Leading the team of TATA Communications employee as a CHRO, Aadesh Goyal has his own take on attrition, hiring talent and employee engagement. Goyal feels the term employee engagement is a little misunderstood by corporates in today’s time.He has been associated with the company for more than eight years and believes the best way to engage an employee is to respect their decisions, understand the need and make sure they is comfortable at work place. In an exclusive interview with BW People he sheds lights on the best employee policies at TATA Communications, his idea of employee engagement and his contribution to the workplace.
Edited excerpts from his interview:
Q. Are Indian graduates are job ready?
Ans. Nobody is job ready, if you’re doing the job which you’ve already done them maybe you are job ready. These days I keep reading about a lot of MBAs and engineers talking about how they are not ready for the job. And that is true and that is true because what you study in school and college is all established and conceptual knowledge. So it will never reflect the needs of today because the change today is so phenomenal. So institutes must develop their curriculum but companies need to keep developing talent and groom fresh minds and polish the talent. At TATA Communications we do don’t believe in hiring ready made talent. About 75% of hiring are college graduates and MBAs with 1 year or less experience, those are the people we grow at our organisation.
Q: What are your thoughts on attrition?
Ans. There are two things that we want to work on, first is to keep the employees inspired and engaged for as long as they are in the organization and second is to accept their decisions if they want to leave. But make sure they have the best time when they were a part of it. The first two years of your career are tough, and that’s when people leave the job maximum times, so the best thing you can do is to engage them well. They have a certain desires and need and they are like your customers, but you cannot meet every need of every customer. So you need to create a standard product which is flexible so people get what they want to an extent. Since the time I joined the organisation there has been a lot of change be it technologically, strategically or economically because companies are trying new things. So whenever new stuff happens, people question its working so we have to create an environment where people can adapt to the changes and learn these things quickly.
Q. What are the changes that you’ve brought in TATA Communications ever since you joined the organisation? What is your take on the wellness of workforce?
Ans. Wellness is really a big topic today and it depends of the amount of time people spend at work and commuting. So at TATA Communications what we have done is through our health and safety programme we have taken lots of measures related to postures, right furniture, and we’ve created breakout rooms for teamwork, and standing tables. Since it’s been said “Standing is the new smoking” because sitting for 8-9 hours a day is worse than smoking and at our new office we even have cycles attached to our desk which is really great.
Q. Are there any measures that you’ve taken for women, who are new mothers but also a die hard professional at heart?
Ans. We allow a lot of people to do their job from their homes, they don’t necessarily need to come to the office to work, a few years ago we launched global flexible work hours policy, where you can either choose to be a homeworker, an office worker or a flexible worker, but it’s not just that you have to choose, of course you need to reach to an agreement with your manager, but once you do it, then you can start working from home. By this policy, women were benefited more because whether we like it or not, women take more responsibility and care for their families than men do.
So, it gives them a chance to do both. We have also launched a 6 month global leave for child care for the primary care taker of the child; it could be a man or a woman, with these policies everyone can be a professional and also manage their personal lives.
Q. What type of employee engagement activities is TATA communications engaging to and how important is it?
Ans. At TATA communications we have a tradition of sports carnival, so every year employees from different regions come together, make teams and about 3000-4000 employees take part in this tournament. The concept of employee engagement is a little misunderstood topic, it is not about having fun and going to picnics, it means what meets the needs of the employee is. The recognition you get from the work place is an engagement driver. I am having fun doing my work is en engagement driver, does my manager care about me is an engagement driver. So we work on about 20 drivers, and one of this was in last year august which we called the “Drive week” where drive means, Daring, Responses, Inclusive, venturing and ethical. And in our idea of employee engagement idea, we said that one of the things of being ethical is being humane and about venturing is something you’ve never done before. So one day we asked our employees to leave work on paid basis and to go and work for an NGO. About 72% of people participated and it came out to be a huge success. Since it was a contribution to the society and it is now going to become our annual ritual. For this year, our focus is on certification, so we’re motivating people to become certified in different fields like become a certified data scientist or anything else that they like so they can learn whatever they want to learn.
Q. How important is technology in TATA communications for hiring? Do you think a decision as important as hiring should be left on a Robot?
Ans. It can’t be left on a robot, we are using AI and machine learning for about a year for hiring and here’s how we use it. If you want to hire a thousand college fresher, it is very easy. If you want to hire for something skilful and responsible like Vice president of marketing it is relatively easy to hire because you put a sustain search to find that talent. But it’s in the middle of these two where the difficulty is, you’re looking for the right match, so we are using a technology which understands the skill like a human, it understands the CV like a human does and it crawls the internet. So we are able to go where the recruiter is not able to reach, and get the most qualified and appropriate person in front of the recruitment manager. This technology looks for a match and skill which is required so we’re not using it for selection; we are using it as a search engine to get the lot of quality talent.
Q. How are you using the leverage of social media to hire the right kind of talent in your organisation except linked in?
Ans. We do not look at social profiles of people to make a hiring decision. If I’m going to interview somebody, I will always go and look at the candidates linked in profile for interviewing. Because there are several things that I’m looking for. Despite of the CV that has been put together I’m able to go and see a slightly different variety because everything that is documented and said is embellished in a particular way, and its human nature. I’m not bothered about the candidates’ personal choices or political choices. On linked you see their professional interests and peoples recommendation for them for a particular talent. So you get more output from their LinkedIn. I have never gone and looked for somebody on Facebook.