HR leaders' Role is to Set New Paradigm For Employer-Employee : Dr. Vipul Singh
Speaking about looking up to someone; Dr. Singh shared and said, "Steve Jobs – for his persistence. Almost 11 years after he was ousted from the company he built, he went back to save it and turned it into one of the most renowned companies in the world!"
As an experienced HR leader, how do you see HR as the function will transform in the future?
During the pandemic, one aspect that stood out was the ability of HR teams to control damage and the endless complexity of people management and come up with contingency plans; all this while keeping the spirit of the organization intact. For me, the future is already here – there is a greater rate of adaptability in terms of the ability to be creative and flexible. There is a visibly increased courage to shut down old ways and transition into the new norms seamlessly. Above all, digitizing and enhancing payroll, employee check, onboarding, HR services, data management, learning, etc. will prepare HR for the next wave of transformation and unprecedented slowdowns.
Keeping associates engaged during this time is a crucial task. How are you managing this in this contactless world?
At ADP, our associate engagement administration team and team-level focus groups have unleashed their creativity to keep our people engaged – I'm talking about virtual fitness sessions, virtual jamming sessions, virtual team fun activities and a host of other exciting things. Our focus groups are making the team members run around in their homes for games like scavenger hunts and teasing them with virtual crosswords. Our larger associate engagement administrators are leveraging our collaboration platform, ADP works, and third-party screen application, Webex, to conduct fitness challenges and virtual jamming session for the entire associate population – nearly 10,000 of them! The best part is that our people are liking these.
What are the best practices you initiated in order to help your people to stay healthy & fit?
We are going all out in our attempt to ensure the overall wellbeing of our associates. To begin with, we partnered with psychologists and physicians to provide on-call mental and physical wellbeing counseling to our associates between 9 AM – 9 PM every day.
With physical health into consideration, we have urged our vendors to provide ergonomic chairs and work desks at reasonable prices to our associates. Some teams have even gone to the extent of having chairs from office delivered to their team members' homes.
Besides these, our engagement 'focus groups' have been regularly conducting healthy living and eating challenges, sharing wellness blogs, encouraging virtual fitness sessions for their whole team.
We are experiencing broken hierarchies. Will this here stay for long?
Getting things done virtually is the new normal. Hence, the best thing to do is to learn efficient ways of connecting with team members. This improved efficiency will have a direct impact on the speed at which things get done. This will also reduce the bureaucracy because leaders will delegate decision-making to enhance speed—resulting in increased empowerment for employees. Be it the HR systems, customer-response systems, development systems or manufacturing systems, I believe that the ability to respond promptly, instead of waiting for hierarchical approvals, will have a positive effect on the workforce of tomorrow.
As a leader you might observe empathy, open communication is trending during these times. To what extent do you agree with its importance?
Constantly staying at home and trying to address more instances of balancing professional and personal lives takes a toll on the overall wellbeing at some point. With a potential increase in health issues, there is an increasing appreciation for its importance and how leaders can show greater empathy towards discussing any such obstacles that may be holding their employees from working efficiently. As we mitigate this period, organizations are already coming up with better solutions, employment benefits, and programs in place to help employees. In fact, at ADP, we provided a special one-time COVID bonus to our associates, COVID insurance, and more to show we care.
What is your one advice to give to other HR leaders?
We are not oblivious to the change that's happening, and how! To thrive in the new world order; we need the courage to take risks to transition into the new norm seamlessly. As HR leaders, our role is to build a new employer-employee paradigm in the new order, flexible leadership and team working models that allow people to adapt to change quickly, and deep employee wellness and wellbeing programs.
