Be it due to the pandemic or the major tech disruptions, the world of work is witnessing transformations like never before. The techniques and strategies that worked in the past are turning out to be ineffective in the current time. While the entire functioning of Human Resources need not be altered, some insights and modifications can help the industry to thrive. 

The basis of any transformation begins with understanding the nitty-gritty of the subject matter. Zoheab Rehaman, who is the Head of People Success at Plum, started a LinkedIn Live series titled Uncovering HR. During the session, he and his team spoke to the top HR leaders about talent acquisition, culture building and employee engagement trends.

After acquiring knowledge on the art of building and nurturing talent, he came up with his latest e-book - The People Success Playbook. During an exclusive conversation with People Matters, Rehaman shed light on his research and his latest publication. 

Excerpts from the interview:

How can The People Success Playbook help HR leaders?

Just like any other industry, Human Resources has also seen some major disruptions. While some are acute, others have the ability to have a larger impact. The purpose of this e-book is to document all those information so that others can refer to the quality content, learn from it and implement some of the best practices. 

The topics covered range from branding, hiring, mental health, all the way to inclusion and diversity. These are the subject matters that have become immensely significant both from employees' and employers' perspectives. Hence, I believe this e-book will help HR practitioners.

What are the major challenges HR leaders are facing today?

While there are a number of issues pertaining in the industry today, some of the key problems are talent acquisition and retention, finding relationships and employment agreements. When it comes to talent acquisition and retention, this aspect has been a challenge and will also continue to be a challenge. This is because from hiring to retaining talents, not one said formula can work and that’s why there needs to be regular updating.

The second major challenge is finding relationships. The reason is as HR leaders, managing relationships at work is more important than anything else, especially with people working from home or in hybrid work environments. What HR leaders need to focus on is how to support healthy relationships. 

The other challenge is employment agreements. Employers have begun to recognise the need for customised benefit plans to address the most pressing issues. With more benefits, including child care benefits, and expanding coverage to mental health services, their chances of having a sound workforce multiplies. 

Are Indian companies driven by a culture of care?

Yeah, absolutely! While companies around the globe are driven by their culture, particularly in India, organisations have their unique personality, which is mostly driven by shared values, principles, traditions and the actions of the people. 

How should companies go about creating employee-centric policies?

Unlike how things were done in past, leaders and employers have now begun to understand the value of deeper employee-centric policies. Here are a few points to give more clarity on this: 

Analyze the current company culture

Organisations need to analyze the current company culture and there are a variety of ways of doing this. The first step is to understand what needs to be changed from the employees’ standpoint. This analysis will expose common patterns and trends across one or many departments. Once you're able to identify those departments and issues, come up with a strategy to resolve them. 

Make data-driven decisions

Whether it's a process workflow, project, or any process that needs to be improved, it's important to analyse the best practices that some of the other companies are practising. Anonymously survey the employees to see what are some of the employee improvement policies that can be created in your company too. The key point here is that don't make changes to create a policy or a process based on assumptions, because assumptions could be wrong.

Focus on taking action 

After you've analysed your company's current situation, the last step is taking action. Giving employees the autonomy to make their own decisions and come up with their own projects can actually go a long way. Also remember, not all changes can be made at once. Always be patient with your approach. 

Do you practice all these policies and strategies in your own company and how it has changed work for your employees? 

We have started conducting Employee Net Promoter Score surveys. This gives us insights into what kind of policy changes need to be made, what kind of process changes are to be done and how can we care better. With this, we realised managers are not well equipped to manage a team. Hence, we started a manager training session or a manager training series. 

These sessions are conducted by some of our internal managers who score really well on manager and promoter scores. In this, we cover topics like how to have effective check-ins, how to set pragmatic goals, how feedback frequently helps an employee get beyond what they can do and so on. 

And obviously, we as an organisation take care of our people really well. People are the most important asset for our business. And business can improve when we take care of our people, so these are some strategies that we've implemented, on how we can listen to our people and be more effective in making decisions.