Anisha Saluja | HR Lead - Mahindra Last Mile Mobility | Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd

For Anisha, impacting the lives and careers of employees and thereby transforming organisations was one of the reasons she chose HR as a career option.

As the HR Lead for Mahindra’s Last Mile Mobility, she’s played an instrumental role in transforming the organisation structure and capability building - From ensuring the sales function has the data to build the right organisation structure for front-end functions to enable business delivery to architecting a learning experience platform that propelled technology-led on-the-go learning, she’s had a transformative impact.   

Agility and Collaboration

“While earlier the organisation transformation cycle would take three to five years, it now takes six months to completely change the business context, consumer preference and talent needs. Hence high agility and swiftness in all functions and a high degree of collaboration to learn and gain strengths is key to success,” she said.     

The biggest HR Challenge       

“The biggest problem for HR is knowing whether to 'Build or Buy' talent to accelerate organisation delivery, at the right cost and also grow talent from within but without compromising on quality,” she notes

This problem, according to Anisha, encapsulates how companies define their talent agenda while also giving an insight into how companies identify their critical talent.

Reflecting on an initiative to address this challenge, Anisha shared her experience of implementing a "Talent to Value" exercise – which was aimed at identifying critical roles (Value Enabling and Value Generating) in the company with a view of a 3-5 year business strategy. She then looked at the people occupying the roles to understand whether they were high performing or not.

She then created personalised development plans for them and mapped 'internal successors' from a 3-5-7 year horizon. “This has helped the organisation to identify critical roles and map key talent and move towards building talent. This is not done with the intent to avoid 'Buy' talent but to promote internal talent and give them opportunities,” she added  

Are You In the List Experience

"The best lessons for me were the jury interaction and the memory challenge. The questions in the Jury round made me think about the aspects we tend to miss in our regular fast-paced life: Learning, reflecting on failures, the impact we create, and what we can do differently.

Memory Challenge was a big reflection on how much our memory can retain. In today's era of technology and everything at the tip of our fingers, it's important to go the old school way sometime!!" she said.         

To gain new perspectives and insights from the People Matters Are You In The List winners, follow the #AreYouInTheList.