- Industry
- 8 min read
Building the ability, as an HR professional, to not be emotional and yet be passionate is a fine art: Mphasis CHRO
“My job is to help address the problem. Yet, if you are absolutely unemotional, you will also lose the passion for the job,” says Ayaskant Sarangi, CHRO, Mphasis, explaining how striking the balance is ‘a fine art’. This is something Sarangi has learnt through his many failures and successes in his career across roles.Highlights
- Be it talent recruitment, management, compensation & benefits, or leadership transitions, credibility is created by what you are able to bring to the table and not just by how many people report to you, according to Sarangi.
- He shares a strong view regarding talent building versus talent buying, and how Mphasis is more in favour of building talent within the organisation.
- About 75 percent of the leaders at Mphasis are home-grown and the rest are hired laterally.
- The gender ratio of Mphasis' board of directors is 25 percent, as three out of the 12 members are women.
![<p>Ayaskant Sarangi, CHRO, Mphasis</p>](https://hr.economictimes.indiatimes.com/Themes/Release/images/https://img.etb2bimg.com/files/cp/upload-1626354070-ethr-default-thumb-image.jpg)
“Building the ability as an HR professional to not be emotional and yet be passionate is a fine art,” says Sarangi.
This is something he has learnt through his many failures and successes in his career across roles.
“My job is to help address the problem. Yet, if you are absolutely unemotional, you will also lose the passion for the job yourself,” adds Sarangi explaining how striking the balance is ‘a fine art’.
Another key leadership learning, Sarangi shares is building credibility and being able to influence, and the fact that both of these are dependent on each other.
“Be it recruitment, talent management, compensation and benefits, or leadership transitions, credibility is created by what you are able to bring to the table and not just by how many people report to you,” says Sarangi.
“This depends on how many people you are able to influence; on the other hand, to be able to influence multiple stakeholders you again need to be credible,” he adds.
Concerns as an HR leader
Some of the important concerns that are pressing questions for the IT industry at large, and Mphasis as well, summarised by Sarangi, are as under.
1. Talent building versus talent buying
Sarangi shares a strong view regarding building of talent versus buying of talent from the outside market, and how Mphasis as an organisation is more in favour of building talent within the organisation, through its various policies and practices.
This is to continue to remain effective and ensure that the employee culture of the organisation remains unimpacted and is an important one to figure out collectively.
2. Employee communication and creating an engaged workforce in a hybrid working model
The concern is of not just creating but also sustaining a strong employee value proposition and culture and that in a hybrid environment.
Sarangi says, “The times have changed and we see a lot more communication, less on emails, and probably a lot more on other mediums. This has to be better leveraged in terms of how more engagement of people can be brought about through this.
3. Leveraging the impact of AI to create a more productive organisation
AI has been there for a long time, yet over the last couple of years, there has been a very important shift that has happened.
Sarangi says that earlier, AI was only in the hands of a certain set of people– 'techies', who knew how to design programmes and leverage it.
Now, it is much more analytics centric and driven. We are all dependent on AI now, and even non-techies are using it, experiencing it, and aiming to get value out of it. Therefore, one can't swim against the tide; one has to swim with it.
So, AI, as a field, has its own set of opportunities as well as challenges. As an organisation, however, the concern is to leverage AI for the betterment of teams and employees.
Evolution of talent landscape in the IT and consulting space
Sarangi says over time, he has seen employees and young talent are more keen on learning and upskilling themselves from what used to be earlier.
He says, "I see employees a lot hungrier to learn. Because they've realised that the quality of work has become more interesting and demanding. It is in their own interest to keep themselves relevant for that job or work. Gone are the days like the late 2000s, when one could just be in a cushy job, and by just being a good people manager, managing projects and allocating work, he could survive.”
Secondly, he talks about the quality of teaching and the number of students on the rise.
There are enough opportunities for people to learn both from colleges, and even from the internet or virtually at their own pace.
Sarangi is himself a pass-out of NIT Surat, and in his batch of engineering, he recalls that there were only 36 students from computer science. This was back in the early 1990s.
“Now, not only have seats for computer science gone up, but even colleges and institutions have been mushrooming,” he says.
Thirdly, Sarangi also talks about a whole shift from knowledge to skill becoming critical, because it is not only about learning a new language, but also, where one gets a value or a premium- the learned ability to apply that knowledge in real-life situations.
"And that's where the role of corporate becomes really relevant and important. Because while I get loads and loads to train people, to really be able to teach applications of that knowledge is an important shift even as organisations," he says.
This aspect of organisations to teach applications is also undergoing a change. And therefore, it becomes relatively easier for organisations to link growth with skills, and skills with career paths.
He adds, “Growth is linked to skills development, and therefore to future growth of an individual, professionally and financially; that's how I've seen the industry change.”
Employee demographics at Mphasis
Total employee strength of Mphasis is over 34,000 globally, and the overall gender ratio stands at 35 percent.
Gender ratio of Mphasis's board of directors is 25 percent, as three out of the 12 members are women.
Learning & Development
1. For the junior-most layer of the organisation, there is a strong focus on e-learning.
Communication skills and writing skills are the top priority for the first three junior most layers of the organisation.
2. For the middle managerial layer, focus areas are both virtual and instruction-led, and a lot of time is spent on building managerial skills such as how to lead teams, how to delegate tasks, how to review, how to give feedback, etc.
3. Mphasis runs a pilot programme for training 100 women - specifically focussing on their career acceleration and their development for leadership positions in the organisation for future.
4. For the senior most leaders of the organisation, that is CXOs, CXO minus 1 and CXO minus 2 layers, there is coaching intervention and individual development plans for all leaders in India and abroad.
Leadership insights and challenges
"Our modus operandi, as far as leadership movements are concerned, is that the first option is always to look at whether we can have a leader from within the organisation. And then we go to the market. The reason why we do it is to sustain the culture of the company,” says Sarangi.
About 75 percent of the leaders at Mphasis are home-grown and the rest over 20 percent are hired laterally.
Sarangi says that 60 to 75 of the topmost leaders in the organisation, who have played various roles across positions, are all from the organisation.
These employees and a significant number of the workforce have stuck to the company for over two decades, according to Sarangi.
Gender ratio of leadership
At the AVP level, the gender diversity ratio is 20 percent; at the VP level, it is 17 percent; and at the SVP level, it is above 13 percent.
Sarangi acknowledges the trend and the declining ratio of women leaders at the organisation up the ladder.
He says that external hiring alone cannot solve this issue, because opportunities itself in the first place are limited in these positions.
He says, "The change has to be brought about right from the junior and mid levels in terms of developing more female leaders from within the organisation."
Mphasis has another developmental programme apart from the Pilot programme for FY 2024-25 for women leaders from the positions of AVP and above, to accelerate their careers and make them future ready for its pipeline building.
Sarangi’s views on which is the best work model
Sarangi says it is the context of a function where one is working that can decide the best model and how it is not ideal to have a paintbrush approach to it.
Yet in the IT industry, given that technology is being leveraged more and more, it is becoming easier to have remote or hybrid models.
“But two things have to be borne in mind as far as designing any framework is concerned – The first big point is security, again industry specific, yet even within the IT industry, financial services could probably be having more stringent requirements,” he says.
The second area is around creativity. He adds that anything which requires a significant amount of brainstorming and discussions, it's difficult to pull it off in a remote mode.
Typically, what Sarangi suggests would be that as a team when discussing or debating something intense, team members could be present in-person for those certain number of days, because these discussions would get compromised on say Teams or Zoom calls.
He adds, “In my personal view, despite the technology, nothing is more powerful than connections and one-to-one interactions, and probably just being able to have a hot cup of chai with your work friend or colleague, and even be able to discuss some of the other aspects of life.”
This gets compromised if it is purely a remote work model. So, hybrid is a better option contextualising it to situations, roles and specific industries wherever it's feasible.
But at the same time Sarangi also talks about the importance of time, not wasting time and effective time management.
He says, “I don't want people to be wasting three hours a day in traffic, that's a killer. Last week, one day, I spent three and a half hours in traffic coming into the office. This can really impact my productivity as a person.”
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