“Differentiating Workforce Strategy – The Changing Landscape”
Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to Human Power.
This profound thought holds its relevance to the Indo-German HR Partner forum, which is now shaped into a valuable knowledge forum and a great platform of HR fraternity to gain expertise from best practices across German organizations.
On 9th February 2016 Lanxess India hosted the 1st meeting for the forum in 2016, at Lanxess House, Thane. The topic this time was ‘Differentiating Workforce Strategy – The Changing Landscape’, which drew various views from the forum about ‘can one size fit all?’, ‘Person or Position?’, ‘How to identify key positions?’
Senior HR Professionals from Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Co. Ltd., BASF Group, Bosch Group, Evonik India, Häfele India, LANXESS India, Mercedes-Benz India, Schaeffler India, Siemens Ltd., TÜV India, Volkswagen India, Wacker Chemie India added their valuable contribution to the forum.
Lanxess HR Head Ms.Surabhi Mittal along with her team planned an informative and interesting day for discussing the topic along with a twist in tale with adding an angle of Indian Mythology into Business Strategy. Mr.Jacques Parez MD and CFO, Lanxess India presented Lanxess Business and the focus for the organization. His views as a Business Leader gave insights about expectations of top management from HR function. ‘How can HR make difference?’ and ‘How can HR create Competitive Advantage?’, he quizzed the forum for dialogue on these questions and the ideas started flowing. HR Partners from all participating organization shared their views about crucial role HR handles in driving business strategy. Mr.Parez added tremendous value to the discussion by openly sharing his experiences about performance culture in organizations, importance of ‘Fairness’ in evaluating people considering even the external factors affecting performance and many other questions from HR partners.
Mr.B. R. Suresh introduced the workforce strategy adopted by Bosch thorough a spontaneous yet detailed presentation, wherein he shared the templates and tools devised by HR team at Bosch for managing Talent lifecycle and strategic workforce planning. He shared his views and experience about overall topic which were related to other members as well and it resulted in great information exchange.
From the day Lanxess team shared the invitation to the forum, the idea of Chanakya as great HR strategist had left everyone intrigued. So post lunch Mr.Rajesh Kamat took everyone back in time to seek answers about their curiosity. Founder of group More Than HR (MTHR), Mr.Kamat has established link between Indian mythology and business strategy for conducting interesting training programmes for organisations. Stories from Indian mythology and case studies of Indian companies were presented to drive crucial HR strategic concepts.
Ms.Surabhi Mittal then presented the case study by Lanxess HR Team on ‘Workforce Differentiation of Business Excellence’ which was one of the Top 6 case studies presented at AIMA case study competition. The case study was very informative, the strategy implemented by Lanxess to identify key positions and managing portfolio of positions to achieve great results was shared with forum as a good read. It was also a good take home about how Lanxess has designed its strategy along the lines of ‘Formula X’ it’s value system and implemented it with effective organizational branding.
As the day came to end, everyone summarized it as a wonderful learning experience with some great exchange of thoughts and wonderfully managed meeting by Lanxess team.
