole segmentation approach in marketing can be used in HR /AB testing concepts can be used for experimentation /sentiment analysis in employee pulse /agile methodology to teams etc. We can only earn a place on the table by understanding nuances of business and how the people processes /practices can create an impact,” explains Menon.
No organis01ation embraces the efforts unless its shown in form of positive output. Menon has always been a curious learner and that has been his strength which has helped him scale with the organization. An year back when he had joined the organization, Swiggy only had 500 employees and 5000 Delivery partners; as compared to today’s times when the employee strength has risen from 500 to 10000 employees and over 3 lakh delivery partners.
Like any other employee, Menon too had to strive hard to make his own name into a new environment. Remembering the initial struggling days, Menon shares his experience when he dad to deal with a leader who had high need for power, was biased and also had credibility in the system because of being an early joiner. Hence almost like a founding group member, the individual was keen to fire an employee without much due diligence or following principles of natural justice and had to put my foot down to ensure leaders don't act whimsical as this could have lead to a cultural break down and precedence.
Further, Menon states that he has always ensured keeping the bar high on integrity for himself and his team and believes that “unless you don’t care about your employees’ integrity, you can never expect reciprocation from their end too.”
