As businesses continue to explore what the hybrid world of work looks like, there’s a need to step back and learn from the innovations over the past year. In this conversation with People Matters, Maveric’s Ranga Reddy talks about a variety of new priorities and approaches to people practices.

Ranga Reddy is the CEO of Maveric Systems. In a career spanning over 15 years, he strated as a management consultant and worked with organizations like World Bank, American Express, Reckitt and Coleman, Arthur Andersen, Ernst & Young, Polaris Software, AT Kearney, NDDB and the Government of India and has covered the areas of business strategy, people management, change management and transformational leadership.

1. How has the last year changed your perspective on performance management?

The outlook of performance management has significantly changed. 

First-up, associates taking up personal initiatives and accountability to lead a higher degree of business initiatives, would stand out and would be regarded as potential leaders by choice in the given situation. 

Secondly, a clear roadmap is drawn out between leaders and their managers on team efficiency and effectiveness. This is needed to get the best out of your team in this current situation and evolving environment. 

Finally, with close supervision and collaboration, performance has taken a new shape. It has enhanced predictability and created a sense of accountability among employees to outperform themselves. 

2. What are some new practices in measuring workplace productivity and performance you’ve adopted in light of the emerging hybrid workplace model?

It was essential for us to focus on the right measures which could raise the bar for workplace excellence. At Maveric, we have undertaken some of the below initiatives in line with our growth strategy. They include:

• Management by objectives, wherein we have clearly defined KRA’s/KPI’s for functional and cross-functional teams across the board. This will enable the teams to work with the same intensity. 

• Steps have been put in place to eliminate functional silos faster, thereby reorganizing teams to focus on accomplishing a given strategic objective.

• Leadership changes have been made as part of our realignment efforts. Our cross-functional leaders will get the team to focus on realising the objectives whereas functional leaders will support respective team members to drive results. 

• Quarterly reviews are in place to monitor the progress of teams. A team’s overall achievements and effectiveness would be recognised more than an individual contributor. 

3. The year 2021 is set to become the year of continuous reinvention – with new ways of working becoming more permanent and innovation becoming central to HR’s practices. How are you thinking about these challenge areas?

The year 2021, is for recovery and innovation across all the sectors of the country. These unprecedented times have been hard on the whole industry, some were able to manage it, and some were not.

We are making continuous enhancements in key processes which deal with client stakeholder management, project quality delivery, and the required IT infrastructure to support our associates. 

We are placing significant investments, enhancing leadership attention, inspiring new thinking, and innovation on hiring, encouraging learning and development, facilitating more employee engagement, with a sharp focus on building a great culture. 

Lastly, and most importantly, we are continuously evolving our employee well-being practices through various wellness initiatives at regular intervals to re-energize our associates.

4. How is the role of HR set to change? With a greater individual autonomy and accountability – what’s the impact of the HR function and policy/ process level change?

The role of HR is critical in driving business growth. In the distributed work environment, aligning employees to the company culture calls for significant HR attention. We were able to crack this code last year and our annual performance did the rest with 20% CAGR. Similarly, we nurture and develop leadership by placing them in complex assignments and allowing them to apply themselves with a reasonable degree of empowerment and accountability. During this process, we let the rest of the organization support these emerging leaders to be more effective. The policies in effect maintain the discipline and provide a more streamlined way of working.

5. How are you mapping continuous learning/ skilling with workplace performance, given that it has become critical to business continuity?

Continuous learning has come a long way from what it used to be earlier. With the speed of technology change, gone are days when associates use to get shortlisted and nominated by the business units for various learning programs. Self-learning and learning by choice with a clear purpose in mind is the option that associates must undertake. This will make them future-ready for taking up new challenges with their acquired skill mastery. Maveric’s Hire and Nurture program is built around the same principle. We onboard talent who have an interest in a specific skill and nurture them with pragmatic learning programs to become masters in their chosen fields.

6. What are your top talent priorities for the upcoming quarter?

As part of our future growth journey as a banking technology transformation specialist, we have a clear roadmap on our top talent priorities.

For maximising growth for existing customers, we are looking to expand our leadership footprint across functions like customer engagement, technical engagement, and delivery transformation. These opportunities are part of our key competencies such as DataTech, Digital Transformation, Temenos, and Quality Engineering. 

Banking domain knowledge has always been our core strength. To grow this deeper, we are seeking leaders who have substantial prior experience in program delivery impact across the banking value chain of retail, corporate, wealth management digital ecosystem. Additionally, we are seeking leaders who have prior experience in developing new-age solutions in the focus areas of customer experience, regulatory risks and compliance, digital operations, and analytics. 

Leaders who are highly committed to conceptualising new learning architecture and building new-age learning platforms supported by learning partnerships will also be a part of our Maveric family.