In Conversation With Shweta Mohanty, Head of Human Resources, SAP India

What role do you think performances, performance evaluations and feedback play in mapping employee success? 

I fundamentally believe that performance evaluation is not equal to feedback and the organizations who are able to design people's practices around these subtle but big differences are able to link it to the employee success in a much better way. I'll give you an example. Fundamentally when we look at evaluation, evaluation is performance evaluation is always towards an event. You know, linkage to an event, for example, a progression or a promotion or rewards. So in very crude terms, you can say it's a label, it's a judgment, often in comparison to others.

And that that fundamental premise is something that curtails and organizations attempt to map it to employee success. Instead, if I would really want to put it in the way of feed forward, I actually hate to use the word feedback because feedback inherently means you look back, right?

I do believe in feed-forward or, giving inputs to to an individual or an employee with the sole aim of improving their performance for the future in mapping employee success, because the moment you look forward you look at employees.

You look at what kind of roles they would fit in. You can look at what kind of input you are giving to them to chart their success. And that is really, really critical for any organization. So any input that is positive, is looking forward to making employees with a fundamental belief that the employee would take that and work towards it and work on their development areas.

But more importantly, also, being fully aware of what an employee's strengths are and how they really work in mapping that strength to the right roles in the organization leads them to employee success. And if we are able to do that well, I think the performance evaluation part, becomes really easier because you have kept the employee at the heart of the whole process,

And if we, if we are able to design our people practices around it, I think we have, we are guaranteed employee success.

How in your view can organizations, culture, and values impact the mapping of employee success?

It is very important for an employee to see the growth map. Salaries, most organizations will pay me according to the skill that I inherit but what about my growth map? Five years down the line, I shouldn't be earning a lakh and just be an area sales manager who would stagnate my growth if I plan on changing into any new organization. So how do the company's culture and values impact the growth map? It's fundamentally important. and an organization's culture has a huge role in employee success. Employee success, for me, personally, is when employees are able to be themselves and have a psychologically safe space to continue to bring their best potential. They know what steps that they need to take, to enrich their careers.

And there is one big change that we have observed in the last almost five to seven years. Is that the career graphs of people are not really linear anymore? It's not like if you will become an area sales manager, then you will become probably a regional sales manager and then you will grow in your career.

Today, people really want to have zigzag career paths, and it is valued as an organization for people to have holistic experiences because when you have holistic experiences, you have a full view of different aspects of how an organization is run, but if you're selling a product what is the feedback coming for that product, if you are designing a product what the customers are saying about that product.

And that's the reason why we need to really look at employee success in terms of very diverse career paths. And we especially in SAP, if I'm talking about my organization, we absolutely encourage that we have people, you know, who in my team, in my own team who are actually technical, you know people you know, who decided to move to human resources because they have a passion for the subject.

And it's okay if the employees are failing at some point in time, not everybody becomes a star in every role they pick up. And it's okay to not to be so successful in something and come back. And that's fundamentally the culture that relates to employee success.

While you say that today organizations like SAP are giving that platform that you can zigzag your career and reach the potential aim that you always have in your mind. Do you think there are any tools, IT techniques or resources that organizations can use to track employee progress?

So I think one of the fundamental premises with any career path comes with self-awareness, right? If I'm aware what are my strengths and what are my dealers? What are my challenges? What are my opportunities? Then I am in a much better space to say okay this is where I think I would be successful. I am on this career path and I would really want to chart into something completely different. So in terms of the tools and resources, what we really use is that we do have 360 feedback, right?  We encourage our employees to go and seek feedback from the peers that they are working with or the customers. We also have ample opportunities for employees to do what we call short-term projects or fellowships.

Where it's a testing phase,  you have an interest in an area. You go and take three months or six months and go and work in that area and see whether you really have passion, understand what are the pros and cons,  how, really you are, you coming up in that space.

So I think the self-awareness bit is something that we really encourage and we have a lot of tools enabling that we also you know, in terms of the resources, we also do a lot of you know opportunities, for example, hackathons, you know, you have. You know, opportunity to go and you know, work with a completely different team.

We have something called as social sabbaticals, right, where employees go and actually work with an NGO in a different country or in a different state within the country. to really solve deeper, you know, social problems with the help of technology, right?

And that kind of opens up opportunities for them. And I think that is something which helps us to holistically to get into the self-awareness piece of it. And we, we do build up tools around it. So 360 fellowships social sabbaticals, opportunities, hackathons and innovation.

Exactly. Lastly Shweta, do you think there are certain challenges as well organizations face while mapping employee success? And if so, you could name a few challenges and put strategized solutions to them as well. 

So, one of the challenges when you are working with a diverse set of employees, one of the challenges certainly is how do you align the employees with the organizational strategy and how well are you able to do that. Right? Every person in the organization I do feel has to have a connection with what we are trying to do overall in the organization. What are the organizational priorities?

What are some of the strategies? And that linkage is very important and that's where we face challenges sometimes because how well that information is percolating to every employee when they feel that their code that they're writing or the impact that they're making in the work is, is really helping the organization.

We do a lot around that we have strategy sessions that run across the organization. We ensure that our managers are talking about that linkage at every opportunity. It is one of the biggest challenges because the moment our employees are disconnecting from the organization, and that Is when the employee success is impacted, they do not know how their work is contributing to the, to the bigger picture.