Neeraj Bahl, the Managing Director and CEO of BSH Home Appliances, is a strategist who believes in sustainable and profitable growth. In a career spanning more than 25 years, he has donned many hats and has worked in mega companies like Samsung, LG, Electrolux and Panasonic. Neeraj is a specialist in consumer electronics and home appliances, has specialised in sales and marketing and is known for establishing some of the best sales networks and channels across the country. He is also known for establishing new business ventures, cracking big corporate deals, and being an expert in handling modern trade and organised retail.

In an exclusive conversation with People Matters, he shares some of the fascinating, people-centric initiatives being led at BSH Home Appliances and how the company champions an empathy-driven and trust-oriented work culture. As they embrace new digital innovations to lead HR transformation and support an increasingly distributed workforce, their workforce is at the centre of all their policies and decision-making to the extent that they have even created accessible, inclusive work-from-home opportunities.  Additionally, numerous upskilling opportunities from Talentify to Sparks are made available to empower their people’s career journeys. Here are a few excerpts from our conversation as we discussed more about the people practices at BSH Home Appliances. 

The future of work calls for transforming how businesses lead operations and service clients. So how are you building those new-age skill sets at BSH? 

BSH, especially BSH India, emphasises customer-centricity, and we completely believe that the skill-sets most in demand align with this. Because at the end of the day, the brands that will survive the future are the ones who know their customers and the market well. It’s become extremely essential for businesses today to have in-depth knowledge of e-commerce and digitisation, as well as know what skills they must acquire in the domain. Currently, we’re focusing on our D2C campaign where we encourage all our employees from different divisions such as sales, marketing, logistics, service, IT, commercials and backend functions to work together and empower them in their journeys of learning a new tangent of business. 

Through such learning opportunities, we also aim to reach around 10% of turnover in our D2C business over the next 4-5 years. This also helps break the monotony of one’s roles and responsibilities over the years. Also, more than simply building competencies to thrive in the future of work, I believe a leader who is open to collaboration, inclusion, empathy-driven, customer-centric and with an agile mindset will become critical. Today, we have to adapt to new technologies and changing trends quickly. As a result, we have also designed programs to elevate these skill sets among our leadership bench at different levels of the organisation. For example, our skilling programs tend to send first-level managers to top business schools such as SP Jain, and we also plan to have partnerships with IIM. 

We also emphasise a lot of cross-functional learning opportunities, as you can see in our D2C project. An interesting thing that we also noticed during the pandemic was a rise in call rates when people had to use our appliances without any scope for in-person customer service. As a result, we had to solve around 2000 cases in the first month, utilising tools such as training videos to manage installations and use cases. This was a wonderful learning experience for us, where we learned how to meet our customer needs remotely and with limited manpower. At present, through our multiple training centres, we ensure that our employees are trained in-house and offered new pathways to grow their careers. 

If you could share some words of advice to our community on preparing themselves for the future of work, what would it be? 

Just like how I tell my sales team that all answers lie in the market, in the same way, I would say for HR, that all answers lie with your people. So I often have coffee conversations with the Managing Director to learn more about the employees with whom I haven’t had the opportunity to interact.

For the past three years, I have personally taken care of the induction program where all new joiners, regardless of the department they are in, have a one-on-one session with me where I ask them about their onboarding experience and their overall experience at BSH, which helps me a lot in understanding the situation at hand. I also believe in open communication where employees feel free to express themselves in a space centred around psychological safety. During challenging personal periods, we don’t want our employees to stress about their job performance because I personally, as a leader, do not get deterred by failures. All we want is to create a culture where people try. 

We really should know our people well and we want to create an environment where we hire and retain them for life. During the pandemic, when there were so many pay cuts, we gave our people the highest increment and gave them every facility they needed. We also launched several facilities tied to employee wellbeing, knowing how stressed our people were and gave them the options to expand those benefits to their family members. We were really concerned for our employees and made sure that they knew through all the benefits we offered them, from privileged leaves and pay, gross payments in case of loss, and so much more. This was all done to offer mental security to our people.