India is a strategic market for DuPont and we have high growth aspirations. The focus in the last three years has been on building our capability to serve our customers. Having established a strong business presence, we are now looking at optimizing on our presence. In this scenario, the three major HR priorities are accelerated leadership development, competency building across different areas like sales, marketing, technology and local innovation, and building a respectful work environment to carry forward our core value of ‘respect for people’ to enable every employee to contribute to their full potential.

The HR challenges will be critical to our success as it is 'people' who will help us meet our goals and aspirations. Hence our focus is on hiring talent, and retaining them by providing them with challenging assignments. We face an additional challenge with regard to the 'Gen Y' employees who have different aspirations, expect different pace of movement, new technologies and collaboration tools. The challenge is compounded by the fact that it is the same experienced and trained professionals that all companies are vying for leading to a constant war for talent.

Therefore, a lot of my time is spent on talent activities like strategic recruitment, leadership development and employee engagement, as they are critical to our success, going forward. I am also working on a project to better understand the needs and expectations of these Gen Y employees.

Strategic workforce planning, critical positions to be filled, number of competency building programs held and number of people trained, succession planning, and cross business /functional moves for leadership development, are some people-related goals that I have on my scorecard.

HR at DuPont has 2 major critical roles; one is that of being a 'business partner’, and therefore understanding the business strategy, key issues and challenges, from a people perspective and provide solutions for the same; and two, to act as a 'consultant' to the businesses on people-related matters.

As we work on our organizational goals, all key businesses and functions are a part of the process. HR being a critical function is a prime partner in the organizational goal setting process. Each function including HR needs to understand the implications of our goals and strategies and develop their respective functional plans and strategies to support the overall corporate goals.