Building an Organization Predicated on Purpose
Q. With the current growth plans, there has been an increased focus on hiring. How has your talent strategy changed to cater to this business need?
A. I think we have a powerful employer brand and attracting talent has not been a challenge. We are not a new player in that sense and especially in the financial services space, we have built a unique position of being "hatke" (different). That said, the deeper we go into the country the greater is the variety of channels and models that we discover. Let me share a short story to explain as part of our process of identifying locations for our rural bank branches we had a team that was travelling in rural Madhya Pradesh. While on these visits people would ask us why we were making inquiries. As is practice, we handed out visiting cards and informed them about IDFC setting up a bank. After two days of such interactions, we were flooded with calls and text messages with people expressing interest and wanting to join IDFC! We eventually had to build a process to handle this information and engage potential hires. From that one trip to the district and a few visiting cards, we identified almost 150 people. I am not sure if this experience will play out in other rural geographies but you are just overawed by how diverse this country is there is a war for talent in metros and two hours flight time away you can hire people by just being there and talking about your plans! Our primary focus when hiring is on culture fit. We run a fit-forculture assessment across all levels right down to the frontline. The intensity increases as we move up the hierarchy with increased weightage at senior levels. You could join us even if you are 80% on technical competence but you must meet our culture fit requirements a 100%. Although this is the aspiration of every HR Head, it is having a leadership team like we do at IDFC which is committed to building an organization with the right kind of cultural framework that allows me to push this agenda. I will always compromise individual brilliance on the altar of corporate culture because misfits, even if they are outstanding performers create a domino effect of compromising the culture in your company and that is a slippery slope! Start pulling that one loose string and the entire fabric starts to unravel. In terms of origination, we are experimenting with some interesting frameworks. One interesting concept is the idea of video job descriptions. As evident, instead of writing a boring word document we will have the line manager talk about the job and bring out the passion and excitement of the role and why one should join IDFC. We are also experimenting with the technology of contextual and unstructured data search.
This technology should be able to replace the visual scanning of CVs.If successful, this should help shortlist the right resumes and reduce our recruitment timelines and costs significantly.
Q. How would you use rewards/ pay effectively to drive the right behaviors in the financial services industry?
A. We believe there are two sides to rewards– intrinsic (motivators) and extrinsic (demotivators). Demotivators as Herzberg explained are those elements, the absence of which will demotivate but increased presence of the same will not necessarily motivate. For example, if the compensation for an employee is well-positioned when compared to the market, further increases will not alter behavior or performance in any significant manner. Hence, extrinsic rewards have limited utility in driving top performance. The intrinsic elements on the other hand include intangible things like the joy of doing the job that you do, the culture of the organization, working with a great team, finding a purpose at work, etc. These on the other hand have almost a limitless correlation with engagement and performance. The approach we have is to maintain threshold on the extrinsic factors but our focus is on investing in intrinsic rewards to help our workforce align to a sense of purpose and create an emotional connect which is crucial to creating differentiated and rich outcomes.
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