Q1: You have a successful track record of over 20+ years working with multinational organizations across the Americas, Europe, and Asia and have managed board-level HR strategies, shaped cultures for business growth and transformation, and coached senior-level executives. Tell us about your massive professional journey so far and your life as the Group Chief Human Resources Officer of Aster DM Healthcare?
To be answered
Q2: The world of the future is not the world of capitalism, it’s the world of ‘talentism’. Organizations have acknowledged, more so after COVID-19, that the world of work is driven by employees and not the business. In the current context of work, how difficult does it seem to acquire, train, and retain good talent?
Globally, the health workforce has long suffered from labor shortages. This has been exacerbated by the workload increase caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Major collapses in healthcare systems across the world during the peak of the pandemic led to calls for strategies to alleviate the increasing job attrition problem within the healthcare sector.
If you build a house and the foundation is not solid, your home will begin to crumble over time. Nurses and clinicians are the foundation of healthcare, representing the largest segment of our organization. We have over 8000 nurses and over 4000 clinicians across Aster and as there is a global shortage of nursing staff and we see more instances of nurses leaving direct patient care itself (as part of a McKinsey survey: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/around-the-world-nurses-say-meaningful-work-keeps-them-going), it is paramount that we do every bit to help retain our frontline talent in line with our brand promise “We’ll treat you well”.
We have a dedicated onboarding programs called NEST which gives opportunities for nurses to be trained by seasoned nursing educators and Chief Nursing Officers at our flagship hospitals once they have joined. Once on-boarded they become part of Aster Flagship Initiative Grow (Get Ready for Opportunities at Work), which aims at developing leaders amongst the nursing community to help them build careers across management tracks, taking up operational and leadership roles as well in our hospitals and clinics.
As per recent research by McKinsey one of the top reasons why nurses leave has to do with their well-being and environment, they operate in. Burnout is a key concern and to ensure well-being of our frontliners, our Well-Being Strategy called “Meet the Moment” centers around physical, financial, mental and emotional dimensions. We have monthly leadership led dedicated town halls to empower frontliners to share their thoughts, suggestions with us with a promise that we will listen and address their inputs. Recognition is a core theme in these leadership connects. For mental well-being, we have dedicated well-being sessions for nurses, which focuses on key mental health issues like burnout, anxiety, depression. To cascade a culture of well-being, we focused on creating Well-Being Champions amongst different functions and peer support groups and communities (Aster Support Groups) within our hospitals and clinics. Well-being is a shared responsibility.
There is a greater challenge than ever before in retaining (and attracting) frontline talent. To do it correctly, you have to balance the “hygiene” factors of employment – elements like compensation and working conditions – and the “motivators” – aspects that motivate employees to stay, such as positive peer relationships, meaningful work and overall well-being.
Q3: Outlining futuristic visions, building an in-sync team, and having a goal-oriented approach is imperative to drive businesses towards success. In your experience of strategic HR leadership, what are the most effective strategies HR professionals must implement to support ulterior business objectives?
The pandemic hit most of us hard. Today, we see teams playing a more critical role in helping organizations respond to crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Whole companies suddenly working from home as offices fall silent. Millions re-evaluating their lives and careers. The Great Resignations, Quite Quitting and Moon lighting have creeped into our everyday vocabulary. As we see Organizations grapple with the above complexities, there is also a systemic change from a management system based on old rules—a hierarchy that solves for uniformity, bureaucracy, and control to a more collaborative, network-based organization built around multi-disciplinary and agile teams.
There is a clarion call for a people and customer centric model that is more flexible and responsive, built around with a futuristic vision for the organisation while still being powered by deeper connections, and digitalization. Enabling agility and fluidity, organizing around employee experience by focusing on key employee moments that matter most, building sustainability through a diverse and inclusive culture, fortifying people and functional centres of excellence and centres of competence that drives business and organizational value through complex environments are some aspects that as HR professionals we must focus on.
While these trends are not new, they are approaching tipping points.
Q: As the conversations around the Future of Work become more aggressive, HR is expected to lead the agenda of future-proofing the workforce. However, what are some of the skills you think are required by the HR leaders and their teams to respond to the challenges and opportunities posed by the future of work?
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted labor markets globally during 2020. According to a recent research conducted by Talogy (a talent management organization), attracting and retaining talent is the number 1 leadership challenge for the next 5 years and great leadership will become a key differentiator when trying to overcome this challenge. That being said, life has an amusing way of bringing us back to the basics. Today, if we look back at the origin of the word ‘Leader’, it was always defined as someone who is chosen by the people or for the people because of their ability to bring people together, influence and guide them towards a common objective. The future of leadership is also the same.
Leadership is no longer about preparing for digital disruption and transformation, but more about embracing and adapting to it. Leadership in the future is arguably more about humanizing than digitalizing: building trusting relationships, creating inclusive and supportive working environments, and fostering collaboration and communication across various work contexts. Considering that employees increasingly expect more people-centred leadership, few skills that HR leaders and teams can emphasize on would be:
• To be receptive, resilient, authentic, ethical and inclusive in order to drive change and enable engagement in a hybrid working environment.
• To maintain focus on connecting with people both as individuals and as a team.
• To develop a growth mindset and learning orientation and cascade below. Leaders must have a continuous desire to develop and improve to respond to future demands.
• To constantly coach and develop people, empowering them to deliver and setting them up for success.
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work
https://hbr.org/2021/09/future-proofing-your-organization
Q: Reimagining human-machine collaboration is a crucial part of navigating business transformation for the future. However as the workplace and workforce become increasingly digital, people are longing for the human touch. How can we build a human-centric culture that engages talent?
We’re living through a time in which technology is advancing at a staggering rate. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the convergence of several trends in the health care industry, particularly consumers prioritizing convenience and access to care. This lead to our digital transformation journey as a way to become more consumer-friendly while simultaneously changing our operations, culture, and use of technology.
In this massive transition of moving towards digital care, it bears reminding that digital adoption is a two-way street, requiring the satisfaction and buy-in of health care providers as well as patients. We understand that this transformation can be challenging for our employees, especially those who are providing direct care to our patients and thus it becomes extremely essential for us to have a human-centered approach that will help make this change in people’s mindset, culture, and decision-making capabilities a tad bit easier.
At Aster DM Healthcare, we believe that creating a human-centric culture is about embracing new practices that focus on bringing greater humanity in the way we lead, engage and grow employees, along with our business. From our recent culture survey in 2021, we understand that 95% of our employees are aligned with our purpose of providing quality care that is accessible and affordable globally. When employees feel that they are contributing to the bigger picture, they feel valued and important which becomes crucial when creating a human-centric culture.
Another key aspect to consider when building a human-centric culture, is to recognize employees. Recognizing achievement doesn’t only mean rewarding employees for accomplishing set goals and targets. Recognizing them for their great work in everyday tasks, for going the extra mile for a customer or proactively collaborating to solve a difficult problem is just as important. Paying attention to these details and awarding out-of-the-box thinking shows employees their impact and contributions. At Aster, we have monthly townhalls in each of our facilities to ensure that we do not miss a chance to recognize our employees apart from organization-wide initiatives such as ‘Gratitude in my Attitude’ where employees were encouraged to recognize each other on the ‘Yammer’ platform.
Last but not the least, leaders need to take responsibility in building the mental resilience and ensuring well-being of their teams before they can expect them to be at their best. At Aster, our brand promise is ‘We’ll Treat you well’ regardless of whether you are a patient or an employee. To build a culture of well-being, we encourage managers to have regular connects with their teams to gauge how team members are feeling. We also provide periodic counselling sessions for our employees through our in-house psychologists/mental health experts. We conduct mental health awareness town-halls for nurses and other periodic corporate wellbeing initiatives including talks and workshops. We are also in the final phase of the first responder training where employees are trained to aid other employees who are facing any mental health challenges and will also be spearheading Aster support groups.
To summarize, leaders that build a strong sense of purpose, encourage their employees to continuously grow through recognition and understand the importance of mental wellness have an amazing opportunity to create cultures that their employees will be proud to be part of.
https://hbr.org/2020/11/telehealth-is-working-for-patients-but-what-about-doctors
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2020/07/09/key-questions-to-ask-yourself-when-creating-a-human-centric-culture/?sh=5fffa13c5ded
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/patients-love-telehealth-physicians-are-not-so-sure
Q: We are already in the second half of the year 2022. Please share with our readers what you envision for the future of work in 2023?
As the world grapples through greater uncertainties such as living in a post pandemic world, high rates of inflation, changes in political institutions and leadership across the world and major humanitarian crises owing to the recent geo-political tensions and conflicts, I believe the future of work would be disruptive to say the least. Businesses and in turn employees will find themselves navigating through unchartered waters and it is important that at moments like these we double down on building capabilities such as empathy, curiosity, and a learning mindset in our workforce to steer us through what might lie ahead. While the future is uncertain, we know that technology will continue to shape the world and we must as HR practitioners learn to be agile and become a digital native. In all this culture will be the magic glue that will bind both the physical, in person and the hybrid workforce and as people champions, businesses will often rely on HR practitioners to guide them through an uncertain and yet an enterprising tomorrow. We should be ready to become the harbingers of change.
https://www.gartner.com/en/insights/future-of-work
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-organization-blog/the-brave-new-business-world
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