Enabling Workforce Development has been one of the key focus areas of corporates in the recent past.
Employee Relationship has gone beyond the traditional realm and has taken on a whole new dimension. The focus on enriching employee skills, making them future ready, providing a balanced well-being package, focusing on work – life balance, among others has been rightly prioritized by the employers.
The Chief Human Resources Officer of Sony Pictures Networks, Ms. Manu Narang Wadhwa, shares her views on the issue in an exclusive interview with ET Edge Insights. She also highlights the 4 Ps that drive an organisation- People, Purpose, Profits and Passion. Excerpts from the interview
What impact do the changing business models have on the varied categories of workers that we employ/could employ? (diff employment models)
As the world returns to ‘normalcy’ post-COVID, it is evident that the definition of ‘normal’ has changed entirely. Terms such as ‘hybrid’, ‘remote’, and ‘boundaryless’ now figure prominently in any discussions related to work. Changing business models and the convergence of various trends like work automation, increased flexibility, and location-agnostic talent pools present an opportunity for businesses to reimagine and transform how work gets done.
The potential impact is multifaceted in nature. There are obvious risks, such as increased cybercriminal activity, increased errors, and defective quality control. But, there are also opportunities to focus on previously untapped talent and hiring to become more inclusive. Keeping these risks and opportunities in mind, it is still essential to ensure that workers experience an innovative, engaging, and inclusive workplace.
At SPNI, in addition to full-time employees, we also support contractual and gig workers, who form nearly 16% of our workforce. While the modes of employment may differ for sections of our workforce, our thrust and focus is on providing a unified experience to each employee – be it a contract worker, a gig worker, a remote employee, or a full-time in-office employee. Our policies, practices, and initiatives are geared towards ensuring that the entirety of our workforce feels supported and included, with their work-life balance championed and their contributions recognized. This has formed the foundation of our organisation’s culture, which is well-known for openness and innovation and has been duly recognized in various HR & Business forums.
While technology removes the physical divide between these different sections of workers scattered across the globe, the onus is on business and HR leaders to ensure that work-life balance and social relationships at work are enriched even as the work distribution, time, location, and life stages of the employees evolve.
How can you as a leader enable engagement of a diverse workforce such that they are all driven towards the same organizational goal?
The benefits of having a diverse workforce speak for themselves. Inclusion has been proven to be a critical factor in boosting employee engagement and performance.
At Sony Pictures Networks India, our overarching philosophy – “Bring Your Own Self” – guides the different people policies and engagement initiatives introduced to augment and enable our diverse workforce. These policies, practices, and initiatives are spearheaded with buy-in from leadership at the highest level, allowing the same to percolate to the last mile.
When it comes to engaging such a unique, diverse workforce, our focus is on curated interventions. With content and revenue functions forming a significant portion of our employee base. The engagement process begins much before they even enter our system when they are potential employees. Even at this stage, our recruitment and branding efforts aim to provide exceptional candidate experience.
Once in the system, employees in each business/function have different needs and pain points. This is where our HR team continuously partners with businesses to craft and deliver curated interventions that target and solve the exact needs of the employees. So, for our Content teams, it may translate into an intervention like Content Masterclass, which features industry stalwarts taking them through various aspects of content & storytelling such as Storytelling, Screenwriting, and Crafting Realistic Characters. But for a section such as Sales, it may take the form of an interactive and highly specialised sales enablement intervention like “Ad Sales Reimagined” that focuses on key mindset shifts to excel in the highly competitive industry landscape and deliver true client value.
These curated interventions are supported by org-wide engagements throughout the year, including celebrations and commemorations of key days and around values/capabilities we want to recognize by giving employees a platform. These include platforms such as “SPNI Innovation Hub (SIH)” – where employees pitch their pathbreaking business ideas and are eventually incubated, and “SPNI Pitchers” – a platform for our employees to pitch new show concepts which could be adapted for TV or OTT and produced by our own studio, StudioNEXT.
Tying the various threads of engagement together is our leadership engagement program – L.E.A.P (Leadership Amplification and Engagement Program), which utilizes various innovative formats to ensure a year-round connect between leaders at the highest level and employees at the last mile.
Zooming out onto the larger picture, these practices, policies and initiatives enable us to foster a more innovative, engaged, and productive workforce which is passionate about and driven towards organizational goals by virtue of the sense of belongingness that is created when they can bring their authentic selves to work.
For many organisations today, navigating the present landscape with all of its new problems, such as hybrid working and “The Great Reshuffle,” can be challenging. Keeping this scenario in mind, how have you seen the evolution of the HR Industry and how has the growth changed over time?
From being personnel managers to being the strategic business partners that they are considered today, HR has come a long way.
Thankfully, today HR is not simply a function that helps businesses avoid getting into trouble over employment laws or enforces rules — but a key factor in gaining a competitive advantage over competitors. Companies that attract, hire, engage, develop, and retain the best talent will simply outperform those that fall short in these areas. To capitalise on this talent, HR ensures their training, development, and engagement – all in alignment with business needs – to augment their potential and ensure they are productive in the short run and prepared for the long run.
The pandemic and its aftermath were one of the key instances that revealed the significance of the HR function for organisations. For most organisations, including SPNI, it would have been impossible to remain viable and stay afloat during and after the pandemic had it not been for their HR leaders and teams.
The SPNI HR team has played a crucial role in enabling the organization and its various BUs to reimagine the business front during and after the pandemic. Our digital platform, SonyLIV, was completely revamped and relaunched amid the pandemic – it clocked in 18.2 million subscribers within two years of the relaunch and has delivered one smash hit after another. Our post-production function – Broadcast Operations & Network Engineering (BONE)- was successfully converted into a profit centre to provide production services to other media houses.
I could go on, but none of these wins would have been possible to achieve without our HR team’s continuous thrust on upskilling and reskilling our employees for the future of work, without their innovative attraction, engagement, and retention practices for our talent and without the policies & practices that support our diverse employees at all life stages.
In a nutshell, HR as a function has evolved and navigated the extremely turbulent landscape by emerging as a true partner to businesses, being attuned to the needs of the employees, seeking and capitalizing on opportunities for transformation and optimization of processes.
It is a pivotal time in the history of HR, the role of this function has become more visible and more foundational to organizations than at any other time before.
Businesses that are overtly focused on earnings, frequently lose sight of their mission. They subsequently lose track of the most vital aspects of their business: their employees and consumers. People, Purpose, or Profits? What should be the order of preferences each organization should follow?
In addition to People, Purpose, and Profits – I’m of the opinion that there’s another ‘P’ – ‘Passion’ (which is the starting point/primary focus) that fuels the purpose of any organization and its workforce, first and foremost. From a business perspective, passion is where it all starts and is a key aspect of the driving force for people to buy into the purpose and deliver profits. Employee value propositions are all about articulating this passion to the people. Our EVP, Tell Stories Beyond the Ordinary, too, focuses on our singular passion as the connecting thread for everything else. The people need to be passionate about the organization’s purpose to maximize profits.
When businesses focus on passion, purpose, people, and profits in that order, they are able to achieve productivity in the short run and optimized performance in the long run. Today’s employees work for passion and purpose, not just for money – businesses must shift their focus and strive towards connecting these threads to drive more meaningful careers for their people and give them opportunities to tie in the impact of their work with the passion and purpose of the organisation.
