IGSM, Greater Noida organised a day-long HR CONCLAVE on the theme “HR As a Strategic Business Partner” on Saturday, 26th September 2015 at its Greater Noida Campus.

The event began with an opening address by Dr Taruna Gautam – Director, IGSM followed by an introduction to the theme by Dr. Itiliekha Dash, Area chair OB & HR at IILM Graduate School of Management.

Mr Sanjoy Mukerji, Managing Director of iClinic Healthcare and Diagno Labs was the chief guest on the occasion. He started with those values that a company must incorporate in its vision statement i.e. increasing both the shareholder’s value and customer value and making an alignment to at least one character of an employee to organization. Also he mentioned 5 key points that one must look forward to:

• Every organization is becoming service organization. Therefore, it is important              to think of the policy to add values.
• The frontline people are the most important people of the organization because they serve the customers.
• Growth is the mantra that everyone should face and experience.
• Organization should adopt the right culture to match with the product, customers etc.
• It is important to integrate the communication process between frontline’s and executives.

Chandan Chattaraj ,President – HR (India & Global),Uflex Ltd was the key note speaker of the inaugural session. Mr. Chattaraj set the direction and elaborated on the broad idea about the whole discussion. With supporting data he spoke about “transformation”, how important it was to experience and understand it, than just learning new things. He emphasized on the idea that key investment for strategic role is knowledge and it was increasingly becoming investment centric than cost centric. He also mentioned that the strategy of UFLEX as an organization was to “Understand your people and your organization”. He elaborated on his journey from a Welfare Officer to a Strategic HR.

Both speakers concluded that in order to be in the centre, HR personnel must understand their responsibility towards the business, objectives and mission of the organization. 

SESSION 1: The changing role of HR leaders from background contributor to strategic value creator.

After the inaugural session, the conclave proceeded to its first panel discussion on the sub-theme “The changing role of hr leaders from background contributor to strategic value creator.” The first panel member of this session was Mr. Mainak Maheshwari. Mr. Maheshwari started the discussion with two questions.

• Why is it changing?
• What is actually changing?

While answering the first question, he reminded of how the importance people as an asset have changed the mindset with respect to generational shift. For answering his second question he talked about lot of job opportunities and startup culture and how the traditional perception about HR is changing. At the end of the discussion, he shared the lesson he learned from his experience; “an HR manager needs to be friend, philosopher and guide. For this, empathy and sensitivity is must. Always be futuristic”. He concluded that KRA/KPI should be aligned with that of business and there must be an understanding of complete business to grow with competition.

Mr. Vivek Tripathi was the next panel member to talk. He spoke about the importance of HR: “HR is too important to be left with HR. It has to be embraced by every part of the organization.”He threw light on “What is changing and what is driving this change?” Also he spoke of the major challenge faced in HR i.e. TRUST. He also emphasized on Values, their adaptability, integrity and passion for excellence.

Mr. Muralidhar Shyam was our last panel member of the first session. He started his session mentioning some major challenges that a HR department as a whole has to go through. Some of them he mentioned were: Talent Strategies, Core competencies, building capable teams as per KRA/KPI’s. He talked about the foremost role of strategic HR and also emphasized on the fact that effective strategies rest on three foundations ie. Value Creation, Value Delivery and value Capture.

Session 2 – Practices that differentiate the best organization from the good ones.

The second session commenced with video demonstrations on connecting customers and focusing on competencies. Mr Deepak Jalan, Group Head, Resource Management Group, Tech Mahindra opined that the core value of an organistion should be based on freedom to explore. “An organization must focus on seeking for best employees, should be customer centric and should respect individual effort”. He also spoke about sustainable business practices by exploring new ideas which necessarily entailed risk.

Ms Anju Sabharwal, the second speaker of the session shared her experience with Vodafone. She highlighted how the company’s initiatives like focusing on reward and recognition, knowledge empowerment, grievances redressal, girls education, organizing co curricular activities etc for its employees were making a difference in their well being. She concluded her session by emphasizing how happy employees contributed to organizational success and helps a company to build a brand.

Mr Abhishek Tiwary, Managing Director, KPMG was the last speaker on this panel. He spoke about the role of leadership and mentioned that great leaders by themselves were not good enough for building world class companies; it required the concerted effort of talented employees who were aligned to a company’s mission and vision to transform a dream into a reality.

SESSION 3 –Harnessing the power of Gen Y to drive business ahead.

Mr. Anupam Dubey, Key Accounts Manager-Utilities, at Paytm discussed the different features of Gen Y: techno savvy, entrepreneurial, environmentally minded, comfortably self-reliant, socio-mobi generation. He also mentioned that 50% of India’s GDP came from people with average age of 25 years. He suggested prospective managers to focus more on career opportunities and multi-dimensional growth, rather than evaluate growth in monetary terms alone. He concluded his discussion by saying “There has been a shift from work-life balance to work-life integrity.” Ideas for Gen Y already have arrived and in progress such as work from home, leadership development programs & innovation challenges and entrepreneurship.

Mr. Kunwar J Singh, Head HR, Rolls Royce deliberated on how we should equip ourselves in harnessing Gen Y. He also mentioned how Gen Y is different in terms of connectivity, technology orientation, productivity and job skills. He said that Gen Y were more inclined towards technology, and instance feedback and results, and that they were more opportunistic in their attempt to be successful.

The last speaker of this session Mr. Sujoy Basu emphasized that Gen Y were the People who wanted to achieve their goal by walking an extra mile if necessary. They had the extreme personality traits and believed in leadership and self motivation. They were self driven individuals who could avail every opportunity for growth. Mr Basu, emphasized the various initiatives taken by organizations today to harness the power of Gen Y, like recognizing innovation and their risk taking attitude.

Dr Arvind, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer, Ministry of Defense, Government of India delivered the valedictory address at the Conclave. In his address Dr. Arvind emphasized the growing importance of ‘knowledge as an asset’ in determining the prosperity of nations and the role of knowledge capital in fostering economic growth and prosperity.