Leading With People-Centric Approach: Head HR, PNB MetLife

How are you efficiently managing this COVID crisis hit situation at your organization?

Our company is a people-centric company and our foremost priority in responding to the crisis has been the safety and wellbeing of both, our employees and customers. When the Government announced the national lockdown, we moved quickly to close our 106 branches and advise all our employees to work from home.

Having successfully tested our business continuity plans (BCP) well before the lockdown, our business was able to smoothly transition into the work from home -mode with minimal disruption to customers.

Flexible work arrangements were already strongly ingrained in our work culture, and we’ve continued to support and encourage employees to work flexibly – particularly those juggling caring responsibilities with the closure of schools and other institutions.

We have also hosted webinars with a medical doctor from International SOS to help employees learn the latest facts about COVID-19, and launched a dedicated microsite with information, tips and best practices from all our markets on supporting our customers during COVID19.

Our strong adoption of digital tools, including our real-time customer service app, ‘khUshi,’ has enabled our people to service customers from home. We have taken additional measures to expand our online capabilities to process claims, set up a dedicated customer care number, and relaxed the timeline for renewal of payments.

How are you as an HR leader keeping employees happy and hopeful? In this low time, it is important to stay hopeful.

Both as an employee and the HR Leader, I understand the impacts this period of isolation can have on morale and the stress and anxiety it can create.

This is something we anticipated and have significantly increased our focus on regular communication with employees through SMS, emails, WhatsApp and frequent calls. Our leaders, including our MD & CEO, have been highly active in engaging with employees and have sent out regular messages encouraging them to stay motivated and focused on supporting our customers.

Various innovative employee engagement programs have been developed including a “Friday Connect” email with tips on wellness and staying connected with colleagues. These programs have been well received and attracted strong participation.

Another area which we have actively focused on is skill-building and using this time of lockdown to encourage employees to complete virtual training programs.

Through the company’s USD 10 million Workforce of the Future Development Fund, which was established in 2018, we have been introducing new learning programs focused on enhancing digital skills, innovation and collaboration globally.

Additionally, our Learning and Development team has converted many face-to-face programs into virtual training sessions. Besides this, we also identified customized and specially curated programs for each team and assigned the related training to them.

Keeping your employees well connected. How are you keeping the workforce/ employees connected and productive?

This is indeed one of the biggest challenges that we face as an organisation with over 10,000 employees spread across 106 locations of India. Thanks to our BCP preparedness, we could provide laptops and VPN connectivity to many of our employees to stay connected at home. Our digital servicing platforms have enabled us to continue serving customers 24 hours a day in these challenging times.

The larger challenge is ensuring that our geographically dispersed field salesforce stays connected and continues to be productive in this challenging time. Like the corporate offices, our sales leaders have adopted digital channels and set up daily virtual sales huddles to discuss leads and how they can help advise customers in a virtual environment. We also organized special training programs to help the sales teams up-skill and improve productivity.

I am sure this has a direct impact on fresh hiring. How do you think this has impacted the hiring trends?

While the current situation has created a lot of uncertainty for businesses, we generally take a careful and considered approach to hiring and continue to do so.

This being a time of lockdown and social distancing, we are leveraging technology to replace face-to-face interviews with virtual ones – this is something we were trialling even before the lockdown.

Do you think you'll be facing some challenges in the post-COVID situation to be back in the conventional setup? What will they be like?

Nobody knows exactly what things will be like post-COVID19 so there will most likely be challenges as we adjust to the “new normal”. We anticipate employees will have heightened anxiety and concerns about travelling to work (especially via public transport) and as well as questions about how we will protect their health and safety in the workplace.  As employers, we need to be aware of these concerns and higher levels of stress and anxiety and be ready to support our people as they transition back to work.

On a positive note, I think this situation has demonstrated the benefits of working from home (WFH) and offering employees greater flexibility and going forward, new ways of working will emerge. Also, I believe the connection that employees have established while working remotely has built new friendships and will positively impact our working environment.