"Stay True To The Cause"

Heading the human resources for the healthcare major Philips in the Indian subcontinent, including Srilanka, Nepal, Bhutan & Bangladesh, Vishpalla Reddy is entrusted with several critical responsibilities, like HR across market commercial operations, Philips innovation campus (R&D), healthcare innovation centre, global business services and factories. Prior to Philips India, Reddy has worked with organisations like Uber and American Express, and has got wide exposure in terms of managing large employee base across boundaries. She shares her vision of the role of HR, and her role in the organisation.

What is your driving force?

What drives me personally is to meaningfully create business impacts through HR strategy and interventions. This is possible only through strong partnerships with business leaders and balancing employee and employer needs. I believe that HR does drive measurable results like any other strategic function in an organisation. Another factor that drives me is the opportunity to work with talented individuals from diverse

backgrounds which is an enriching process to interact and learn from colleagues to work together in a collaborative environment. I believe in mentoring women at the workplace where sharing learnings as a working mother would assist and encourage others to navigate their career decisions as well. This includes reiterating the importance of family, sponsors in the workplace and defining one’s own path at a pace that works for them.

What has been your journey like at Philips India and what has been your learning curve here?

Philips is an organisation that is deep rooted with an innovation culture and looks at leaders across the organisation for role model leadership behaviours — such as taking decisions boldly and swiftly with an enterprise mindset. Moreover, the organisation has enabled us to shape our future, drive swift execution, develop people to upgrade capabilities as well. Philips encourages me to be at my best, embrace flexibility and collaborate impactfully. This enables me to operate and bring out my best at work for myself and my team.

In your role as an HR person, how do you ensure efficient running of the organisation?

We continuously come up with new developments and significant contributions to ensure effective running of Philips. As meaningful innovation stays at the heart of everything we do, our aim is to improve people’s health and well-being. Never has this central tenet been more important than it is during these challenging times. Our focus areas are to deepen our leadership task of patient safety, quality and integrity, to enable our leaders and empower our people as well.

How do you ensure that organistional goals and employee needs are in sync, and in case of problems coming up on employee front, how do you solve those while keeping organisation's goals in mind?

Philips has relentlessly worked to provide a healthy and conducive work environment for its employees, and we have reconfigured our working mechanism likewise. The manager’s role is to enable the employee in

being productive. The key to achieve an organisation’s goals is to have capable managers who are compassionate and can empathise with employee’s problems. For the betterment of our employees as well as the organisation we make sure that we offer a free space to the employees for transparent communication and break away from the silos.

How have you accomplished the task of managing an entire organisation during a pandemic?

Philips has remained committed to the well-being of its employees, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Philips management team has worked extensively to navigate through the pandemic where we did adopt several initiatives for employee safety and wellbeing. We at Philips have adopted a 'triple duty of care' approach to identify customer needs, employee wellbeing as well as business continuity. This included remote servicing for our customers during the lockdown, managing demand and supply at the factory to continue operations to support our customers. We also developed agile HR policies and benefits to ensure employee engagement and productivity during the tough times. The pandemic allowed us to explore new ways of working together and enabled us to embrace flexibility, to collaborate impactfully and connect virtually.

As a people person, what are the goals you strive to achieve in an organisation apart from management goals?

Apart from management goals, the ability to be agile and charter the unknown is crucial. We ought to consciously move from driving change to shape the future thinking from a strategic perspective. Another goal is the courage to lead with the purpose of standing up to internal and external pressure to conform in order to stay true to the cause you believe in