HR2.0:RethinkingChangingWorkWorld SPECIAL FEATURE
23
25
Dr.SyedArifullah
G
roup
Head-HR,
G
RTG
roup,
Chennai
26
19
Special Feature
CHANDANCHATTARAJ
President - HR
(India
&G
lobal),
Uflex Ltd., Noida
15MakarandKhatavkar
Group
Head
-HR,
KotakM
ahindra
BankLtd.,
M
um
bai
GuruvayurappanPV
Sr. Vice
President - HR,
Om
ega
HealthCare,
Bengaluru
AjayKrBhardwaj
Vice
President HR,
Bajaj Energy Ltd.,
Noida
21RajeshTripathi
Vice
President&
Head,
Corporate
HR,
GHCLLim
ited,Noida
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BUSINESS MANAGER FEBRUARY 201814

BUSINESS MANAGER FEBRUARY 201815
SPECIAL FEATURE
BM Do you think HR has been
able to become a serious
business partner in 2017 -
something that was a
buzz for several years
now?
MK I strongly feel HR fraternity
has evolved over a period of
time from being a Personnel
Manager to now being a
strategic business partner.
There is a strong pressure
on HR professional with
managing 3-4 generations
working together, volatile
economy, digital disruption,
managing cross functional
workforce, AI - HR is the
epicentre to manage these
disruptions and ensure the
transformation is seamless
and smooth. The demand to
be the strategic business
partner is more than ever at
the moment.
With increasing availability
of HR data analytics, the HR
practioners not only have
more time to understand
data in structured manner but also are able to predict employee
behaviour. This enables them to take proactive measure on employee
development and engagement in a more calculated manner.
Digitization has also empowered employee to be independent and
resourceful. With HR systems being active, day-to-day
transactional HR tasks are carried out with ease and seamlessly.
Employees are encouraged to resolve their queries through
multiple self - service platforms and simplified HR processes.
Overall this has enabled HR practitioner to focus more on
relationship and partnership building roles than focus on
transactional activities. The extra mind space is now allowing
them to think beyond the realm of HR and spend more time to
understand business and provide HR solutions to solve business
strategic problems.
BM Do you think HR transformation is important in this
technological age? If yes, why?
MK HR is going through intense and rapid change. Organisations are
expecting HR to take the lead in digital transformation - especially
About the Author
Makarand is an alumnus of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. He holds a post-graduate certificate in change management from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland,
USA. With more than three decades of experience, Makarand has held senior leadership roles at Multinational banks. An accredited coach, he has coached senior level leaders across
financial services.
Technology will touch literally all the elements of a
typical employee lifecycle.Self - service will be the
basic tenet of organisational working and to that
extent,transactional activities like managing routine
data,transactions and controls will be eliminated.
Employees will be expected to take significant
responsibility for their own learning and development.
HR Professional will have to manage shorter and
fragmented employee life cycle.
MAKARAND KHATAVKAR
Group Head - Human Resources,Kotak Mahindra Bank Limited,Mumbai
Sharpen focus on
connecting and
integrating people,
work and platform

BUSINESS MANAGER FEBRUARY 201816
SPECIAL FEATURE
when it is about creating employee experience. This expectation
calls for transformation at 3 levels - Employee Mind-set, Workplace
environment and most importantly HR offerings being digital
itself.
As digitisation and agile organization has become central to
business thinking, HR has to sharpen its focus on connecting and
integrating people, work and platforms. This will have a direct
impact on productivity, empowerment and creating collaborative
teams.
BM What were some of the biggest lessons you learned in 2017 to
take HR transformation to the next level?
MK If change is the only constant thing in life…we are experiencing a
different change. A change that is disruptive in business, society
and even in Nations. This is the "new normal" and the strongest
theme of our time. In fact according to Forrester's predictions,
customer's expectations will outpace companies' ability to evolve
and invent experiences. This trend will pose a major talent and
people challenge for HR professionals. I am sharing few
perspectives on areas which HR professionals may want to ready
themselves for the future.
To adapt to the new normal, I realised we have to quickly align the
team to a common goal and rally all our energies to achieving this
goal. First step was to share a business aligned HR vision to
quickly align the team to "what we want to focus and achieve".
Taking a cue from one of the four tenets of the bank's vision, we
decided to build the HR operating vision that focussed on building
organisation capability, build culture and sustain value and
deliver premium employee experience.
Next was to create a highly flexible and agile team which does not
shy away from the initial discomfort that change brings along. The
mantra adopted across the team was to target the transactional
and to make way for the transformational. We identified all the
administrative tasks that would take 70% of HR relationship
manager's time and brought it down to 20%. This was to ensure
they have a bandwidth to focus on building business partnerships
and handholding managers in the digital HR transformation
journey.
Other lesson learnt was to ensure high quality employee
experience at each and every HR touch point; we focussed on
simplification of HR processes and ensuring constant
communication. Seamless flow of information within HR was
important to bring in agility to create a differentiating experience.
Continuous review and feedback mechanisms in the form of
service quality scorecards for all roles were put in place for
constant tracking of progress and making periodic corrections.
The service scorecard provided valuable, quantitative and
qualitative metrics for performance measurements of HR term.
Lastly, celebrate success no matter how small they seemed. This
was a crucial lesson I feel many of us miss. Transformation
journeys can be nerve wracking and emotionally challenging.
Acknowledging it to the team itself was a small win I experienced.
Also it is very imperative that the entire team is driven and
positively motivated to keep at it. The celebration ranged from
small informal appreciation of achieving smaller goals to a
relatively formal appreciation ceremony at a team gathering. This
did have a huge positive impact on the team morale.
In a nutshell, to make any
transformation successful,
the lesson I learnt was :
Align the entire team to one
common Vision, rally all our
energies to achieve the
goals, design flexible and
agile teams, identify the
road blocks and collectively
come up with creative
resolutions, continuous
review and feedback to
make online course
corrections and finally
celebrate success - no matter
how small and insignificant
they may seem.
BM What do you think HR
practitioners struggle
most with, in the new -
age work world?
MK In this disruptive era that
we are witnessing, HR space
will be far more exciting and
strategic than it has been in
the past. While the headline
themes may appear similar
to the past but the depth,
context and complexity may
be overwhelmingly
different. Designing
organisations for future is a
challenging trial and error
process. It is going to be
continuous, dynamic and
sometimes nerve wracking
process.
There is something I believe
the HR practitioners will
have to imbibe in them and
thereby enable the
organisation to deal with
like 1.) Create an agile and
collaborative organisation,
2) Be Customer Obsessed, 3)
Managing Disruptions and
4) Empower Learning. But
above all, be the culture
catalyst to bring out the
mind-set change that will
enable the organisation to
deal with the above
challenges.
Agile and collaborative
organisation : Most
organizations were
designed for efficiency and
effectiveness leading to
Our 2017 lesson was to ensure high quality employee
experience at each and every HR touch point.

A new skill now is just a mouse click away. This, however, doesn't
mean that the learning function will cease to exist.
BUSINESS MANAGER FEBRUARY 201817
SPECIAL FEATURE
complex siloed
organisations. However this
approach will soon be
redundant in the
unpredictable and
disruptive era. The need of
the hour is to not only be
efficient but to do it with
speed, agility and
adaptability to enable the
organisation to compete
with the global markets.
Creating flexible, adaptable
structures and collaborative
cultures will be a big asks
from HR professionals.
Being Customer Obsessed
: Traditionally HR has been
responsible for serving the
internal customers so that
the frontline employees can
serve the customers better.
However, given the ability of
small and unlikely players
to disrupt large established
businesses (new payment
platforms like is a good
example in banking sector)
even HR will have to think
external customers more
than ever before and align
hiring, reward and
performance management
processes from the
standpoint of external
customer. While HR will
have responsibility for
ensuring great employee
experience, every policy and
organizational process must
be viewed from overall
customer experience.
Managing Disruptions :
Flourishing in an
unpredictable, constantly
changing volatile business
environment and adapting
to these never - ending
disruptions is one reality
here to stay. We have seen
disruptions everywhere - be
it banking, manufacturing,
medicine education and
customer behaviours.
Handholding managers and
employees through these
disruptions will be number
one priority for HR
professionals. One must remember there may be no proven
solutions and being agile to make online course corrections will be
the need of the hour. Ability to withstand the pressure and
demands and being more collaborative and creating a learning
obsessed organisation will be another expectation from the HR
practitioners.
Empower Learning : With companies facing rapid disruptive
changes, yesterday's skills are becoming obsolete at an
accelerating speed. Re-skilling is now a necessity to ensure one
talent is still relevant in the current business scenario.
What's encouraging is there is host of high quality free or low cost
content available for organisations and employees to up-skill
themselves. They have ready access to continuously learning with
the thought leaders through various mediums.
A new skill now is just a mouse click away. This, however, doesn't
mean that the learning function will cease to exist. On the
contrary, in the digital era, soft skills such as leadership,
influencing, delegation, team management and human interaction
skills will be more important than ever before.
BM How did HR employees and senior management team
members respond to the HR transition vs other employees at
the workplace?
MK I strongly believe that "When you take people along, you can never
go wrong". It doesn't matter if the customer is your senior
management or a regular employee.
Like in design thinking process, for all our solutions, we kept the
employee need as our pivotal focus. We unconsciously followed the
some parts of design thinking approach i.e. "What is", "What if"
and "What Works".
What is - This phase we focussed on identifying the problem
statements. Each of the problem statement was validated with our
employees across levels through focus group discussion and
personal interviews. Once the hypothesis were arrived at we
moved to the next stage.
What if - For each problem area, we collectively (with business
SMEs) envisioned the new future? Our focus was on discussing
only on possibilities rather than constraints, because that would
limit out thinking.
What Works - Each possibility was then discussed in-depth and
given our business requirements, capabilities and resources, we
formed cross functional project teams to execute the solutions.
Steering Committees comprised on senior leaders across business
verticals who gave the project team insights on what and how
things can work in the current environment. These leaders then
helped us mobilise the employees across organisation to adopt the
new ways.
When you have accurately identified the pain areas and you
collectively come up with plausible solutions which are scalable,
simple and easy to implement - nothing can really go wrong…what
can go wrong are the initial teething issues one faces during
implementation. And the beauty of collectively arriving as
solutions is also the sense of ownership is much higher and if
anything is not as per desired outcome, everyone is in it resolve the
issue immediately.

Moving with technology, the landscape of Human Resource (HR) has
been undergoing enormous alteration in its roles and functions.
BUSINESS MANAGER FEBRUARY 201818
SPECIAL FEATURE
BM How do you see the HR landscape changing in the present
business scenario?
MK Moving with technology, the landscape of Human Resource (HR)
has been undergoing enormous alteration in its roles and
functions. Unlike the conventional supporting role, HR is
increasingly playing a leading role in critical business decisions.
While there are many areas where HR Landscape is getting
changed, I would like to touch upon few aspects which I believe
will have higher impact :
a) Digitised HR-Employee Experience : Digital HR is taking
strong steps AI, NLP and robotic process automation. Artificial
intelligence tools, process automation and self - service
transaction. This will lead to a complete transformation and
redesign of employee experience. There will be intense focus on
integrating diverse channels and medium like mobile computing,
video, sensors and artificial intelligence to redefine employee
engagement, culture, wellness and productivity. The result will be
a new breed of products that will totally reinvent what HR
technology - and HR itself.
b) Sharper focus on HR Analytics : Data has always been an
important aspect of decision making process. However given the
fast paced business environment we operate in, we have
transitioned using the data from post - mortem to predictive
purposes. HR is aggressively exploring multiple predictive models
which enable them to take proactive people development decisions.
For example, products like success factors or oracle can suggest
training programs based on the employee roles whereas
cornerstone system can which employee has propensity to conduct
any fraudulent act or may fail to complete mandatory/compliance
trainings. This also means HR practioners have to soon equip
themselves in understanding analytics and predictive models.
c) Redefine Learning and Empowering : Fast paced technology,
increase rate of job change, constantly learn new ways of thinking
- the only way to keep one's talent and skill relevant to current
requirements is learning. Empowered learning puts greater
power, freedom and flexibility in learner's hands and it can take
extraordinary array and forms depending on the industry. The
offering is soon shifting from just providing learning platforms
(LMS) to learning experience platform (Edcast). More and more
technology like AI, NLP will be designed to cater to individualised
learning experience. The real challenge for learning professionals
will be to create an integrated learning experience ranging from
classroom sessions to mobile based real time learning sessions. At
no point I believe that classroom training will cease to exist,
however the topics and subject that will get discussed in classroom
will be different.
d) Employee Wellness : Work - life Balance is emerging as one of
the critical employee concerns for HR practitioners. With
workplace culture being so dynamic and globalised - wellness and
emotional well - being is impacting employee productivity and
engagement. With analytics at the core of HR Transformation,
there will be lot of employee data available which will highlight
employees who are prone to critical health issues, give customised
health related information like diet plan, exercise regime, medical
test analytics etc. From HR perspective, the information can be
used to take proactive measure and interventions to address the
potential health issues
employee may encounter.
BM When you look at next 3
to 5 years - what's is your
prediction for the future
with respect to HR
technology?
MK HR technology will emerge
more than ever before.
Technology will touch
literally all the elements of
a typical employee lifecycle.
As I have said before, self -
service will be the basic
tenet of organisational
working and to that extent,
transactional activities like
managing routine data,
transactions, controls will
be eliminated. Even high
end tasks like employee
induction, basic functional
training will be performed
by bots. Employees will be
expected to take significant
responsibility for their own
learning and development.
HR Professional will have to
manage shorter and
fragmented employee life
cycle. We will see higher
degree of technology
deployment in areas like
performance management,
learning and wellness.
In my view, HR
professionals will need
deeper understanding of
new technologies and
additionally, they must also
be sensitive to managing the
potential ill effects of
technology. Employee well -
being, stress management
and managing medical costs
will take significant time of
the HR professionals.
Overall, HR professionals
will have to be technology
savvy behavioural & social
scientists that will be
responsible for managing
disruptions skilfully and
humanising workplace.
(All views are personal)
BM