Olam Group [Sgx: Vc2]

Joydeep Bose

Joydeep has worked in industries such as chemicals, technology, food, and agriculture, and has a strong background in human resources. His areas of expertise include organisational performance improvement, transformational change, and mergers and acquisitions. Human Resources consultancy engagements with major Fortune 100 firms in the United States were among his previous responsibilities.

1. What are some of the challenges and trends that have been impacting the HR Space lately? Also please mention some of the technological advancements being deployed to help mitigate those challenges?

The HR sector is adopting innovative technologies to curb prevalent challenges. The last 20 months of the COVID-19 pandemic and the whole need for managing the crisis has been the biggest for everyone in the HR space.

Employees are the biggest asset of an organization. They need greater flexibility in terms of work preferences and the nature of work. In addition, the employees require more choices in learning opportunities and where they would want to contribute.

What’s more, employees seek a quest for meaning and significance. Several frontline team workers are increasingly aware of the rights they are entitled to and demand the same to be implemented into operational workflows. Most businesses are trying to meet the employees’ demands through the use of digitization. These technologies are impacting businesses, especially the brick and mortar kind, indicating a need for many of these organizations to work differently.

2. Would you please elaborate on how you successfully implemented some of the technological and process elements at Olam?

We have a long way to go in using and adopting technology in the HR space. There are employees’ needs that are both overt as well as implicit. However, the key concern is to understand that a whole host of employees are not too expressive about their requirements and is achieved in a fair amount of time using feedback and interactions.

We break down the life cycle of an employee in an organization and collect feedback at every stage of that cycle. Feedback data is collected from people who have applied for jobs, people going through the selection process, and then onboarding. Feedback is also collected at critical life events within the company. For instance, an annual incentive is crucial because that’s when people get recognized or notified for their performances meeting the expected standards.

Presently, technology is playing a crucial role in collecting employee information. For the last five years, we at Olam have been using a digital platform connected to the database, which automatically sends out specific questions in an engaging way. The feedback comes in, and it populates a dashboard through which we get to know feedback for different segments of our employees about their needs and actions to be taken. These insights give us data to work on and help shape the experience that employees expect.

We also use statistical analysis tools to get insights from the feedback data. For example, we can measure the engagement exhibited between supervisors and their subordinates in an office space and their effects on the employees. Insights generated from feedback data reflected how supervisors are spending more time with the team members correlated with higher engagement. By using such insights, we started training and rescaling our supervisors around some of those behaviors to engage the teams better. The HR team needs to be aware of how to best use this data and not just observe the dashboard for hotspots but instead derive insights from that data. This also helps to boost efficiency by being more productive at lower costs.

“Several frontline team workers are now more aware of the rights they are entitled to and demand the same to be implemented into their companies’ operational workflows”

In addition to data analysis, automation plays a major role in improving the recruitment process by automatically reading the applications using tracking systems at those firms.

For example, in the sales graduate program, we deployed a technology that identifies the predictors of performance by looking at high-performing salespeople. These tools are used to identify the different predictors of performance, which then picks people who demonstrate those predictors. The model continues to refine further owing to the built-in AI. These technologies are applied in Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Central America markets.

3. What are some of the top technological innovations revolutionizing the HR space? Please also list some of the changes that could play a beneficial role from a technological perspective.

The current business world is striving to find a way to predict the performance of talented leaders. It is fascinating to keep track of how advancements are happening in that area of performance prediction. The other exciting trend is providing the right kind of experience to employees and is an amalgamation of understanding the needs and expectations of employee groups. For instance, collaborative tools are used daily, such as Zoom, Microsoft teams, or even Slack. They have a positive impact on the way organizations use these tools effectively. The third area of interest is analytics and how it can be applied to key decisions that have been made, by building insights.

4. What advice would you want to share with budding entrepreneurs or startups on how they can best streamline businesses with technology so as to have the best HR practices at their companies?

For entrepreneurs who want to get into the HR tech space, they need to align their solutions to the business leaders in the market. Their biggest value should be apparent to the business leaders or the CEO of the organizations. If the budding entrepreneurs can pitch their product to the CEO and get their attention, they’ll have a winner on their hands. However, most of the products are pitched only to the HR community and not to the business leaders or to the actual users of the product.

An example of a trending technology that budding entrepreneurs can work on is to provide live insights. Nowadays, insights are captured on mobile phones and uploaded to performance platforms. The platform will weave through all the data captures and, through its own AI and machine learning, bring out any patterns that may have come out of all these. These themes are then presented on phones for self-reflection, which can be discussed with the manager. This enables the manager to base their feedback on the inputs from all the other teams. I feel that this is quite revolutionary in performance management, and budding technology providers should explore more such avenues.