After 2 years of only online meetings, members of the Indo-German HR Partner Forum reconnected on Thursday 17th February 2022 to revive their connections and reset a new path for the post pandemic world. The group consisted of HR Directors, HR Vice-Presidents and HR Country Heads of 16 Indo-German member organizations including Baerlocher India Additives, BASF Group, Bharat Forge, Bosch Limited, Covestro India, DHL Express, Evonik, Fuchs Lubricants, Häfele India, Knorr-Bremse Technology Centre India, LANXESS, Siemens Limited, Škoda Auto Volkswagen India, Thyssenkrupp India, TUV India and Wacker Chemie.
With some familiar and some new faces in the room, the HR partners began by introducing themselves, and sharing the strengths and current challenges of their HR function, and the solutions that they were seeking. This opened the dialogue and brought a lot of knowledge, information and pain points on the table.
As an over-arching theme, it emerged that reorganized and transformed businesses have been taking the great resignation head-on. Although varying in the range of 5 to 15%, attrition has definitely affected most of them. Customer centricity has been the new buzzword. Business lines have been getting stronger. With forays into the mobility and electrification, some predominantly industrial companies have been transforming themselves into technology companies, breaking through traditional hierarchies to emerge with flat organizational structures.
HR teams have been focussing on creating better and more personalized employee engagement s, retaining current employees, finding suitable talent, virtually integrating new team members, sustaining culture through the hybrid mode and empowering people not to be reactive and to deliver to the last mile. On the other hand, employees have been focussed on evaluating what success means to them, seeking new definitions by aligning business and personal growth.
With this background, it has become essential that the HR teams continue to innovate how to up their talent game, develop and deliver a talent strategy based on the segmented needs of the employees, continue to keep learning and development alive, and remain sensitive to touch the hear and minds of the employees.
Given the high levels of empathy and confidentiality in the room, the HR partners shared their pain on the loss on some of their close colleagues, their complexity in rolling out the voluntary retirement scheme and their difficulty in dealing with the upcoming labour codes.
Post the tea-break, one of the HR partners as well as IGTC faculty member Dr. Anita Bandyopadhyay facilitated the S-O-A-R Exercise. All the HR professionals came together to brainstorm and list down inputs regarding the Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations and Results of the Indo-German HR Partner Forum on a common whiteboard. Setting straight the vision of the forum, 5 years from now, HR partners concluded this exercise by voting their desired future aspirations and envisaged results. The day concluded with a decision to meet once a quarter and continue professionally supporting each other and working together for the benefit of the Indo-German fraternity.
To know more about the activities of the Indo-German HR Partner Forum, please connect with Radhieka R Mehta, Director, Indo-German Training Centre on igtcdirector@indo-german.com
