Culture is key to talent management and business growth. The impact of the Great Shuffle, combined with the rising demands for flexibility and well-being, opened up new pathways for Talent Leaders to curate employee journeys more meaningfully. But creating and curating a strong, desirable and exciting company culture is easier said than done. And so to empower you to drive cultural transformation, LinkedIn Talent Solutions brings you its latest season of Talent Streams, where C-suite leaders come and share their expert insights on leading transformation in times of disruption. With their key lessons spanning a range of HR domains from DEI to company mergers, this is one series you cannot miss out on!

With inspiring stories by leading changemakers for the HR community, this series now has completed its latest season on one of the most critical topics of the hour: Building purpose-driven strategy and curating a culture of learning for growth. Coming back to the importance of culture for growth, ensuring a culture driven by purpose and the hunger to learn is fundamental to unlocking the potential of your people in an era where opportunities and challenges walk hand in hand. And to empower organisations to achieve success in their people strategies, Ashish Kumar Singh, CHRO, Meesho and Pankaj Khanna, EVP & Head Revenue Assurance, Coforge, and Head HR, Coforge BPS shed light on the critical facets of designing talent strategies for thriving in the future of work. Some of the key lessons they shared include: 

Embracing inclusive policies on the business and people front

Highlighting Meesho’s journey, Ashish shared how inclusivity was at the heart of the enterprise since the start when it became a vital source of income for women resellers using their platform. Recognising the unique role they played in the society, inclusivity became part of their business model as they scaler up. Their Meesho mantras called for designing solutions with a user-first and problem-first mindset so that they always had clarity on the problems they wanted to solve for all sections of society. On the people front, inclusivity was a critical value part and parcel of their hiring strategies where they ensured that no bias seeped into their recruitment process and the talent pool was as broad and diverse as possible.

Supporting employee’s growth journeys with purpose and impact

‘Talent strategy is actually the key for everything, whether it is integration, whether it is promotion, whether it is propagation, whether it's hiring,’ shared Pankaj. At the end of the day, any successful talent strategy needs to ensure its people's growth by opening up doors to various career and competency-building opportunities in the workplace. From instilling purpose and impact in their day-to-day roles to empowering employees in designing Individual Development Plans (IDPs) to implementing transparent goal-setting and performance management processes, all of these strategies are priorities by leaders both at Meesho and Coforge. Upskilling and reskilling are vital to not just the larger business growth strategy but critically impact talent retention, with reports pointing out how companies that excel at internal mobility backed by L&D can retain employees 2x more than those who struggle with it.

Communication is critical to change management strategies

When Coforge embarked on its journey of merging companies into its organisational structure, communication played a critical role in the long-term success of this gruelling process. Pankaj highlights in his story that regardless of whether the merger is led by structured or unstructured assimilation or a directive objective, transparent communication is vital to ensure that all employees are on the same page. It is imperative to keep a pulse of the people and to repeatedly communicate the culture and ethos so they can feel a part of the organisation as they come to terms with the various ongoing transformations. Additionally, along with dipstick surveys on employee sentiments, metrics to define success are equally fundamental to check whether the organisation is steering in the right direction. 

Leveraging technologies to develop asynchronous ways of working

Flexibility is the need of the hour and every organisation needs to prioritise this value in their talent strategies, emphasises both Ashish and Pankaj. With digital transformation at the heart of HR transformation, it is no wonder that technologies will be at the bedrock of designing and implementing flexible working policies. There is an increasing need to shift from synchronous ways of working where the entire team has to come together to make decisions. What’s beneficial for the long term is a more asynchronous working style where we can explore different formats of collaboration to meet the needs of a growing and global workforce, spread across geographies. 

These critical lessons will be a game-changer in not only the organisational policies you design but also the impact you achieve. However, there is lots more that Ashish of Meesho and Pankaj of Coforge still have to say! If you’re looking to gain access to the conversation in full and explore more inspiring stories, click here and LinkedIn Talent Streams will be your answer.