At what point in your life did you decide to take up HR as your career? What were the guiding / motivating factors?

I started my career in 1996-97 as an MR- Machine Room In-charge at NIIT Ltd. and then joined a firm named Lehren Fan Club where I learned the basics of Marketing and how to sell an ideas to HNIs.(High Networth Individual). Ever since I started working, I realised that I had a knack of getting along with people effortlessly. Somehow, people around me often sought my advice & and my solutions were working well with respect to developing & nurturing their skillset. Guiding and counselling people around me in various elements, went into the right direction, which gave me immense satisfaction. Hence I felt as if HR was the right domain for me to hone my skills in people engagement & training them to be the best version of themselves.

HR is one practice that touches human lives directly. Do you think employers and specially HR Professional can play role in reducing stress levels of employees through various employee engagement initiatives?

For me, the term HR does not refer to the Human Resources, but Happy Resources. I believe that for an organization to thrive, it needs to pay its maximum attention to the welfare of its strongest asset – its employees. My mantra is to keep a motivating & encouraging atmosphere in the office, so that people’s happiness is visible in their work too. 
In today’s digitization and automation world we can surely automate processes and improvise the productivity but where will we get the human touch. According to me people need people, in organization employees are so stressed not only with their work but also travelling to and fro to office. Hence in an organization, it becomes the responsibility of the HR to introduce and execute various activities which will help to reduce stress, engage and motivate employees. This connects employees not only at a professional level, but also at a personal level as it engages employees to observe each other’s habits & peculiar traits. 

What are some of the most important employee engagement initiatives related to Music, Art, Dance or Sports that you have taken in your career?

Being a sports & fitness enthusiast myself, I strongly connect to the nature as the best healer of man-made stress. This ideology gave rise to ‘Synergy – The Team Building workshop’ which is an outbound training program, carried over a weekend, for the entire gamut of teams. I believe that team building happens stronger when you put people in a fresh situation than the usual chain mailers at their desk.
We also have our glamorous as much as we can- Datamatics Annual Achievers Awards, which is held every year across all functional locations of Datamatics group. During the function, we showcase the talent our employees carry. Be it singing, mimicry, or dances or even the audience fillers, everything is orchestrated by out in-house team. This gives our budding management role-bearers a platform to hone their people skills We have a group named Josh @ Datamatics under its umbrella, Josh volunteers with the support of HR team executes various activities and festivals throughout the year, there are various competitions being held i.e. Karoke, Master Chef, Sudoko, Diwali, Christmas, Holi, Republic Day, Independence Day etc etc. When we talk about sports we have a dedicated Cricket Team which plays at Club level with various corporates and have won various tournaments in last few years. Similarly we have Football team who participates and competes with various corporates. For women’s day, we had set a back-to-school theme and played various games in reminiscene of their childhood.

Do you think time and cost for employee engagements are an investment for the organisation and can help in multi-fold returns?

Engaging Employees is the most powerful element which every organization needs to undertake, the more you invest in engaging people, the more returns the organization gets. We have seen that engaged employees are more productive and happy as compared to the non-engaged employees. I must say that engagement and productivity are linked to each other. Happy and Engaged Employee delivers much more than the expected and hence the employee in my terms is a HR- Happy Resource.

Do you feel there is a need even to reach out to the family of employees so that they get better connected to the company? Have you undertaken any such initiative in your past or current organization?

I believe that every employee working in an organization is as a family member and the employee’s family is an extended family. As we consider the parents, spouse etc. as a family member it a duty of an HR to draft policies in such a way that the extended family is involved in the know-how of their near and dear ones. We call parents/spouse at the annual award event as a special guest and felicitate and recognize the employee/s in front of the entire organization. We have an event named “Kids at Work” in which for a full day an employee spends time with his/her kids in the office as we arrange games and competitions for them.
HR team gets immense satisfaction when happiness and pride is seen in both employee and family member’s eyes. For us, our employees are no less than our families, since we spend almost maximum wake hours around them.

What is the one change that you would like to bring in HR practice that has potential to boost employees work-life balance?

In today’s traffic world it is extremely difficult and time consuming to commute in Indian cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai etc. Average travel time taken by any employee is approx. 4 hours per day. If any employee spends 4 hours in his travel, 9 hours working in office then where is the time left for his immediate family. Hence one change I would like to get in every organization is WFH – Work from Home and WDC – Work During Commute. WDC is that when an employee logs in during his travel we should consider his/her login hours.

What are your personal interests in Music, Art, Dance or Sports and how do you continue to pursue it?

Sports is something which I am going to continue all my life. I have been an avid runner & an active member of marathon groups across the city. I love driving, travelling and trekking, recently completed two difficult treks – Chadder Trek and Brahmatal Trek. An interesting thing about me is that I Love music and recently have started singing.  Have actively performed and enjoyed singing in the organization’s award functions. I would love to continue singing for my entire life.

Any other thoughts you may want to share.

There is lot of scope to be done in HR to make it a happier practice. Current requirements cannot follow the age-old methods and technique. We cannot follow people; we should see what people need. If you give respect you get respect, understanding people is a skill and disrespecting everyone makes one lead to nowhere in life.