HR As A Catalyst For Business Transformation & Success

Welcome to the Vantage HR Influencers Podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Vantage Circle, the simple and AI-powered rewards and recognition platform for employee engagement.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Welcome back to the Vantage Influencers Podcast, where we bring you thought-provoking discussions on topics that matter. I'm your host, Sanjeevani Saikia, and today we will have a conversation that will change how you perceive HR's role in business transformation and success.

As we already know, organizations are constantly seeking avenues for growth and sustainability. Amid this pursuit, the role of Human Resources has evolved beyond traditional administrative tasks. It has become a strategic partner in driving business transformation and success. HR functions are now recognized as pivotal in fostering innovation, shaping company culture, and optimizing workforce performance.

Therefore, it is important to understand how HR functions serve as a catalyst for business transformation and success. To discuss this in depth, we have with us Neha Saxena Shenoy, the Deputy CHRO at Cairn Oil & Gas. Let's begin our conversation with her. Hi, Neha.

Neha Saxena Shenoy: Hi, Sanjeevani.

Sanjeevani Saikia: First of all, it's truly a pleasure to have you here with us today. Before we delve into our discussion on HR as a catalyst for business transformation and success, I'm eager to learn more about your professional journey and the experiences that have shaped your expertise in this field. So, could you share your corporate journey with us?

Neha Saxena Shenoy: Fantastic, and the pleasure is all mine, Sanjeevani, and a big thanks to you and to Vantage Circle for inviting me to do this podcast. I've done a few of these podcasts before, and I know they're going to be great fun. I'm hoping the audience learns something along the way, and I learn something too. So, looking forward to it.

About my professional journey, I have been working in the field of HR for the last 20 years. A few things stand out through my career: I've worked in positions of increasing responsibility and complexity across business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and now the energy sector, and helped organizations and people be more successful through that journey.

In the past 20 years, I've had the privilege to work across multiple geographies, be it the US, Bangalore, Mumbai, Gurgaon, and Pune as well. I've had the good fortune of learning from people who come from multiple different backgrounds and helping them do better in the organizations they work in. I've also had the privilege of supporting leadership teams focused not just on India, but also on larger geographical regions like Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and the US. I'm really grateful for all the wonderful experiences I've had through the course of my career, and of course the outstanding mentors and managers I've learned from.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Thank you so much, Neha, for sharing your journey with us. It was truly wonderful and we really appreciate it. With your permission, I'd like to begin today's conversation on the given topic. So if you're good to go, we can start.

Neha Saxena Shenoy: Yes, let's dive right in.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Great. It's a known fact that strategic HR initiatives drive significant organizational transformation. Companies can leverage HR's expertise to navigate the complexities of the modern workplace, and it's important to understand the critical role HR plays now that it has evolved into a strategic partner. So, could you provide us with an overview of how HR functions can serve as a catalyst for business transformation and success? And most importantly, what key roles does HR play in this process?

Neha Saxena Shenoy: Right, Sanjeevani, very good question. Before I answer, I'd like to build a quick context. If you look at businesses and organizations today, they are going through three major shifts in the post-COVID world: the first is environmental, the second is organizational, and the third is people, leadership, and culture related. Let me talk through each of these.

If you look at the environment today, volatility is a feature, not a bug. For example, the energy industry that I currently work in is going through a tectonic shift. It's perhaps one of the most volatile industries, with dramatic price swings, impacted by multiple factors including geopolitics: ongoing wars, new energy discoveries, demand for green energy, and changing consumer demands, in addition to tech shifts that impact the industry. No sector is actually left untouched by this sweeping change, whether it's consumer, tech, retail, or automobile; they're all facing tectonic shifts in their worlds.

What's interesting, particularly since we're in 2024, is that globally more voters than ever in history will head to the polls this year. At least 64 countries plus the European Union, representing about 49% of the people on the planet, are meant to hold elections this year, which for many will prove consequential for years to come. The fortunes of a lot of companies and sectors will vary depending on election outcomes, not just companies that sell to governments directly, but also those that engage with governments indirectly. That's one part of the environmental-level shifts.

The second set of shifts, happening at an organizational level, is the need for greater learning agility, or closing the capability gap. Now, more than ever, the need for upskilling and reskilling is critical. The half-life of skills we learn in academia has shortened so much that before an Indian student completes a four-year engineering degree, what she learned in her first year may no longer be relevant. As a consequence, it's even more important for organizations to provide the right opportunities to upskill and reskill the workforce.

Digital transformation continues to be a factor driving a lot of change, and connected to that is a focus on greater productivity and efficiency. Shareholders around the world put a lot of pressure on corporations to increase speed, to get things done faster with fewer resources. In fact, a recent industry report that came out earlier in 2024 pointed to a tectonic shift with respect to tech jobs caused by AI. If you look at last year, that same line of reporting found that 30% of companies surveyed reported that technology has replaced workers, and the prediction is that 44% of companies surveyed would look at further replacing workers with AI and technologically advanced solutions.

Also, a recent McKinsey report done across seven countries points out that 20 to 30% of critical positions in organizations are not filled by the most appropriate people. The same report very interestingly mentions that the highest performers in an organization and in a role are 800% more productive than the average performers in the same role. So, in this day and age, what becomes important is catching high-potential, high performers early, stretching them with meaningful work, providing them a customized employee value proposition, while balancing organizational dynamics, politics, and of course limited budgets, especially in an era where remote working, skill shortages, and the need for new skills are prevalent.

That's the second bucket of shifts. The third one, I'd say, is very interesting: people, leadership, and culture. You and I, I'm sure, will resonate with this, and I'm sure many of our listeners went through a lot of soul-searching when COVID impacted all of our lives and our families. It led people to reevaluate their work-life priorities, and it led people to revise their attitudes towards work. The pendulum has swung both ways in the last few years: what started out as quiet quitting moved to the Great Resignation, then to quiet firing, and then led to mass layoffs across different industries. This has led to a need for a new way to attract, develop, retain, and engage talent, including rethinking the hybrid world.

The second shift within this bucket is an increasing trust deficit. The world is moving more towards trusting one's own individual and a little less towards trusting large organizations and large bodies, questioning everything one sees. There is a need, now more than ever, for authentic, self-aware leaders who can connect and inspire in an inclusive way. On a connected note, inclusion is no longer only about men and women; it's about everybody. Irrespective of who you are, meaningful diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are things people are definitely looking for in their workplace, and they vote with their feet if they don't find an inclusive workplace where they feel they can belong.

The last piece in the people, leadership, and culture bucket is a continued focus on mental and emotional well-being. Organizations have realized that it's not adequate to provide health coverage purely from a physical health perspective; health is much more than physical health, which is why the focus on mental health continues during these times.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Given the context you just shared, my next question would certainly be, how does HR catalyze business transformation?

Neha Saxena Shenoy: I can definitely share more in terms of stories and examples, and I'll talk about examples I have seen or driven closely, and which are close to my heart as well.

If you look at HR, it's essentially the glue that binds strategy, culture, and people together to drive organizational success. One memorable story that exemplifies HR's transformative power is from a business I used to lead HR for a few years ago. The industry this business was operating in was booming, with new clients jumping into the bandwagon and many people setting up overnight supply chain and manufacturing facilities to deal with the booming demand. Unfortunately, despite a booming industry, the business I led HR for was struggling; it was in the red on every single financial parameter and every single people parameter, which of course was a perfect storm for someone like me to inherit.

Coincidentally, the business leader for this organization was just about two months older than me on the job; they were also new to the organization. But I think both of us really shared a zeal and a passion for turning the business around, and we rallied together to make sure that turnaround happened. Through a strategic partnership with the business leader and focused interventions, the business actually turned around in just about a year.

So how did we do that? We did it through four very specific and focused steps.

The first was customer-focused organization structure. The organization structure this business had in the past was not very close to the customer, and as a consequence, there was perhaps more internal conflict than focus on serving the customer. So reinventing the organization structure, especially for key areas that were customer-facing and critical to the success of the business, like supply chain, sales, and customer experience, was very impactful in driving that change.

The second piece we realized is that there's no substitute for having the right people in the right place. What became important was being very thoughtful about whether we should build, buy, or borrow talent. In this context, for critical roles, it was very important for us to build and buy talent proactively rather than reactively. So we did very clear, data-driven, proactive succession planning, backed by clear development plans for the successors we had identified, so that succession planning actually came to life and helped the business succeed.

The third intervention was customized retention planning and execution. The initial phase during which I was leading HR was marked by the Great Resignation, and for us to stem attrition in the business, we realized we needed to operate at scale while also customizing and personalizing our solutions to individuals in the organization, because what keeps one person in their job may be very different from what excites another. So we looked at marrying insights from AI-driven early warning systems with human intelligence, which together became an unbeatable combination, giving us a clear heat map of who would be our high, medium, and low attrition-risk people. Since we married this with human intelligence, we also got a very clear plan of action for each person, which we were then able to put into place to retain the workforce we had.

The last thing we did was culture building. Culture building doesn't happen overnight, but what helps is very consistent communication and a high say-do ratio, so that when people look at leadership, they know leadership is clear about the kind of culture they want to build and is actually putting action behind words.

So these four interventions, customer-focused organization structure, right people in the right place, customized retention planning and execution, and culture building, certainly helped us turn the business around. In fact, I'm very happy to share that not only did the business turn around in just about a year, it actually ended up outperforming its annual target by about 15 million US dollars. This shows the pivotal role HR can play in business transformation.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Interesting, really interesting, and congratulations on the results you achieved through your strategies and outlook. It was really wonderful, and you backed your claims with statistics, so it was really insightful. I really appreciate it when we share real-life experiences or examples, because people are able to relate to it and get a better understanding. So it would be great if you could share some more examples of how strategic HR initiatives have driven significant transformation within an organization.

Neha Saxena Shenoy: Let me talk to you about an experience I had earlier in my career at Microsoft. This is a change I was part of and contributed to, but the big part of this story is that it was driven straight from the top of the organization.

Flashback: all of us know Microsoft as one of the most valuable companies on the planet today, but many years ago it wasn't the case. Microsoft started out very strong in a market it dominated, with a clear strategy of wanting a desktop on every table. But somewhere down the line, it lost its market dominance. Other players came to the fore, Amazon being a prominent one, which started eating into Microsoft's share. There were news reports about Microsoft having lost its sheen and perhaps losing the plot a little. That's the perfect storm that Satya inherited, and he was very sharp and clear in understanding that culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In fact, the first thing he did when he took over the CEO chair was send an all-employee email talking about how he wanted to drive a cultural transformation in the organization.

Microsoft was an organization with very strong personalities and brilliant minds; to this day, I'd say the most brilliant people I've ever worked with are my former colleagues at Microsoft. Having said that, because they were so brilliant, there was perhaps a missed opportunity around learning more. There were more know-it-alls, and Satya wanted to make sure they became learn-it-alls. He followed up the cultural transformation with very concrete steps, which is what I really admire about his leadership and about Microsoft as an organization.

For example, he re-imagined the vision, mission, strategy, ambitions, leadership principles, and culture of the organization. The mission he articulated was about how Microsoft wants to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. He also talked very clearly about the strategy to get there: building best-in-class platforms and productivity services for a mobile-first, cloud-first world, at a time when Microsoft was taking a bit of a beating on exactly those fronts. It was very smart on his part to clearly articulate the direction and strategy the organization was meant to take.

He also collaborated with his leadership team to articulate ambitions around reinventing productivity and business processes, building an intelligent cloud platform, and creating more personal computing, without forgetting the hardcore strengths Microsoft brought to the table. While some of this sounds like straightforward business transformation, the great thing is that he also thought about leadership principles and culture tenets that would help the organization pivot the way he hoped it would.

Microsoft articulated three leadership principles, simple ones everyone can resonate with, which clearly laid out expectations from leaders: creating clarity as a leader, generating energy, and delivering success. Connected with that was a lot of work on culture, with five tenets the organization focused on.

The first and biggest was growth mindset. Those familiar with research on growth mindset know it's an entirely different way of perceiving things, acting on what you perceive, and evaluating yourself with respect to the results you get. This connected with the shift from know-it-all to learn-it-all.

The second culture piece was being more customer-obsessed, a huge part of the solution towards reinventing Microsoft and making it more relevant and closer to the customer.

An element Satya was personally extremely passionate about, and which I had the good fortune of hearing him speak about in person, is diversity, equity, and inclusion. At Microsoft, this wasn't looked at only through a gender lens, but also through a lens of generation and geography. The intent was to create a much more diverse and inclusive organization where talented people from all backgrounds are welcome.

"One Microsoft" was another big element of the culture: moving away from the silos of a large organization towards collaborating as one Microsoft, getting outcomes, and ultimately making a difference for consumers. So those were, from a business perspective, the big influences of the change.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Thank you for sharing the example of Microsoft, because you've once again highlighted the need for a culture of learn-it-all, which is what Satya Nadella has been promoting. I recall in one interview he mentioned enrolling in more courses than he could complete.

Neha Saxena Shenoy: Yes, so in a way he's made it very clear that we're all in the process of learning and shouldn't stop. The wonderful experience I had was that at Microsoft, the reimagination of the vision, mission, strategy, ambitions, leadership principles, and culture was communicated far and wide. There was not a single important meeting, internal or external, that didn't have these elements right at the beginning. And Microsoft encouraged people to engage with the vision, mission, strategy, ambitions, leadership principles, and culture by personalizing what it meant to them and then applying it in their daily lives.

Sanjeevani Saikia: True. In this example you just shared, how specifically did HR facilitate and manage organizational change effectively? And it would be great if you could also share some best practices for HR professionals to navigate these transformations smoothly.

Neha Saxena Shenoy: The HR team at Microsoft did a fabulous job. One step before I talk about what the HR team did: Satya's leadership team translated the business transformation agenda, meaning the mission, strategy, ambitions, leadership principles, and culture, into people priorities. These weren't HR priorities; they were priorities critical to the success of Microsoft's business, and they weren't necessarily owned only by the HR team. Members of Satya's leadership team were sponsors for one or more of these people priorities.

For example, in line with the "One Microsoft" change, one of the people priorities was "work as one," and connected to it, the CHRO and her leadership team carved out and documented very clear HR strategies; again connected with "work as one," the HR strategy was to be a proactive catalyst driving cross-company business strategy, which became a driving force for change at Microsoft.

The effort didn't stop at people and HR priorities; it also tied those priorities to HR behaviors. For example, in the past, the HR team saw itself as mostly responding to business requests, and they wanted to move more towards being a change catalyst. Another behavior shift was moving from accommodating everyone to focusing more on leaders. From being more reporting-out focused, they wanted to be more data-driven. From being more program-managers or programmatic in approach, they wanted to shift towards being more solution-oriented. These were very concrete, specific behaviors, and for each, there were clear guidelines on what to keep, stop, and start doing, co-created with the HR team, which helped us evolve our own thinking and ways of working.

Needless to say, the entire HR ecosystem, systems, processes, and tools, was overhauled to meet the changing needs of working as one Microsoft. For example, there was a focus on using more data-driven insights in decision-making, which led us to use Power BI dashboards much more intensely; our meetings became focused on how the needle moved on metrics the business was responsible for and that HR could influence, giving all of us in HR a fantastic opportunity to connect the dots between what we do and how it impacts the bigger picture of the business.

The second thing they did was simplify and standardize processes and move more towards a self-service model, which removed the burden of some non-value-add activities from HR teams and let them focus attention on where the organization wanted them, more on leaders versus accommodating everybody.

The next thing was to enhance and bolster HR and employee skills. A huge part of working at Microsoft HR was helping employees grow and helping managers become better coaches, working with leaders and coaching them so they could create the right ecosystem for their teams and for the people managers reporting into them. There was a lot of action around creating career guides, not just for HR to coach employees on, but easy-to-use guides for managers to pick up and run with when holding a meaningful career conversation or "connect" conversation, which was the equivalent of the performance management system. They also created digital libraries and tools so it became much easier, even for a first-time manager or someone newly promoted into a leadership role, to use those tools and get the outcomes required of them.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Interesting again. So in a nutshell, HR had a lot to contribute towards making the business transformation happen at Microsoft. Now, HR also plays a very important role in fostering employee well-being, impacting overall individual and organizational performance. It would be great to know from you how you prioritize employee experience, and is there an example you'd like to share?

Neha Saxena Shenoy: Absolutely. Let me talk to you about an example from a time when I used to work at Honeywell. I used to be the HR director for two of Honeywell's largest businesses in India, about 350 million USD in revenue and about 2,300 full-time employees plus another 5,000 contract employees.

These businesses, during the COVID period, just like everybody else, were facing the Great Resignation. During COVID lockdowns, none of us were even able to travel outside our homes to engage with our employees, and the ways to meet and connect with people were far more limited, mostly a passport-sized photograph on a Teams or Zoom screen on a laptop. That certainly loses a bit of the emotion, the heart, and the essence, and there was quite clearly a need for us to think about how to retain and engage employees given the constraints of that situation.

One of the things we did, for all 2,300 employees within my remit, was personalized retention planning, and we did that by leveraging AI. For 2,300 employees, creating a personalized plan can take a very long time unless you do it at scale using technology and AI, and we did leverage AI to get there. We had an AI solution that connected dots between multiple data sets. For example, it would connect the dots that an employee who's had a change of manager may have a higher chance of being an attrition risk, and if that same employee hasn't had a great rating in the last performance cycle either, the chances they may be disengaged go up. Or another employee putting in too many hours outside of regular work hours, including weekends, might be at risk of burnout, which could also lead to attrition. Or someone taking a lot of unscheduled leave might be missing out on work as a consequence. There were so many different data points each of us emits on an ongoing basis, and we used AI to bring all of those together and analyze what trends might be emerging for every individual in the organization.

As an HR leader, what I got at the end of this exercise was a very clear red-amber-green heat map that gave me a flight-risk score, so I could say with some confidence that one employee was more likely to leave than another in a different part of the organization. Having said that, AI doesn't necessarily give perfect answers, and it's very important to temper that with human intelligence, which is why we didn't stop at just an AI-driven retention exercise. We took that data to the respective managers, sat with managers of all the employees, showed them the heat map for their team, and asked for their validation on that data. That gave us a much clearer picture of why certain behaviors might be showing up in employees and whether they were temporary; maybe someone was taking leave because they had a sick family member to care for, and that wasn't necessarily a long-term attrition risk.

We also got a much clearer picture, not just of who our high, medium, and low-risk people were, but of what would actually keep individuals happy in their jobs. By the time someone has already resigned, it's often too late to pull them back from the brink, but if you look at retention measures that are more proactive in nature and address the pain points employees might have, those retention efforts bear much more fruit and lead to better business impact. That's exactly what we did: for each individual who showed up red or amber on the heat map, we connected the dots with the manager on what their pain point might be or what they're looking for. What excites one person might be very different from what excites another: someone might want a stretch assignment in a different function, another might care more about visibility to senior management, another about money, another about a promotion. It's important to put a finger on the pulse of what motivates each person, because one size doesn't fit all. Once we had that clear data for each individual, it became our guide, and we used it not just to develop individuals but also to engage them and transparently communicate what we had in the works or had already completed, so their confidence in the organization and management stayed strong and they remained invested in the organization's growth. That was one set of more personalized actions.

Another set of actions we took were more organizational. Especially during COVID, these were highly stressful times; people would be double- or triple-booked on their calendars and didn't have the benefit of blowing off steam through a corridor or coffee-table conversation. They also didn't have the advantage of meeting new leaders face to face, especially people like me who had joined during the COVID period, or the business leader who had also joined during that period; that personal connection was missing, and emotionally it had an impact on building the bond. To solve for that, given the COVID protocols and restrictions, we started informal connect sessions. One thing we heard back from teams was that they wanted more clarity on how we wanted to reach the business outcomes that had been targeted, and there was a clear strategy the business leader had come up with along with his leadership team; our role in every conversation, town halls, small group meetings, round tables, informal connects, was to make sure we kept reinforcing the same story.

The other part was creating space for a "cooler conversation" in a virtual environment, so we started semi-structured connects once a month where we'd send pizza to everyone's house and do a Friday evening chat session where we wouldn't talk business or work at all; it would be more of a fun session to help people unwind and build bonds beyond the day-to-day. For people to be retained and have a positive employee experience, their head, heart, and hand need to connect with the organization, and with the interventions I mentioned, we were able to connect the head, heart, and hand to the organization, which certainly helped enhance employee experience and directly impact individual and organizational performance.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Now, Neha, I'd like to explore how HR can harness technology and data to optimize recruitment, talent management, and performance evaluation processes. I'm very interested to know how you're using AI today particularly. Please help us understand how you're leveraging technology and data-driven insights to drive business transformation, and are there any specific tools or strategies you'd recommend for HR professionals to stay ahead in this rapidly evolving landscape?

Neha Saxena Shenoy: Great question, Sanjeevani. There are multiple technology solutions that can help HR drive business transformation effectively, and these solutions exist across the employee lifecycle. Let me talk you through a few.

If you look at recruitment and talent acquisition, we use applicant tracking systems, which help automate candidate screening, identify the best candidates, and parse through resumes to highlight the best fit with high accuracy and speed. I'd want to call out that, as is the case with every AI solution, there are biases that can come in, so one needs to watch out for biases related to age, gender, or otherwise while using recruitment solutions.

The second piece: in the past, I've leveraged bots for employee engagement and policy clarification. Some of the more predictable, ongoing nature of work that HR has to do can be easily handled by bots; I've looked at implementing some of those to get more efficiency for the business and for HR.

From a performance management perspective, there are multiple use cases that help people with goal-setting using generative AI. In fact, a lot of people even use generative AI to write their performance appraisals, and to give feedback as well. Technology has completely disrupted the kind of performance analytics we have, and the ability to connect dots between leading and lagging indicators with respect to financial and organizational productivity is mind-blowing today, so there's a lot to learn there.

From an engagement perspective, there are tools that keep a finger on the pulse of employees and provide sentiment analysis in real time, helping prevent attrition and identify areas of improvement from an organizational lens, which helps anticipate turnover and flight risks and take proactive measures to retain top performers.

Something we leveraged in learning and development is augmented reality and virtual reality, particularly for high-volume trainings that need to be delivered within a short period of time at scale, such as for new campus hires. We actually won an Economic Times award for some of that work, in addition to gamification, which I'm sure a lot of organizations have leveraged too.

On succession planning, past organizations I've worked with have used a lot of technology, not just to identify the right slates but also to ensure completeness, correctness, and conversion of those succession slates into real-time actions.

Employee well-being and workforce analytics is another use case; the example I gave earlier about connecting the dots between an employee's behavior, for instance whether they're using a lot of personal time on office work and Outlook or Office 365, are leading indicators that give insight into employee satisfaction levels and productivity trends, enabling more data-driven decision-making in HR.

Another use case I've seen done beautifully many years ago at GE was predictive workforce modeling. GE, being such a large organization with a lot of technology depth, connected the dots between macroeconomic trends, including the talent landscape in different countries, cities, and geographies, and internal trends for different job families. Since they sat on a lot of data, they were able to analyze external macroeconomic trends and internal attrition trends, along with the business plan for the next three years, to build a predictive workforce model. I remember that work seeming extremely futuristic and ahead of its time, and even today, in 2024, I know of very few organizations that have been able to effectively marry macro and micro trends to create predictive workforce models like that.

Sanjeevani Saikia: I'd now like to shift focus to key metrics and KPIs; this will be the last question for this episode. Measuring the success of HR-led business transformation is essential for continual refinement, and I believe having a proper understanding of the mechanism really helps track progress made over time. So, according to you, how should organizations measure the success of HR-led business transformation initiatives, and how can these insights be used to continually refine and improve HR strategies?

Neha Saxena Shenoy: HR is business, so HR metrics are business metrics in the context of business transformation, and I'd say the North Star that drives any HR transformation needs to be aligned with the business's own North Star, whether that's revenue growth, margin expansion, EBITDA expansion, or a growth target for a particular geography. Whatever the organization's success metric is, it ultimately becomes the North Star of any HR-led business transformation initiative as well; that's how I've operated, and that's how I've seen success across multiple industries.

Beyond that, key metrics HR should focus on to make sure they're on the right track come from breaking the business down into financial metrics, business change metrics, and people-related metrics. Let me give an example from an organization I used to work with many years ago that was going through a lot of transformation: it had split its business into two parts, had an acquisition that needed to be integrated, and was aiming for a one-billion-pound revenue target for a newly formed region covering Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. That one-billion-pound target was quite clearly the North Star, and, as with every business metric, it was broken down by geography, with growth percentages allocated right down to the last region. Connected to that, of course, were headcount, cost, productivity, and attrition numbers. You can have multiple metrics under each of those headers, but essentially there was a clear connection from headcount, cost, productivity, and attrition to ultimately reaching the revenue metric.

Some of these metrics are point-in-time, some are lagging, so strategically it becomes important to pick which metrics to drill into and what sub-metrics to put in place across the value chain. For example, if you're looking at headcount, talent acquisition metrics become important, so you need clarity on what your talent acquisition pipeline looks like if you're hiring to meet a certain headcount. If you're looking at productivity metrics with respect to the organization pyramid, connected metrics around succession matter too, whether you're looking at people ready in zero to one years, one to two years, or three-plus years, or the conversion, correctness, and completeness of that succession slate. You can go into any level of depth you want with HR metrics, but as a leader, I'd try to keep it simple and connect the dots ultimately to the business transformation initiatives. From a perspective of connecting leading indicators to financial metrics, I'd keep it to maybe three to four degrees of separation from the business metric; going deeper might seem helpful, but in my view it isn't, because people end up chasing minute targets and lose sight of the larger ones. I'd advocate for bigger-picture targets, with at most three clicks down into each of those financial targets from an HR perspective.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Wonderful. As we wrap up today's episode, Neha, is there a final thought you'd like to leave our listeners with? And for those keen on staying connected with you beyond this episode, could you share how they can reach out to you?

Neha Saxena Shenoy: One final thought on key metrics: these need to be connected not just to HR, but also to leaders and people managers. If HR takes the responsibility of meeting every single metric on its own shoulders, success will likely be limited. Organizations that have included people leadership metrics as part of a leader's own success have certainly seen better outcomes from both a business and a people perspective. The second thought, from a managerial perspective, is that most organizations already have people-related metrics on managers' goal sheets, but some organizations have gone the extra mile and created a people leadership index for every manager, tied to an opinion survey or culture pulse score, and then hold managers accountable to it. In my view, this works more effectively to drive organizational outcomes and to make sure those metrics are reached in a holistic way.

I really enjoyed talking to all of you today. HR is a field where we all continue to learn every single day, and that's something I'd really advise every listener to do: continue to learn. There's so much to learn in the HR space, and I'd encourage everyone to go out of their comfort zone and learn something new every day, whether it's a field you know very little about or one you're already a specialist in. That's my mantra, and I'd love to learn from you as well. If you'd like to engage in more conversation, you can find me on LinkedIn; my name is Neha Saxena Shenoy. I look forward to staying connected with each of you and hearing your feedback on how today's conversation went.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Neha, having you as our guest today has truly been a pleasure. Your insights and expertise have added immense value, and we appreciate the time you've dedicated to sharing your knowledge with our listeners. Thank you so much for your valuable contribution.

Neha Saxena Shenoy: Most welcome, Sanjeevani. It was my pleasure and a delight to talk to you today. Thanks for being such a gracious host, and thanks again for having me.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Thanks a lot. Thanks for listening to the Vantage HR Influencers Podcast. Please do subscribe to the Vantage HR Influencers Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our YouTube channel for new episodes.