At People Matters EX India Conference 2022, the agenda was to empower a mindset of opportunities, one that drives creativity and innovation to design an employee experience that keeps pace in the era of digital transformation with a human touch. As we embark on a journey to create a meaningful workplace, we bring to you the top 10 key insights that our expert leaders shared with us on building a holistic roadmap for EX.

Employers are having to create spaces and places where people can truly start to explore themselves in the context of the organisation. -Ben Whitter, Founder and Chief Experience Officer at HEX Organisation.

People seek to work in organisations where the leaders don't tend to get hung up on the hierarchy -Ramkumar Narayanan, VP Technology & Managing Director, R&D at VMware India

In 2022, companies with great people are truly the differentiator. Today with the right tech tools, it's going to be attracting and retaining the right talent. Looking at the market cap, companies that have the right talent can claim a larger share. For this, compensation, work culture, and benefits are crucial components. -Satish Kannan, Co-founder and CEO at Medibuddy

Today, the world of work has decisively entered the era of employees. They have greater power and leeway than they did pre-pandemic. As we draw our employee experience strategies, the most important thing to consider are moments that matter. The questions employees ask through their journey with us as an organisation. -Priti Singh, Senior Vice President, Head Human Resources, South Asia, Mastercard

“Compensation, work-life balance, stability, location and respect are all relevant when we talk about EVP even now, however, the employee priorities have changed now. What employees want today and what makes a strong EVP today drill down into these broad buckets -- purpose, wellbeing, flexibility and the need for connection and growth.” -Raj Dharmaraj, Head HR Strategic Deals - India & APAC Cognizant

During the pandemic, often we are faced with choices, choices in terms of how we deal with our partners, how we deal with ourselves, how we deal with employees, and it starts with the place of empathy. We honoured all the performance bonuses, including the internships that we had committed to various campuses across the country. And truth be told, we didn't have a view of what the business outcome would be for the year. Will we meet our targets? None of this was known. But we went still ahead and honoured all of those things. I think when you take care of people, when you put empathy at the heart of your people practices, magic truly happens, right? -Krishna Raghavan, Chief People Officer, Flipkart 

Language plays a great role in setting the right precedent for DE&I. Starting right from the beginning where we talk about JD and recruitment sites, we have to be cognizant of the language we use and make it inclusive. Moving ahead, hiring managers have to be aware of the biases that hinder diverse hiring. Similarly, performance management has to have the right tone to ensure conversations on appraisals are inclusive. -Chandini Kamal, Global Head - Diversity and Inclusion, Employee Engagement & Experience, Wellness, Rewards & Recognition, HCL Technologies

All systems have been mostly designed with the majority in mind. To truly change the marker, we cannot have ad-hoc solutions. Taking a holistic view of how are you interacting with your customers, your employees and your partners all play an important role in how you shape your DE&I conversations. Companies have to invest in creating the right awareness in form of toolkits, guiding principles, training modules etc and provide managers with a safe space to explore and grow. DE&I is a long journey and requires a lot of thinking through to be successful. -Aparna Mittal, DEI Advisor, Corporate Lawyer & Founder at Samāna Centre for Gender, Policy & Law

The minute someone joins you, your manager should ask them what really matters to them outside of work. That is logged for all future conversations that the manager will have with team members.

 -Tanmaya Jain, CEO and Founder of inFeedo

“Set up an office that reflects the ethos of the organisation, find ways to form communities, create a sense of enjoyment, value, happiness, that translates into people wanting to be part of the work.” -Manmeet Sandhu, CPO, PhonePe

Did you enjoy the conference? Make sure to read our full coverage coming to you in the next few days!