Performance Management

Every employee is an asset, and their

skills must be fungible: IBM India’s
Thirukkumaran Nagarajan
‘Employee experiences must be meaningful, simple and cohesive.
Organizations must invest in designing highly personalized, digital
experiences for employees to help them succeed in a virtual, distributed,
and agile environment,’ advises Thirukkumaran Nagarajan, Vice
President & Head of HR, IBM India.

Thiru Nagarajan is the Vice President and Head of HR for IBM India/South Asia. He is
responsible for the people strategy, leadership, skills, engagement, employee services, and
diversity & inclusion of the workforce across India/South Asia. Thiru brings over 20 years of
experience in human resources, including expertise in the areas of HR Services, Talent
Acquisition, and Global Mobility. In his most recent role as the Vice President, HR, for IBM’s
Global Business Services’ Global Delivery, Quality & Solutioning functions, he was responsible
for executing on talent strategy, reimagining, and delivering digital HR solutions, and driving
culture transformation. In an exclusive interaction with People Matters, he talks about how
technology can be leveraged to build the right work culture while simultaneously driving
productivity in the face of business disruptions.
Here are a few excerpts.

With increasing automation in the workplace, how can HR technology be leveraged to support
performance management in a more transparent and bias-free way?
Technologies like AI, analytics and automation on the cloud have become pervasive across
organizations, including the HR function. We are seeing it being leveraged on multiple fronts
related to talent such as skilling, matching employees and external candidates with career
opportunities, supporting managers with better salary investment guidance, eliminating manual
tasks in benefits administration, payroll through robotic process automation, and many others
including performance management. It is all about translating multiple structured and
unstructured data points regarding the employee and business outcomes into talent insights that
enables managers to make better performance decisions.

AI is judgment neutral at the outset, but it relies on data that

is collected and the basis on which it is trained on. It is
therefore essential to continuously test evolving datasets and
model outcomes for bias and make adjustments as
necessary.
As driving productivity becomes one of the top priorities for leaders moving forward, one cannot
deny the critical role a positive employee experience plays. What are some of the key strategies
that can help achieve this among a distributed workforce?
In the current environment, employee engagement is very vital for organizations than ever
before. Employee experiences must be meaningful, simple and cohesive. Organizations must
invest in designing highly personalized, digital experiences for employees to help them succeed
in a virtual, distributed, and agile environment. It is also crucial to adopt an organization-wide
approach of extreme collaboration, communicating with impact and cultural intelligence, which
cuts across traditional silos and can enable employees to be resilient. These experiences must be
constantly improved and continuously aligned to the needs of the business and clients.

Given that there is a rising trend in shifting from performance management to performance
enablement, how can technology be leveraged to augment human capabilities and build a highly
skilled workforce?
In the knowledge economy that the world has evolved to, skills have become the core of how
work gets done. Every employee is an asset, and their skills must be fungible. They have to be
relevant and valued by clients. Technology, which has permeated every level of an organization,
is now at the driver’s seat for performance enablement and skilling initiatives. It is absolutely
necessary for organisations to have a technology platform which enables online, self-paced,
multi-channel, highly personalized, curated learning. They must have consistent investments in
technology and superlative content as the foundation of learning & development strategy and
further create career progression roadmap for employees based on their learning.
Organizations can apply AI to personalize learning at scale, providing every employee with the
right learning at the right time. Predictive analytics can be used to identify - with precision - the
skills that organizations have in the workforce at all times.

Companies can also use AI to assess external data sources

and trends. This prevents obsolescence by detecting the
skills needed in the future. Another key focus should be to
foster a culture of perpetual learning that rewards continual
skills growth.
Aligning employee growth to organizational growth plans is a key move for leaders. What can
organizations do to ensure that employee growth journeys can yield to not only increased
productivity but also business growth?
Talking from my experience of being part of the information & technology sector, here are some
of the ways that organizations can evolve and grow - to not just boost productivity, but also
better attract, develop and retain employees-

 Move talent across the organization to give differentiated experiences & provide them a
better understanding of the business imperatives
 Alternately, provide opportunities for short term assignments or stretch projects that are
location-agnostic
 Conduct real-world problem-solving hackathons or ideathons to nurture innovation
 Empower teams to function like start-ups to imbibe entrepreneurial skills
 Provide opportunities for formal and structured on-the-job learning for employees to earn
credentials which has significance not just internally but externally as well
 Adopt incentive-based learning and skills-based compensation
 Provide transparency in job postings with priority to candidates who have taken the
efforts to reskill themselves as relevant to the position and business priority

What are some words of advice that you would like to share with fellow talent leaders to build a
future ready workforce that is driven even in the face of business and digital disruptions?
On similar lines as I mentioned earlier, skills are the new currency in today’s talent landscape.
The future of work demands much greater volume, velocity, and variety of learning for the
organization and for employees. Executive leaders must create a culture of continuous learning
that increases organizational resilience. Employees must become continuous learners to keep
their skills up to date for success in their current role, and they must reskill periodically to
advance their career or to jump into a new high-demand role.
Organizations should embed learning directly into work design so that people who need to
acquire new skills can do it as needed on the job, at their own time and pace. Agile learning is
the discipline for making this happen. Agile learning future-proofs employees, which, in turn,
future-proofs the organization. And organizations must ensure that employees translate learning
& exercise skills into action, in their everyday work.
Topics: Performance Management, #PerformanceBeyondProductivity, #HRTech

Author

Asmaani Kumar
Asmaani is Senior Associate-Content at People Matters. You can reach out to her at
asmaani.kumar@gopeoplematters.com