Episode 20: Designing an Exceptional Employee Experience (Interview with Tanuj Kapilashrami, Group Head of HR at Standard Chartered Bank)
How do you define and develop the culture required to deliver on your organisation's purpose? How do you involve employees? And how do you measure the impact to ensure that you're on the right track?
My guest on today's episode of the podcast is Tanuj Kapilashrami and she's tackled all of these challenges in her role as Group Head of HR at Standard Chartered Bank and also ensured that HR has taken the lead role in driving employee experience throughout the bank.
You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.
In our conversation Tanuj and I discuss:
How the CHRO partners successfully with the CEO and executive team
How employees helped co-create the people deal at Standard Chartered
The role HR has taken to drive employee experience throughout the Bank
The emerging skills that are required in HR
We look into the crystal ball like we do with all our guests on the podcast and ponder what the role of HR will be in 2025
This episode is a must listen for everyone in HR particularly those involved in business and HR transformation as well as those leading efforts in employee experience, people analytics and other leadership roles within the function.
Support for this podcast is brought to you by Perceptyx to learn more, visit perceptyx.com.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I'm delighted to welcome to Tanuj Kapilashrami, Group Director of HR at Standard Chartered Bank to the podcast. Great to have you on the show.
Tanuj Kapilashrami: Thank you very much David.
David Green: Can we start by giving listeners a quick introduction to your background and your vision for HR? Because I know you've had quite a good career particularly in the banking sector.
Tanuj Kapilashrami: So thanks David. I took on the Group HR Director at Standard Chartered in January of this year, so I'm still relatively new to the cohort. I was the Head of Talent, Learning, Culture of Standard Chartered before this and in a 20-year career, largely been in financial services. Worked with another big bank, various roles in HR, before joining Stan Chart two and a half years ago. In the career I've done, as is typical of most CHROs owes, multi-discipline, but also fortunate enough to have done it across multiple markets. So I did 10 years in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, India, but then I've also spent time in the Middle East looking after the Africa and the Middle East business.
David Green: We're going to talk a little bit about those cultures and some of the nuances that that brings to HR a bit later in our discussion, but firstly we get a lot of questions, what does a CHRO do? What are your main responsibilities? And how do you partner successfully with the with the CEO and the executive team?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: Some of it I think is very standard. And a huge part of the role is partnering with the CEO and colleagues on the management team, but also playing a key role with the board on a variety of people and culture related issues. It's the advisory nature of the role, which is personally most fulfilling and actually if done well can be quite valuable and that involves high levels of trust, a really good understanding of business. And actually having that professional confidence around the tables that you sit in. Everyone has the sort of competence by the time you get to these levels but it's the professional confidence and how that comes through in some of the conversations which I think is quite important.
David Green: And I think the Business Acumen thing is important and it's something that maybe that we've neglected a little bit in the HR field.
Tanuj Kapilashrami: One of the earliest things I did when I took on my big HR leadership role many years ago, was got everyone in my team trained on reading a balance sheet and it sounds a bit naff when you say it, but you'll be staggered at how many people in HR could not talk to you about how the business that they are in makes money.
And since then I've always done it. I always get massive teams, two and a half thousand people now. To talk about how to read a balance sheet. How does the bank make money? Who are our customers? What do our customers want? And actually instilling that discipline is quite important, when you talk about that professional confidence around the tables that we that we sit on.
David Green: I know when we spoke last week you talked about how you've actually helped develop the culture to deliver on the bank's purpose. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that because it was a fascinating conversation when we had it between the two of us. I think our listeners would love to hear about some of that.
Tanuj Kapilashrami: So David, I'm hugely passionate about it, I've talked very very often that companies now very regularly have a Chief Culture Officer. We took the decision and something I strongly believe in there, we don't need that role in Standard Chartered because our CEO is the Chief Culture Officer. You know, I think he is very clearly somebody who's passionate about the agenda who actually not just role models it but has endorsed and defined the container within which we are doing all of this work. Given the fact that the CEO has a massive number of priorities, he does, lean on his team. And in this case specifically me and my organisation to a) advise him, tell him what best practice looks like but also help in the execution of that agenda. So a big part of what the HR function is in service of is the cultural transformation of the bank. All of the work on culture is in service of improving our client service, client experience and ultimately our performance. So, that's the the massive underlying statement.
What did we do? Culture has always been very important to Stan Chart. We are sixty markets, one hundred and twenty-five nationalities, one-hundred-and-sixty-year heritage. Always been important, but went through a very difficult phase like many other Banks, it was an industry issue where both our performance but also our culture got questioned repeatedly. We appointed a new Group Chief Executive towards the end of 2015. Series of what I call mechanistic changes, so a new management team, raising Capital, writing out bad debt, making some fundamental structural decisions as far as our business is concerned. And once that first phase was over. Our Chief Executive Bill Winters took a very conscious decision that the focus needed to turn now into how do we engage hearts and minds and how do we get into the next and the really exciting phase where we transform the culture?
So that's where the burning platform came from. We started off where I think it's always a useful place to start by speaking to hundreds of our clients across the footprint. So pretty much in every Market. We did client interviews. Why do they bank with us? What is their feedback on us? How do they believe we have changed?
All of that client feedback got translated into a series of workshops in the market. What are we doing well, what are we not doing well, what do we need to change and that then translated into what I call the ultimate exercise in brevity where we tried to convert all of that insight into one word, which will actually be the North Star to all of this culture work and that word was human. So we toyed with international, we toyed with loads of words and ultimately the one the board and the management team settled on, looking at all of this inside, was human. So we said we are going to be a human Bank, a human organisation. As we launched that into the organisation two questions came up.
Human in service of what? And how do I do it? And it became quite clear to me at that time that we needed to do much more definitional work for it to stick. Human in service of what? Became the work we did on redefining our purpose. So it was very clear that "human in service of" had to be the purpose of the bank. Again the work was done, the work on purpose was done much more top down, it was done with the board and the management team and the question was very clear. If Stan Chart doesn't exist in the world, what difference does it make to the world? And actually it's a very... It's actually a very profound question, if we don't exist as a bank what difference will that make to the world? And that led to us articulating our purpose and we also looked at the client insights, looked at our history, went into our archives and the purpose was driving commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity. From a commerce place to our trade origins the role that we play in international trade, prosperity, prosperity of individual's, nation's economies and how we do it is through our unique diversity which is within large global companies truly differentiated.
That was the first question: human in service of what? The second question was, how do we do it? And there as opposed to doing it top-down we decided that we are going to co-create it with all eighty-six thousand employees and we did a massive crowd sourcing piece of work leveraging Perceptyx who do our employee surveys we had 94 percent people who responded to the crowdsourcing exercise, massive, got loads of data points and then we did a classic machine learning algorithm to pull that down into a set of words.
Resulted in a cross-functional workshop for two days that helped create our valued behaviours. Valued behaviours are not values because values are deeply personal and sometimes a bit moralistic, valued behaviours are the standards of behaviours that we want everyone to live by that will help us create the right culture in the company.
So. How we do it? Is by living the valued behaviours. Massive body of work in the last 18 months embedding those valued behaviours around and across all our processes. So how we hire, how we promote, our training programs, the messaging across the organisation. The last two bits, which I would say are really important pieces, is we then focused our energy on employee experience. So if valued behaviours are the standards we expect from our colleagues. What do they expect from us in return? And it's a classic EVP question, but at its heart is a two way people deal and a much more adult relationship in the organisation. So classic EVP work but helped us define a people deal that we became quite public within the organisation to say these are the standards of behaviours. This is what you get from the organisation being an employee. So that was the second piece of alignment.
And the last piece we did was aligning that work with the external brand work. So we did a brand refresh in 2018. All of the brand work has three pillars which are the same pillars as our valued behaviours and that got launched externally, some of it you see in the Liverpool... If you go to the Liverpool Instagram page a lot of it there is #neversettle which is one of our valued behaviours. And actually what we were able to do is our clients experience of us as a brand got aligned with our standards of behaviours internally. So it was the classic alignment between client experience and employee experience.
And that was I think where we have come to in the journey.
David Green: So that leads on nicely to the conversation around employee experience, when we spoke last week you quite rightly said that only 18% of the employee experience really comes from HR processes and technology. So I'd really like to understand how you involve the rest of the business in that whole employee experience journey?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: I will start off by saying David and again, we discussed it, employee experience is absolutely critical and we've been talking a lot about it in our industry. We've been talking a lot about it within Standard Chartered bank, I talk about having a product owner mindset and if you look at our consumers today, the way they are consuming products externally, experience is a massive part of it. If you don't focus on experience, it's really a race to the bottom. I use product ownership quite deliberately because we have to remember that in HR we are also product owners where employment is the product, and one of the things I keep telling my team is some of the principles around client centricity, how do we design products? How do we think of experience? Needs to be absolutely the same. So that for me is almost a starting pitch. I quoted to you a research, which I must say didn't surprise me, but the numbers did sort of it stagger me a little bit, we focus so much of HR transformation on our systems and our processes, but actually having a really slick system, where you can go and apply leave and your manager approves it, while it's really important, that does contribute maximum 18% up to 18% to the overall experience. So, if you look at the workforce today and the future of work, there are so many other things right?
It starts off with promises, technology, collaboration tools, the way people are engaging outside of work, they want that same experience inside work. We found job impact is one of the top five EVP drivers for us in Stan Chart. For colleagues to be able to deliver the best job impact they need slick org design. They need efficient work processes. They need better technology. So when you start thinking of employee experience as a collection of all of this, some of it owned by HR, many not. The question really comes to who really owns employee experience in the company? And I've led quite a bit of discussion around this around our management team. I do believe having the alignment really helps. So having a very clear purpose and EVP and a CVP or employee value proposition and customer value proposition aligned to that purpose ensures that employee experience doesn't become an HR thing, it becomes the thing in the company. And I think some of the definitional work that I spoke about is actually quite important to get the narrative inside the organisation aligned.
So when we talk about employee experience now our Head of Technology, our COO, Head of Property, Supply Chain management use the same language to talk about it that I do and which is hugely important. So I think that's the first thing.
The second thing that we have done... To be fair we are still in the process of doing, is actually mapping out all of our employee journeys. So if you map out the employee journeys with specific focus on moments that matter actually it becomes a much more cross-functional conversation because a large part of some of the journeys are HR-owned but there are large parts of the journey which are not owned by HR. So mapping the journey and bringing in other stakeholders in the debate, keeping in mind how our client value proposition coincides with the employee value proposition is I think the way we are approaching it. Finally, it's the power of data and analytics. We have been able to conclusively prove that where we have evidence of higher employee experience it has resulted in higher client experience and actually bringing those data points together in service of the broader culture conversation. Throwing that back into the organisation and actually making those relations, the correlation between them, I think is quite important as well.
David Green: So it's almost like HR is the conductor of defining and delivering the employee experience but you need the orchestra, which is the rest of the business with you to help a) define it, but then b) the delivery part.
Tanuj Kapilashrami: Absolutely and as I keep saying, how to get the organisation to the place that employee experience is not an HR thing it is the thing in the company requires huge orchestration, I think, by the HR organisation.
David Green: And in doing that what are some of the challenges you have had to overcome?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: The challenges are many. We talk about resistance to change, we talk about a generation of leaders, and I put myself in them, who grew up in a very different world.
We are all now leading and managing the next generation of workforce that's completely different. So that resistance to that change. Not knowing what good looks like so, how do we generate those proof points back into the organisation so that people experience what good looks like is a big challenge?
I mean, there are three big mindset shifts we are talking about within the organisation. Technology, client centricity and productivity. And when I talk about technology, we are talking about it in the context of disruption. So it's not just plugging in technology, it's how do we... If you look at the three mindset shifts, they require a very different level of thinking which involves reskilling, retooling, having a very different conversation with leaders at all levels in the company.
David Green: You know and that thing as you've talked about, those of us from slightly older generation like me, not only are we having to learn new skills we're also having to change the way we've done things in the past and we're going to talk about that a little bit from an HR perspective in a minute. But what was really interesting in the conversation we had last week, is some of the new skills coming in to HR. So your Head of Employee Experience has got a very different background from most people within the HR function.
Tanuj Kapilashrami: Yeah, I was very clear that in the employee experience lead role we need to get somebody who's got a product design mindset and we've got somebody who doesn't have an HR background, does not even have a banking background and actually comes from a pure product design, experience. And what he's been able to do in a very short period of time is bring that discipline in.
So we are using ethnographic research. We are doing lots of product trials, we are speaking to consumers and users very differently. I think that's been a real learning. It's been a massive learning for me. What excites me the most after 20 years of being in this business is the amount of unlearning, I'm having to do to be able to design an organisation that's going to be fit for purpose for the next hundred sixty years.
I give you a simple example and this comes to the point around proof points. We realised that people leaders of a certain generation needed to experience some of this themselves. We have got... We did a new piece of technology it's walk me, which basically is now sitting over our core HR processes, so that leaders and colleagues as opposed to going through traditional channels i.e. intranet site, massive policy documents or calling up people in HR, actually have a very intuitive process that guides them through basic HR processes. Also the process which is system agnostic, so, the process takes them little blurbs, little head question marks, guides them through the process.
We ran that process through mid-year, 90% of our colleagues engaged with that technology as compared to the same time last year where 13% accessed our traditional policy document intranet site, but we were also able to calculate that for the ninety percent over that two-month window where everyone does their mid-year conversation. By leveraging the technology it's saved them 40 minutes of their time over that two-month period. And suddenly the conversation moves away from sexy technology to how does that experience and that ease of experience translates to greater productivity giving people that time to have 40 minutes extra to have better quality conversation.
And throwing that back into the organisation is the kind of stuff I have learned from my head of employee experience who thinks of it much more like designing a product as opposed to traditional way of writing out a policy document.
David Green: And a great way to break down some of the silos that we traditionally had in HR is by bringing people with experience of other sectors and other areas, really ,and we see a lot in the work we do at Insight222 in the People Analytics space, a lot of the people analytics leaders haven't got background in HR because you've got people in HR who have the background in HR those two skill sets can come together. So I'd be interested and I appreciate it's quite early days in the redesign, but what are some of the early insights you're getting from the new people deal at the bank.
Tanuj Kapilashrami: We have very recently, about three months now, completed our big employment survey of this year. And if you go back to the beginning of the culture journey, which is three and a half years now, actually some of the proof points are really impressive.
When we started the culture journey we said, we also designed a dashboard, by which we measure progress, again something I think we in HR need to get much better at and we said, what are the three questions we are going to answer with this culture work? Are we becoming a better place to bank? Are we becoming a better place to work? And recognising the change in behavior is implicit in answering both these questions. Are we showing, are we demonstrating, that we are behaving, our behaviour is improving in line with our valued behaviours? So those were the three questions.
So the dashboard, which every quarter we populate, so we look at client improvements scores, brand awareness scores, for the first question, better place to bank. Better place to work, we look at attrition, we look at engagement. How are we behaving? We look at things like inclusion index, Innovation index, conduct, what's happening to employee conduct.
So in this entire journey we've been able to monitor and see our progress. The latest results we've done, to me it's staggering. Our net promoter score which was plus two, three and a half or four years ago is plus 12 now, so consistently we have seen year on year improvement in our net promoter score.
There's huge variability. It's plus 50 in pockets. It's minus in some areas. So we have clearly work to do, but collectively our colleagues tell us that we are becoming a better place to work. On our client metrics you look at Brand awareness, you look at our client satisfaction scores across most business segments have seen an improvement.
To me what satisfied me the most is the improvement we are seeing on creating a culture of inclusion and a culture of innovation. As part of our annual survey we do a couple of pulses and then a big one, we look at progress on our EVP metrics and we've had an improvement across all of them, but the areas which show consistently improvement is a challenge culture, a culture of innovation. So, the piece around, do we have a culture that supports innovation for our MD population has gone up by 15 points over this period. Which given the business we are in, the disruption that's happening in our industry, the markets we are in, is massive.
So it is my firm belief that this work it does show results. It requires consistency and it requires... If it's a flash in the pan it goes away, it requires that rigour and consistency to make the results stick.
David Green: I guess that's one of the roles of the the CHRO and the HR leadership team is to really drive that employee experience and that continuous focus on it as well?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: Continuous focus on it and going back to what is it in service of. I think that's where sometimes in our function, we do ourselves a bit of disservice. It becomes so much around the product and the initiative as opposed to what is it in service of? And it has to be in service of performance and greater client centricity, which cannot be done if you have a superlative employee experience.
So it's that power of narrative which I believe is hugely important.
David Green: So all this talk about employee experience and a better deal for employees. What are some of the implications this has on some of the HR technology that we use?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: It's massive. The implications on HR Technology is massive and a lot of the work on technology in our industry and in Stan Chart first started with looking at technology on basic HR Service delivery. And again, I think it's hugely important because the more you can make some of the operational work slicker and the more you can align it to how people consume products externally the more you get noise out from the system. So, the way we are changing our core HR systems. But what we are doing is while replacing the core we are adding on things, applications on the core purely thinking of experience in mind.
So, we could change from our traditional operating system to the one now, but what's really made the difference is having Walk Me sit on top of it. Which actually guides people in delivering a very different experience. So that's happening to the core.
The other area which we have picked up in a massive way, is this whole theme of what is HR in service of? Is HR in service of the top thousand leaders in the company who have always got white glove concierge service or HR is in service of the thousands of people, in our case, a hundred thousand people who work in Standard Chartered globally.
And that has been a big mindset shift for my own function because clearly we are in service of a hundred thousand colleagues who day in and day out serve our customers in some of the toughest parts of the world and that means thinking of people capability very differently. Thinking about how do we get continual learning, the idea of development growth, really central to our proposition. To do it at that scale you have to leverage technology. So there are several interesting experiments that we are doing currently. We are piloting this idea of Talent Marketplace. So, almost think of it as an internal LinkedIn where people can pitch themselves, people can pitch for roles and matching happens.
But how cool would it be if somebody doesn't get the kind of roles that they are aspiring for they automatically get channelled to the kind of development they need to be able to... So that gets to the whole learner experience, moving away from learning being pushed from the centre to actually, a bit like how you consume entertainment in Netflix, right?
You go on Netflix and there are recommendations made to you on the basis of what you consume. We are piloting something very similar on learning. And again trying to link that to your career aspirations and growth. So to me, what takes up a huge amount of work, as it should, is streamlining what I called core HR processes, but it's in the idea of how do we build capability?
How do we build this idea of continual learning growth and development at the heart of our people proposition? Is where we are trying out some very interesting innovative technologies.
David Green: And of course for all those, particularly some of the personalisation stuff, you need that core underpinning of good data and good analytics.
So we're actually recommending the right things to the right people within the organisation based on their needs but also where they want to take their careers.
Tanuj Kapilashrami: I can't stress the importance of that enough, I actually believe when you talk about future roles in HR, data scientist is going to be a category of people that would be a really prized skill in HR and I spoke about employee experience getting somebody from a non HR background. The other area where we are buying a huge amount of expertise is in the data analytics space. And again, it also... In our business, which is all about managing risk as well. It also talks about people risk very differently.
So, traditionally when I spoke about people risk within my business, I spoke about what number of jobs are weekend, what is our attrition? I do talk about that. But actually what I really talk about now is what's the kind of capability needed for the future? What are the kind of skills needed for the future?
Where do we have them? How do we build them versus buy? And a lot of that comes from really good use of data and actually the insights, the skill is around pulling the right insights and building that narrative. So I think that's really important to have the right conversation.
David Green: And you did some work around this whole network analysis space as well at the bank?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: On the culture journey, clearly once we define this, the first port of call were the senior leaders, the 1200 board MD's we have, we've done some really good, I think, leadership development work with them. But it became very clear to us that the influencers in the business are not always the senior most people.
So this idea of, if you are a people leader in our op shop in Chennai or an op shop in Shenzhen managing a team of 500 people. You are perhaps much more of an influencer than a very senior individual sitting in a head office. So very quickly after leadership development at the top and setting the right tone at the top we focused our energy on people leaders. So a lot of the stuff around people leaders. But when you start looking at that, a level of segmentation is needed and one of the things that we are trying to think of or again experimenting very successfully in two large parts of our business, is trying to develop a heat map of the network. So, who are the people that people gravitate to how do we start thinking of influencers that is not driven by hierarchy? How do we go figure out who those people are? Who either because of what they represent in terms of technical expertise or because of how they are seen as culture carriers in the bank. Are they people that people gravitate to? And what do we do with those influencers in ensuring that they help us really embed the cultural transformation?
So there's so many exciting technology solutions today available, to start looking at those network analyses, looking at how people engage with each other beyond the traditional means and we're deploying a few of them and trying to see which is the one that we want to then implement at scale.
David Green: It's a fascinating space. It's one I've been learning about for the last two or three years and as well as looking at influencers, you can start to find out how innovation happens. How different sales teams for example, or different banks perhaps, how they drive more customer service and the strength between the teams and you can also find out people who are big influencers, but are maybe at the risk of burnout as well. So you can try and prevent something about that. There's so many things that we could probably do another podcast on that...
Tanuj Kapilashrami: I find it fascinating because what it also does, going back to one of the biggest problems that traditional businesses like ours face is this hierarchical culture.
And how do you then almost start moving away from it and start thinking of what does agile actually mean in practice and then coming to the power of data and insights, the kind of experiments you can run. Are those teams that work in that network way more productive and more effective than teams that are working in a hierarchical way?
What are the networks that are developing between things that we are not... The big question of how does work really get done? How does work really get done? Sometimes looks very different to how we think it gets done and the more insight you can get around how work really gets done I think there's a real opportunity to try and transform the culture on a mass scale.
David Green: And another use of network analytics is around inclusion and diversity. Now I know Standard Chartered may well be headquartered in the UK, but obviously the vast bulk of your business is done in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. What are some of the nuances involved for those listening from the more developed world? What are the nuances of HR and also how do you capitalise on some of that diversity as well? And link it towards innovation for example?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: Yeah, it's a really good question. Obviously something very close to my own heart. Some of the markets that I've had the privilege of working in and seeing some of the cultural issues up front. To me the nuances are at three levels. The obvious one, different time zones, different languages. Just the spread like I said, we are 60 countries. We employ on last count one hundred and twenty-five different nationalities. So just the logistical challenge is the first nuance.
The next level is where there are a set of cultural norms, local cultural norms, which could be on surface be in conflict with your global standards of behaviour. We talk about inclusion in a big way. We are in markets where homosexuality is illegal. We are in markets where women are treated very differently in workplaces than men. It is the cultural norm. And when you have those differences of culture, trying to instill globally consistent standards of behaviour without having it being ignored is a second nuance.
The third nuance which I think is subtle but really important is when we in the Western World talk about, create a culture of challenge, speaking up, non-hierarchy. It means very different things when you sit in London and New York. To if you sit in South Korea, we did... My team developed an app, it's called feedback 3-6-5.
It's an app on your phone which helps people give feedback to each other but just real time feedback right after a meeting to peers. And we started tracking how many times people were giving feedback upwards. It was very little and there was a big push that Bill our chief executive, me, members of the management team did.
Sometimes without realising that in many cultures giving feedback upwards would be not giving face to an elder and that is a real nuance that we need to sort of recognise and contend with. I think one of the advantages of having worked and lived in many of these markets is moving away from being prescriptive to actually defining what standards look like and encouraging a conversation and debate.
So, for example, when we launched our valued behaviours we. Decided we are going to do it differently and you know when you launch something like valued behaviors in the business that I represent most often than not it's a corporate memo. It's a big email from the chief executive and sometimes there is an e-learning mandatory test that you need to pass to see your edit.
And what we said was. All our people leaders 14,000 of them got a pack of cards with the valued behaviors on them and scenarios based on valued behaviors, and we said get your teams and talk about the scenarios bring out those conflicts in the context of what are our standards as opposed to us being prescriptive from the center.
So. I think I would response to the nuance has been that we will be very clear and explicit on the standards of behaviors. But as opposed to mandating and thou shalt not do it. We will encourage an environment where people have that open conversation and debate, right? Diversity is hugely important to us.
But the one area we are going after in a big way is the idea of inclusion and actually the idea of inclusion in some ways helps you address these nuances. It's to understand that we recognise each other's perspective. We both commit to living the standards of behaviours. As described in our values and behaviours while recognising that the way we respond to it might be slightly different.
So I think it's just that awareness and what does that mean in the way we engage with people so that we can bring them along in the journey as opposed to alienate them.
David Green: Well, thank you but unfortunately, we're coming towards the end of the podcast now, but it's been a fascinating conversation certainly from my perspective.
So we end with a question that we ask all our guests on the show. What do you feel the future role of HR will be in 2025 and you can go further than that.
Tanuj Kapilashrami: I suspect you hear the same things again and again David. The obvious one is it's pretty clear that, human capital, people are a massive enabler of people strategy.
The role of HR has been and should be to be strategically helping in maximising the value of our human capital. But then if you start looking beyond that, that's when I start getting very interested. We are the generation of HR leaders that are going to be able to create the environment for this generation that's coming into the workforce, to learn, earn and grow.
It's a massive responsibility. We are also the generation of HR leaders that will have to start providing solutions to future skills, the skill gap in the majority of our markets, the growing gap between education and employability and those are the big challenges that are being faced and will be faced by HR leaders of our generation.
That's where I think we have an opportunity to really leave a legacy. So, at the most simplest of level it's about commercial acumen. How do you talk about culture, employee experience as being at the heart of what businesses will look like and are looking like, but at the higher level it's really starting to think about how do we get the new generation coming in?
Learn, earn, grow but also what do we need to do now to start thinking of future skills that are going to be needed in the world. And how do we start getting ready for it? And I do believe it's a really exciting time for the function and I think there is a real opportunity for HR leaders of our generation to grab this opportunity and leave a real legacy.
David Green: Yeah, it's definitely an exciting time for the function I think and certainly even more exciting I think as the next five years unfold. Tanuj thank you very much for being a guest on the show. How can our listeners stay in touch with you?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: Well, I am on LinkedIn so you can see me - Tanuj Kapilashrami on LinkedIn.
SC Bank is also on Instagram and Standard Chartered is also on LinkedIn Standard Chartered bank, and I would encourage you to go and visit our social media channels to just keep abreast with all the exciting things that are happening in the bank.
David Green: Well we look forward to continuing to hear more good stories coming out of the work that you and the team are doing there so Tanuj, thank you very much for being on the show.
Tanuj Kapilashrami: Thanks a lot, David.