<div><strong>Sandyp Bhattacharya , VP and Global Head of HR, Mahindra Comviva</strong>, has successfully managed culturally diverse environments in a global scenario, spread across entities and continents. The biggest challenge to a HR practitioner in his mind lies in sifting true talent within and outside the organisation. Sandyp has many ‘youngest firsts’ to his credit and was among the youngest HR professionals in the industry to occupy a Management leadership position, when he became part of Comviva’s Apex Leadership Team in 2008. With a Masters in (Personnel) Management, from Pune University, Bhattacharya was presented the ‘HR Leadership’ Award at the Asia Pacific HRM Congress, 2012.<br /><br /><strong>What made you to choose HR as a profession? </strong><br />For two primary reasons. I had an inherent interest in human behaviour. Also, I wished to influence positive change around me. HR profession gave an interesting opportunity to achieve both. I felt at that stage that talent pool in this space was not adequately developed, and in a rapidly evolving domain, I saw a great career opportunity for myself.<br /><br /><strong>What has been the biggest achievement in your career? </strong><br />There have been successes and failures on a regular basis. I feel that culmination of a series of successful global initiatives by my team during one of my stints gave a lot of satisfaction. It created a highly engaged, focussed and capable team. Amongst many capable leaders and teams, I was chosen for the President’s Annual Award. The highest annual award of the company. Apart from this, the sheer pleasure of seeing people groomed by you reach high levels of recognition in the company and industry gives me a lot of satisfaction. I feel, the quality of leaders you create and leave behind in the industry is one the biggest measures of professional success.<br /><br /><strong>What have been, the primary traits/qualities that have helped you attain your present position?</strong></div><ul><li>The desire to learn new things, and unlearn things which are not relevant anymore. It is easier to learn but more difficult to give up and unlearn what has worked for us in the past, but are losing relevance now is a more difficult.</li><li>Courage to stand up for one’s views, and show with conviction and passion.</li><li>Strategic thinking and rigor in following them through with actions.</li><li>Basic planning and preparedness with a detail oriented approach from any large initiative to a simple thing like a small meeting that is coming up.</li><li>Innovation and thinking out of the box. Not the herd mentality.</li><li>Building relationships.</li><li>Integrity and Transparency in words, thoughts and actions.</li></ul><div><br /><strong>What are the challenges you are facing in organisation?</strong><br />The biggest challenge is to sift out true talent within and outside the organisation from the huge pool of people around us. True talent is rare. Once one finds them, we must give them the freedom and keep them developed and engaged. <br /><br /><strong>What are the steps a company should take to develop and motivate future leaders?</strong><br />It is critical for the organisations to establish multi-pronged approach and mechanisms to identify high potential individuals. Having found them, as mentioned earlier, one must give them the freedom; and keep them developed and engaged. Most importantly, they should have the freedom to fail. Mentorship for such people also can enhance this leadership development process.<br /><br /><strong>What is your rate of attrition? How do you prevent it?</strong><br />Based on anecdotal data, we could be anywhere at 20-30 per cent lower than the industry average in our space. We drive engagement through our internally developed People Focus Octagon Model, acronymed ENERGIZE. Some of the aspects like Engagement, learning opportunities, competitive salaries and benefits, open environment and challenging and meaningful work makes Mahindra Comviva one of the most preferred employers in this space.<br /><br /><strong>How do you retain talent in your company?</strong><br />As mentioned above we follow an employee first philosophy. The thumb rule is – if in any situation, a human decision is equally divided between an employee and the corporate side; we would bend towards the employee. We believe, over a period of time this almost always creates employee and organisation working together on the same side.<br /><br /><strong>What sets your company apart from other companies as far as work culture goes?</strong></div><ul><li>Open and informal work culture.</li><li>Allowing people to fail and do well again.</li><li>Allowing people to break the boundaries.</li><li>Approachability – open door approach by all levels.</li><li>Employee First Approach.</li></ul><div> <br /><strong>What is the biggest challenge you face when selecting people?</strong><br />The talent pool in the VAS, mobile financials and related domain is not adequate to meet industry needs. We have to dig outside the domain to look for people. But our answer to this is grooming talent from within. We therefore do a strong campus programme called ‘Comcubs’ where we hire brightest engineers from top 25 campuses every year. We also do B-school hiring from premier institutes like IIMs, London Business School etc. and look towards investing in them over the years to occupy 80 per cent of all our talent requirements.<br /><br /><strong>How do you track of employees' satisfaction or dissatisfaction?</strong><br />Formal engagement surveys year on year, apart from other functional surveys and internal feedback mechanisms, like heart to heart, employee dipsticks that happen during the course of the year on a regular basis.<br /><br /><strong>How has HR been important to the bottom line of the company? </strong><br />We are into people business. We have a strong role to play in impacting cost structure, quality of innovation and creating a talent pipeline of the company. We strongly facilitate the employee productivity improvement. In the last 4 years, our gross revenue per employee has more than doubled.<br /><br /><strong>How has the downturn affected HR? </strong><br />There has not been any impact as far I am concerned<br /><strong><br />How should HR be integrated with the core line of business? </strong><br />By truly understanding business and understanding the nuances of the same from revenue, growth, market, cost and delivery challenges perspective.<br /><br /><strong>If you could change three things about HR practices, what would they be?</strong><br />I would only add understanding of business. One clear measure would be- asking HR people to be able to write 90 per cent of job descriptions themselves instead of asking business to do the same. This automatically would ensure that HR understands the business. Today they rely significantly on line managers to do the same.<br /><br />(<strong>As told to Poonam Kumar</strong>)<br /> </div>
