Himal Tewari is the Chief Human Resources Officer of Tata Power Group. He brings with him a wealth of expertise spanning across various HR domains.  In the current crisis he has been leading from the front and ensuring the safety of employees. In a conversation with People Matters, he shared some of the key things that he is doing and why learning is important during the lockdown. 

As a leader, do you measure performances during the crisis? If yes, what are the key parameters that are considered while measuring performances?

This crisis has made our planning and review horizons much shorter. Also, we are classifying our tasks and targets as critical and non-critical. The aspect of employee safety and managing critical operations has become the core focus and we keep calibrating what is essential and what would be delayed given the lock down and manpower deployment constraints. The focus of the current Standard Operating Procedure is to manage hygiene and social distancing, and this has been the cornerstone of our implementation. Another important measure for us was to ensure well being for our contractual workforce, including ensuring that our contractors are paying them on time. We have an elaborate BCP process which was put to implementation in these times.

The year 2019 had been all about tech adoption and digital transformation, with conversations surrounding what the future of work would like. How do you see the future of work now?

I completely agree. Many of our technology and digital adoption initiatives really helped us during this crisis and this period has also accelerated our digital journey. Even before the crisis, our company was a showcase in terms of adoption of e-learning and this culture of learning at your own pace, space and time now has really helped us in institutionalising this new form and helped in employee engagement. 

The productivity gain that we have achieved in this time has been through a lot of digital collaboration tools that we have implemented or developed and most of the functions have seamlessly transitioned to work from home formats because of this. While there is room for improvement, our digitisation and automation efforts have indeed enabled both mainstream and support functions to seamlessly work within and outside offices.

As a CHRO, what are the things you are doing to create a learning culture in the organization during the crisis?

As mentioned earlier, even before the crisis we were investing heavily in managing and creating a culture of e-learning. We had also created specific paths for individual employees whom had to be delivered through multiple methods including e-learning, specific programs and one-to-one coaching. In our experience, a combination of frontline engineers working in remote locations with good internet connectivity and a repository of content leads well to adoption of e-learning. 

As a philosophy, we have also created the individual as the centre of this development planning which in the past used to be largely driven by their supervisors and managers. Giving this empowerment to the individual has given a new sense of ownership and purpose to their respective learning journeys. We have also specifically taken leadership development as a focus area and curated programmes, with renowned academic institutions, that are long term and specific to our context.

What is that one job that is going to be critical at your group in the future? And why?

It is difficult to pinpoint one particular role, but I would rather broad base is to say all frontline roles in plants, operations, network and customer management centres. If the crisis continues, we will have to deliver value and our frontline roles will become exceedingly important and critical.

According to a survey, 93% of high performing organizations believe crisis uncovers talented leaders. In your experience of managing crises, how relatable are these results?

This crisis has unravelled the leadership and commitment of our frontline employees. Working with very limited resources and challenging external conditions, they showed exemplary courage and commitment to turn up for work every day and demonstrated tremendous application to run our technical areas with extremely satisfactory results and parameters. Many of them have shown exemplary application and innovation which we will take forward even when the crisis is over.