How should companies address the growing demand for better employee experience and create the right talent initiatives that help enable adaptibility, resilience and performance?

To help find answers to these and other critical talent dilemmas, the HR Evolution Perspectives 2023: Experts Take brings exculsive conversations with top HR leaders across APAC. This article is part of a series to deepen our understanding of insights gathered from the HR Evolution Perspectives 2023: Empower and Evolve research study. A landmark study conducted by People Matters and Darwinbox, this is the largest HR report in the APAC region. It is based on responses from over 1,200 HR practitioners, 350 CXOs and nearly 1,500 employees.

In this current edition, we spoke to Anjali Raghuvanshi, Chief People Officer at Randstad India, for this Experts Take edition. Anjali has been instrumental in facilitating HR transformation journeys at the business and organisational level and is passionate about societal and environmental impact. She is currently designing a robust social responsibility framework at Randstad India and continually associates with educational institutes to hone future talent. In this discussion, Anjali highlighted the following significant HR transformation trends:

Top highlights from the conversation include:

• How to find the pulse of what employees want and what they expect
• Building the right leadership buy-in
• Role of culture in raising enagement and resilience
• HR-tech transformation journey of Randstad India
• Treating employees like customer to plan better inititatives

Culture a critical lever

While Randstad India focuses on profitability and revenue growth like any other business entity, people have taken centre stage in deciding what kind of organisation we want to build and what skills we want to bring in, explains Anjali. She highlights three prominent levers of HR transformation in the organisation:

• Culture: creating an alignment between the workplace culture and business strategy to drive performance across all levels of the organisation
• Performance: building a rigorous performance management framework driven by frequent measurement and feedback
• Engagement: identifying the pulse of the workforce to make people-centric decisions and driving higher engagement and productivity

To create complementary progress across these three levers, Anjali explains the importance of getting the buy-in of the top leadership. She adds that these goals are not that of the HR function alone, and we need to form a nexus of people, leaders and managers to enable these shifts and translate our visions into tangible business outcomes.  She explains with an example: "When we introduced a dedicated programme to talk about people’s goals, aspirations, development and performance a few years back, it had limited takers in the management team. But, as our pilot programmes showed that having these conversations increased retention, engagement and performance, leaders responded and took action.”

Treat employees like your customers

“I like to think of all employees as customers, as it helps build the right experience and journey for them”, Anjali says. This helps the HR team understand the employee experience in relation to the technology, policies and culture and gives a unique perspective into what truly matters for people. “With changing business practices and availability of new customer experiences, employees will naturally expect HR processes to become more seamless, agile and personalised. HR leaders are responsible for understanding these expectations and delivering results that satisfy people's individual aspirations.”

One key aspect of this process is to have your ears on the ground and not limit your feedback collection only from managers. “Having dedicated formal and information platforms to frequently capture what people say and feel about their work is critical. While technology can give you a tool, how you apply it to derive maximum results is up to you.”

Building a consolidated platform

An advocate of bringing all HR processes and services under a single platform, Anjali says a disjointed user experience hampers utilisation and engagement. “A single consolidated platform to access all people management services will increase the ease of use and maximise feature application”, she explains. At Randstad India, she has been driving these integrations, sometimes even across different verticals, to ensure easier access and collaboration.

She adds that shifting leaders and managers to new systems is always a combination of a push and a pull. ”When you focus on the ‘why’ and show how a new system can improve the work experience, you can drive adoption without mandating it. Depending on your unique system and processes, you can follow a carrot and a stick approach at the right touchpoint to ensure higher utilisation and returns on system investment.”

Download the full HR Evolution Perspectives 2023: Empower and Evolve report here.