“People are our biggest opportunity and challenge,” says Nandini Piramal, executive director, Piramal Enterprises who leads the company’s OTC (over the counter) business as well as heads the HR of Piramal group. Excerpts from an interview:

It’s unusual for CEOs or business leaders to retain the HR responsibility. What prompted you to take this up?

The only way we can reach our goals is if you have really good people. I think people are the fulcrum of what will give your business acceleration and lift.

And unless you have a long-term strategic view of how it’s going to work, you can’t do it. I think HR is actually very strategic and you need a very long-term view because unless you really understand the business issues, you can’t solve the people problems.

Two, I think HR has a lot of science. You can call it behavioural science. Even in terms of data, to make decisions you need better data. My mentor was Keki Dadiseth, who if you remember, before he became Chairman of Unilever India was HR director.

When you hire, how do you ensure you are getting what you want?

It’s never perfect. We can all become better interviewers. We have started a management trainee programme, where we take trainees for two years and make sure that they do a mixture of roles during that period. So that they see the entire business that they are working in. And then they – at least in the OTC programme – do a variety of different things, and then they become area business managers. We also hire laterally, where business experience and things like that come into play. One of the things we look for is humility. I think humility is really important. We are not a culture where people can order others about. You have to work across and influence people without authority. I think that’s one of the big things which at least I value.

Are there any specific questions you ask in an interview that help you gauge a person?

I actually ask people to give me an example where they have not used authority. When someone disagrees, in a hierarchical culture, it’s very easy to say I am your boss just do this. I think now cultures are changing where you have to ask, you now convince people saying how do you do that?

What are the big changes you are bringing for Piramal in the HR space?

When I started out we weren’t very process-driven. So my first thing was to introduce processes. We used to give out bonus payments for the year in September for a year ending March 31. And we started doing key result areas (KRAs) from October 1 for a year ending March 31. There was no sanctity. One of the things I did was to say this is the last time we are going to do performance pay-outs in September. KRAs will be due April 1, therefore you work backwards and the first draft happens in January. But we will also finish the reviews by June and we will do bonus payments in the June cycle. I announced that in September, nine months earlier. Nobody actually believed me, including the HR team. But then I just kept on reminding people that the first draft is due in January 15. Bonus payments and increments happened in June. That gave credibility. We said we were going to pay on time. I am going to make sure of that – and then we made a lot of changes to the performance management system to make it more transparent, more fair, and communicated this.

For many years we used to get the lowest scores in KRA and performance management. That is actually why we chose those aspects to work on. Now we get pretty high scores from them. Then we started doing a lot more on learning and development, systematic learning on both behaviour as well as technical skills.

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