Employees are one of the most crucial facets of an organization and the quality of your employees has a massive say when it comes to determining the success of your business. Over the years, businesses have become more employee-centric but still owing to the fact that employees are a very dynamic entity, it is important that businesses align themselves with the requirements of their work force so that they can strive for sustained success in the industry. One of the most pioneering names in the Indian HR space is Simin Askari who currently occupy the position of Senior Vice President - Corporate Human Resources & Business Excellence at DS Group. Throughout his journey as a HR professional, this industry stalwart has been able to create an inclusive working environment where the employees feel welcome.

In an exclusive interview with Higher Education Review Magazine, Simin Askari shares his thoughts on the ever-changing changing HR landscape.

Share your views on the present landscape of Human Resources space. What are the major gaps that you are currently witnessing?

There has been a paradigm shift in the whole perspective of HR functioning. Earlier HR was working from a time bound mind-set, with clear deliverables and predefined resources. Now the end objective is to provide value and impact to the business. Enhanced understanding of company's internal customers is a knowledge asset, something on which HR now banks on. HR has stepped up the game to deliver not only unique but personalized employee experience. Pandemic has set different demands coming from the employees in terms of flexibility and agility. While HR has been able to catch up with the new events there is still a lot of effort required to provide answers to the new reality.

The gaps clearly are in filling the fresh expectations with renewed HR policies which engage the new age employees. Providing career experiences is paramount, where employees feel they have been able to gain from the learning opportunities provided by the organization and have been able to prove themselves valuable in return. HR needs to understand the ambiguity and flexibility that the future of work demands. HR professionals cannot be formulating strategies for only one possible future but need to have deep understanding of business environment to frame practices which are adaptive. Though HR has started showing interest towards data driven decision making which has hugely affected scenario planning, but research shows that technology and resources for data analysis are looked at as investment by many organizations. The endeavour should be to create an engagement program strategy which covers all the touch points throughout the entire journey of the employee with the organization.

Post-pandemic what are the major trends has been introduced across this domain?

Undoubtedly, employee well-being is the foremost priority which haunts most of the organizations. Company wide policies which ensure employee safety have been at the forefront at almost all the organizations. Focus on work life balance and designing wellbeing into the work culture; have been key to creating and nurturing a happy, healthy and productive workforce. Mitigating unnecessary stress at work has become crucial. Organizations have recognized a dire need to make employees feel personal and emotional connect from their remote locations. This has been a challenge for HR professionals to create and foster an environment where employees feel valued to retain a high performing culture as it used be when employees attended physical workplace. This warrants system wide transformation which can be achieved through use of technology and re-evaluating priorities to connect individuals with their work and team to achieve company goals.

Investing in critical skills to create critical roles has been another trend that has caught attention to keep employees relevant. With the ambiguous and agile nature of sudden business environment reskilling employees to fill in new roles has proven to be a game changer. The tough times have taught that it is critical to shift focus from individual roles to organization-wide skills. HR needs to facilitate this by motivating employees to take up multiple opportunities and not get stuck with just the preparation for the next role in accordance with their competence. Building a resilient organization should be a top priority, which is ready to fight out any adversity. This can be achieved by acceptability of diverse ideas to enhance solution development. This can prove beneficial for the organization to have a holistic approach towards choosing a potential solution which is able to respond better and could course correct with varying market conditions.

COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the need to have distributed power structures. The agility of decision making and accomplishing work heavily depends on the layers of decision makers. Due to availability of employees at remote locations, it has gotten hugely impacted. It has been in the best interest of the organization to forego top-down approach and foster information sharing, collaboration and transparency across all teams.

What are the key traits the HR department should expect in an employee during the recruitment?

There are five critical job qualities that all recruitment teams look for in a candidate:

i)Teamwork: Collaboration is the key. The skill not only makes the employee perform well but also manage others well. It is the lubricant which helps in overcoming obstacles smoothly. For a new recruit to be able to create group cohesion is the most important trait that a recruiter looks at. The trait is pertinent to align to the business focus for creating significant impact towards the success of the organization.

ii)Willingness to Learn & Work: Organizations and systems have become ever evolving. It is crucial for an employee to have hunger to learn and evolve on a continuous basis. Recruiters should be looking for flexibility and adaptability to learn new technology or skills. Another crucial aspect is that the employee must exhibit the competence to put the learnt and upgraded skills to the work/profile, s/he is assigned. There are times when employees up skill for their own professional growth, hence it is important to exhibit willingness to use the acquired skill for the benefit of the organization.

iii) Communication: Being eloquent is not what a recruiter should look for as not all individuals can excel that. But being able to clearly get your message across to your colleagues and subordinates in verbal speech or emails and simultaneously understand the essence of their messaging, highly impacts an employee's performance.

iv)Self-motivation: Performance at the peak, without the expectation of only being rewarded at the end is a trait the recruiters should look for. A self-motivated individual portrays that the employee enjoys the work that is assigned and would be willing to do a good job regardless of any external motivation factor. The employee driven by passion is more likely to outperform.

v)Culture Fit: It is one of the most important traits because an individual is more likely to leave in a short span if s/he does not fit in the culture of the organization. This not only will hamper the performance but also retention.

Why should more people opt a career in HR segment? What personal and professional growth a budding HR professional can expect from this industry?

People are the most important success factor for the organization. HR professional becomes an influencer, with the employment and hiring decisions made by them to secure the future success. It provides a chance to the individual to make employee welfare and happiness their personal responsibilities which inspire both the stakeholders. Being in HR, one gets an opportunity to understand the training needs which empower employees by having transferable skills which will not only enhance the current performance but also lead to a secure career path wherever they choose to work. Advocacy of policies that truly influence and help in betterment of life of an employee is truly satisfactory. Be it benefits that the organization decides to offer or the insurance or safety policies, all have a positive impact on the employees' life. Being capable of spotting and solving an issue that might arise and hinder the success path pays off well, being in HR! It is gratifying to sort smaller kinks before they become tight knots in future. HR also throws opportunity to work on varied technologies if one chooses to work in the field of analytics.

Not all employees have a clear plan in their minds for moving ahead in their careers. Working in HR empowers one to provide clear directions to new career opportunities to employees. The nudge can go a long way in creating healthy relationships with people which might last forever. HR professional can guide employees to align the career paths they choose with their life goals making their professional journeys more fulfilling. HR professionals exhibiting these qualities can themselves prosper leaps and bounds. Listing a few personal benefits of working in HR: individuals become more people friendly, gain critical problem solving skills, become technically aware & advanced, stay aware of government regulations. These traits open up a path for HR individuals to lead the entire organization.

As remote working has emerged as a new norm of the corporate segment, what are the key trends the HR industry has recently incorporated to maintain a positive work environment?

The role of HR in the organization was made concrete due to uncertainties thrown by the pandemic. It became pertinent for the HR function to take note of the challenges that haunted the employees inside and outside of work. The pandemic prompted the HR professionals to focus more on the human part than the standard policies and procedures. The moment focus shifted to maximize the individual strengths of the employees, productivity started to rise. The flexible working hours were instrumental in balancing work life. HR had instrumental role in establishing relationship between an old employee and a new hire as many new hires had not got a chance to come to office. This called for new mentorship programs where the old employees were requested to keep some time off from their daily routine to talk to the new hires on daily basis to acclimatize them with the company culture.

HR has become incharge of the health guidance of the employees. This has become critical for the business strategy. The data capturing of vaccinated employees and later boosters to making employees feel that they have a safe environment at home to work without stretching a lot has all created positive vibes for the employees. The only multilayered operational challenge that hounds the HR is how to train their managers to supervise the subordinate's work from remote locations. Improvements in workflows seems a solution without an employee getting a feeling of continuous surveillance. Flexible working hours, uncluttered workflows, stress management, mentoring and coaching, health guidance will be few trends that will be part of the new normal to create employee experience whenever the employees would go back at work.