IIM Raipur recently hosted its annual HR Summit & International Conference, which explored the emerging challenges in the field of HR, from a VUCA perspective.
The event saw the participation of over 24 HR professionals from varied sectors as they contemplated on how to face Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) business challenges. Panel discussions and paper presentations, conducted as part of the event, lent an academic flavour to the summit as the speakers tried to examine how VUCA-capable leaders helped build successful businesses.
Day 1 of the summit kicked off with a panel discussion on “Leveraging Diversity”. Prashant Srivastava, President (Group HR and People Excellence), Reliance ADA Group initiated the topic on “How a mix of traits, gender, race, religion and culture in the workforce contributes to the success of an organisation” and later the panellist explained diversity from their own experiences. Murali Padmanabhan described diversity with the help of an example on how American universities prefer students with value and generational diversity and the effect of diverse workforce on effective solutions to problems. A different perspective was presented by Shantanu Das, VP-HR at Emami, proposed enhancing gender diversity and unity for creative problem solving. Kumaar Priyaranjan, Head, Human Capital at Hikal, explained diversity with reference to electoral diversity and how the development of a State is dependent upon non-discrimination against diverse groups of people.
The second panel discussions on the day focussed on 'Leadership in the VUCA world.'
Day 2 began with panel discussions exploring real world problems faced by HR executives. The first discussion was on “HR Analytics and Metrics”. Recruitment, employee engagement, talent retention and performance management for an HR professional were some of the major themes that were explored during the discussion.
Murlidhar Shyam, VP - Group HR RJ Corp Healthcare, showcased the use of HR analytics in Recruitments, and explained how HR analytics could be leveraged to improve the quality of intake.
Use of analytics for employee engagement within the organisation was discussed by Ajay Nair, CHRO, Housing.com. He stressed on how important it was to eliminate feelings and biases from data in analytics. “Torture the data, not the person associated with it,” he asserted. Adding to the discussion Anil K Misra, CHRO, Fidelity National Financials, elaborated on the predictive ability of analytics for top talent retention. He described how risk profiling is done in order to identify talent at risk of attrition and consequently intervening to engage them for retention.
The next panel discussion dealt with issues relating to “Competency Management.” The panel tried to focus on paradigm shifts within the HR function in order to maintain compliance and for building organisational capability.