Welcome to the final episode of series 10 of The Digital HR Leaders podcast. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic HR functions with People Analytics Teams have been pivotal in co-ordinating and leading responses to the crisis in companies all around the world. Well, one such company is Indian multi national giant Wipro, which found it had to suddenly contend with 150,000 remote workers in India alone.

My guest on this week's episode of the podcast is Renil Kumar, Vice President HR at Wipro. He is the personification of a modern HR Leader, Business focused, data-driven, technologically savvy, inclusive and collaborative.

You can listen to this week’s episode below or by visiting the podcast website here.

In our conversation Renil and I discuss:

• How People Data and Analytics enables hyper-personalisation across Wipro’s 200,000 plus global employee workforce

• How a powerful People Analytics project at Wipro delivered quantifiable value to the business, as well as revealing some interesting insights on the impact of team size and promotions

• How to infuse HR Professionals with the skills needed to be more data-driven and why experimentation, starting small and getting hands-on drives progress

• How Organisational Network Analysis can be applied in Sales and Customer Service

• What HR can do to prepare their organisations for an increase in remote and hybrid working

This episode is a must listen for anyone interested or involved in how HR can drive significant value in large multinational businesses. So that is Business Leaders, CHRO’s and anyone in a HR Leadership, People Analytics or HR Business Partner role.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by Panalyt. To learn more, visit https://www.panalyt.com.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Renil Kumar, Vice President and Global HR Head at Wipro, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Welcome to the show Renil. Please can you provide the listeners with a brief introduction to your background and role at Wipro?

Renil Kumar: Thank you, David. I am also delighted to be on this podcast.

So I have been a HR person all my life for the last 20 odd years, I lived and worked outside of India, where I am now based. Through the journey one thing has been constant with me, I have been very close to the Business. I love to experiment a lot, to play around and like to kind of put it back together and see how it works and that in most times helps with problem solving. One area that I have been specifically interested in has been Sales and Sales Processes and Sales Systems. The second area which I have been also working on quite a bit is in M&A in the International office.

David Green: I know we are going to talk a bit about some of those things in some of the topics we have got later, particularly in relation to analytics and how that can help HR really drive outcomes in the Business. What I am interested in first Renil, is what has been the impact of the crisis on Wipro? And what has been the work of the HR Leadership Team to try and help the organisation respond?

Renil Kumar: In one word it is learning, it has been a fantastic learning process. We got ready early but nonetheless, we were always challenged. To cut a long story short, we did fantastically well as an industry and as a company. We got about 150,000 employees to work from home without even testing it once, which is unimaginable. What I also saw happening was a collaboration of different teams. I started off a weekly call with all of the teams and everybody was coming together and trying to do their best. But what happened that was the most interesting part for me was, all the data that we had in our systems, was no longer useful.

At Wipro we have more than 150,000 people in India and do I know where they are right now? Do I know are they safe? If I know that, how can I help them in other ways to get down to their work and settle down in their work. So we work largely on desktops, imagine carrying a desktop to your hometown 40km away, is that possible? As HR, we did a bunch of gathering of data, used extensive amount of Microsoft forms and other ways of getting information real-time of where the employees were and that helped us in a big way in deciding what we do and how we do things. So we also had some interesting experiences, we had to charter flights, which I have never done in my life, to get people who were stranded in the US or Australia. So we had a bunch of different experiences, but at the end of all of this, what I saw was that we ended up playing one of the most important roles in getting all the teams together and making sure many things happen.

David Green: Yeah, it is certainly something that I have seen from talking to your peers in other organisations, that HR has really come to the fore during this crisis. And as you mentioned, data has been an important part of that.

I am thinking now, in a wider perspective not just linked to the crisis, how does data support you in your role as a HR Leader in Wipro?

Renil Kumar:  I have been close to data and analytics for a long time. One is employee experience. I have been very close to ensuring that we have a hyper-personalised environment for engagement and that in a context of a 200,000 people organisation, has a different meaning altogether. How do I make sure the person gets what he or she wants? Can I get them individual attention to what they want? Can I get to speak to them individually on a periodic basis? Can I plug that all back into our systems and processes? So hyper-personalisation is one major thing, I have been personally interested in and have seen lot of results around that.

Second is it is all about information. Information to HR teams, information to employees. And finally, I think the most important part for me as a HR Practitioner has been that this helps to quantify what value HR brings to the table for the business. Am I really able to quantify just beyond seeing our attrition, am I able to say this is the level of risk that we are carrying and then be able to quantify it.

David Green: Brilliant, well we are certainly going to dig into the first one, I think. You are clearly very passionate about how analytics can provide hyper-personalisation. Can you talk a little bit about your experience here, around how you have personalised HR services for employees?

Renil Kumar: Yes, for me, that journey at least started off by coincidence. It just happened. So what we did was rigorous data for about three years, 36 months, to see patterns of how and why people are reacting, given a certain social stimuli. So let me give you an example. Where do you think attrition is higher? Is it in a smaller team or in a larger team where your Managers and the whole structure is bigger. Where do you think is higher? What do you think David?

David Green: Smaller team I would say.

Renil Kumar: You are wrong. Do you know why it happens the other way? Simply because larger teams have got better attention, better managers, better focus in the company. Smaller teams do not have that. On average what I found was at least 300 to 400 basis points higher in smaller teams. I will give you another example, and this is why we came up with that three week study three or four years back, I have seen the pattern over the last four years and nothing has changed.

Most managers come and tell me, I want to retrain somebody or I want to promote somebody. What do you think happens when you promote somebody?

David Green: Usually my intuition would say, if you promote someone, you drive higher engagement from them.

But I think you are going to tell me something different aren’t you.

Renil Kumar: You are now getting the trend. So yeah, that is exactly what happened and I will explain to you why, especially amongst the youngsters. They do a bunch of stuff, they get qualified and they finally get promoted. They don't want to wait three to four years to get promoted again and there you are, they are going to the next company, trying to make sure that they get the promotion. Then long story short, we did an extensive amount of work on that. We understood what are the patterns? And we drew up six different priority levels of who are the people who are potentially about to go from the company. Question is, what do you want to do with this?

I, for one, I have been a big fan of making sure that we digitise engagement and that has never been easy. So, what we did subsequent to that was to try and build an application, which was built from scratch. In the front end, it is pretty simple, it had at best about 25, 26 questions, depending on what was chosen as options. But the best part of the whole thing was it could be answered by the HR person in 90 seconds. That was a rule, in 90 seconds I should be able to capture my half an hour conversation with you, and that gave us enormous and powerful insights. Now as a third step, what we ended up doing is started plugging in all the data, into all the HR processes, to make the circle complete.

So let me give you an example again, as an employee, he or she says that she wants to get promoted. The conversation happened four months back, the promotion cycle happens once or twice a year, depending on which Company you are talking about. When the nominations come I am able to see the employees that have qualified. If the Employee has not qualified we can write an e mail “hey employee, you have made progress since the last time we spoke but I guess you have not qualified. I would like to be upfront and talk about that.” That is one step.

Second step is Managers who have not nominated. Now I go back to the manager and say “hey, this employee has expressed interest to be promoted next cycle, are you considering or are you okay to let go?” Now the Manager comes back and says “ no, no, I have considered it but i’m not going to promote them.” We then flag it to go and talk to the employee.

And this is applied for anything. If I have a certain set of employees giving me feedback on a Manager, I am able to immediately start a 360 degree for the Manager. We have multiple use cases on all of this.

Finally, beyond all of these process that we could bring this particular tool in to, what gave us a lot more insights was all the data analytics. This is the risk in your Business, in your set up and these are the 30% of people who are at risk.

So if I could just summarise, what happened four years back was that our attrition rates went down by almost 5 or 6 basis points and in both of the businesses that we manage. Now, fast-forward that, I have been moving into a new Business unit, just about 18/20 months back. I started the same process all over again and again the attrition went down, more than 7 basis points. It has been a long journey and we have been adding to it regularly. It looks very simple on the face of it, but a lot of stuff has been added up behind it, it has become very powerful.

David Green: And of course the more data you put in the better the predictive power becomes as well. Try these different things to action it because, as you said, it is all very well identifying from the Analytics, but then you have to put it into practice and action it as well. So it sounds like you have done an amazing job of doing that, given the improvements that have been made.

One area that I find when I speak to a lot of your peers around the world, is the challenge around how do you improve the capabilities of HR professionals when it comes to being more data-driven?

Obviously you have worked in a few Business units at Wipro, how do you go about infusing your HR Team with the skills they need to be more data-driven?

Renil Kumar: I always found that, with due respect to my teams, I have always found that they have been more attuned to a softer part of HR and they normally shy away from the harder parts of HR like analytics, logic and program management. So I have been trying to do this by encouraging all the teams and the peers that I work with in trying to always experiment and do stuff around analytics in HR. So one thing that I have been always saying is that people have to start small. You can't build something overnight big, you have to keep nibbling on all sides. You have to keep chipping in inch by inch and then you eventually get to something which makes for a meaningful exercise for the company.

The other problem that I have with my teams was that we always wanted to make sure that we built stuff, which is not probably what we use in our day to day work, but look at some stuff which probably may add value to us or the company eventually.

So I have always wanted my teams to experiment and build projects around stuff that they are not directly responsible for. For example, they can pick up a small project which can make a difference for a certain team that they work with. And these projects are typically something that they would not be normally using in their day to day role.

And finally, the way I see it is that until somebody is hands-on they'll never get to the end of it. Even as a leader, unless you are hands on and you are working in the data, you see a lot more insights than if you just get given a set of slides with the data on. I have always found that extremely helpful, not every manager and not every team leader is comfortable with that but I really think that managers and employees alike in HR should regularly dirty their hands with a bunch of data. How small or how big it doesn't make a difference.

David Green: It is all about learning, as you said, and being a bit more comfortable experimenting and stepping out of the comfort zone sometimes. Also developing yourself as a HR professional, because let's be honest, all HR professionals are going to have to be data driven to an extent if they want to further their careers and add value to the Businesses that they are supporting. I really like those pieces of advice there. Talking about that, what advice would you offer to other HR Leaders about implementing technology and analytics in their organisations?

Renil Kumar: I see data and analytics as something that has to be in the day of work. And today what is happening is that most people make an elephant out of it.

So I think that is the first thing you should definitely make sure that, and this is what I compare to jorali window, where you end up seeing a big black box. On the one side of that black box you see the HR Practitioners on the other side is a bunch of companies offering whatever HR technology, or even what is there in Microsoft. If one does not look at both sides and start producing the black box, you don't get to any part of it. So I think it is most important for people to start small again, and maybe look at the end and what it is like for the employees.

The other things that I have been very interested in and have been experimenting a lot is marrying disjoined data, which means don't restrict yourself to just data in HR. It could be data from Sales Teams, it could be Marketing data. I have normally shied away from using data in the social space because that is not going to be easy, but what is already there within the company. That could be in Workforce Planning, it could be anywhere and that has given me immense insights.

David Green: I was going to say one thing on that, I liked the way you talked about the Sales data too, because at the end of the day, you are not going to solve Business problems just with HR data. And that is where I think, as you said, the power comes in when you blend those data sources together. So investigating Sales for example.

Renil Kumar: Yeah, at the end of all of this that is happening, like you said, the boundaries between functions are getting blurred. As soon as you get into HR, it is more of People Analytics, it is less of HR Analytics. It is everything about a person that one needs to get to know and that is not known by just looking at HR systems.

David Green: Yes, I completely agree. Have you got any examples around that, whether that is in Sales or in other functions of the Business where you brought those data sources together?

Renil Kumar: Like I said at the beginning, I am very close to Sales and Sales function. We did not have real time data for our salesforce. I put in a deal of half million with my incentive goal of 10k and at the end of that, we built a tool which was giving real time information to Sales and Sales folks on the ground. That tool became also a tool where we could encourage Sales Employees and we said “if somebody does so-and-so in this month, they get an extra incentive” So we built a particular tool around that and that went really well because they could get real time information that they didn't have in the past. It also helped the Managers because they could see what Teams are doing in real-time, which is not possible otherwise.

The other area of sales, which I have been working on, is in ONA. That is an area which I have been particularly interested in for the last two years. I spent a lot of time trying to develop concepts and trying to experiment with a lot of stuff. That has really interested me.

David Green:  I would love to hear more about that because I am pretty passionate about Network Analytics myself and actually we have just, I think the episode we published before this one was with Michael Arena. So a lot of stuff around understanding your Social Capital and using it to help drive innovation and lots of other use cases within ONA.

So I would love to hear a bit more about some of the stuff you are doing with ONA.

Renil Kumar: I actually started out with ONA with more of a HR viewpoint about 2 years back. But then I realised the potential of ONA is restricted when you just use it for HR. What I see is that we can use this wherever there is a relationship involved. Let me explain. You can use it when you have a sale and that is a relationship between the buyer and the seller, which is you. You can use it when you have a contract ending to see what is happening. I have been working on this concept and I have given a few of the ideas to a couple of startups that I work for pro bono. So I gave them a couple of use cases. Let's look at a deal it largely happens because there are multiple sets of people on this side and multiple on the other side. Now if we know the strength of that relationship at any given point in time in the deal is known and measured, we can very easily predict if the deal is going to come our way or not.

If we know that our relationships are stronger in the right departments, which are buying and not just procurement or whatever else, I know that we can definitely, probably win the deal. It tells managers, hey, you are on the wrong path. Maybe you should re look at it, can we address and try to build strength in one of the areas of weakness that we find in the relationship.

I really think that is going to be a huge plus for many Sales Departments and it is going to be a huge plus to Sales managers and leaders.

David Green: Yeah. And it is great because it is a signal, it is a signal during the process so it can almost act as a warning that you need to improve those relationships if you are going to potentially win or increase your chances of winning the sale.

So yeah, it is very powerful.

Renil Kumar: So just to extend that, there are multiple use cases and I will probably use a couple more so that I can bring to life what I am trying to say. We have hired hunters, A hunter is somebody who will look at net new companies. Now the success rate is not so great because it is really out there in the market, a relationship and showcasing capability.

If I bring a hunter on board most often they end up going out of the company in one and a half to three years time because don't see enough success. Now if I am a manager of a hunter and I see that he has been asked to look at three customers and I look at the strength of those relationships one month down the line, two months, three months down the line, six months down the line. I can then approach that individual and tell them, I think you have a really strong relationship with customer number one, maybe not as strong with two and then you are the best with three. Maybe you should forget two and just focus energies on one and three. And that brings in an element of coaching, that brings an element of success for the person involved and that really would help managers in many, many ways.

David Green: Yes, it is really powerful and again, the value then that you are bringing to the Business with that sort of information is extremely powerful.

Renil Kumar: Another use case where, let's say somebody joined us from a customer organisation and in a large organisation like mine, I would not know who the person is. So in a large organisation like ours, in which we have ahundreds of thousand people and you are trying to sell to a large customer, normally the Sales person goes out and makes a pitch and there is a sale or not. But when we see ONA and we look at data on it, we find that there are one or two people who have come from that organisation or knew the organisation in the past. Now I can use their relationship and that strength in selling to that organisation. I would not have been able to do that if I had not looked at the ONA data and that is again, very powerful. And I want to say, basically you get the best of the organisation no matter where it lies, whether it lies in Sales or in a person X person delivery, it doesn't matter so long as we get the best to be able to make a good case to the organisation that we want to sell it.

David Green: Yeah and I think in many respects, as HR Professionals, we are only in the early stages of using Network Analysis and really understanding the power that it can give. But I think those examples are definitely areas where I think it is worth investing further.

So if we look towards the future, of course it is difficult to look towards the future too much at the moment given all the uncertainty that is happening, what I would be interested in is what gives you the most confidence about the future role of HR in delivering value?

Renil Kumar: If I look at it from a context of the IT Services companies, and this is probably even applicable to all industries, there is a lot digital work happening. Now, digital is all about people, enabling people to make sure that they are able to work and then you end up learning the new environment. Making sure that we have the right skills, the right placement of people and making sure that we transform teams and managers alike.

So I see a huge part for HR in delivering this. Many organisations are really getting restructured to enable this at this point in time, many systems and processes are coming in and with Cloud, I think it becomes a little challenging because those organisations are learning almost by the day. how will we be able to keep up with that and we play a huge part of making sure that that transformation happens seamlessly.

The other area to look at is how do I digitise a lot of stuff that I do. How do I digitise equipment, how do I digitise training on demand and in person, which can be hyper-personalised. How do I ensure that the right skill is available to the right team and all of this plays a big part of the transformation.

So I would think that we are going to get busy with some of these areas in helping organisations transform digitally and that will be for every organisation out there.

David Green: And as you say, the speed in which we are going to be doing that is probably even quicker now, thanks to Covid.

If you look at the HR function as a whole, what gives you the most concern about our ability to actually deliver on that promise?

Renil Kumar: First, I think we need to ensure that we have the right teams to do all of this. I think in some places you do and some places you don’t, like it is always. Second, at the end of the day, like I said earlier, people need to be hands on but I don't see that happening very often, mostly I see people who would like to not get into it. I am also concerned about how people will be able to adapt to new skills, learn new skills, because I am seeing less of that happening. And more than anything else this is where I hold most of my concern, there is a bunch of data being held by many companies out there, but there are very few people to use it. Even within my own function, I see that in some tools that I go in, there are very few people who log in and get the data out. Fantastic tools but if you are not going to use it is as good as not doing anyway.

David Green: Agreed. Certainly there is a huge area, a lot of areas of improvement, in our field as a whole that is for sure.

This leads nicely onto the question that we are asking all our guests on the show in this series. It is very much related to some of that acceleration that Covid is bringing. What can HR Leaders do to help their organisations prepare for the future where there will be an increase in remote and hybrid working? What are some of the things that HR could do to help?

Renil Kumar: One of the things that I saw most companies doing, including us, was we spent a lot of time around employee care, mental and physical health. That's an area which we cannot stop. We accelerated it and got it really high up at the beginning of Covid, but I think that has to go on because people still need their health assessed.

Two is that hybrid work is here to stay, which means the ability to be able to work at home and at an office is going to remain and therefore enabling our teams to do that, making sure that they are able to do that seamlessly will be a big part in making sure that success happens. And the third one, is that all of a sudden talent has become global. I am able to hire somebody sitting in Austria in Europe for a project in India because I know the person can work out of his or her home. And the same thing with the biggest skill gap in the world today was in the Valley and I see that that is going to change because now you can have anybody working for any place and delivering almost the same output. That is going to be a huge change in the way we going to use talent and employ talent. I think that is a big role to play and very few companies have done that, most of the companies that I have seen do that have come from the Valley, but that is going to become uniform across the board. You may see labor moving from different markets, therefore, where is the best labour available or best talent available, we will end up ensuring that people go and pick it up.

David Green: And I guess, one of the things that we are seeing even in the first few months of the crisis, is that employee preferences are changing. Once people work from home, not all people but some people work from home, they quite enjoy the flexibility around that. Companies are going to have to respond to that and as you said, listen to employees, not just about wellness, but also about where they want to work and how they want to balance the working at home versus working in the office.

Renil Kumar: Absolutely. I can take my own example. I never thought I could work at home, today I am sure I can work at home. You know, pre Covid at Wipro we had a policy that we said we allow people to work one day at home. Now I am sure that is going to come in for a change and you are still not going to lose out. You are probably going to get better.

David Green: Yeah, I think we might move to a future where some companies, some roles, some people, that instead of being the day working from home, it will be the day working in the office perhaps. So a big shift from where we are. Well, Renil, it has been absolutely fantastic to have you on the show. Thanks for sharing your expertise and some brilliant examples with our listeners. How can listeners stay in touch with you and follow you on social media?

Renil Kumar: I am on LinkedIn mostly, so anybody can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

David Green: Well, Renil, thank you very much for your time. Stay safe and stay well.

Renil Kumar: Thanks a lot, David, it has been my pleasure too.