We Link People Program To Business Results: Chaitanya N Sreenivas, IBM, India

How are you as an HR leader tackling the COVID-19 crisis at your organization?

Remote working has been a reality at IBM for decades, both to provide personal flexibility to employees in times of need and to enable a mobile workforce to operate from anywhere in the world.  As IBMers, we have always embraced the values of trust and personal responsibility, so the concept of having our employees work from home as the need arises has been at the very core of how we operate as a company. What has been different in the past few months is embracing this approach at scale, not just among our sizable employee population in India, but around the world. Our IT, HR, Business Units, Crisis Management, Legal, Government Relations, CSR, Operations and Security teams have quickly come together to make WFH a reality for over 99 per cent of IBM India employees.

As AI coming in; how smoothly are you accepting it in your organization?

AI has been deeply integrated into almost everything we do. We started with small pilots, iterated and then went to scale each offering, which really helped us see the value of the AI being deployed in our intelligent workflows. We are the creators of tech that serve the world and our entire workforce shall we say has an engineering mindset that helps employees tinker a lot with ideas, that help us create what we call a ' Cognitive Enterprise'.

As an example, AI has significantly complemented our Talent Acquisition program, making it more objective and less process-oriented, most essentially removing personal biases towards candidates. While automation for operational tasks started a long time ago, the new-age technology powered by AI and ML is now ready to enable HR departments to make data-driven conclusions in relation to the nuance of human empathy and psychology as well.

What are the goals for your HR Team for development in 2020?

At IBM, we have driven and adopted the new way of work for HR which includes AI, analytics and big data. In this environment, we have set out three key priorities for 2020. First, we need HR practitioners to be a Hybrid or a Full Stack HR professional and they need to grow these disparate skills in their profession. Second, they need to embrace and imbibe the agile way of working in everything they do. Third, is to ensure we have an engaged workforce that is energized and rewarded for the exemplary work that they do.

How happy are you with your work-life balance? How can you as an HR Leader can better the situation for your employees?

As IBMers, we are proud of what we do and we have multiple tools that allow us to be more flexible during work. At IBM, we offer flexible work schedules to our employees and understand that irrespective of the situation, a family indeed takes priority, hence, if an employee has a personal commitment that is unavoidable like a parent-teacher meeting or doctor’s appointment that is scheduled, it can be accommodated at a weekday. So employees can decide how and where they want to work and bring their whole self to any project they are working on. This results in creating a high-trust and high-performance culture at the organization.

As an HR leader, we link people program to business results and engage other leaders within the organization to achieve those goals. We have rooted diversity and inclusion as a stirring element of the equation in every aspect of work decisions, as we continuously strive to foster and cultivate the best culture.

IBM as a giant company, how do you manage to hire and retain a diverse workforce?

It is an interesting time and writing policies was never harder than it is today, given you have five different generations in the workforce at the same time. We as a company have always valued and moved to higher-value work in the chain, which has constantly being fuelled by the work we do. At the heart of it, we are a tech company. Our mission has always been ' being essential', and our core value system is deeply rooted in the communities we serve in. The breadth of work and the access we create, which in turn results in opportunities for employees to bring their best to work really has been what makes us attract and retain the best talent in the firm.

Also for the space that we operate in, it becomes imperative for us to re-skill and up-skill the workforce with new technologies and keeping them on par with the changing skills set requirements. The pressing priority is to retain the stride by constantly upskilling ourselves. We believe in providing opportunity and platform not just for learning, but also practicing and applying the same at work.

What are the best practices at IBM?

Keeping things fresh to sustain the professional creativeness and desire, learning keeps people relevant in the ever-changing world we live in. I personally feel that it’s very important for organizations today to not only build an atmosphere that encourages learning but also provide a consistent employee experience, customized to the profession anyone joins in.

Let me elaborate with an example if you join in a consulting profession, all the associates globally have a similar journey tailored and the same is true if you join in sales, delivery, data science, offering professions. Therefore, the depth of skills through a continuous learning mindset sets IBMer's apart. Also, global experiences on cultural assimilation as well as building network help IBMer's stay longer when compared with peers.

IBM has also developed a powerful suite of learning technologies platform called, ‘Your Learning’. This learning platform helps adapt to changing business needs and can accelerate the knowledge curve. It helps every employee learn quicker, learn smarter, and help the company stay agile.

Also, we understand and believe that re-joining the workplace after a long time is quite challenging for an individual considering the rapidly changing business and skills environment. At IBM, we have various initiatives like “Tech Re-entry Program", to help women return to work after a long career break.

Another initiative that we have for new mothers at IBM is called “Charisma” which provides them free access to an online portal. Under the ‘Charisma’ program, there is a Care 9 initiative, where new parents have free access to gynecologists, psychologists, and physicians for counseling. It also provides facilities, such as well-equipped lactation and restrooms, especially for women.

What would be those 5 ways that you as an HR head would choose to create a sense of belonging in the workplace?

A sense of belonging to a community is what gives individuals persistence and meaning in their lives, and this is no less true in our workplaces. As companies are now accepting the importance of nurturing a sense of “belonging,” it’s still a fairly fresh and emerging concept. Having said that, IBM follows below listed ways to create a sense of belonging at the workplace.

· Purpose: We value each and every contribution of our employees, stakeholder, and partners which has helped us build a company which is serving from past 100+ years. These individual contributions are irreplaceable to the company.

· Clear Strategy: Establishing a vision for the company that everyone shares and feels a part of. At IBM, we ensure each member of the company feels that they are making a real and honest contribution, it makes them feel like they belong to the workplace. 

· Leadership & Communication: At IBM, we allow and encourage employees to feel contented with their true selves. It is significantly important to promote independence and understand another person’s story which they shouldn’t hide at work. We promote an open culture at the workplace and our philosophy has been simply put, family comes first, every single time. Diversity and inclusion matter, but it doesn’t work if the sense of belongingness is missing at the workplace.

· Holding each other accountable: At IBM, we help to form conjoint respect, regardless of circumstance or individual backgrounds. Also ‘emotional trust’, is required for a better mutual understanding than we incline to achieve from our knowledge of each other’s talents.

Do you think is AI or technological advancement a threat to employment? 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has fast become an essential part of the Human Resource (HR) operations. In HR, it is used to automate routine, low-value tasks and thus helps free up the HR practitioners' time to focus on more strategic work. AI, paired with strategic insight, generates new possibilities for business and changes how HR contributes to the competitive advantage of an enterprise. Our experience is that AI can be implemented in almost any field of HR, including recruiting, learning, training, job management, and support for people. We believe AI will solve some of the pressing problems facing businesses. AI allows human resources departments to operate programs on a scale without ballooning headcounts or costs.

With AI we are seeing the on-scale change towards better and faster decision-making, and this helps move HR to the modern working process. HR's transactional elements are now either streamlined or entirely removed. It also means that HR practitioners need to be very apt in their skills around Big Data, AI innovations and methodologies as they integrate this into their daily practices.