The obvious importance of the people factor on business excellence makes HR a priority function today. The top three HR priorities that we have set up for ourselves this year are, firstly, driving alignment between organization, employees and stakeholders (customers, investors, etc); secondly, creating a consistent pipeline of leadership at three levels - top level to ensure succession planning, mid-level to ensure available talent who can be moved to top level, and entry level to identify top performing employees who in turn can be moved on to fast track career development plans for middle level roles; and thirdly, creating a higher level of engagement and energy among teams to encourage collaboration and optimize cross-functional expertise.

While it is difficult to quantify the amount of time I spend on people related activities, I must affirm that even when we are discussing business-related matters or solving an operational issue, I always use those opportunities develop our people and tap their talent. But if you were to set aside these efforts, then I spend around 25% to 30% of my time on talent concerns, especially on recruitment, retention and evaluation of talent development.

These are high up on my priorities as I have clear goals to improve leadership capabilities in the organization, recruit and retain the best talent, and enable succession planning.

The leadership team, HR and I are together accountable for the overall talent agenda. Each senior manager is held responsible for his or her team for their succession planning, retention, and for providing quality environment in which teams can effectively deliver.

Though HR plays the role of a facilitator and champions the talent agenda in the organization, talent management is everybody’s job at Dr. Reddy’s. The way I see it, HR creates the frameworks to enable the right conversations so that leaders can focus on the talent agenda.