Building an Organization Predicated on Purpose
Animesh Kumar
Group Head, HR & Corporate
Services, IDFC
Q. From a diversified financial services firm to now a bank, we are sure there is significant transformation. What are the radical changes you expect to see going forward in this journey?
A.The IDFC Group is setting up a bank but that in no way diminishes our commitment and focus on our other non-bank businesses IDFC Alternatives, the AMC, our Investment Bank and Institutional Equities business and the Infrastructure Debt Fund; each of which are market leaders in their respective areas. Setting up a bank is a humungous task and one that will take tremendous efforts. Our HR strategy for supporting the bank build out is centered on two themes the first, delivering a truly differentiated, customer grade employee experience and the second, building a culture and organization that is fired by purpose. While the conceptual underpin of our HR strategy has not changed from our earlier avatar, setting up a bank creates an execution challenge of an entirely different magnitude. "Delivery innovation at scale" will be the biggest shift and we expect to use mobile technology in radically new ways to create a self-service ecosystem that is intuitive and personalized. The other big shift we expect to see is in the "role of the manager". HR must take a leaf out of risk, and just as line managers are the first line of defense from a risk management perspective so must they become the first line of people management. Line managers cannot outsource people management to HR.
Q. Given the competition with mainstream banks, what would you want to retain and reflect as your employee value proposition?
A. Our value proposition in HR is built around four pillars:
a) Attract and motivate the younger employee base we are discovering their interests, attitudes, what motivates them and what they want in the workplace. And we have come up with interesting insights besides the attraction of being part of the team that is reimagining the way banking is done, personalization and purpose are powerful motivators for this genotype.
b) Act as a beacon for women returning to work anecdotally we know that in India a significant number of women tend to take a break from their careers at the point of starting a family. A lot of them would like to come back to full time work and our focus is on creating a workplace that offers them that opportunity.
c) Making banking services available to rural populations that historically have been underbanked is a key focus of our banking aspiration. For us, rural banking is not the cost of doing banking but an integral part of our value proposition for the communities we seek to serve. This implies that between 50-60% of the IDFC headcount will be rural. Delivering our value proposition in rural geographies will need innovative delivery formats. As an example, our wellness model of risk assessment, medical advice, counseling, social support is expected to be delivered entirely through a technology-enabled ecosystem supported with a layered on-ground response framework that leverages NGO partners that we work with for community development.
d) Retaining leaders - while it is critical to retain talent across levels, for any start-up having continuity of people in leadership roles is critical for success. We are building a framework that provides a "reason to stay" for employees across all levels but with a special focus
on the leadership roles These four pillars underpin our Employee Xperience (EX) model. The significance of EX is, that the biggest swing factor in the quality of service delivered, is people. Delivering what you experience personally is so much easier, not to mention it makes for a happier and more engaged workforce. So the entire Employee Xperience platform is built on the premise that employees should be treated the same way we would treat the most valuable customer of the bank. This concept of EX is not HRfocused, but instead employeefocused. So EX will manage all services and transactions that an employee will "consume" in a company bills reimbursement,procuring stationery, internal IT support, internal communications, social platforms and of course, all HRrelated services and transactions will be delivered through this framework.
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