Shivang Ganatra | Senior Manager (HRD) | BPCL

For Shivang Ganatra, Senior Manager (HRD) at BPCL, who has been a part of diverse domains such as rewards, performance management, talent management, HR business partnering, talent acquisition, L&D and integration during mergers and acquisitions, he’s always endeavoured to sensitise the stakeholders on the value that HR brings to the table. In his current role, he’s revamped the ‘leadership development’ program, significantly enhancing the EVP to offer upskilling opportunities, along with contextualising and creating impactful L&D programs, increasing revenue and value for all involved. 

Choosing HR As A Profession

For him, the limitless possibilities in unlocking and channeling human potential for a specific objective made him take up HR as a profession. 

Understanding And Addressing Challenges

HR is surrounded with obstacles and challenges today - keeping pace with fast-evolving external business landscape, supporting organisational aspirations, understanding business context, business models and priorities and proactively modifying people practices to achieve organisational objectives. HR teams need to understand the product, service or business line of an organisation and design the roadmap of short and long-term goals keeping in mind market share increase, while enhancing topline and augumenting the bottomline. Only when each one understands the role of the other in the organisation and expectations from it vs what’s actually achieved, the gaps can be identified. 

For me, as I grew in my corporate career, the approach I use is to understand the ‘why’ of every policy, process or practice before moving to the ‘how’. Through it, Shivang has always aimed to provide solutions that are relevant and effective. 

Since the pandemic, as the world of work experienced multiple shifts quite quickly - WFH to hybrid model to WFO, employee’s market to employer’s market, extreme caution to extreme optimism, the only thing that remained constant through it all was capability. Even with skills evolution, the core business skills, he believes, like understanding customers and developing user/customer experience, have remained somewhat the same. 

In the end, the most impactful takeaway for him is that if you keep yourself abreast with relevant capabilities, you shall find yourselves in good stead. “Talent that keeps upskilling as it deep dives into current and futuristic trends, while being rooted to core capabilities will be an asset to any organisation.”

Key Takeaways from Are You In The List

The entire People Matters Are You In The List powered by Aon was a learning experience from him. From personality, cognitive and functional assessments to situational judgements test, CHRO coaching and CEO jury evaluation – each stage had a different aspect of learning and development. The detailed personality report gave him a glimpse into his preferred working style, while functional and behavioural assessments offered him knowledge about his strengths and areas of development. 

Other than identification, there was also a set of recommendations with actionable insights, learning from others and self-learning resources. While the CHRO coaching was brief, it was the icing on the cake for Shivang, that gave him a chance to introspect and improve himself on a professional and personal level. 

What’s Next?

He believes that an organisational setup that taps into individual potential for achieving collective goals and fosters positive environment will have the competitive edge to stay ahead. In the long run, he believes it all comes down to your persistence levels, ‘when consistent efforts are committed in a focussed manner to lead to success even if it comes with initial disappointments.’

To gain new perspectives and innovative ideas on streamlining HR processes, follow the #AreYouInTheList.