“HR Seat at the Table”
On the historic day of Tuesday 8th November 2016, a few hours before PM Narendra Modi shook up the entire nation, BASF India hosted all the Indo-German HR Partners through a brilliantly strategized and thought-provoking discussion on “HR Seat at the Table”.
Today, many senior executives in the field of Human Resources have earned a seat at the Executive Table by perfectly blending the people strategy with organisation’s strategy. This meeting was organised wherein leaders deliberated what it takes for the Human resources practitioners to acquire and demonstrate to earn a ‘Seat at the Table’. The key to this is continuous learning and competency building in this direction.
The goal of this meeting was to bring together the shared experiences, thoughts and ideas from the different HR partners on the theme. And then, to help translate that learning into action, rapidly as a team capability building, and ultimately to attain the competitive advantage within their respective organisations.
Dr. Raman Ramachandran, Chairman & Managing Director of BASF India set the tone for the day by sharing his motivating and inclusive thoughtson “HR as a Strategic Partner with Business”. His passion and belief in the strategic importance of HR was evident and contagious, making all the partners smile with pride. His talk was followed by an equally enthralling presentation by S. Raghavendra Rao, Head – Learning and Development and Rupesh Basu, Chief Manager HR from Siemens Limited.
The keynote speaker for the day was Mr. R. R. Nair, an outstanding coach, mentor and recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award by the National HRD Network. Mr. Nair is presently on the Board of BASF India Limited since March 2001 among other excellent memberships he holds. Dr. Lakshmi Nadkarni facilitated a conversation with Mr. R.R. Nair on his life journey and invoked a meaningful discussion through which the entire fraternity gained lot of insights had significant professional learnings.
Based on the inputs received from Mr R. R. Nair, the partners organized themselves into groups and into a workshop mode to brainstorm and deliberate as a team on what they can do to build the next generation HR fraternity in organisations with a long term vision. The competencies that evolved to be critically required were as follows: Employment Contract to Psychological Contract, Self-Initiative, Business Managers driving People Agenda, and Business Acumen. It was suggested that the meetings and programmes in the next year should be dedicated to hosting programmes that will enable the HR Partners to build these competencies among their teams.
The meeting concluded with a lot of hope and promise to increase the depth of engagement in the coming year 2017!
