Bhavini is a passionate HR professional with over 16 years of diverse HR experience expertise in the areas of, HR Business Partnering, Talent and Capability, Manpower planning, Organizational Restructuring and Development, Change management, Employee Engagement, Employee Relations, Performance Management, Corporate Social Responsibility and managing entire Employee life cycle across diversified sectors such as Financial services, IT, ITES, Telecom and Motorsports. She has had national and international exposure which enables her to understand and adapt to cultural change.

She has worked and played a key role in known brand names to transform HR role into effective business partnering role to enhance business performance. She has also taught in management school she loves to mentor and coach employees on their career choices, behavioural patterns and relationship management. 

1. COVID 19 has surprised the world and the business leaders are now under litmus test, what is the role of leadership during a time like this?

Contingency planning is an arena where all leaders should venture. Key role of any leader is to convert any challenging and difficult situation to an opportunity. Leaders should drive their otherwise not achieved agendas of connecting with people. Being global to customize trends and best practices to their own organizational and customer needs. Flexibility at work place by exploring work from home options which is seamless on day to day operation. Having a meticulous, visionary and problem solving approach. Encourage teams to constructively translate their hobbies to a long term career option. Need of the hour is to have smart, value driven and focussed leadership. Strategize and plan with clarity for the organization, leverage the team and effectively communicate. Horn, nurture and leverage team strengths and areas of improvement which was never identified or recognized with the busy schedules. Be flexible, adaptable to ever change needs of customers, teams and organizational needs and have the mental strength and wisdom to make difficult choices. Make most of the under-utilized resources with new initiatives which can be structured around research on best industry trends, review existing policies and hiring trends.

2. How will be the company be identifying the remote workforce/WFH champions from this incident of COVID 19?

It’s a very unpredictable and uncertain to identify remote workforce/champions as a lot would depend on how economy, which industry and which region gets highly impacted by COVID 2019, hence leaders can develop strategies to identify set of teams, groups and business lines which can be further broken down by teams that can without the COVID 19 situation could have operated remotely and teams which requires real time customer interaction. Leaders should plan for short term and long term WFH pros and cons by having visionary approach to their businesses and more importantly creating capability which van be nurtured to the changing needs of business not only with flexibility but also my adapting to change, learning and unlearning skills, experience and taking the risk to venture into new arena.

3. How will the Manpower planning for the organizations who does mass hiring will differ post COVID 19/ during Corona economy?

Redesigning the capability model, roles and responsibilities will be the key for mass hiring. The change and challenge is significant to industry and region hence manpower planning will be the most critical for most organizations as due to COVID -19 many economies might undergo recession hence organizations having global footprint will need to plan their workforce with utmost forward looking approach with a strategy of 3-5 year plan as the recession in different regions will take nothing less than 3 to 5 years to recover. In my opinion there will be few sectors like medical supplies, pharmaceutical, online deliverables etc. which will gain and few sectors like restaurants, retail etc. will not gain. Resources who were hired and yet at offer stage can be reviewed and realigned to newer and existing business and roles erupting out of COVID 19.

4.What were the challenges you faced while change management during development of the future leaders? With your experience, what are the key pillars while designing the change management plans?

Talent and Capability building is the most challenging part of any change management. In the process of identifying the reason of change, leaders need to be fast paced on to next line of thought to diagnose and design the strategy to develop future leaders with a mould of change. It would also interesting to observe and analyse how leaders are able to drive and succeed the change agendas for organizational development as that would help in defining skills, strengths and areas of improvement. For change management and adoption to be successful, it is important that an integrated approach is taken across all areas of the program, ensuring the business understands how the solution will impact them and benefit the company as a whole. The key pillars of designing the change management plans are by creating buy in for change by driving beneficial and compelling story, managing people by understanding evolving roles, reviewing organization structure, automating systems and upgrading and upskilling teams on technology, building talent by evaluating internal movements, ex-employees come back with a suitable role and building a robust leadership pipeline, effective internal communication by making change meaningful to the change participants.

5. If you look back three years, what developments have posed the most important new challenges to talent leaders? How has the Business leaders, Founders have evolved over these years?

Every business success is driven by excellence and individual capability working towards a common goal. Leaders come with different background and personalities. It depends on how effective are there people management skills and how beneficial will it be for success of any business. In last three years, digitization is the buzz and most leaders are trying to align their business model to be automated to reduce cost and increase revenue. Having said that also managing millennials, engaging with employees with different genre of experience, pedigree and generation. Due to globalization, most leaders have kept them abreast with newest technology, hiring trends, new business opportunities and expansion in locations, where there is no dearth of talent and good infrastructure. Most importantly what I have observed in last few years, leaders are more open to new ideas, and have showcased flexibility and openness to the mind-set of experience bar and more than welcoming to the fruitful ideas from the younger generation, building and driving common goals and building loyalty among teams, businesses are open to considering, evaluating and funding start-ups and evolving mind-set, experience, approach, style and having progressive and not regressive outlook towards people, teams and internal and external clients which was a challenge until few years ago.

6. What are the people management strategies you have applied in your past organization? Is there anything you have had to unlearn along the way while implementing the strategies? 

1. Rewards Recognition –Every individual needs motivation and to identify opportunities to rewards and recognise them, organization needs to have platforms and programs for individual and teams to appreciate their contribution in success of the organization.

2. Talent Management –It aims at improving business performance and the road ahead to give it a structure is by creating opportunities for employees to step up. It is plan of action to optimize people performance which is specially designed for high potentials who can be nurtured as future leaders for the organization. Talent strategy can be managed by organizations by building a high performance workplace which in turn transforms into a ‘learning’ organisation, building employee value preposition and creating brand value.

3. Employee Engagement –It is a pillar of success for any business and or organizational success. When teams are engaged their behaviour and outcome of performance has high impact, which leads to a road of success. Let me take this opportunity to define the pillars of employee engagement i.e. Relationship Management with managers and stakeholders, how to create culture of coaching, giving feedback, identifying opportunities to develop talent, working environment of happiness for more productive employees, being empathetic, wellness programs, free fitness membership, aligning individual goals to company goals by creating value for vision and mission, engagement surveys for evaluating work satisfaction, cross functional team relationships by cross projects, organizing team events, informal and formal chat with leadership chats, create brand ambassadors by conducting stay interviews, getting feedback on the culture, retention programs, knowledge sharing programs, internal magazines to encourage hobbies and talent apart from work and many such platforms to keep employees engaged which healthy and safe for every organization success.

4. Designing simple processes for a seamless operation by creating teams who are experts and can always value add on their tasks rather than get monotonous.

5. Networking through functional forums and conferences which helps identifying opportunities of global trends and best practices followed by different organizations.

6. Effective internal communication to keep employees abreast with the performance and growth of the organization which will help them decide their career paths.

Learning and unlearning is part of any strategy. I had to unlearn the monotonous way of managing processes and people. Any organization have people embodied with different experience from different pedigree, specialization, and regions. It requires different approach and style to manage people with the different backgrounds hence it is utmost important in the unlearning process to be ready for any change whether with managing people, stakeholders, business demands, economic situations, changes in strategy to meet organizational needs etc. It was exciting but challenging at the same time. To conclude, leaders carrying the right approach and progressive outlook makes a difference.

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