Building on the insights from the HR Evolution Perspectives 2023: Empower and Evolve research study, our exclusive interview series brings together top leaders across Asia-Pacific to get a deeper understanding of the findings from one of the biggest workplace transformation studies in the region.  

In this episode of HR Evolution Perspectives 2023: Experts Take, we have Krishna Raghavan, Chief People Officer at Flipkart join us to delve deeper into how talent initiatives can be made more strategic to drive growth and ensure focus capabilities helps prepare Flipkart for success.

Important highlights from the conversation include:

• Right people with the right capabilities need to be in the right roles
• Spend time building skills, keeping future-oriented outlook
• Important to build the right organizational structure for agility
• Talent experience is an important pillar in supporting growth
• Treat employees as customers and personalize initiatives as products

Balancing growth and profitability with rising costs

HR leaders need to balance these varying forces and create impactful talent strategies that enable business success. Krishna reflected on these trends by agreeing that growth needs to be fuelled by the right talent initiatives. 'At Flipkart, our pace of growth has been significantly high and the aim is to maintain the same growth ahead.'

'The dichotomy between the ambition to grow and keeping your people's costs in check is business reality. Balancing the two is crucial to grow.'  Krishna Raghavan, Chief People Officer at Flipkart

Is your talent in the right position?

For Krishna, impactful talent strategies must be in place to drive growth and profitability. A vital part of these strategies is ensuring the right people are in the right positions.

'Flipkart has many lines of business,' noted Krishna. ‘We realized we need a well-defined talent strategy that makes sure that we have the right capabilities in the right set of people and they are placed in the right set of roles.'

According to Krishna, without this alignment, driving growth will prove difficult.

This harkens to an important report finding where insights reveal that across APAC and India, addressing the capabilities gap remains the most significant challenge in front of HR leaders. 2024 will be crucial as HR leaders across the board find more impact solutions to bridge this gap.

Raise agility by streamlining the organizational structure

Designing the organizational structure that raises agility is vital for companies to address this change. For Krishna, this includes empowering managers, and reducing the layers in the organization to raise efficiency and productivity.

But in a rush to be more agile, organizational structures need to be thought through carefully.

'Additionally it is important to focus on creating a sustainable org structure,' he added. 'You can't have org designs changing every quarter. You have to make sure that through a well-defined talent process, you are able to put together org designs that are in place for a time, helping the company.'

Krishna cautioned against making excessive changes to the organizational design without putting in the robust thought behind why. This would only lead to lower efficiency.

Personalizing for a diverse population

According to the HR Evolution Perspectives report, the need for personalized talent initiatives that reflect the multi-generational workforce of modern-day companies has risen. And for a company like Flipkart with a diverse workforce, this proves a critical need to address.

For Krishna, the talent ex is crucial to build and address. ‘We have looked at creating specialized functional silos within HR,’ he noted, adding that whether its rewards, experience, acquisitions or business partnership, there is a focus on treating the personalized experience piece as a product.

'Aspects like long term career paths and personalized benefits are like products that you are providing to consumers who are employees,' shared Krishna. 'In a product parlance then, your next step is to look at personalisation.'

To deliver a superlative experience and ensure personalization is not just another tick-in-the-box activity, treating employees like customers and talent initiatives like products helps bring in the right vigor.


You gain deeper insights into how the HR landscape in India will evolve in the coming year, download the full version of the HR Evolution Perspectives 2023: Empower and Evolve edition here.

At the time of recording the interview, Krishna Raghavan served as the Chief People Officer at Flipkart.