In Post-Pandemic Era, HR Will Play An Instrumental Role In Steering Organizations Towards A Paradigm Shift: CHRO, Piramal Group
The pandemic changed the world almost overnight. What adjustments were done in your organization to overcome the crisis?
The COVID-19 pandemic made its appearance felt in several other countries before it hit India. The Piramal Group’s diverse presence across 30+ countries globally helped us to pre-empt the situation in India. Our transition to remote working was seamless as most of our HR processes across the Group were already digitized. To enable smooth workflows and business continuity, we were largely focused on building a culture of digital mind-set by training our businesses and functions in order to move up the curve. We ensured the safety of our on-ground COVID heroes that relentlessly worked at our pharmaceutical facilities, glass factories, real estate construction sites and sales offices through our progressive policies of mental and physical wellbeing coupled with infrastructural support that helped us run and continue our operations virtually.
Technology has changed every aspect of our lives. How has technology changed HR as a function over the last few years?
In today’s VUCA world, technology is rapidly transforming every aspect of our lives be it banking, shopping, or entertainment. We are rarely required to visit our bank branch as almost all transactions can be done via ATMs or Net/Phone Banking. Similarly, various technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence are playing an instrumental role in HR process transformation. Several manual routine tasks including sorting of CVs, issuing standard letters, leave calculations, etc. are now automated. Employee self-service through apps for learning, goal setting, employee reimbursements, and claims are key enablers in driving contactless HR services. Digitization and digitalization of HR processes has led to enhanced employee experience in addition to improved interactions between managers and their teams.
Innovative, technology-led data-driven systems ultimately result in better decision-making. At Piramal Group, the availability of data along with business intelligence equips us to effectively cross collaborate by providing real-time data, insights and smart dashboards at the click of a button, thereby resulting in the transition of HR from a support function to a strategic function.
How do you see technologies like AI and Automation helping HR to become a strategic function?
The rapid digital transformation witnessed in the past few months has brought in speed, accuracy and transparency in HR processes, in addition to cost savings. Increasingly, organizations are adopting a blended workforce that comprises a combination of humans and bots working together. These enable HR teams to focus on strategic alignment with bots complementing manual routine processes. A digital employee experience through engagement bots provides organizations with real-time insights into the drivers for employee sentiment. Further, leveraging this information enables organizations to provide a superior employee experience as well as improves retention. Including technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality that are both affordable and scalable, for training, inductions, and collaboration will lead to a truly immersive experience while working remotely.
Piramal Group is a conglomerate with numerous businesses across the globe. How does technology enable you to take care of such a diverse workforce across locations and keeping the execution so seamless?
Piramal Group is a global business conglomerate with diverse interests in Pharma, Financial Services, Real Estate and Glass Packaging. The Group has offices in over 30 countries, a global brand presence in more than 100 markets and a team of over 10,000 people from 21 diverse nationalities.
In large and diverse organizations such as ours, it is imperative to automate manual processes whilst ensuring effective people management, eliminating location-specific challenges and meeting compliance requirements. Engaging with Oracle for its HCM Cloud has enabled us to successfully implement uniform standardized processes across geographies and bring together fragmented HR data over a single platform. HR analytics has further empowered our businesses by providing them with insights on spotting and retaining talent, uncovering trends and identifying potential problems. Collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams, and automated employee query handling through our bot ‘PIRO’ also enable HR to become a strategic partner while enhancing the efficiency of common work processes.
As far as Talent Acquisition is concerned, each position is closed online through Oracle’s ‘Taleo’ ensuring end-to-end visibility and process transparency as per standard operating process. Our automated standardized acquisition process including job requisition, offer rollout, on-boarding and background verification has helped to improve candidate experience.
How do you see HR changing in the post-pandemic era? What role will technology play in that change?
In the post-pandemic era, HR will continue to play an increasingly instrumental role in steering organizations towards a new paradigm shift. The emergence of the ‘new normal’ will make it necessary for organizations to adopt and adapt to newer technologies as remote working will continue to remain in force for some foreseeable time. Data-driven HR has emerged as the new frontier for all HR decisions. Given the richness of data that is now available, we are increasingly witnessing how decisions are being based on science and data instead of the gut.
At Piramal Group, our extensive repository of ~70-80 data points on each employee complemented by predictive analytics on attrition, talent gaps, team productivity and effectiveness further enhance HR efficiencies.
What are the key benefits that you have witnessed after digitalizing HR of your organization?
Digitizing the HR Journey at Piramal Group has resulted in reduction of time spent on repetitive tasks, maximization of employee experience and generation of insights for leaders to make data-based strategic decisions. Oracle’s Cloud has provided us with scalable and localized technology solutions to effectively manage our global workforce. It has enabled us to create an internal job marketplace for our existing employees across the Group, and identify top talent that is best suited for the respective role. Through automated reporting, chat-bots, workflows, etc., we have saved over 1200 days of annual HR efforts thereby reducing manual interventions in people processes. At our Piramal Learning University virtual campus, we have centralized learning operations onto a single platform with a mobile-first technology that enables anytime-anywhere learning, that has resulted in the adoption of e-learning by ~75%. Our attrition modeling allows us to identify employees at risk with 80% accuracy and plan preventive interventions.
Fortunately, this lockdown had given us ample time to rethink and reinvent ourselves. What are those things that you realize or discovered about yourself?
The lockdown has made us realize how our investment in technology has resulted in a smooth transition to work from home. In spite of the lockdown, we succeeded in completing an acquisition seamlessly along with integrating the new entity into our company, because of the excellent systems at our disposal.
The commitment of our teams supported by technology and automation made it far easier for us to ensure cultural assimilation of the acquired entity, which is otherwise is a challenging task. Furthermore, leveraging data to draw meaningful insights for improved decision making during the lockdown was a revelation that led our teams to undertake more novel experiments and test more hypotheses.
What is that one advice you want to give to other HR Leaders?
The core values of a company are put to test especially during difficult times. I have witnessed how HR and IT functions in most companies around the world have worked tirelessly to enable business continuity and provide caring solutions to its employees. I believe that HR leaders must be courageous, stand up for what is right, and uphold their personal as well as professional values to ensure that human resources across organizations remain engaged and productive. In addition, a continued focus on unlearning, learning, and re-learning to navigate and adapt to change will better equip HR leaders in their pursuit of knowledge and excellence. As employees continue to deliver lasting value to customers, the HR impact would tend towards infinity.
