Shivangi: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the People-led show. I'm your host Shivangi, and our guest today is the incredible Vikas Maheshwari. Vikas leads global HR transformation at Biocon Biologics where he is reshaping HR for future capabilities and also working on driving global expansion. Vikas has over twenty five years of experience working with CEOs and business leaders from over twenty different nationalities.

Shivangi: From managing M&A's enterprise performance to building prescriptive analytics and global diversity solutions in both small and large companies. Vikas has truly done it all. I can keep listing Vikas' achievements all day, but I think it's time to hear from him directly. Welcome, Vikas. It's it's truly an honor to have you with us today.

Vikas: Thank you. Thank you, Shivangi. It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. 

Shivangi: So my first question right off the bat is, Vikas since you've done so much, what next?

Vikas: Okay. Okay. You've started with a curve ball, literally. 

Vikas: So my daughter says that I should now move to photography.

Vikas: Enough of HR, enough of tech, enough of sales, and a whole lot of other things that I've done. So my wife thinks that you know, well, Well, I should give it another ten years or something and then set up something of my own. A lot of my friends say that, hey. Listen. Now you should go and, you know, set up your own solution because you know how to crack it in HR.

Vikas: It's something that, you know, has a tech element to it. So, yeah, I mean ideas galore, but if you really ask me, I'm really enjoying what I do. Okay. So if it was to me, I mean my next is pretty much my present. Because a lot of things that I think I'm doing right now are fairly futuristic, if I could use that expression.

Vikas: And then, They have a shelf life of longer than, let's say, a decade. So I'm happy being where I am. So the next for me is pretty much my present. 

Shivangi: what are you like outside of work?

Vikas: Yeah. So, man, I love basketball.

Vikas: And photography is my passion. I mean, these are things that I will always find time for no matter how busy I am. You know, when I was in Dubai, and I used to play this ball above all.

Vikas: Reading comes naturally to me. I mean, I am old school that way.

Vikas: So when you're not seeing me at work, you'll see me at the court, you'll see me at the gym, or over the weekends.

Shivangi: I wanted to understand a couple of work challenges that you're facing right now in your role, which is also something that I wanna know a little bit more about.

Shivangi: But what are your challenges as of today? 

Vikas: One of the biggest challenges that and least spoken about on the employee experience side pretty much is the advent of this, new Gen. So I call this the battle of the new gen versus the old gen. You've got a lot of boomers moving out over the next decade. Some seventy million plus millennials, Some fifty million plus Gen Zs, which are now gonna be a part of your workforce.

Vikas: And I see that, you know, we are not ready to, you know kind of work with them. Our practices, our policies, they are not suited for them. And if you ask me, that is one of the biggest challenges that is steering us, and we haven't really done much about it. The second big challenge that I think is and this is more from an HR point of view is that, you know, we in HR are still When it comes to employee experience, we still think Rangolis, and we still think TGIFs and stuff like that. But I think if you look the look at the workforce, They moved on from the Rangolis, and they expect a little more, a little different.

Vikas: So there's lots that we need to do there. You know, how do you unlock productivity? How do you make work more meaningful? How do you build a sense of purpose? I mean, these are Cliched as as they may sound, but they have a lot of meaning today.

Vikas: And the final one, which I mean, there are tons, but the one that I would like to talk about is that There was a pre-COVID and a post-COVID. I know this is, again, extremely cliche, but I think the COVID kind of woke us up all massively. You know? I mean, it helped us understand that you know, pre-COVID, if you ask me most of the boardroom conversations when it came to people used to be around the matrices of Manning. You know that well, I needed so many people.

Vikas: Do I have so many people? You know? So simple stats. The other was that you would throw people at problems, isn't it? But today, if you look at it, I mean, employee is no more just another brick in the wall.

Vikas: You know? We look at an employee and say, hey. Listen. What's your contribution really to the Value stream, and how do I enhance that? And that, I think, is is where we are now moving, and there's lots that HR is doing and can do in that particular area.

Vikas: So I think that's pretty much where EX is headed if you ask me. 

Shivangi: it's interesting that you mentioned the pre-COVID versus the post-COVID scenario because, you know, that's kind of changed the whole game. You know? 

Shivangi: And something that you mentioned earlier, I wanna bring that into the conversation about boomers moving out and, you know, having younger employees in the workforce. Right? And also something that I read about is that your mission is to deliver hyper-personalized HR Journeys.

Shivangi: What does that mean for Gen Z employees, 

Vikas: It is not as much to say that, you know, okay, by age, you are a certain classification of agenda. But what it means to them, Okay.

Vikas: It is something that is being derived by the socioeconomic factors. Okay? 

Vikas: So what I'm trying to say, therefore, is that with this whole Advent of the new generations or that mindset that is getting cultivated in an organization, the culture of an organization has to be relooked at that. How do you really want to build it? I think hyper-personalization is more to say that Given a certain persona and organization, how are your benefits?

Vikas: How are your practices? How are your policies kind of articulated? And I keep saying that soon we will be talking about, you know, policies by the people, for the people, of the people because that's what true hyper-personalization is. Today, we have technologies. We have tools.

Vikas: We have enough intelligence to, you know, kind of really personalize that. A good example just to leave you on that note is to say that if I was, like, your youngster, you know, about twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three years of age does having something like Medical benefit really, really make sense to me? Well, it is important, but does it really appeal to me? Possibly not. What appeals to me is a dating allowance, You know, what appears to me is a wedding allowance.

Vikas: You know, those are things that I would value more than anything because I don't look at health the way let's say, a forty-year-old would look. Still earlier, for a forty-year-old, dating allowance and a wedding allowance, I don't think would make too much sense. But what would make sense is, okay, child education now and things like that, but do we really think like that, or is it like a one-size-fits-all? So those are the areas that are low-hanging fruits, which a lot of us are solving for have solved but that's the start of hyper-personalization from learning to benefits to talent policies to the sheer, you know, job roles that you have in the organization to personalization on skills. There's a lot that we need to do when it comes to hyper-personalization.

Shivangi: Yeah. I feel like it's a very it's a pretty meta topic. Right? And the deeper you get into it, the lesser it is because then there are so many segments.

Shivangi: And you mentioned something about culture, and I want to know how you define Culture.

Vikas: In fact, I think this whole term culture, okay, as important and deep as it is, It's very misunderstood because the minute we say culture, we think, oh, one culture across the organization. There is not a single organization That has one universal culture to define. You may have a vision. You may have a mission. You may have an objective that you are working through.

Vikas: You may have a sense of purpose as well. But that doesn't mean that the culture is the same. I mean, it comes I'm preaching to the choir here, Shivangi. You know this better than I do. But culture comes from this Latin word colour, Okay.

Vikas: Which means cultivating. 

Vikas: So my definition of culture pretty much is like the smell in the air. And I read this and I heard this from somebody who said, you know, the best way to define a culture is that think about going to Calcutta. Okay.

Vikas: In monsoons, when it's extremely humid, what do you feel like? You feel like just having your rice and sleeping. All right. That's the culture. There's a smell in the air.

Vikas: And then you're gonna go out somewhere in December. The minute you hit the airport, the first thing that you wanna do is go to a beach. You know, eat a lot of food go to parties, and do whatever because there's a lot of energy there. That's the culture that's basically like the smell in the air. Now what is the smell in the air in the organization that you cultivate as the Latin word for culture that you cultivate would define, you know, how you wanna operate?

Vikas: But if you're gonna cultivate a single kind of a culture, it may not be purposeful. You know, But the best way to define or best way to achieve the objective is by start calling culture a working rhythm or a way of working. Because the minute you start looking at it as an optic from a way of working, you realize that, okay, now you're making sense.

Vikas: So a little different thought on on what culture really is, but I think it works. People who've done it have seen success.

Vikas: And therefore, in an organization like Google or for that matter, even Meta, you would find different cultures, okay, within teams. 

Shivangi: Culture is a working rhythm. It's such a nice way to imagine it and put emotion into it.

Shivangi: And, you know, your example is definitely, like, of Goa and Calcutta. Definitely, we rethink it in a very different manner. But I wanna know what is your view of you know, what breaks culture at an organization?

Shivangi: Like, what are the elements that actually harm it?

Vikas: Not just culture, but what really harms an organization is pretty much What I would call noise, which emerges from the fact that you are not productive. I mean, if you really think deeply about it, you call it politics. You call it negativity. You call it, you know, whatever whatever whatever.

Vikas: But it all stems from the fact that somebody is not being productive somewhere. All right. Because people have time at hand to do things. Why? Because they're not being productive.

Vikas: So, therefore, they indulge in politics. Therefore, the culture breaks. That's the starting point. The second that breaks is I've always believed you know, bottlenecks are always at the top. So if you look at a bottle, the bottleneck is not at the bottom of the bottle.

Vikas: It's always at the Right. 

Vikas:  So it's important that what leaders do you know, in conversations where nobody's watching them. That's more important than what leaders do in conversations where everybody is watching them.

Vikas: You know? So two things. One is are people productive? If they're not productive, You've you've got a big, big problem at hand. It'll break everything, not just culture.

Vikas: And the second is the demonstrated behaviours of leadership in closed-door conversations when nobody's watching That's important. 

Shivangi: Typically, people, you know, have engagement scores.

Shivangi: People have NPS people. Like, that's kind of, like how HR tracks the productivity of an employee. What are you looking at? What are your key metrics of success for an employee? 

Vikas: Yeah.

Vikas: I'm so glad you asked that because Yo. That's you know, you asked me this question right up front what's your next I mean, this is what I was talking about. I call this enterprise performance management. You'll have to stay with me to understand what this is. And that this, I think, is pretty much what every HR leader has been looking at, you know, that how do I solve all my problems in one go with I mean, okay.

Vikas: You can't solve all your problems in one go. There's no magic wand with this. But EPMO, as I call it, enterprise performance management, solves a lot of it. So, traditionally, if you look at HR has driven performance, okay, by doing performance management cycles. But what have we really driven?

Vikas: We have driven the process of performance management. Okay. We haven't driven performance management. 

Vikas: I think the solution to the problem is to understand the purpose of performance management. You cannot be reactive about performance management. It's HR to solve for being proactive about performance management. Can you as HR drive this?

Vikas: Yes. By being what? By being predictive. If somehow you could predict at a goal or a KPI level what your performance is going to be today. And are you going to achieve this or not achieve this?

Vikas: And if you're not gonna be able to achieve this, this is our prediction. What is the prescriptive action that I can take to protect that daily run rate of mine? The day you get into that kind of an ecosystem, you have no idea. The kind of delight that you would have driven across the organization with employees would be massive because people would be able to pro-protect their performance, Drive productivity and therefore, you know, get rewarded for it. And I keep saying a happy employee is not somebody who gets trophy perks.

Vikas: A happy employee is somebody who's productive. Okay. And that's what HR needs to do, and that's what we call as enterprise performance management. 

Shivangi: So when you talk about predictive analysis, are there are there two to three tools that, you use for employees for predictive analysis and listening, both of them? 

Shivangi: The first thing that we need to solve is something that HR traditionally has forgotten to do. We used to do it very well early days, fifty, sixty years back, which is setting up the whole goals in the organization. You know?

Vikas: We have the philosophy with us. We know that, okay, there is an organizational objective, OKRs. Okay? And then you drill it down, then you start cascading, cascading, cascading. The problem is that if you actually lift up any goal sheet in the organization, most of the organization, those are not KPIs or goals or anything.

Vikas: They're basically intent statements.

Vikas: The second challenge that you will find in most of these, Well, KPIs, goals, OKRs, tomato tomato to me. But what you will find is that they do not have a parent-child relationship or a cause and effect relationship. How do you predict that, you know, if something was to go or or a KPI at n minus five level was to misbehave, How does this impact the entire goal tree all the way to the top organization goal that you want to achieve? Do you have a cause-and-effect relationship? No.

Vikas: So the first problem to solve is establishing a cascading and a cause causality between goals. So set up your board fees, which stem from the top organizational objectives, and make them extremely objective. Do not have whatever you wanna call them, OKRs and this and that, but Make them extremely objective because they have to be measurable. And then there are tools, as you said, which help you drive Predictive.

Vikas: Today, we have I have been kind of inducted into a data studio. And then you will get about sixty, seventy, eighty per cent accuracy once you've done a lot of testing. And after that, you know, you roll it out, and then prescriptive come over a period of time 

Vikas: You monitor actions. So saying that if this was the predictive, these were the four actions, which is the one that the employee chose and saw result. Capture that data, and maybe next year, you will have a list of repository and prescriptive. So it's a journey if you ask me. So this is more HR processes And then enabling it with the tool rather than bringing in the tool and then, you know, by integrating our processes.

Vikas: Yeah. So that's the approach that we should have on this. 

Shivangi: I feel like employee also needs to trust the organization to be able to be candid about their intent.

Shivangi: I know that trust is super important, but how important is it to 

Vikas: you? Yeah. I mean, you've you've called upon a very raw nerve.

Vikas: I mean, true. Trust doesn't get built overnight. Okay. Yeah. Let's understand the reasons why trust breaks building is a long process.

Vikas: But, you know, the biggest problem is that you don't know why trust is breaking. And here we come up with things like unconscious bias, you know, where managers tend to do certain things that they think are right. 

Vikas: Most managers still in a lot of countries I have this whole mentality that, you know, well, this is my kingdom, you know, and these are people who report to me. You will find them used well, meets Nishas. He reports to me. And there's a lot of there's a sense of pride, you know when a lot of managers say this, which I call as the unconscious bias.

Vikas: So managers can build trust by first identifying what breaks trust. I've known of managers who still value Presentism over productivity.

Vikas: All right?

Vikas: And then to build the trust, I think one of the basic, most important, always works kind of action is the response. Okay. The answers to the most complicated they're usually the simplest one, isn't it? So just respond with transparency saying that, well, this I can solve.

Vikas: Getting solved will be solved. 

Vikas: But if you don't respond just because you don't have an answer, are creating a bigger, bigger, much bigger problem. 

Shivangi: So there are like, from what I see, there are two steps there's a two-step process for building trust. One is listening. The second is acting. In terms of listening, are there so short channels that you can recommend with other HR leaders that for sure work?

Shivangi: Like, it could be something as simple as newsletters, right, or, like, something as complex as surveys or anything that has you can tell for sure that works

Vikas: So but then, you know, I don't agree that survey is listening. A survey is still asking.

Vikas: There used to be a framework for feedback. It used to be used more on the customer side of affairs. It used to be called ACAF, 

Vikas: Ask, categorize, act, follow up. Okay? ACA framework. I think it's lived its life.

Vikas: The shelf life of that whole thing is now over. If you really wanna move from asking to listening, then stop asking. A survey is still asking. What is listening is let's say things like, you know, organization network analysis. You know, it's such a beautiful methodology, which ensures that you're not asking at all.

Vikas: You're reading data that is generated in the organization using NLP semantic, whatever. You know? And then you're figuring out that what is the true sentiment and what you have to do. And if you really have to ask, then don't be, you know I mean, don't be don't ask event based.

Vikas: I've seen organizations who do feedbacks just around the performance management cycle. Everybody's gonna say great things because now they're scared that if they kind of give you a negative score.

Vikas: You're gonna ding them on the score that you owe them on their rating. 

Vikas: But as I said, if you're not responding to what happens in that in that whole, you know, so-called survey, then it's gonna get rejected. Because if I don't act when people for, like, three, four times continuously have flagged health problems, And I don't go back and act on that with the employee saying, what has happened?

Vikas: Let me let me fix up something for you. Then people don't see value in it. Okay. Then it's just data that HR collects 

Vikas: What did you do about that? ONA is another one that we need to explore a little more in the HR fraternity.

Shivangi: But how can organizations deal with managers? 

Vikas: I think Organizations need to give a managers reason to go and upscale and get their management skills in place. That reason cannot be just things like, you know when you're not a good manager, the GPTW, the scores that have come up, they don't give you a good rating. People will always have rebuttals and lot of, you know, arguments around that. But when you start rewarding those behaviors, Again, and hear me clear and loud on this that when you start rewarding right behaviors, that's when the true change really happens In an organization, you know but if you're just gonna be doing the whole I'm gonna ding you kind of an approach, then it typically doesn't work. Create the ecosystem for learning, but don't push learning down somebody's throat.

Vikas: You would give a start point on the cast and saying that, hey. Listen.

Vikas: This happens. You know, and this is what unconscious bias is. But after that, you gotta help and handhold the manager to, you know, kind of go through the whole process of understanding unconscious bias, which I think is a big, big problem of and And the right solution really is the unconscious bias learning environment. 

Shivangi: I have just, like, the last couple of questions left to you.

Shivangi: What is one HR area when automated flawlessly could slash manual work, say by thirty percent. 

Vikas: Yeah. Okay. If it's just gonna be one area, Now I'll just pick up something that I've been talking about for a long time, which is the establishing of the whole skill center of excellence. 

Vikas: I'm gonna give you a quick Twitter version of the whole skill theory, though I would preferably take about an hour to explain this. But broadly, it picks up a role in an organization.

Vikas: There's a technology. There are tools for all of that. They use a bit of net parsing, scraping, ethical, whatever. And they get a skills inventory or a skills repository for that role. And mind you, these skills are not those generic thirty thousand feet in the air skills.

Vikas: For a production guy, this would be autoclave, you know, hardcore, granular level and and gets the skills from there. It it basically benchmarks for that role. So if you were, let's say HRBP in a certain organization, I create a comparitive basket in the technology and say, listen. Go to the best of the best, you know. Go to Amazon, Pfizer, Google.

Vikas: There's that. And pick up these skills that those people possess or the companies are asking for, and that becomes my benchmark. And I also get something known as a proficiency level that at at this skill level skill, what is the kind of proficiency level that that the role holder needs to have? Then the same technology also brings back that which is the world's most consumed learning program, Okay. For this particular skill okay.

Vikas: And where does it sit? Does it sit on Instagram, on YouTube, on Udemy, on Coursera, or wherever? Okay? Mhmm. And the best part that this tech also brings back that for this skill, what is the world paying?

Vikas: So there's a dollar value to this skill. Now this is the data that you've got. Now imagine if you have all of this data. Okay? All you have to do is put it into a certain tool, and now an HRBP within your organization has a Certain amount skill, you know, profiling, etcetera.

Vikas: By the way, these are not competencies that I'm calling out. These are skills. Okay? Right. So they get get those skills at a granular level, and they know for their current roles these are the eight, nine skills that they need to have.

Vikas: They go through an assessment and feedback and all of that, and they get a score. And they say, well, I'm eighty percent there. But given skill adjacencies, because a lot of roles would have similar skills being asked for. So given skill adjacencies, the system also throws up that while your role is an HRBP but you know what? You could get into this particular other role in so and so department because you have eighty percent of a skill adjacency or a skill match.

Vikas: Okay. Now your your Your whole, you know, purpose in life to grow would really be to, you know, kind of prepare yourself for those twenty percent of the skills that you don't have for that particular role. The minute you prepare for that, assess yourself, you're hundred percent ready for the aspired role. The talent pool automatically gets created. The HR knows or the talent people know that this is the pool of people who are ready for that particular role that I was thinking of.

Vikas: Let's pick them up, and that's how you drive internal mobility. In terms of business.

Vikas: If if somebody was to really invest, the enterprise performance management and establishing the skill centre of excellence is where our next year's budget should really be pumped into you to drive better e x. 

Vikas: So for us, the go-live is next month. I mean, as in in January you know, it's gonna go live and we're fairly ready for it. Yeah. 

Shivangi: That's great. all eyes on you, I guess, then. but what is the one piece of advice you would like to give to first-time CHROs? 

Vikas: Ah, okay. 

Vikas: I think if you if you're picking up the c in the HR after whatever number of years of experience, I think first is that you gotta be ready that, okay, you gotta unlearn a lot of things and, you know, kind of apply some new things.

Vikas: And think of HR as equal to tech is equal to marketing. Why I say that is because you know, we launch policies. We do so much stuff, tick in the box, but do we market it well?

Vikas: If you think of a policy as a product, this is where product thinking comes into HR. When you think of a policy as a product which is possibly launched by, let's say, Louis Vuitton, whatever, what do they do along with the launch of a product? Okay. They do a lot of promotions around it. They help people understand the, what's in it for me.

Vikas: Okay? And then The most important thing that they do is they reiterate and and keep improving and keep getting better at it. What do we do? We launch a policy, put it in a certain folder, send an email, mass mail Our job is done. After four, five, seven years, somebody would revise the policy.

Vikas: That's the change that you wanna bring in. That's the marketing side of it. The tech side of it is that HR, The same practices, same policies can be enabled, and can be done better through a lot of technology. Some of this technology is fairly disruptive. But have the courage to, you know, embrace that.

Vikas: So HR is equal to tech is equal to marketing is my one piece of advice for all the new CHROs or the first-time CHROs. 

Shivangi: I feel like with leaders like you there is so much to look forward to in the Indian HR space in the industry space. So thank you for all your point of views that are going to blow some minds for 

Vikas: sure. Thanks, Shivangi. Thank you for having me.

Vikas: I love the questions that you asked. 

Vikas: I just hope that some people find value in what they listen to. I'm happy to take whatever questions they have in the near future,

Shivangi: Awesome.