As we transition into an economy which is driven digitally and enabled by social media and mobile, it is fast paced with rapidly changing skill requirements as startups and e-commerce models of all types are springing up dynamically. In this challenging environment, fostering a culture of continuous learning and reskilling plays a key role in building talents of the future, says Vibha Shukla, director & head, HR at SAP India in an interview with Shishir Parasher. Excerpts:
By Shishir Parasher, Future transition is a not choice, it is a necessity to thrive and succeed in this dynamic industry
- When organisations talk about building talent of the future, what is it that they mean? At SAP we believe that “Everyone is a talent” and our focus is to develop amazing and diverse talents to innovate, grow and win customers. We take pride in having talents from across five generations from diverse cultural backgrounds coexisting at our workplace, with special focus on female talents, Gen Y and also cater to the differently-abled pool. We ensure that we keep investing in our employees and support their career aspirations. The key factors essential to build talents of future are an inspiring and participative work culture with continuous learning at its core, work flexibilities, grooming diverse talents, providing cross-functional exposure and grooming strong leaders.
- Are Indian organisations ready for the future transition?
- Future transition is a not choice, it is a necessity to thrive and succeed in this dynamic industry. With 60 per cent of population in India being youngsters, this number will also start getting reflected in workplaces sooner. Diversity in talent is becoming an order of the day. We believe that a participatory work culture with bottom-up decision making and a learning culture that enables continuous skill enhancement further cements this culture. With the use of our cloud-based applications and other online learning solutions we have created a learning culture which is - ‘Anytime, anyhow and anywhere’. While our early talent programme, global graduate programme, global HR early talent programme and sales/pre-sales academy ensures nurturing the millennial, our LEAP, Beyond the horizon, Strive2Lead and Speed Mentoring programmes focus on nurturing female talent across the grade levels to build the leadership pipeline. Our flagship expert career programme and global leadership development programmes ensure we constantly add strength to both our thought leadership and people management leadership layers.
- What expertise, as per you, is required for this shift? To build talents of the future one of the major aspect is to have a work culture that accommodates the priorities of all generations of workforce. We at SAP believe that workforce challenges can be smoothly sailed through a strong bond between employees of different generations. This requires a culture shift which should get reflected in the entire life-cycle of the employee. Our work culture is characterised by the “How we run” behaviours that describes how we get things done at SAP on our best day and makes our culture unique while continuously providing direction for making every day decisions.
- Gen Y focus: The culture shift was first induced into our recruiting and onboarding process. Our hiring team is focused on hiring Gen Y with a target of having 10 per cent of workforce by 2015. We have a well-established global early talent programme which focuses on Gen Y hiring in our consulting business, global HR early talent programme that focuses on hiring HR professionals and we have also instituted a cutting edge and aspirational sales/pre-sales academy programme, specially for sales professionals.
- Sales /Pre-sales academy for young management graduates: This is a very powerful programme in which we hire top talent from tier – I&II B schools in India through a rigorous selection process, which includes a boot camp in our campus. The selected candidates then undergo a one-year-long development programme to groom themselves to be cutting edge sales professionals.
- Global HR early talent programme: This is to groom HR professionals through a cross-functional development programme.The one-year programme has three rotations through the three functional areas of HR at SAP of which the participants work abroad for one of the rotations. This year, the programme kick-started in Walldorf with 15 new talents eager to begin their career at SAP. We also have some other innovative pre-hiring engagement programmes like faculty day and fresher’s day for new-joiners.
- A culture of mutual dialogue and participation: We believe that a unique bottom-up approach to policy-making and engaging the employees in driving the processes works with employees of all generations. Taking their perspectives into account to create sustainable and engaging work culture also works very well. Some of key processes like manager development, diversity, employee engagement and CSR are run by employee/manager teams like Manageright, Diversity & inclusion, Fun @ work and Seed respectively. To involve all the generations, we have also innovated in the way we communicate to them. Some of our innovations include, ‘Did you know’ mails which communicate different policies and processes to employees through cartoons or animations, ‘Benefits week’ kiosks to spread awareness on benefits and policies, ‘Health devices’ to track fitness and wellness and Wassup! — an online tool for employees to mark their mood and to write any feedback or comments for the management. Our REACH is yet another innovative concept of reverse mentoring and coaching put together which ensures the flow of information between different generations. It is a combination of reverse mentoring and coaching, where our early talents mentor the leaders and then in the second stage the leaders coach the early talents for a fruitful career. Source: mydigitalfc.com
