Article: Create a hi-touch HR organization: Aruna Jayanthi

C-Suite

Create a hi-touch HR organization: Aruna Jayanthi

Aruna Jayanthi, CEO, Capgemini India

Being in a business driven by people, we look at models wherein people can lead the business. It is our innate ability to understand the customer requirements; knowing this fact, customers give us businesses for they know that it will be taken care of by the best professionals. Thus, it becomes all the more important for our employees to live up to the customer’s expectations.

Leadership and talent development figure as the top talent priority for Capgemini. As we focus to build a more customer-facing global model, the challenge is to ensure that our people are aligned to a global business model and understand the customer side of business. Alignment to the common business priority is essential for business to overcome these continuing talent challenges. Next on the priority list is to create a hi-touch HR organization, wherein we have a centralized HR system by having more HR business partners. Last but not the least, we need to move towards a HRO model - HR shared services model aimed towards driving standardization globally.

As a matter of fact, HRO, which is driven by cost along with the need to have a specialized and standardized HR function, is emerging as a critical need to drive the global business model. Besides improvement in service levels, it is especially important in the context of the global model, where people work from different geographies and time zones, thus making alignment critical for business success. Having said this, attracting and retaining continue to be a talent challenge, though the focus has moved towards enhancing employee productivity.

On an average, I spend at least 25 percent of my time on people related activities. This time is spent on attracting the right leadership talent, developing them and ensuring that they have the right goals and direction. Communicating the vision of the company and creating the right environment is an integral part of my role. While I do not engage much in the operational activities of HR, I spend more time on aligning people with the business.

As a CEO, my role in people related activities is critical and it is adequately represented on my personal scorecard. In fact, a quarter of my personal goals are also linked to people and leadership related goals. The investment of time and money is tracked at the operational level in terms of attrition and retention numbers to check the ROI of the recruitment function. However, I do not think that we can yet measure ROI on activities like talent management, performance management and leadership development. While the return on such investments is obvious, I do not think there is a way to put a definite number to this.
 

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Topics: C-Suite, Strategic HR, #ExpertViews

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