HR Transformation Unplugged: Myths, Realities, and Strategic Levers with Vikas Maheshwary

Speaker A: Reality tv, because there's a lot of drama, and I love drama. Let's be real. Our HR practices haven't changed in decades. Authenticity eats perfection for breakfast every time. In some areas, AI is not augmentative. It is actually replacing. There will be a phase where human skills would become a premium.

Speaker B: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another insightful episode of the Digital Adoption Show. I'm, um, your host, Ria Rati, senior digital adoption strategist here at what Fix. And today we have a powerpick conversation lined up for you. Make sure you're subscribed. We are available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. So today's conversation promises to challenge your perspectives and deepen your understanding of HR transformation and transformation in general. Our episode is aptly titled HR Transformation Myths, Realities, and Strategic Levers. And I'm thrilled to welcome our, uh, expert guest, Vikas Maheshwari, AVP of HR Transformations. Vikas, welcome to our show.

Speaker A: Thanks, Riya. Thanks for having me here.

Speaker B: Now, before we dive into the heavy lifting topics, let's kick things off with a fun round of this or that situations.

Speaker A: Hang on. This or that? What does that mean?

Speaker B: It's just you need to choose in some options that I'll give you just a fun bit to start to kick off the show with. Right.

Speaker A: Bring it on.

Speaker B: All right, so comedy or mystery?

Speaker A: Uh, comedy. Life is full of mysteries.

Speaker B: Anyway, plus one on that. Reality TV or documentary?

Speaker A: Reality tv, because there's a lot of drama, and I love drama.

Speaker B: That's interesting. Video calls or text messages?

Speaker A: Video calls any day. At least there's some human interactions.

Speaker B: Yeah. Candid shots or post photos.

Speaker A: Candid shots, because they're authentic. I love authenticity.

Speaker B: Okay. Okay, this one is very interesting. Never losing your keys again or never forgetting a password.

Speaker A: Never losing the keys because passwords can be retrieved. And I remember there was this one time I was looking for my car keys, which were actually in my pocket, but I spent about 20 minutes just looking around for them. Oh.

Speaker B: So we'll let go the passwords. All right, so that was fun. Now back to business and, uh, let's dive into art for the today's conversation. I've seen you often mention things about HR transformations and how transformation space is in general. I would really like if you could peek our listeners into your thoughts on how an ideal transformation project, especially the HR ones, should look like.

Speaker A: Where do I start from? If you look at this whole world of transformation, I think it's a fairly well abused word, if I was to say. And I'm sorry, because Your title of the episode is also Transformation. It's almost like a buzzword that goes around and everybody has different definitions of what transformation really is. HR transformation. I think the way people define it is to say that somebody who comes does a lot of systems, technology, implementations, et cetera. But I think that transformation in HR is pretty much about people, process and then technology. You start from people, you don't start from technology, you think a lot about processes. So your start point is not technology. And that's the myth that exists that a lot of organizations, when they even post job descriptions of HR transformation, you will find that there's a lot of call out on systems and technology in hr. I'm not saying that technology is not important, but the start point is not tech. Never.

Speaker B: All right, that's pretty insightful. I mean, I agree ah to it in a, uh, greater extent. So what do you think how the guidelines should be made for all these processes to come first before the technology,

Speaker A: even before you get to the guidelines? I think it's important for whoever is driving HR transformation to understand that why are we doing it right? People say that why fix it if it's not broken? I think that the reason you bring in an HR transformation capability within your organization is to get better at doing things. And it's not something new. We've been doing this for many, many decades. When I started my career in 97, we were pretty manual in nature and then came this whole E governance and IT revolution and a whole lot of other things. But the reason why we were doing things differently one is because you always want to evolve, you always want to get better at doing what you do. Second, there is a generation that you handle, there is a certain workforce that you handle. If you look at today's workforce, they expect consumer grade experience in organizations unlike my age where we were happy being or getting whatever we were getting. But today the expectations are a bit different. Also there is this strategic optic of saying that lines of businesses also make an impact, right? When you evolve your nature of business or what you deliver to the organization. So for example, there was a retail, which was a very brick and mortar kind of setup, and then came E Commerce, right? And then we started saying that we'll send things online. And then came, okay, there is a B2B way of doing business, then there is a B2C way of doing business, and then there is a B2B2C way of doing business. A lot of these are uh, strategic decisions that organizations take which is on the line of business or the way you operate. So your operating model per se goes through a change. Now if that happens, then obviously there is something that you need to change in your way of working. Right? Because you're not catering to your operating model if you do not change your way of working. So that's another reason why you look at HR transformation. The third is that you always are chasing a top line or a bottom line. Unless you're an ngo. You would be looking at greater revenues but at the same time you would want to build efficiency. So I think HR transformation initiatives pretty much cover these three areas. Which is to say that how are we catering our processes, our uh, policies and the others to the workforce that we have at HM hand? Second is that how are our ways of working being changed? Change is the wrong word. But how are they getting better to kind of cater to the operating model? And third is of course how you're building efficiencies. So these are the reasons why you would get onto the path of HR transformation.

Speaker B: So from what I could understand, we could focus more on skills based organizations and a setup.

Speaker A: You could. There's so many things. If you had to really ask me, what are uh, the multiple areas of impact? Okay, let's start up top. Let's be real. Our HR practices haven't changed in decades. You still have a performance management system which is fairly old school. We still follow the rank and yank approach, just put people into buckets. Our uh, learning and development initiatives, while we do talk about, okay, we're getting better on tech as far as learning and uh, development is concerned, but it is still very generic, it's old school. A lot of uh, our practices haven't changed. The job architectures that we do, the uh, using the job evaluation methods. A lot of these practices need to be looked at. I'll give you a small little anecdote. I remember when I started my career and then somewhere in 2002 I became one of those guys who would be sent into training programs. So I was nominated for a manager development program. It was a four day program. I loved it. I went to the program, everybody around me was saying, hey listen, there's going to be a four days of interaction with your other colleagues. There's going to be a lot of post training workshops. In the evening you would get down together, have dinner, have drinks and party and all of that. To be very honest, the reason I was going there was because I wanted to socialize. Four days of that workshop and I came back, hand to my heart, a lot of things that I learned There did I ever implement or did I ever know how to implement? The answer is no, I didn't know. All right? And that's true for a lot of people who go through these long programs. I wonder, was the what's in it for me very clear? Was it. So I was going there with a whiffim, as we say, what's in it for me to say that I want to meet people, I want to socialize, I want to network, I want to have a great time in the evenings. But did I go saying that, okay, I'm going to learn delegation and negotiation and this is the problem that I'm going to solve? There was no such connections. Okay. And that is an example of how our uh, age old practices need to be revamped. You refer to skills based organizations. And I've been speaking about it for quite a few years and I think it's a fairly disruptive way of looking at how hr, ah, operates in organizations. Yeah, uh, a lot of people come and say, Vikal, what's the difference? We've always been in HR designing things like competencies. And then we go and say that, oh well, you're an hrbp. Here are the five things that you need to do.

Speaker B: There's a formula to everything.

Speaker A: There's a formula, right? And it is common for all skills based organizations actually try and say that can we get a little more deeper, can we get more strategic skills based organization, Try and enhance productivity in the organization. It is not something that you do because you want to get better at just learning and development programs. It is something that you do because you want to impact your bottom line. You want to show a real ROI behind uh, learning and development. You want to look at skills and make your hiring decisions basis the skill ecosystem in your organization. If you're getting a new line of business, you try and understand that to run this line of business and be successful on it. What are the skills that I need? Not the people, the skills that I need in the organization. When you start thinking like that, your entire ecosystem of HR operations goes through massive disruption. I think if you've read the book Work Without Jobs, I came across it last year and I think a lot of what I've been doing on the skills side of building a skills based organization is resonating there. So the world is moving towards this. It's not something that I am saying as an art of possible, it is something that is happening where jobs are getting fractionalized. So if there is a job, there are some people sitting there like me, who are now trying to break it down to tasks, okay? Every job. And then for each of those tasks, trying to find what are the skills required. And then they are creating an operating model which is basis the skills and not the roles.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So this is happening. This is a reality today. And the next step, obviously is to map this to KPI so that you can put. So traditionally, we always allocate roles and KPIs, right? All I'm saying is that maybe it's time for us to start allocating, uh, KPI basis skills or skills basis KPIs.

Speaker B: So based on the example and the anecdote that you quoted, would you rather have your own employees learn on that skills or would you hire externally?

Speaker A: Okay, Riya, you've just thrown a curveball at me. Okay? It's not an easy question to answer. Here's the thing. I think the way I would, uh, so let me say this is more about would you buy a skill or would you build a skill? I think the way I would look at solving for this is to say that the skill that we are discussing, okay, for which the decision has to be taken, is it an emerging skill, hot skill, or is it a maintaining or a declining skill? One second consideration I would have is that if this skill is connected to a certain KPI and a KPI to a certain objective, and that objective is something extremely important to me and I do not have time at hand, I would rather buy.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: But if I have time, and I know that this is not something which is an immediate need for me, I would want to build. A lot of people, a lot of your listeners may not like this answer of mine, but let's think it. Let's step back and take off our HR hats and think like a CEO of the organization. If at the end of the day you are driving productivity, you are chasing a certain top line, and time is money. So your decisions of hiring or developing have to be based on that. So therefore, I remember there's this. There's this declining skill that I keep talking about. And if you read the WEF reports of 2025, data analytics has been called out as something like a declining skill. Okay, all right.

Speaker B: Okay. Uh hm.

Speaker A: I would actually go deeper to the response to your question to say that I would also think of not just build and develop or buy, but I would also think of what am I retiring, right? Which are the skills which are becoming redundant because there's an AI or there is a system or there's an sop. So how Do I also, at every given juncture think of which are the roles which are getting redundant or maybe some parts of the role are getting redundant so I need to repurpose that. So these are the kind of decisions that I would take. But my reference point would always be is this skill something that I have time to build? If I don't, I would rather buy. Now, you could rebut, you could say, what if the skill is not available in the market, then I have no other choice. And I come from uh, some organizations which are in the pharma space and they're chasing a certain skill for which they have a handful of people in the market. Okay. It's a small, very incestuous kind of an operation. So if the skill is not available okay. In the market, then I have no other option but to develop it. Okay. So these are the considerations that I would have before I decide on build or a buy strategy.

Speaker B: Considering the pace of things moving around, I think it's every day that when we see that there's something new and there's something that's dying. So you mentioned AI. So what do you think about AI agents? Like how are they moving into the transformation space or innovation space?

Speaker A: Okay, so when you think of AI here, a lot of my colleagues, they come up and I'm. And they say that AI augments, right? That AI is augmentative. I'm going to say something very controversial, but it's bold to say. And I would say that, mark my words, you may after a year agree or disagree, I could be wrong. But I think in some areas AI is actually a replacement. It is not augmentative, it is actually replacing. I know of people in some organizations who have certain elements of HR as full day jobs. Preparing a 9 box, for example, a full day job. And I can tell you with the right kind of a tech implementation, AI enabled, you can do this without a human interaction. Right? So are we talking augmentation or are we talking replacement? And then comes this whole world of agentic AI, which actually is not just about content creation or it's just not about generating a ah, response to your prompt. It actually does a task. Yeah, right. Am I wrong to say that they are going to replace or are they just augmented? It's something that we will have to wait and watch. But I'm willing to put my put a wager on saying that it's actually going to be replacing. A lot of our efforts and human jobs are made of efforts. If you are able to replace through an agentic 10 things that I do in a day, then what else am I supposed to do? But that also means that people who have adopted AI or who are adopting AI, they have to think little differently. You have to open up your brains to say that, okay, if this is gone, this part of my job is gone, then what else can I do and how do I make myself relevant? And I'm not saying that we have to upskill ourselves on Python and neural networks and take control of forward or backward propagation on an AI model, none of that. But how smartly are we able to use AI? And here's my second big bold statement. Okay? I think that the next few years is going to be a lot of disruption in the way of working, especially because of agentic AI. But then there will be a phase where human skills would become a premium because people will realize, well, all of this is done, but there's something that's missing and that's the empathy. All right, Initially, there'll be a lot of excitement around the glamour quotient of an AI. If that starts happening, then what are we left with? We're left with human interactions, we're left with empathy, we're left with human skills. And they will become a premium over the next once this whole phase of initial excitement of AI is done.

Speaker B: I also read this somewhere, adding to this, or maybe a controversy to this, that back 25, 30 years when computers came in so everyone was afraid about their jobs, that, okay, computers are something that's going to take us job. And I think this is the same cycle happening for the AI transformation.

Speaker A: Nailed it. Okay, excellent. And I was a part of that journey because I was working with this company called NIIT limited and we were an IT education company. And I remember we'd picked up this one order with a bank, I'm not going to name the bank, we picked up a corporate training order. So we were supposed to go and train them on Ms. Office skills and how to operate a computer. And I am kidding you, not a lot of people would have seen memes around this. But this has happened to me in person. I was in that room conducting a corporate training workshop, training people on how to use computers. So the first lesson was, how do you switch on and switch off a computer, right? And there was this one gentleman who was looking at, at the screen and feeling very annoyed. And I just walked up to him, I said, sir, what's wrong? He said, your computers don't work. He said, the keyboard is wrong, this keyboard is incorrect. I said, what's wrong? And he Said, uh, there is no any key in the computer. A, N, Y. I said, why do you need an any key? He says, because on the screen you see press any key to continue. I can't find the any key. Okay. And I didn't know should I laugh or should I? But then that was the phase and a lot of people used to. You're right, people used to say, oh, this is just a phase. You know, you can't replace human interventions. Look at what Excel has done. So these disruptions happened and people did lose jobs. Why are we not willing to admit that people have lost jobs because of an automation and today because of AI? A recent Josh Burson article and a uh, podcast I was listening to. And Josh Burson is my God, by the way. So he said that there are a lot of companies which have put the white collar hiring on freeze because they want to see whether with the impact of AI, do they really need these people? I get it. If you're working in a blue collar space, working on a machine, but a white collar job, probably there are certain areas, there's certain tasks, as I keep saying, which uh, will become redundant. Okay. And therefore there is an impact on the jobs. And it is about time that somebody started saying that. Guys, let's get our act together, get better at this because this is coming, this is here. This is not something that's going to happen five years down the line. This is right now, right here.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think farming's going to come back to the picture.

Speaker A: I would love it. I wish I had a land somewhere, but yeah, would love it.

Speaker B: I think working together, like working with a computer, working with Microsoft is something that is the only way we can survive. So working with the AI, I think that will save all of our jobs. Yeah.

Speaker A: AI is a part of your team. Agentic AI is what you spoke about. It has to be a part of your organogram. You have to give it the right spot and consider that as a part of team and keep training it. By keep training it, when I say keep training it, I mean make it better. Okay? Make it do better jobs. From a uh, 3.5 AI model to a 4.5, we've come to O1 which just doesn't listen and just doesn't read and just doesn't see but also thinks so. The O1 model of AI actually thinks so. Why is that? Not a team member of mine, but I know a lot of people think that. What about me then? Well, let's look inside and let's see what else can we do. So you spoke about skills based organization, Right. The AI would give you recommendations, references, models, frameworks, but the eventual design of it will always be a human. Right. But the transactions between that, transaction of implementation, transactions of getting some data together, all of that can be driven through an agent. So let's get that. So our focus is now more and more on design. Okay. Strategy. And then we move forward in life.

Speaker B: So Vikas, I think enterprise performance management, that is something I feel that often flies under the radar. So what unique capabilities would you think that all of us can bring to the table compared to the traditional performance management applications and strategies?

Speaker A: Let's do a role reversal. Let me for the next 30 seconds be the host of the show and actually ask a very simple question to you that you've been a corporate employee for so many years. Okay. Uh, what is it about performance management that you as an employee do not like?

Speaker B: Okay. So I think it's a very tedious and a very long process and defining the goals, defining every quarter the same thing again and again, giving the feedbacks to it, the feedbacks of the system. I understand that it's important, but yeah, that's something that's a bit.

Speaker A: So you don't like the clunky forms, a lot of writing to do.

Speaker B: And it's the same thing.

Speaker A: And it's the same thing. And you also know. I also know that a lot of times we ask, oh, this is what you've written, give it to me. I'll also copy paste. But that's on the process side. But how about on the outcome side? So let's suppose at the end of the year something happens, right? Ratings, this, that. What's your reaction to that? Do you like what you see as an outcome or you don't?

Speaker B: Honestly, no. Because I believe in all of these processes. When everyone's filling anything or there's a back and forth here, I'm not sure if everyone's honest or not.

Speaker A: Because you think that your manager. Okay. And I'm not saying that your manager, but uh, pretty much a lot of people think that you're. That the manager, when he or she rated me on my performance, was only thinking about the last two, three months of my performance, but the full year picture was missing.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Which we call the recency bias. Yeah. By the way, there are some many biases in a performance management system. But then if you could nail down for the last 30 seconds, one minute, if you could nail down so many challenges in the performance management process, why haven't we fixed it okay. And this is where I say that we in HR have to be solving for this with a very open mind. We cannot be applying learned behaviors over the last 20, 30 years, 40 years. By the way, performance management is an industrial era, uh, practice.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: We are now in a very different. So we have to think differently, we have to reinvent ourselves. And this is what enterprise performance management, my version of enterprise performance management was. So by the way, enterprise performance management, if you just Google it out, has been there. Finance and uh, strategy teams have led that as a decision making tool. I just want to take it deeper. And my view is that if we as hr, we go and we claim that performance management in the organization is my role. Okay? And I'm going to manage that. Then let's manage it. Let's not judge, uh, because that's what we're doing. We're doing a judge and a jury at the end of the year, right? Where there's a judge who's the manager, there is a jury which is, let's say the HRBPs and the other. And then there's an employee and somebody like a jury or a judge, they come together and they say, um, good, bad, ugly, isn't it? But what are we doing as a proactive measure? Are we reacting or are we being proactive? We're actually reacting. Right. How amazing would it be if Riya, you in the morning, just like your Apple nudges and fitness nudges, etcetera, you get a thing saying that, you know what? Today your daily KPI was, let's say $100. You are going to fall short by about $20. Okay, here are the three things that you can do and you can ensure that your daily run rate is not missed. And this is somebody who's talking to you, who's not a manager, who's not reviewing you. This is not somebody who comes and starts preaching you. It actually gives you three hardcore implementable actions saying that do these and you will be able to achieve it. You might like it. Yeah. You might like this because it's a nudge. Yeah, yeah. It's not a, it's not a crazy email or it's not something which is saying what the hell are you doing? No. So you would like it if it has been designed. The nudge has been designed with a positive psychology and not necessarily with a negative connotation. That's what your fitness apps and the others do with the nudge. So that's managing because you're helping the employee become more productive. So that's one element of enterprise performance management. The other element or the outcome of an enterprise performance management is it's a decision making tool. What happens in an organization is that we design KPIs, right? We design or OKRs. Uh, for me it's just tomato, tomato. But when you design these KPIs, most of these end up becoming intent statements or project plans. They're not in the true sense of a KPI. Now step back and imagine for a minute that in your organization again you had a top objective. And we go back to my earlier story saying the top objective is digital transformation. And you have a measure, five measures, and now you've assigned it to some people, some this, that, whatever. Now assuming that you are the CHRO and there's one KPI which has been assigned to you because you have the necessary skills, now your doctors will also have some KPIs. Yeah, imagine if these KPIs were connected to the CHRO's KPIs, okay, right now the chro's doctors also have some doctors direct reports. Imagine if these KPIs were connected to the direct reports, KPIs of the CHRO and eventually to the Chro and eventually to the CEO and keep going down and down. So what you are basically trying to create is a KPI tree and you are establishing not a correlation but a causality between KPIs, saying that if at the junior most level some KPI performance is dinging or is not happening, what is going to be the impact across the full tree all the way to the CEOs KPI? If you can get that kind of a visualization, um, suddenly the decision making process in an organization changes. It is not reactive, it's proactive. Now giving you a real life example, let's suppose you're a manufacturing company and your manufacturing depends on the products that you source, the raw materials that you source. Assuming that there is a supply chain person, a very junior person, and there was some raw material that the person was supposed to source, which hasn't happened five days of a delay. But since you have this KPI tree, you can now easily calculate that the minute there is a three day delay, you don't wait for five days or 10 days. The minute there's a three day delay, you know what is going to be the impact on batch, throughput, production, et cetera, and from production to supply chain, as in sending the products out to sales, eventually that entire map is available to you. So if somebody can take a decision in the whole food processing chain, somebody can take a decision saying, because there's been a three day lift this product, let's not prepare for this product's production. There is an alternative that I can look at, okay? And let's focus all our energies, uh, to build that because for that we have the raw material coming in on time. I'm giving a very simplistic example just to help you understand what enterprise performance does from a decision making point of view. The third is employee experience. Because going back to the first example of you getting nudges, imagine if every day you know what your performance is. Are you doing good, are you not doing good? There is no surprises at the end of the year. Uh, you know it when you get into performance management process that I didn't do that well or I did absolutely brilliant, okay? And then you get your ratings because the system clearly calls it out that you have done 120% of your KPIs, you will get a performance rating which is rewarding to that kind of performance. So all of these things you can do if you start working on the enterprise performance management. I call it enterprise because there is an element of decision making. I could have called it reinvented performance management, the new age performance management. No, but it has got an enterprise view because every employee's contribution to the organization is seen here. Therefore it's an enterprise view to performance management.

Speaker B: So this often comes up that there are just problem statements in all of these conversations and there's no solution to it. Like I would bring in with my team that okay, these are the problem statements, but who is giving the solution? I don't think anyone is. And I think the approach that you mentioned, the tree approach that you mentioned, I think that would beneficial and we actually internally at what fix are going through these changes? Oh, is it like from a traditional systems to like a new approach where all the KPIs, the OKRs of every management level is visible to everyone and

Speaker A: they're connected to each other.

Speaker B: Yeah, they are a bit connected to each other because at the end of the day everyone's success and everyone's failure is together. But I would like to understand from the employee standpoint of view that how can we all be better at uh, going through these changes? Because oftentimes we all are also resistant to it. Every change comes with a resistance. So how can we do that?

Speaker A: I think if you look at change. So let's create an equation. How do you drive change in organization? Let's address that. If change was C, so then C is equal to four times in brackets M, M plus three times in brackets V. Okay? V as in victory plus two times in brackets I minus F and close the bracket. Now what does that mean? M stands for the motivation, okay? Okay. V stands for the value proposition, uh, of your solution. Um, I stands for incentive to change and F stands for friction in the process. Just think about it. Anything that you bring on board, okay? And this equation, to my mind actually applies in everything in life, okay? Anything that you bring on board, no amount of your hammering with internal communication and this and that will make an impact till the user's motivation levels are there. And that's why I say the highest factor in change is the user's motivation. And that is where this whole exercise of building a wifim or a wifu, what's in it for you? What's in it for me? That has to be very clearly articulated, okay? Then comes the value proposition that by doing this, what really changes, okay? Which is like the second most important factor. And then comes the third most important factor, which is there has to be an incentive to change. If by adopting an enterprise performance management, I'm able to get better on my productivity, that's an incentive to change. But if the tech that I'm using is too clunky or doesn't work at times, then that's a friction in the process, isn't it? So when you cater to each of these elements and then you create your change impact or a change management strategy, you'll be much better. The problem is that a lot of us in the change management functions, one rely on somebody called a change management function. Change is not, uh, a siloed initiative, it is everybody's responsibility. The problem also exists when everybody is saying different things. My version of why you are bringing in enterprise performance management has to be the same to an HR vp, has to be the same for a CEO, has to be same across managers. Everybody has to be talking the same narrative, and that narrative has to be thought through properly. As I said, think about the motivation for the user, think about the value proposition, think about the incentive to change and the friction in the process. When you think about all of this, you get the right story out and then go ahead and implement a solution. If I give you a quick example, let's suppose you lost your phone right now, okay? Your motivation to buy that phone is so high that even if there is a friction in the process that you have to go 10 miles and buy, you have to spend a lot of money, you will still go ahead and buy Absolutely. Can you make your story so strong that there is a reason for you to adopt something? Uh, you gave me five examples of the reasons why you hate performance management. If your story was to tell that this is how we are solving for it, no surprises at the end of the year. Uh, you are rewarded for your true performance, not perceived performance. You are getting better in productivity day by day, and for that we will reward you. Suddenly my motivation is so high that I just want to go and adopt the new process that you put for enterprise performance.

Speaker B: Could you share some examples of any organizations where these systems are perfectly in place?

Speaker A: Don't ask me questions that you find answers on Google or these days GPT. Okay. But if you go there, you'll find many, many organizations. I think Walmart's done a great job on epm. There are many others. Okay. IBM is another one. And they use it as a decision making tool as much as they use it for employee satisfaction. A lot of companies, there are products which have been created specifically for enterprise performance management. Okay. And they drive this, this whole connectedness between KPIs. The KPIs connected to a certain kind of a, uh, skill. A lot of these systems are available, but system, as I kept saying, I said in the beginning, you should attack the system at the end. First get your processes, get your stories, design your Personas in the organization. And then once you've done all of that, then wire the tech accordingly. I've said this so many times that I keep getting bored of saying it. Are you going to be wiring your processes around tech or a tech around a process? So you have to be very careful about answering this question. Because if you're going to just bring in a tech okay, and then say okay, because the tech does this. So my processes are going to be the way the tech wants me to do it. Eight out of ten times you'll fail. But think about your process. Then get the tech, the right tech and wire it on the front process. There.

Speaker B: There needs to be a link between all of these. Digital adoption.

Speaker A: Oh yeah.

Speaker B: Tech implementation.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Yes.

Speaker B: How do you think that we can be better?

Speaker A: Yeah. This is all going back to the fundamentals. Right. How do you do your tech orchestration? I keep saying that a lot of, uh, I. Okay. A lot of companies, they buy tech out of pure influence and they end up with a lot of tech debt in the organization. The reason you pick up a tech is because everybody's picking it up.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, stop doing that. Okay. First create your architecture. So I worked in one of These organizations where I said, okay, let's have a four tier architecture to a HR tech orchestration, where at the bottom most layer we would have a system of records, then we would have a system of intelligence, then we would have a system of experience. And on top of that you would have things like point and solutions like POCs. Let me break this down. A system of record. A lot of the HR IMs, solutions, without taking their names to my view, they've become a glorified Excel. And they will be a glorified Excel till the time they bring in some intelligence.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So beyond the normal ESS or whatever the terms are, uh, leave management, you also want some intelligence on top of it, Right. So what are the systems that you're bringing in there? And then on top of that you want a system of experience. You said it that you hate filling up those clunky forms. How amazing it would be that if you had a tech which was like a ui of a WhatsApp, you just enter three things and it's done.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You want to apply for a leave, don't want to go through five, six, seven, eight steps. You say, hey, listen, I need a leave tomorrow. The bot or whatever tells you you have five days of balance in your cl, you want to use that or an el, you say cl, uh, done, finished. If that was the experience that you want to give, there is some investment that you need to make there. And then there is a point, uh, point solutions or a POC layer, which I call it, which is to say that there will always be new tech coming in, while your bottom three layers are all integrated to each other, talking to each other, but there will always be something new which is coming up. You don't necessarily bring in a new tech and then integrate it to your overall architecture. You want to see whether this works or not. So keep that layer at the top. Once you have established a POC and you see a reason for you to integrate that, then you integrate that. But all of this, you have to be careful about the roi. You do not invest in tech just because, as I keep saying, because of peer influence. Yeah. Or just because somebody came and made a massive pitch to you. No, you have to see that. What ROI does this give you and what's the real business case? And it has to be in dollar values, not estimations and cuts.

Speaker B: So at the back end you need to check, okay, do we need this or not? And if we need this, how do we implement it better and how do we adopt it better?

Speaker A: I think this, okay, let's stay here. You said, do we need this or not? If Henry Ford had asked his customers way back that, what do you need? They would have said, before the invention of cars, they would have said, we need four horses to pull a, uh, horse carriage. Nobody would have said a car. So what do we need? Is not something that all the time you would get an answer from the employees. A lot of times this is about the art of possible. That what is it that you can do differently which makes things better? AI is a classic example. A, uh, lot of people, nobody came up with saying that I need agentic AI. No customer went ahead and said, I need an agentic AI. But there were some people who were exploring the art of possible, and they came up with agentic AI. Today, an agentic AI exists which can pick up a product, do the sales of it, and report back to the CEO saying that this many products sold, the whole marketing team is getting impacted and sales teams are getting impacted with this. So that art of possible has to be thought of while there is also this whole need from an employee or understanding what the employee wants. But the art of possible should never be ignored.

Speaker B: So, Vikas, you have been mentioning about art of possibility, right? How do you think we can embrace or this thought can be embraced into the employees of any organization?

Speaker A: Okay, then we're talking about building a certain kind of a skill in the organization. Okay. If you want to get onto the path of identifying the art of possible, then there's very. It's a very important skill that needs to exist, and that's known as curiosity.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: If you're, if your organization or the people that you work with, if not curious enough, then they would always be doing the same old over and over again. Huh. Now a lot of people ask me, how do you build curiosity? I think what you guys are doing right now with this podcast is a great thing for such people to somewhere rekindle that lost skill of being curious. We were all curious when we were kids, right? And then something happened to us. It's called life. But how do you re. Excite those guys say that? Listen, there's lots that you can think differently about. So podcasts, conferences, events, reading, a lot of these things are important. I know there's a boss of mine, I mean, ex boss of mine. Can I call out his name?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure.

Speaker A: Naveen. Okay. Naveen Narayan. And I worked with him in Biocon. Biologics. He always said that you have to be out there, you have to be listening and talking and doing keynotes. And all of that. And we had a competition amongst each other. I said, listen, in my performance review, you will ask me how many thought leadership, uh, sessions did I attend and how many did I deliver and what did I learn and what did I bring back? This is something that I've experienced with one of my earlier bosses also Savita Jaktiani, who was with Landmark Group when I was working there heading the HR for Digital team. And he also had this thing that our people should be out there learning new things at events and conferences because that's where the new age best practices are shared. Not to say that academics are not important, going back to basics are not important. Everything is important. What is the new is something that you need to go out and explore. And he used to put that in the goal sheet of people saying, how many events do you attend this year? This is amazing. And that suddenly made people open up, uh, and think differently and innovate.

Speaker B: Shout out to Naveen on this and Savita Jaktiani. It's a very innovative thing. All right. I think we have spoken enough about transformation projects, innovations, change. This is something that is happening, will happen, always happen. There's a cycle to it. I would want to pick your brains on something that's been going on LinkedIn pretty much every alternate post. Something about Gen Z's and something about office politics. So your thoughts on it? This is a very open ended question. I would leave you to it.

Speaker A: Okay. Gen Z. Yeah. Okay. I think again, it's a bit of a curveball. Okay, again there. Because I'm not sure that how much should I exp. But I think that this is, this is basically marketers making a lot of money.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Right. When they say that there's a Gen Z, there's an alpha, there's a boomer, there's a millennial. Ah, they're assuming a lot. The only people who have made money with these hashtags is actually the marketers. And then we in HR get a buzzword to talk about. And then I also the same posts that you're referring to, I can think of a few. And where they say that Gen Z expectations are very different. I think not necessarily. We are stereotyping too much. Ways of working are different. But if you look at the current workforce that we have in the organizations, which is a lot of millennials and a lot of Gen Zs coming in and soon there will be a lot of alphas. There is one common thread that I'm seeing and I would say that for myself as well. Okay. Rather Two. One is that we have now started valuing authenticity. And I keep saying authenticity over perfection. Authenticity eats perfection for breakfast every time. All right, so authenticity over perfection. Because I think today's workforce expects you to be real. They don't want you to be coming with preachy thoughts. They work well. It's like a Shah Rukh Khan movie that you see, you come out you like very well, but after three, four days, you may have forgotten. Okay, no mal intent towards Shahrukh Khan movie. Ah, I just took that name. But any movie. Very few movies that stay inside your heart, that those are the movies that you find very authentic. The other is there's a trend that I see across workforce, which is people have started valuing productivity over presentism.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And this is something that happened. I think a, uh, lot of this is because of COVID All right. But pre Covid, we used to throw people at problems. I'm telling you, I've been a part of such conversations where one of the core KPIs that we used to look at is Manning. That what percentage of workforce do we have? Have we hired what we needed? Are we at 80% Manning, 90% Manning? But I think those days are gone. We've stopped throwing people at problems. Now we are saying that how can we get smarter about hiring and employees, not just another brick in the wall? Okay. A lot of these things have happened, and this is across generations. And I also know of certain organizations where they thought that everybody in a certain age group is a Gen Z, so they would prefer trophy perks like coffee machines, beanbags, fancy offices. But then I go back to those HR guys saying that, okay, you implemented all of this. How much did it impact as far as your attrition is concerned? Said nothing. Zilch, nada, zero. Uh, no impact whatsoever. And then I also know certain organizations, they say actually it impacted it adversely because a lot of people got intimidated that. Why are you doing all of this? We are very simple people. So I think a lot of this is about not generations, but Personas in an organization. Personas which are. Which. Which could take into consideration the background that you come from. If you think of a certain age group and you and that person comes from Bangalore, the upbringing is Bangalore or Delhi or Mumbai versus, let's say, Vizag or some tier 2, tier 3 cities. The behaviors are different. So you're looking at Personas and not generations. So that's the caution that I throw out there in the air, that don't just assume and stereotype and generalize. You Said politics.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, what was that? That was more interesting. I should have addressed that. So you said that. How do you handle politics? The office politics?

Speaker B: Yeah. Your thoughts on it?

Speaker A: See, I love office politics. I think it generates a certain kind of competitiveness in the organization and all of that. I'm a big Suits fan. For that matter, I love Harvey Spector. All of that is great. But I think there's one solution that I have in mind, M which is just come. Maybe AI solves for it.

Speaker B: Is it?

Speaker A: You see, why do politics happen? I mean, it's basically you and I not getting together, right? Not getting along in the sense that we have conflicts and this and that. If your tasks and my tasks were to replace by agentic AI, would there be any politics? Just a food for thought for you

Speaker B: and for your viewers perspective on both the things the Gen Z and the office politics. Okay, that's something to think about for all of us. Yeah, for sure. So, Vikas, thank you. Thank you for being here today. It has been a fantastic conversation. I actually had a pretty big thank you note for you. But since, uh, we're talking about authenticity, let's just keep it aside. All right. The session was very insightful. A bit of controversies here and there, but it was a pleasure talking to you and I look forward to more conversations with you. It was a very fresh perspective. Different perspective from what we have been reading, from what we have been hearing generally. So it was great to have you here today. Thank you.

Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you, Riya, for having me here. And I think I can feel that energy coming from you. And I think the reason you enjoyed this was because none of this was scripted. Okay. A lot of this was straight from the heart. I wish you all the very, uh, best for successful this episode and many more episodes going forward.

Speaker B: For sure. Thank you. Would love to have you back. For our listeners here, if you found value in today's episode, please subscribe, rate and share the digital Adoption show. Stay tuned for more impactful conversations until next time. Keep innovating and transforming boldly. Thank you.