With a focus on the evolving landscape of work in an exclusive interaction with Nimisha Das, senior HR director, Kellogg South Asia (rebranded as Kellanova since early October) delved deep into how her organisation approaches talent retention and development through innovative learning and development initiatives.

As an HR leader, what is your perspective on learning and development culture, and how this can be improved to retain the talent?

Learning and development culture is pivotal to attracting and retaining top talent in an organisation. For employees, given the pace of change in today's hybrid and technology-enabled workplace, learning is imperative to not only survive but thrive. 

As organisations grow, having future-fit skills are important and that’s where organisations are focussing their investments in their evolution as learning organisations. Learning and development programmes based on the focused enhancement of functional and leadership capabilities are required to aid the overall development of employees which ultimately supports talent development and retention.

What according to you prospers learning and development culture at the workplace?

At Kellanova, encouraging a mindset that is curious and open to unlearning and learning, is the crux of building a learning and development culture. 

In addition, we have strategic tie-ups / partnerships with best-in-class learning providers like INSEAD, Bridge, Upgrad, and SPJMR among others to offer support and bridge and scale the capability gap. Along with partnerships, we also leverage technology to drive the learning culture through application-based and bite-sized learning modules to ensure learning is relevant, accessible, and practical to our employees. 

To understand the accessibility of our learning and development programmes, we also have implemented effective systems and measures that track the learning effectiveness within the organisation. 

How has learning and development impacted Kellogg and its employees? What are the important benefits that learning and development helped you achieve?

Learning and development initiatives at Kellanova have had a major impact on our organisation and our employees. Our focus has been on identifying, nurturing, and retaining key talent while upskilling and reskilling them to maintain a competitive edge. These initiatives have proven beneficial in developing India as a hub for leadership and functional talent for the region. Case in point, we have a healthy export of talent outside India for key regional and global roles. Furthermore, the development of our functional capabilities pipeline has allowed talent to keep pace with growth and in some cases build capability ahead of the business curve and external asks. 

What sets us apart is our individualised focus on career conversations with employees that allows us to map the organisational growth goals to employees' long-term career aspirations and their strengths and areas of development.  

These learning and development efforts have not only improved individual skills but also contributed significantly to Kellanova’s overall talent and business growth; proof of which is our Global Organisational Survey Score (2022) where 81% of our employees have stated that “they have sufficient opportunities to learn and grow” within the organisation.

Has Kellogg introduced any change at the policy level given the importance of learning and development in the workplace?

Learning and its approaches are a guideline and not policy within Kellanova. The focus of learning and development is about having a differentiated offering for the organisation and the talent pool. The overall L&D structure internally ensures that while we have focussed learning for all, we also have created differentiated development programmes for key talent to evolve and progress faster.

The learning and development conversation is integrated and very closely intertwined with talent development to ensure the entire cycle of professional development is done.

Such programmes within a framework that supports and encourages learning for development are not only people-centric but also align the organisational requirement towards building a future-ready workplace.

How have the changing priorities of the employees influenced learning and development in the new world of work?

The evolving priorities of employees in the modern workplace have influenced learning and development paradigms to a great extent. Within Kellanova, bite-sized programmes and application-based self-guided learning has worked favorably in our hybrid workplace. Ultimately, new ways of engaging with employees to develop and update their skills need to be balanced with digitally enabled learning to prevent digital fatigue. 

This will help growing organisations like Kellanova stay competitive and retain and attract the right talent as we continue our journey in building a future-fit organisation.