Noopur Bhandari | HR Business Partner | Signify Innovations India Limited (erstwhile Philips Lighting)

A dedicated individual with a passion to make a difference by adding value, personally and professionally. Approachable, spirited, an ardent learner and strive for innovation-that’s how Noopur describes herself

She graduated from SCMHRD in 2017 and joined Philips Lighting as a trainee. Within 6 months, she was chosen for an early landing role as 'Recruiter for Enabling functions and Campus Manager', and later 'HRBP and L&D Manager'.  She thrives in rising to new challenges and growing with opportunities while contributing meaningfully - be it professionally with innovating in traditional roles while adapting to changing circumstances in her organization, or driving change by building a digital learning culture and promoting gender diversity in her organization, or personally with learning new skills. She has also been a national level athlete and she relishes reading.

Build thriving ecosystems

During her school days, Noopur was identified by our sports teacher to have the potential in becoming an athlete. While she was better than my classmates, she did not win any of the intra school competitions for the first 9 months. Despite this, her coach maintained his confidence, trained her rigorously, and constantly motivated me to keep pushing myself. With the right environment, she finally not only won in inter-school competitions but also competed nationally. This journey made her realize the importance of building a strong, enabling ecosystem to drive excellence and unleash potential. Her aspiration to build such thriving ecosystems made her choose HR since it allowed her to create similar enriching experiences for people from all the parts of an organization directly, while also being able to develop foundational systems where other managers can contribute in driving growth for their own teams.

Ensuring optimal balance

Often in HR, we see the need to ensure optimal balance - be it between conflicting HR goals and business goals or between becoming data-oriented or people-oriented. As an individual, she is a very balanced person and she maintains the same in her professional life as well. While taking any professional decision, she is able to maintain the right balance while factoring in varying perspectives of business and HR as people and data,  thus leading to an optimal decision, whatever situation arises. She also constantly upskills herself to ensure she has an appropriate understanding of divergent views. This not only differentiates her from others, but it has also contributed to building credibility.

Building an agile workforce: Key priority

The biggest talent priority for her is to build an agile workforce. Today, we have been largely successful in developing people competencies and building potential leaders. However, it is primarily restricted to growth within a field or domain. We are not able to build a workforce that is not limited by function, technology, or ways of doing business. This is predominantly because of limited relevant development intervention as well as a leadership attitude to avoid risks. In the current VUCA world, agile talent is the need of the hour which will make organizations more adaptable to an ever-evolving world and she hopes to be at the forefront of that culture and outlook change.

The one thing I will change in HR

To a large extent even today, HR is behind the curve in adapting to technologies and automating processes. She would like to change that, as newer technologies and automations for transactional activities increase productivity and allow HR professionals to invest more time focusing on value addition and strategic activities. 

The one thing she will retain in HR

We are progressing towards data-oriented approaches to problem-solving in HR, which is contributing significantly in preventing biases, efficient decision making, and promoting transparency. However, she would still like to retain the human touch in HR and ensure that the “people” side of HR is not lost as it is imperative for driving values, building culture, developing connect, and promoting innovation. Hence an optimal balance should be maintained in adapting to a data-oriented approach and while retaining the humanistic approach.

Vision for HR's future growth

Her vision of HR is to evolve into a field that combines its human-centric approach with technology, data analytics, and business acumen as its core pillars. The future of HR requires us to not only adapt to the fast-changing external environment but also be change champions and ensure that the business is equally flexible and adaptable to innovations while maintaining core human values. This can only be achieved by (1) building culture and talent that is responsive to change, (2) understanding newer ways of working - its impact on the business as well as people and (3) making optimal decisions - all of it enabled by a natural synthesis of human, technological, analytical and business insights.