Focus on employee flexibility, autonomy, rewards: Lenovo India HR head

Bhavya Misra, Director and Head of HR - India, Lenovo

As demand for tech talent increases, Lenovo India’s people strategy is aimed at creating flexibility, autonomy at work, rewarding careers, and wellbeing for employees. The multinational personal technology company is geared up to maintain a robust talent pipeline, HR head Bhavya Misra told Moneycontrol in an interview.

Misra said Lenovo India has rolled out three models focused on responsibility and autonomy to attract employees back to the office. Edited excerpts:

How is Lenovo India sailing its ship amid the ‘The Great Resignation’ wave?

Our HR chatbot ‘Amber’ assesses employee sentiment and mood to provide a real-time prediction of an employee at risk of attrition. These early-warning signals are then shared with HR partners and leadership teams who try to understand and solve for employee experience proactively.

As per Aon India’s benchmarking report, our attrition rate has been much lower than what the industry has seen.

How do you maintain a robust talent pipeline in light of increased demand for tech talent?

We strive to build an ecosystem of care, connection and camaraderie. Our people strategy is focused on creating nimble and fulfilling employee journeys centred around flexibility, autonomy at work, rewarding careers, and wellbeing.

A few key initiatives and processes that have helped us attract and retain talent over the years include self-owned and company-assisted career maps. As part of our annual organisation human resource planning process, employees reflect on their long-term and short-term career aspirations and preferred role movements, self-evaluating against Lenovo’s cultural and leadership competencies to chart out individual development plans (IDP).

Managers leverage these IDPs to identify potential successors for key roles.

What role does internal talent development play at Lenovo India?

We strongly believe in and work towards providing internal role movement and project-based career exposure to employees. At Lenovo, you have the opportunity to pursue roles across functions, business units and regions.

Last year, four out of five senior leadership roles were closed internally. We have also launched Lenovo gigs where employees can choose to work on diverse projects across the globe in line with their skill interests and IDP.

Industry trends suggest that maximum attrition happens in entry-level roles. To beat the same, we have created an innovative career model… where high-performing employees are put in a structured job rotational programme…

They are rotated across three high-impact jobs and provided learning journeys to build their strategic and leadership acumen.

What are some of the changes in the employee value proposition adopted in the past year? How do they help attract and retain the best talent?

Our value proposition is designed to help us attract and keep the world’s best talent, while also equipping us to energise, engage, and build our team. To define our value proposition, we spoke with Lenovo employees globally to find what makes us unique. Four key elements emerged from the value propositions that make Lenovo a compelling place to work.

First is ‘global local.’ Lenovo is truly a global company, with operations in more than 180 countries. We integrate international ideas, methodologies and values while empowering our regional sectors with the trust and freedom to make their own decisions.

The second element was ‘respect and trust.’ At Lenovo, we always put our people first and acknowledge that great ideas can come from anywhere and at any level. By providing people with the flexibility to grow, we empower them with the support they need.

Thirdly, it is about ‘exciting and rewarding work.’ As a company that prides itself on innovation, we’re always working on a wide range of challenging and exciting projects.

And last but not the least, ‘grow in transformation.’ As we move towards an AI-driven era of intelligence, we pave the way by introducing next-generation people-oriented technologies that give individuals the power and freedom to reshape their future.

How is Lenovo India bringing employees back to office?

We came up with three different models, and employees can adopt any one depending on the segments and verticals they are working in. Your role content determines whether you need to be in the office or not, and it’s not a mandate for everybody.

For instance, roles where collaboration or dependencies on each other would be very few, such as technical, the person qualifies for 100 percent remote. And for roles requiring a complete presence in the office, not always but at least a certain number of hours – factory, client-facing duties – there is 100 percent office.

Currently, most of the employees – 60-70 percent – are coming under hybrid work models. As long as the working model is working within the teams and the leaders, Lenovo India has left it to them only.