Are You In The List 2018 Winner: Anuvesh Chandra
Anuvesh Chandra | DGM – HR | Hindalco Industries Ltd
Inspiration for me to join the HR field comes from home, my father retired after spending over 35 years in the HR & IR field and I grew up hearing about his enterprises across various industries, hence in a way I was primed to enter this field. One of the key reasons I pursued my post-graduation and subsequently a career in HR is the immense untapped potential of this function to make a difference in the growth of organizations.
Business success comes when the internal strategy anticipates and responds to external conditions. Regardless the business models, the key differentiator for all successful organizations across the globe (across generations) has always been its employees, and HR as function has the opportunity and a mandate to directly influence this stakeholder. Having seen the industry for the past 7 years, I am convinced that an appropriately organized and empowered HR function will continue to play a very important role in growth and sustenance of great organizations.
Points of differentiation
A healthy mix of Analytical and Conceptualization (A&C) abilities together with Emotional Intelligence (EI) has helped me deliver effectively in my field. A&C ability helps me in understanding and assimilating swiftly the business levers, strategies, processes, contexts and jobs, while EI helps in effectively interacting and engaging with people. A combination of the two has helped me in my career till now to quickly come up to speed with the business context, understand business issues, develop suitable solutions and develop connect with people for implementing the solutions.
Biggest Talent Priority to solve
Reskilling workforce to manage different jobs or manage the jobs differently would be the key talent priority for the future. The work methods are changing as a result of rapidly evolving technology, thousands of jobs are being replaced and would continue to be replaced with AI / automated systems. While this has been true since the first industrial revolution, what is worrying is the speed of change in the past few decades. Previously people had the chance of surviving through their careers before a disruption really changed the industry or the nature of jobs being performed as disruptions were far and few and took time to spread, thus giving time to employees to either slowly adopt to change or continue with their outdated work method till end of employment period.
In the current context an average worker may see disruptions hitting her industry maybe more than a couple of times during their careers. Hence to survive and thrive in this new industrialization revolution, each employee needs to continuously upgrade their skill sets to be compatible with new work methods in existing jobs or adapt to completely new jobs.
The one thing I will retain in HR
Employee Connect – With the evolution of technology and advent of virtual work spaces and numerous digital modes of interaction, there is a real danger of losing the core strength of the HR function viz. employee connect. This may lead to paradoxically dehumanizing the Human Resources function itself, hence HR people need to proactively work on sustaining the employee connect at N=1 level, and leverage technology to establish this connect rather than substitute the connect with technology.
The one thing I will change in HR
Data driven approach – I would like my function to become more anchored to data for making people related decisions that impact business. HR decisions more often than not, are based on intuition and benchmarking rather than actual contextual data, thus these decisions become much more susceptible to opinions and whims of leadership or employees than actual need of the organization.
Vision for HR's future growth
Constantly evolving function which proactively leverages technology to enhance and enable talent capital of the organization to deliver superior business results. HR will need to provide consumer level experience whether digital, physical or cultural to its employees to ensure that the best of the talent joins the organization and is engaged to deliver superior results. While many organizations already recognize HR as a strategic partner in driving business results, HR function needs to constantly reflect, re-imagine, re-skill and rebuild itself to ensure it keeps delivering value in the VUCA business environment.
