Rajesh Uppal has an advantage over most other CHROs. This senior executive director not only leads HR at Maruti Suzuki but also drives the IT function. In his over 32-year career at the auto major, he has spearheaded many initiatives, including digital transformation, learning & development and CSR. He also drives the Maruti Suzuki Training Academy that is tasked with building competent people across the value chain. Excerpts from an interaction:

Maruti has seen many shifts — from public sector to private, from Indian control to Japanese. How has the culture evolved with these shifts?

Maruti was unlike a PSU even when we started off way back. The top management had initially itself introduced a strong culture, which was a mix of Japanese and Indian.

There are four pillars to the culture. We are very strong on process definition (way of working), process adherence (everyone follows this way of work), discipline (nine am means nine am) and trust among people. The culture we introduced when we started has continued till now.

Yes, we have been tweaking a few things as we go along. But the fundamental pillars have remained the same.

On top of that, we have created space for the innovation teams to work on. If you look at our annual results, the meshing together of the two cultures seems to be working very well.

The challenge for us is to teach this culture to the fresh blood we infuse in the company (300 people are hired every year at the entry level). But we have built strong processes around that.

How is the automation piece going to impact your workforce — given that the auto industry is going to see a lot of that?

Whenever any new technology comes in, the same debate starts of whether people will be replaced.

But at the end of the day only the job content changes. Different skill sets are needed. Yes, our industry — auto — is changing with new regulations coming in, new fuels coming in.

So the need for preparing people to adopt new technologies is much higher than earlier.

That’s the area for us to work on and we are putting our people through work environments to understand this change. We send them to our collaborator in Japan to understand new tech.

Our whole focus is now also on identifying the right talent for these changes.

Do you use HR Tech to scale the speed of talent management?

When I began handling HR too, one of the first projects was to build a robust recruiting process using AI. Because the data available in public domains (LinkedIn, etc) on people is very high. But how do you identify them to match your requirements?

We have managed to use tech to build a new recruiting process. With this we have shrunk the hiring cycle to one-third of the traditional process. But speed is one aspect, quality is another. Technology has enabled us to increase our reach as we can now reach out to passive talent and tap into a larger pool.

Have you outsourced talent management?

No, we have built internal capabilities. Outsourcing is only the efficiency part, and we may look at it later.

In the course of the digital transformation journey, how has the HR function evolved?

The digitisation piece addresses three different dimensions. One is the efficiency piece. Do you respond to employees fast? The second part is the experience part — how are you delivering a better HR experience to your employees and partners and the campuses who engage with us. Third piece is effectiveness. That is where data analytics and AI come in. Digital has been key in driving these three key changes.

Has the fact that you spearhead IT as well at the company helped with people management?

That has speeded up the process a little bit. But end of the day, people on the ground have to transform and change. Today, the speed is also due to the IP technology available in the cloud. The cloud platforms available make new processes implementable faster. For instance, we could do the recruitment roll-out in three weeks. Traditional way, it would have taken months.

How are employees adopting the digital transformation? Do they have the mindset to embrace change?

I don’t have that challenge here. Adoption is good. For example, we have an employee app, HR Assist, that we developed in-house and launched a few months back. Adoption is over 90 per cent. Everybody is free to get into it, but we find that 90 per cent of our white-collar employees (the company has a 7,000-people-strong workforce) are already on it. It has made life easier for them as there are a lot of self-service options in it. Sales people travelling to dealership, etc, can mark attendance, people can do leave tracking, get their reimbursement claims.

We have done some interesting things on the app. We are a very spread out company, with our people present in 53 locations and so many people have to contact HR for various issues.

We came out with a tab called Ask HR. You can send any HR query on this, you get a ticket number and the response is sent very quickly. A chatbot is now under development. One of the best things that the app does is it gets people closer. It gets employee engagement going.

Any challenges that you face with millennials entering the workforce?

Millennials seek flexibility. But frankly, flexibility in manufacturing is a very tricky thing to do because shop floor has to work at one time.

Gender diversity in manufacturing is also difficult given the supply shortage though we are working consciously on that. We now have 550-odd women employees — but year by year the numbers are growing steadily.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW