How Pandemic Led Birlasoft to Introduce Benevolent Fund in 2022

Mar 28, 2023

Corporate | 10 min READ

This article was originally published in All Things Talent - Source link

In a discussion with All Things Talent, Deepak Dobriyal, Sr. Vice President, Global leader of Talent Management and Corporate HR at Birlasoft, opens up about his company’s complex challenges. He also shared different approaches his organisation took to support the employees during the COVID-19 pandemic in the last few years.

Deepak Dobriyal

Senior Vice President

Human Resources

Birlasoft

Could you provide us with a quick summary of everything Birlasoft has accomplished in terms of talent growth and management?

Today, Birlasoft is an organisation with around 13,000 professionals globally. Broadly speaking about our business landscape, our primary markets are the United States and Europe, but we also address the Asia-Pacific and India markets.

Our diverse talent pool includes technology and industry specialists from multiple countries who cater to our clients globally.

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The past few years have been quite challenging, especially for the HR personnel of a company. What were the key challenges you faced? How did you mitigate them? Do you have any learnings to share?

The COVID-19 pandemic was a global shock. As an organisation, our initial focus was to ensure the well-being of our employees and provide them with a support system that was so needed at that time.

At the same time, we had to ensure that all our employees had the tools to operate from home seamlessly. We also wanted to ensure minimal disruption to our ability to provide our customers with the best services during the pandemic continuously.

Fortunately, our employees could adapt to remote working and ensured that service levels did not drop during the pandemic, despite the challenges. Hence, setting up systems and processes for working from home was the initial focus, which happened rapidly and seamlessly.

After the initial period, we started looking at the overall well-being of the employees holistically, like the high-stress levels that employees were going through due to the uncertainty in the pandemic and members of their family testing positive for COVID-19. We took multiple initiatives to address this issue and to avoid employee burnout. To mitigate this, we set up a 24X7 help desk for employees to reach out for any query. We ensured necessary medicines were shipped and dropped at employees’ homes when they could not find them locally. We even sent oxygen cylinders to some employees during the second wave of COVID-19.

The benevolent fund is linked to the second COVID-19 pandemic. We wanted a long-term pandemic plan, not a quick fix. We initially provided funds and insurance to our employees. Later, as a long-term plan, we designed the Ikshana program to support our employees’ families in times of need. After losing employees and their family members to COVID-19, we wanted our employees to have a stake in everybody’s collective wellness.

We strengthened our Employee Assistance Program (EAP) to evolve into a comprehensive support system for mental, emotional and physical well-being. Professional counsellors were deployed as part of EAP to support our employees during this demanding phase.

Unfortunately, we lost a few of our colleagues during the second wave of COVID-19. We also started focusing on how we could support the affected families. This led to the birth of our own Employee Welfare Program named ‘Ikshana’ (a Sanskrit word that means to care deeply) last year to support the family of an employee who died during the service. The programme provides a lump sum to the family to help them cope with tough times, such as paying for the deceased employee’s medical expenses that were covered by medical insurance and supporting children through college or professional school.

The programme also helps employees pay for their children’s congenital disease treatment if medical insurance doesn’t cover it.

We also restructured our variable compensation plan to increase take-home pay during this time due to inflation and rising living costs. This helped people manage inflation and rising medical costs.

We also offer free app-based doctor consultations to our Indian employees. Another agreement with such organisations provides discounted medicines for our employees.

Is the Benevolent Fund a direct derivative of the pandemic situation?

Yes, it’s linked to the second COVID-19 pandemic. We wanted a long-term pandemic plan, not a quick fix.

We initially provided funds and insurance to our employees. Later, as a long-term plan, we designed the Ikshana program to support our employees’ families in times of need. After losing employees and their family members to COVID-19, we wanted our employees to have a stake in everybody’s collective wellness.

It is funded by nominal contributions made by the employees and the organisation. This ensures that all the Birlasoft employees have a stake in each other’s safety and security.

Since the Benevolent Fund’s formation last year, how many people have benefited from it?

We have supported 10-11 families during the pandemic through our special COVID-19 Insurance policy. As far as this fund is concerned, we have supported 5-6 employee families since its inception in April 2022.

You also mentioned some systems and processes that were put in place during COVID. Can you share a few of them? How did they impact the organisation?

Last year, the talent situation was really challenging. There was high attrition and variance in the demand and supply of talent. So, instead of reacting to the current situation, we took a long-term perspective for problem-solving.

We worked on intensifying our capability-building programs to provide development opportunities to our existing employees to help them scale up on the desired skills/ competencies, empowering them to become ‘future ready’.

We’ve signed up with a leading learning platform – Coursera that allows employees to build customised learning journeys and learn from world-class content sourced from the best global Universities and content providers.

We revisited our entire competency framework and co-created our new framework with external and internal SMEs. Our new competency model, called GROWTH, incorporates the realities of the post-COVID-19 world and the new age competencies required in this changed world, but is deeply anchored in our core values too!!

The world is pivoting towards a hybrid work model. We have been studying the trends which are influencing the future of work and continuously evolving and adapting our own ‘future of work strategy’. In our opinion, the hybrid work model provides the best of both worlds for the employees, the flexibility of getting to the office to meet colleagues, bond with the team, and do great collaborative/ innovative work. At the same time, it allows them to strike a balance by working from home for a few days.

Therefore, our systems and processes must adapt quickly to this new reality. It is a difficult situation, it’s neither going back to pre-COVID-19 nor being fully remote.

You talked about the need to rebuild and reshape the competency model. So, from the perspective of Birlasoft, does the previous model no longer work for the organisation?

Every competency model has underlying behavioural stands that form the core of the model. With time, some of these behaviours may lose relevance and need to be revisited. Competency models have to reflect the realities of the changing world.

For example, learning agility was not found in many competency models earlier, but it’s considered extremely crucial in the current business context. To elaborate, let me discuss a typical role of a Project Manager in the changed environment, where most projects are increasingly operating in an agile mode. In an agile project, the Project Manager not only has to understand the customer’s perspective, but they also have to think about the technical solution, manage the dynamic project environment and simultaneously manage the people working on the project. If this is not enough, the Project Manager has to continuously engage with the clients to plan the subsequent ‘sprints’. This environment will require Project Managers to demonstrate very different competencies from the traditional project delivery models. We will need more rounded professionals in the future who are quick to learn, fast to adapt and have excellent communication/ people skills.

What would be your top three predictions for 2023 that can significantly impact the business when it comes to talent?

In 2022, we were all occupied with getting the talent needed to deliver business growth. Whereas in 2023, the focus will likely shift toward the quality of the talent with the right competencies. Talent will be the true differentiator between organisations, especially in professional services industries.

In 2023, the demand and supply situation will become better. It has already improved compared to last year. Further, the attrition situation is improving and is returning to almost pre-COVID-19 levels for most organisations, and where they have not, they will most likely reach there in the next couple of quarters.

In 2023, most progressive organisations will focus on intensifying their efforts to get better talent insights, which can help them plan better and help the business deliver more predictable growth. Many organisations are investing heavily in deploying talent intelligence systems powered by Artificial Intelligence to monitor trends and predict future talent requirements/capability gaps. These investments should pay off in the next 3-5 years.

Lastly, the geographical constraint for getting the right talent will largely start reducing in 2023 and most likely disappear. The compensation models and benefits practices may evolve to accommodate flexible working, gig working, etc.

What are the most important parts of HR policy from Birlasoft’s point of view that made a difference?

At Birlasoft, our employees are our biggest asset. Our commitment towards our people and their families is anchored around the core values of – Engaged, Dependable and Challenger. All company employees follow the six cultural tenets – Organization First, Customer Centricity, People Centricity, Say-Do ratio, Be Bold and Quick decision making. They reflect what is expected from each employee and define life in Birlasoft.

The employees understand the values and cultural tenets as they act as guiding forces whenever they make a critical decision.

Our policies and organisational processes are aligned with the values/cultural tenets and we think it important in today’s dynamic world that all employees have a common framework that guides them in a way that reflects the organisation’s cultural ethos.

Employee care and well-being are important to us and are reflected in everything we do. Our policies and processes also reflect our deep-rooted belief that if we care for our employees, they will care for our customers. We have been constantly rated high by our employees on ‘Work-Life balance’. Also, long before everyone talked about hybrid working, we had empowered our managers to decide on working from home, flexible working-hours, etc.

The future of work is here, and we are rapidly adapting our work processes, policies and systems to reflect the new reality. An important part of this transformation will be democratising the processes as much as possible by enabling employees and business managers through a ‘talent marketplace’ and ‘self-service’.

Was any business impact measurement taking place at Birlasoft from the HR perspective?

The future of work will demand us to devise multiple work and compensation models for people doing gigs. For example, we at Birlasoft have built our talent marketplace where internal gigs are shared. Employees can bid for these gigs and give solutions. If the solution is accepted, they can work on it and get rewarded for the same.

We experimented last year on gigs to see whether there was acceptance amongst the employees. We saw this easing and impacting business in multiple ways and scaled it up.

For the employees, it is an opportunity to work on areas they are passionate about and to get rewarded for their efforts. This also helps us to meet the organisation’s talent demands for short-duration projects. We see this as a WIN-WIN solution.

Global tech companies are right-sizing and laying off. What emerging niches and mass skills do you think will remain opportunities for job seekers?

Given the pace of technological innovations over the last few years, the biggest challenge for every job seeker is to be relevant in the market.

Consequently, one fundamental suggestion for job seekers is to continuously upgrade their skills. Increasing learning agility and adapting to evolving situations are also essential.

Several people think Java and Microsoft are the basics they need to be well-versed in, but they have changed quite a lot. The best way to approach them is by learning how to apply them in a rapidly evolving digital environment.

Understanding the business context and acquiring adjacent business skills will also be beneficial.

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