Vani Garg | HR Business Partner | Pepsico

For Vani Garg, who has taken up the role of HR Business Partner at Pepsico recently, she's always focused on two aspects: designing and building effective HR strategies to achieve business results and create holistic, positive employee experiences that enables, rewards and helps people realise and achieve their true potential. In all her years as an HR professional, she’s strived for diversified, growth-oriented experiences, that inadvertently led to wider appreciation for different business and people context. 

Drive to Choose HR

Vani truly believes that a great HR leader can have a profound and positive impact on people and organisations and that’s been a major driving factor for her to opt for HR. 

Challenges Ahead: How HR can Address Them

For Vani, the biggest problem statement for HR today is to future-proof organisations from industrial, economic and technological disruptions and predict the trends of tomorrow. With the advent of Generative AI and chatbots, HR needs to keep pace with the tech advances, become digitally savvy, look for suitable use cases for application, all while balancing it with the ‘human’ element. 

In her earlier roles, Vani had designed new structures for effective change management strategies, carved out roles which were data-centric and tech-oriented to meet business needs and focused on upskilling and reskilling initiatives to help employees acquire new skillsets. She also consciously worked towards creating an employee experience where employees were able to bring their whole selves to work and find fulfilment in their job roles. 

As we move ahead into 2023, a year of widespread economic changes and shifting employee preferences, it is imperative for HR leaders to rethink how technology and humans would interact and its impact on individual roles and organisational structures. With more and more employees preferring flexibility and hybrid models of work, organisations are innovating business models that are frugal, efficient and can withstand external volatility. 

The biggest takeaway from the past few years of disruption for Vani includes agility as a key to stay ahead of the changing business landscape. With multigenerational teams that are increasingly geographically dispersed, the focus is back on designing a culture where employees feel heard, respected and have a purpose. HR leaders will have to design initiatives to curb burnout and change fatigue, resulting from re-organisation pile up. “In 2023, employees not only expect their workplace to be a space where productivity fosters, but a place where collaboration is empowered and work-life balance is supported with clearly defined purpose and impact,” she shared.

Highlights from Are You In The List Awards

For Vani, the assessment process and the journey with People Matters Are You In The List powered by Aon has been insightful, empowering and thoroughly enriching. The multi-dimensional approach to assess applicants encompassed analysing different aspects of an individual’s professional achievements, leadership style and the impact created through their roles along with functional, cognitive and personality assessment. Through the comprehensive assessments, Vani was able to engage in self-reflection, which helped her gain insights into her unique strengths and how each one of them helped her grow as a professional. 

The CHRO coaching and CEO interactions helped her understand how one can leverage one’s strengths in real-world scenarios. In addition to this, she also had the chance to interact with peers from diverse organisations and industries, which led to learning from their experiences and build her own personal network. 

In conclusion, the entire process was a game changer that helped her recognise her individual traits and become self-aware so she could continue on her leadership and development journey. 

Mantra to Live By

The future of work, Vani believes will be led by HR as they build upon organisational resilience, flexibility, fluidity and agility. And as she looks at HR leaders today, she has only one advice: The only person you should try to be better than is the person you were yesterday! 

To look at the mantra the winners of People Matters Are You In The List live by in this AI-powered world of work, follow the #AreYouInTheList.