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Business Manager Cover Issue: HR in Energy Sector

1. What are the existing and emerging HR challenges of your sector?

Among the principle challenges facing the energy sector, two of the often talked about are:

  1. An aging workforce, particularly in the highly skilled segment of the workforce.
  2. Scarcity of talent in the leadership pipeline. Industry as a whole has failed to recruit or retain adequate human capital to assure enough bench strength, nor have they been able to attract the new generation of energy professionals.

Additionally, the of jobs in the energy sector are undergoing a shift. This reflects changes within specific sectors – for example, as the balance of oil production becomes more spread out around the world, jobs are being created beyond traditional regions. Meanwhile, deployment of renewable forms of energy is enabling local job creation in the many geographies where the new installations are being built and maintained.

But there is a need for creation of higher-skilled jobs too – for example, in programming and operating more intelligent energy systems. These new jobs should also offer better health and safety: remotely supervising robots as they perform dangerous tasks that were previously done by humans.

The changing nature of jobs in the energy sector will also bring about social transformations. As with many sectors, we can expect automation to put some people out of work.

2-How HR is contributing as HR business partner at sites and strategic business partner at central levels?

A key thrust of our HR strategy is to renew our manpower capacity and capabilities to support the continued growth of the power sector. The right discussion should be around “what relevance do the current structure and team size of HR have in supporting the changed business landscape, new age workforce and overall employees experience? or, do we continue to deliver value and respond with speed on matters needing our attention?

Within each organization, we also observe a number of areas where a refreshed HR operating approach can unlock significant value. Just as new skills and capabilities are required to succeed in a new industry environment, the same is true for mind-sets and behaviours. For example, day to day leadership capabilities must continue to evolve as Power sector becomes more like manufacturing industries, with a focus on efficiency and continuous improvement. This calls for a cultural and organisational shift toward more autonomous frontline supervisors and cross functional teams, without putting safety at risk. 

These changes will create flatter structures where the relevant skills for the task at hand become increasingly important relative to the employee’s level in the hierarchy. At same time, technology is already changing the way we communicate and access information across organisational boundaries. HR needs to explore these shifts and come out with a hybrid model. In my view the old business partners and COE model is passé. Agile HR is just not a new jargon; it is an acknowledgement of changing expectation of HR from the Business leaders.

3-How HR is contributing in developing new skill sets in employees to make them future ready?

In the past, learning prepared employees to skill up for the predictable cyclical business changes. Today, there is a need to create an agile learning ecosystem that has the resilience to adapt constantly and a pull- based model. Learning & Development has become a key strategic lever to constantly think ahead of the learning curve. 

Practices need to change as the company changes — as it grows, reorganizes, or faces new threats. Once-useful practices can quickly become stale, meaningless, or even counter-productive. If the original intent of an off-site retreat was to help teams bond, what needs to shift now that the company has tripled in size?

At JSW we launched Lakshya 2020 which is all about building skills for supervisory level employees. It’s a mix of technical, functional and behavioral skills development for the future- ready workforce. We are also leveraging e-learning tools in a big way to reach out to diverse/remote located plants, employees coming in shifts, young sales force with short window of learning time and shift employees focus to the cutting edge technologies. 

From an employee perspective, any skill building that leads to achievement of business results is exciting, rewarding and helps create an innovative organization that learns, unlearns, and relearns all the time. In my view HR should stay away from “quick fixes” like sending HiPos to B-schools and sitting back to assume a sea change in leadership behaviors. It never worked in the past and shall not yield significant ROI in the future too.

Finally, as in the other areas of Power sector business –  AI, Analytics, and Digital Tools will also provide value creating opportunities within the HR Function. Therefore, HR itself must start to build capabilities in these fields.

4-With increasing intervention of IT/ITeS in HR, how you are retaining human face while handling employees’ dissatisfaction?

The future of the workplace is all about people and putting a premium on their uniquely human skills: judgment, vision, wisdom, creativity, and resilience. This will allow us to connect with ourselves and each other in new ways. Another truth: revolutions start small.

In pre- digital era HR optimized for efficiency and standardization with shared services and the separation of front and back offices. In digital era HR needs to focus on “end to end experience, delivered seamlessly with new age technology,with personalization. All employees are co- creators of the culture and our programs. They are no longer consumer of HR, but co- producer. Further, employees will have same expectations of what they have in their work lives as they do in their private lives. 

If we approach our role with the above mindset of collaborators and invite and engage with employees, we may certainly find enough opportunities to dialogue, consult and value add. I am a firm believer that technology will allow HR to provide the human touch with scale. 

5-How do you comment upon the present PMS being used and what are the changes should be adopted to keep it relevant?

There has been a lot of debate recently about performance management but the debate has been side tracked into whether to use ratings or not.  What we should ask is ‘how does a system like performance management support our strategy?’ Let me cite a successful case to illustrate. With the advent of “cloud” it was felt logical that Microsoft needed to move to a collaborative capability but their old ‘stack ranking’ approach drove internal competition within performers. They’ve redesigned their whole approach to performance management not based on whether to get rid of ratings but on how to drive collaboration. Between 2012 and 2014 they measured dramatic increases in collaboration and there was good amount of correlation to changes in their performance management system. 

HR needs to look at all the organizational systems, compensation and bonuses, planning and budgeting, especially strategic workforce planning, and ask if they support our ability to disrupt. Sadly, most of the HR Heads I talk to, have diluted PMS to a Compensation Management Tool in their organization. 

Changes which I would recommend to keep this subject relevant are- 1. Provide meaningful reward for exceeding plan and consequences for missing, 2. To work on Manager’s accountability for process of rewarding, 3. Work on a simple process, & 4. Raise the bar, every cycle.

6-How HR in your organisation is linked with customer services and sustainability issues?

Employees and prospective recruits increasingly expect and even demand that the brands they work for stand for something beyond profits and quarterly earnings and align with their desire for purpose. This is especially true of Millennials, who will make up 75 percent of the workforce by the year 2025.

I believe that when employees embrace an organization’s purpose and values, their engagement with customers and external stakeholders becomes an expression of the company’s brand. Energy is something that is vital to our way of Life and impacts people all over the globe, thus it is in the interest of Energy companies to be “trustworthy”. Along with many countries worldwide, we must balance the trade-offs between 3 considerate – energy security, economic competitions & environmental sustainability. This is known as the “Energy Trilemma”. 

To overcome this, HR can continue to play its legitimate part of building a strong capable workforce while development of energy policies, enhancement of infrastructure and augmentation of investment in R&D continues to be led by other functional heads in the background.  

Ultimately, a strong talent culture is built and maintained through implementation of sound HR practices, shaped by the trends and disruptions as described in the conversations above.