Leadership

Are You In The List 2017 Winner: Divya Amarnath

Divya Amarnath from HUL also had a brief social entrepreneurship experience which gave her an experience of setting up of a business and making it operationally profitable, and solving complex problems.

Divya Amarnath | Head – HR Services Delivery, India | Hindustan Unilever Ltd.

I have been working with Hindustan Unilever Ltd since 2012 when I joined as a management trainee. In my current role, I am responsible for smooth end to end delivery of HR processes of recruitment, performance management, compensation, payroll, exit management and lifecycle processes for 7500+ white collared employees and 11000+ blue collared employees across India. This role involves simplifying HR processes delivering eciency and cost savings by continuous innovation and improvements to the processes. Being a Core part of the South Asia HR Leadership team, I am responsible for driving the business-linked HR strategy across South Asia. The accountability includes Deploying and sustaining technology enabled standardized lifecycle management and managing payroll for 11000+ Blue collared employees across 31 factories across remote locations in India. In this role, I lead a 90-member team comprising employees on HUL payroll and contractors and responsible for managing the budget of Rs 20 Crores across the portfolio. As an additional responsibility, I am leading Digital transformation in HR for HUL and leading HR Organisation transformation for “Future HR” initiative of Unilever whilst being a part of global Organisation Design steering committee in Unilever

In the first 3 years of my experience I gained deep experience of leading regional sales business partnership and factory HR and IR including business linked wage settlement process, union management, handling legal cases, engagement, and capability building. I have a brief social entrepreneurship experience which gave me an experience of setting up of a business and making it operationally profitable, and solving complex problems

What differentiates me from others

I have always handled roles that were previously occupied by people much senior to me. Hence, I see my differentiator has being able to handle large, complex roles by being able to get out of comfort zone, resetting to zero, learning new skills, and being open to struggles. In return I have got much richer experience, ability to handle complex situations and lead large teams as compared to peers of my age/experience.

My Biggest Talent Priority

The industry is changing at a rapid pace. To keep the talent strategy relevant, I think it’s important to break out of traditional ways of attracting, developing and retaining talent. The key actions would involve:

Exploring ways of agile resourcing by leveraging open talent economy ,
Breaking traditional org hierarchies and build peer network based culture, and
Digital footprint analytics based engagement and rewards.

My biggest priority at this stage would be point b). I believe once we can deploy this successfully the stage for larger organisation to be open to adopting point (a) and (b)

The one thing I will:

Change in HR: Step up digital and use of analytics in making talent decisions, capability investments and simplifying processes to generate great employee experience. The pace at which digital has caught up in marketing, branding, product development has been much faster and it’s time for HR to step up to expand its digital horizons by leveraging technology to its fullest

Retain in HR: Keep the element of "human touch", "empathy" and "emotional intelligence". In the fast-changing world, in VUCA environment its very important to keep this to seamlessly unleash human potential to the fullest

This is how I will disrupt HR

Digitise process-related aspects like onboarding, presence management, exit management etc and bring in Artificial intelligence in activities like query management, talent acquisition, reward, and recognition. This will enable HR to free up time and invest more time in building agile organizations that can respond to changes in the external environment quickly. In this world HR would add value in bringing in insights and trends from the external world and constantly re-engineer organization, talent and capabilities to keep up with the changing business needs and market trends.

Here are the other winners: