The World Youth Skills Day (15th July) signifies the importance of learning and development to enhance skills amongst the youth. With technology advancing at rocket speed, the youth are unable to keep pace with it. The result is a skill gap in the field of technology and many other areas, where technology is widely used. The same issue found a rightful place in Budget-2019 too. It addressed the need to focus on the area of skill development, apprenticeship and corporate learning among the youth. In addition, the budget professed a need to reform the educational institutes and make learning more…
Author: Puja Bothra | HRKatha
Puja Bothra | HRKatha
She has been a business writer for a decade now. Besides, she also influences people through motivational workshops. Likes to travel long distances with a book in hand and accounts her travels in a blog. She is very passionate about Yoga and calls it her purpose in life.
Snapdeal has a brand new workplace in Gurgaon. What really stands out in this swanky, chic and open office is its youthful energy. Apparently, startups are breaking the norm to redefine workplace design, and Snapdeal’s new office is symbolic of the same movement. What is the advantage of having an open office? The answer is, transparency! It has become the new mantra for business organisations and has its roots in the fact that organisation structures are flattening. Additionally, changes are taking place in every aspect of business and the office space has come to be an extension of that phenomenon.…
Prashant Khullar, former CHRO of Mahindra Holidays & Resorts, is the new senior VP and HR head, Max Life Insurance. Incidentally, he has always worked in the hospitality industry, and this new role in a completely new industry, is a milestone shift in his career. Khullar has worked in the hospitality space for 21 years, having begun his career with Four Seasons Hotel, as a management trainee, where he worked for a year. After that he switched jobs quickly, first ITC and then Hyatt Hotels. It was at Taj Hotels Palaces Resorts Safaris that Khullar’s career blossomed. He joined as…
This is the third book from the author, Vinay R Kanchan. He urges us to draw inspiration from people who have made phenomenal achievements through lateral thinking, and have also applied these lessons to business. Vinay R Kanchan’s Sportivity, is a self-help book that emphasises the importance of creativity in an individual’s life. Divided into ten chapters, the book generates ten unique ideas to live life in the creative lane. Moreover, it establishes an explicit connection between working creatively and making phenomenal achievements in life. The author bases his ideas on his observations of a handful of extraordinary men and…
A neat and clean office, in other words, a decluttered workplace helps to enhance employee productivity. After all, there are no flying papers, over-flowing paper-trays and cupboards suffocating with overloaded files. A holistic change is taking place within workplaces, and technology is the single most prominent reason for the same. And it’s not just papers and files. Also missing from the futuristic workplaces are office boys! Organisations are no longer employing staff to run errands for employees— such as to print or photocopy documents, serve tea, arrange the furniture and so and so forth. This is yet another form of…
Rajendra Ghag is a senior HR leader whose career spans over three decades. Changing his tracks early this month, he has moved from HDFC Life (financial sector) to Blue Dart (logistics). Ghag joined HDFC Life in September 2009 as Sr EVP and CHRO. Operating out of Mumbai, he worked there for 10 years and in the last few months also played the role of chief value officer. He was ranked amongst the top 100 most influential HR professionals in Asia by CHRO Asia. Before joining HDFC Life, he was an employee of DHL and led the HR department as head-HR,…
Gajendra Chandel, who hails from the auto industry, and has worked with Tata Motors for five years and Tata AutoComp Systems for over eight years, now plans to explore the start-up space. With a rock-solid foundation in this industry, it is not surprising that he plans to join/invest in BattRE. Headquartered in Jaipur, BattRE is a technology-driven startup founded in 2017, which provides innovative solutions to tackle the issues raised by carbon footprints, noise pollution, and the hassle of traffic, through e-bicycles and e-scooters. Nishchal Chaudhary, founder, BattRE, was once the head of marketing for the states of Gujarat and…
Budget-2019 is iconic in more ways than one. The presenter, Nirmala Sitharaman, has joined a field that has been dominated by men for decades. Incidentally, the only other woman to present the budget was Indira Gandhi, way back in 1970. Therefore, not surprisingly, the budget provides a positive outlook with a boost towards women power in the Indian economy and how they are truly capable of contributing towards the goal in every conceivable way. Swami Vivekananda had rightly said a century back, that there is no chance for the welfare of the world unless the condition of its women is…
Fujitsu Consulting India (Fujitsu) is fading the culture divide between India and Japan and how! Interestingly, all its employees readily embrace Japanese culture and have no qualms in learning the language either. Japanese culture Planning meticulously, following methodologies, Kaizen, and survival theory are some aspects of Japanese culture that provide a solid foundation to Fijitsu India. And why not? Japan was, and arguably still is, one of Asia’s primary superpowers. Every employee that walks into the Fujitsu office gets an opportunity to learn not only from Japanese culture, but also other world cultures because the Company largely serves international clients.…
By the end of June 2019, Anthony Kiran will be exiting Indus Tower, where he is now head-talent acquisition. Kiran wishes to continue his education at Harvard, from September 2019. Having joined Indus Tower in February,2016 as head-HR, Kiran lead the business HR function for Hyderabad. In June 2018, he moved to Gurgaon as head-talent acquisition, shouldering the responsibility of driving and leading the front end of the recruiting process across India. Kiran, who has about 12 years of rich experience in corporate and business partnering roles, started his career with the Ashok Leyland Group in the UAE. During the…
HR professionals are responsible for evaluating and appraising employees across levels and divisions based on pre-determined targets set for each of them by their managers. In the same context, how are HR professionals evaluated and appraised? Are there targets that can be quantified for them too? This discussion was born in a recent meeting with a CHRO of a big IT multinational. Incidentally, we were quite amazed by the frequency with which he was churning out-of-the-box ideas from his office. We couldn’t stop ourselves from asking him, how he got so much time from his regular work to plan a…
The business venture, Jaipur Rugs, tells us a story about an imaginative entrepreneur who belonged to a small village. The important thing is that the business (Jaipur Rugs) and him are one — intertwined — and so, we need to know both to savour this tale. Nand Kishore Chaudhary grew up in a village without any formal education and training to prepare him to start and run a large venture Chaudhary says, “I did not know how to hire people and I had no clue about what traits to look for during interviews. Because of my lack of experience and…
A recent survey by Deloitte — ‘The Deloitte Global Millennial Survey 2019’— shows that the younger lot of workers, such as GenZ and millennials— are pessimistic about work, economy, business leaders, financial institutes and more. The 2019 report is based on the views of 13,416 millennials questioned across 42 countries and territories, and 3,009 members of Gen Z from 10 countries. Comprising a diverse group of respondents, the survey aims to generate a more comprehensive perspective of the two generations as a whole. Millennials are those born between January 1983 and December 1994 and Gen Z comprises those born after…
These days, it’s common for companies to release videos on how great it is as a workplace. Clearly they want to attract best of talent and want to flaunt why their employees feel that Ola is the best place to work. We came across one such video posted by Ola Cabs, titled, ‘We are Ola.’ The video further reveals that for four consecutive years Ola has featured among the top companies India would like to work for. Starting with Rahul Maroli, VP, Ola who says, “At Ola you are constantly encouraged to think BIG, it is not about what it is…
There is an apparent pull and push amongst businesses across industries for one reason— employees. It is a known fact that having the right talent is a game changer, or rather, a game enabler for all organisations. In today’s age and time, each company is competing to get the best slice of talent available in the market. While hiring competitive human capital is challenging for organisations, an even bigger challenge is to retain them and not lose them to competitors. Thus, it is important to provide the hired talent with the warm and comfortable space required to make them stay…
Bajaj Auto is leading the change by staying ahead of companies in the industry. How? From its innovation labs, it is tenaciously generating ideas capable of elevating the employee-engagement experience. Recently, the Company’s official page on a popular social-media website, carried a series of posts. Each of them was a collage of pictures with vibrant colours and graphics. These visually-appealing posts were created to introduce the management trainees who were hired from various B-School campuses in early 2019. In addition to a thumbnail image of each trainee, there were snippets of information about them. We found them to be a…
Sreekanth K. Arimanithaya has joined Global Delivery Systems (GDS) executive committee of Ernst & Young (EY), as well as its Global Talent Committee, chaired by Trent Henry, global vice chair for talent, EY. Prior to this, Arimanithaya was working with DXC Technology, the IT services and solutions company, where he was the joint managing director and the senior vice president, workforce management, reporting to the global chairman and CEO. Arimanithaya was also on DXC Technology’s global executive leadership team. Before DXC, he worked as the head of talent and CIO for Britannia Industries. He has also held various talent leadership…
Working in teams has been a part of our culture since the beginning of civilisation. However, the dynamics have changed dramatically over time. Technology can be blamed for periodically disrupting the way we collaborate at work. Telegrams, telephones, pagers, e-mails and mobiles—every new invention has had the potential to empower collaboration. However, in the last five years, technology has grown rapidly and so has its impact on business growth. The increasing influence of technology in business is providing a cutting edge to teamwork through multiple social tools available in the ecosystem. Also, a new breed of employees— Generation Z (Gen…
In every organisation, there are some people who do their work silently and are hardly heard, let alone known. As a matter of fact, they are very important for the organisation, not only for the good work they do, but also for their composed and nonchalant presence. The common belief is that this group is more suited for roles such as finance, accounting, technology than marketing, sales and customer relationship functions. Moreover, the public perception is that they are quiet, dedicated and prefer to work solo. People of this personality type do not compete with others. Their fight is with…
Perception rules everywhere, even when freshers at the beginning of their careers join small, unknown companies, multinationals or large companies shy away from hiring them. Working in a small company—is it a stigma? How prevalent is this prejudice? If it does actually prevail, then it is apparent that bigger brands look more closely at the candidates’ former employer’s brand value than their role there. Candidates suffer a double whammy when their former companies happen to be not only small but unknown to the recruiter. Understandably, everyone does not have beginner’s luck! How many bag prestigious jobs the moment they pass…
Business leaders put in a lot of effort to onboard employees and for good reasons. They create a positive first impression for them. It is rightly said that the first impression is the last impression and is one that lasts perpetually. Research shows that when onboarding is successful, there is a greater chance of an employee feeling more engaged, confident and purposeful. Moreover, it ensures employees’ soft-landing into an unknown environment and helps them sail through the difficult initial few months Interestingly, at the other end of the spectrum is offboarding. Leaders need to devote similar, if not more energy,…
Business organisations now and then initiate internal re-structuring. While, some employees emerge from it unscathed there are others who suffer defeat. Employees grieve because they receive pink slips or find themselves on the wrong foot because of a designation change. Recently, the telecom industry’s key player Vodafone Idea saw dissatisfaction amongst its employees. Apparently, the employees have been anxious about losing jobs since the two companies announced a merger in August 2018. Their fears came true and about 4000 employees have been displaced since then. Moreover, a designation change that has been on cards since then, is now being…
The small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) sector is not growing at a pace, it should have been. The sector which includes manufacturing, infrastructure, service, food processing, packaging, chemicals, and IT, employs around 40 per cent of the Indian workforce, but its contribution to the GDP is slightly above 6 per cent. This is not because of lack of efforts. What is missing is people strategy and it is high time the sector goes through a transformation to develop a visionary mindset. Given its hire and fire culture, it is common for the baseline workers, comprising manual labourers, to quit very…
Geethaa Ghaneckar has got a new office address at HDFC Bank House in Mumbai. She has joined the bank as executive vice president and head of CoE. Ghaneckar says, “This role has been created to ensure a structured approach to talent management and leadership development.” Apparently, this is a new role created by the BFSI giant under the leadership of the CHRO, Vinay Razdan. Ghaneckar will be responsible for quality assurance in HR aspects, such as engagement, organisational development (OD) and culture, diversity and inclusion, as well as employee value proposition. Employee wellness and communication are also amongst the responsibilities under the…
Here is a company with a business proposition that is embedded in the minds of its employees. Interestingly, the company is doing so through simple day to day activities planned for its workforce. Singing songs at work is not an uncommon practice at this workplace. What is more, the employees get a special welcome when they arrive for work, on the first working day of the New Year — a sitar recital by Mansoor Khan. “Sound plays an important role in our lives. All our activities revolve around sound or absolute silence. The vibrations that we get in the room…
Bacardi rings a bell, and that too a happy one if you are nuts about the tipple. Along with consumers, it is adding a zing in employees’ lives and how! Recently recognised for its superlative people practices and workplace culture, and having scored very high on parameters, such as credibility, respect, fairness, pride and camaraderie, the spirits company has disrupted the norm to innovate employee practices. Sanjit Singh Randhawa , managing director, Bacardi, India and SEA, says, “For Bacardi, culture comes first and is at the heart of everything we do as a company. Our global cultural pillars of ‘Founders,…