Piramal Group creates sectoral hiring strategy, hires more women in quality functions: CHRO

Vikram Bector, president and chief human resources officer of Piramal Group

Amid massive disruption in the talent market, Indian multinational conglomerate Piramal Group has taken its entire performance management system online in a bid to increase transparency and allow employees to see where they stand against their goals.

“Technology has been a crucial enabler in Piramal Group's focus on maintaining a quality workforce and functions,” Vikram Bector, president and chief human resources officer of Piramal Group, told Moneycontrol in an exclusive interview.

The company has created a sectoral hiring strategy. For the pharma business, it continues to hire in the quality functions and operations with a focus on female talent. “We continue to hire in operations as our manufacturing plants are in a high capex cycle and growing all over the world,” Bector said. Edited excerpts:

What are your key takeaways from recent HR trends? How do you see it changing in the next two years?

One of the three key takeaways was that it is crucial to building a culture of learning and development in the organisation. As companies continue to adapt to the new world order, it is important to increase employee learning and development opportunities. Employees prefer to stay and strive in organisations, which help them learn and survive.

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The second important point that we’ve seen is that employees favour purpose-driven organisations, employees have favoured organisations which have a larger mission and purpose for the betterment of society and stakeholders and lastly organisations which have acknowledged and helped employees deal with mental wellness and stress.

In the coming years, I see leaders striving to create and maintain connections between people, mission, and company. Organisations will adopt an advanced learning culture and focus on mental, physical and financial wellness.

How has Piramal Group reacted to these trends?

In the event of recent changes, Piramal has brought its entire performance management system online. This increased transparency allows employees to see where they stand against their goals. Technology has been a crucial enabler in Piramal Group's focus on maintaining a quality workforce and functions.

We also use HR analytics extensively for decision making enabling business intelligence, insights, and smart dashboards that are delivered at the touch of a button for effective collaboration across the board. We are doing away with Excel-based reports completely and running all our HR meetings on dashboards which are automated.

What is your take on the moonlighting issue?

We feel that people need to be committed to the work that they are doing. We provide enough and more opportunities for growth as our businesses are growing constantly. Employees can raise their hand to change roles through our internal job portals. Through our Piramal Foundation, we also promote a lot of employee volunteer work that one can participate in.

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How has attrition been at Piramal Group in the last two years? How do you predict the future in this regard?

In the last four months, our attrition is coming down across the board as a factor of external circumstances and internal efforts.

How has been the progress on diversity and inclusion (D&I) so far?

We have a strong and shared commitment to workplace diversity and fostering a culture of inclusion. This commitment is deeply intertwined with the Piramal values and we believe that our organisation is strongest when we represent the diversity of the communities. We firmly believe that our ability to strengthen our culture, drive our business strategy and build long-term relationships with our customers and consumers depends on a truly diverse and inclusive work environment.

Gender diversity is crucial to the success of businesses in India. Outside of India (in the US, the UK and Canada) women already form a very large part of our workforce. We have effectively maintained a gender-balanced workforce within the organisation, and expect to continue doing so. It has been possible for us to ensure gender diversity at our workplace because we go beyond mere numbers and provide challenging roles that can get the best of our female employees. Corporate functions have over 40 percent female employees, which is much higher than our peers.

How is Piramal Group enabling flexibility for its employees? What percentage of employees is currently working from offices?

Even before Covid, we had flexible plans in play for our corporate office roles. We afford full flexibility of 8 days a month of work-from-home (WFH) for employees in our Mumbai-based corporate offices.

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What is the hiring plan for this year? What is the strategy for attracting the best talent?

Currently, we have 22,500 employees including in our Piramal Foundation. Post the DHFL merger, we hired around 9,000 people in our financial services business and created many more jobs across the world in our pharma and real estate business last year. We have created a sectoral hiring strategy.

For the pharma business, we continue to hire in the quality functions and operations and that is a place where we are hiring a lot more women. We continue to hire in operations as our manufacturing plants are in a high capex cycle and growing all over the world. We are adding more capacity and therefore we are hiring more people in operations and quality and all the other functions relating to the manufacturing operations.

On the financial services side, we are hiring in retail in frontline roles, sales and credit operations, and in our alternative business, we are hiring top-rated fund professionals.

What does Piramal Group look for in prospective employees?

The most important thing is to be yourself. A LinkedIn study found that employees who are loyal at work are happier, more engaged and prouder. The ones who are proactive, have learning agility, can envision the growth of the organisation and grow with it are the first preference in terms of hiring.

Any special requirements for managerial candidates?

‘Piramal Success Factors’ is our framework of leadership behaviours that help drive high performance at Piramal. These are leadership behaviours that align with our values – Knowledge, Action, and Care, and we have tried to integrate them with our hiring.

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The six factors are ‘Think Big, Serves Customers, Commits and Delivers Results, Displays Humility, Collaborates, and Empowers & Develops’. This framework helps us streamline our HR processes from entry to exit, that is improve how we recruit, manage performance, identify potential, plan for succession, create development plans and also recognise performance.

Further, we do a lot of psychometric testing to understand if a candidate aligns with our values. We have innovated our hiring process with automated tests both technical and psychometric tests for assessment, especially for frontline roles in sales.