In just over a year, Centric’s India team increased its employee count by 100 percent. HR Lead Hemant Batra explains how his team is building a people-centric organization and feedback culture amid such dramatic growth.
The Human Resources Association of India (HRAI) recently named Centric Consulting India practice’s HR Lead Hemant Batra its Changemaker of the Year.
Between 2021 and the end of 2022, our India team experienced tremendous growth, doubling its number of employees from 250 to 500. But in addition to the challenge of managing the tremendous change that comes with such growth, Batra’s team did its work during a massive transformation in India’s approach to HR.
“In the Y2K period, India started to become a leader in offshore IT services,” Batra explained. “Employee welfare was not a focal point, and an aggressive culture developed to meet clients’ demand for long hours. Though organizations began implementing additional benefits and more work-life balance, their efforts were not sustainable.”
Around 2006, Batra said an influx of foreign organizations in India brought a fresh perspective to the continent, including ways to build more constructive cultures.
“Today, Indian organizations are making great strides in building a culture that prioritizes employee well-being, leading to greater job satisfaction and productivity,” Batra wrote in an article he published in HRAI Magazine.
For its part, our India practice focused on both operations and culture. Operationally, Batra’s team implemented an HR and employee self-service tool and transformed its approach by automating most of its operational processes. Centric India’s HR Dashboard now tracks and reports every operational activity, including compliance data, to the leadership group.
Culturally, the India team has implemented policies to guide the company’s highly flexible work style and the type of work employees do.
“People can choose to work in an office or at home, though most people reserve their office time for socializing,” Batra said. “All of our employees are client-facing, and they do more development and consulting work. Employees can choose to specialize in cutting-edge technologies and platforms like Salesforce, cloud or automation, but they are free to explore other areas, too.”
In his HRAI Magazine article, Batra detailed how the India team is building such a people-centric culture by:
- Putting peers first: Show gratitude for the outstanding colleagues on your team. You build stronger relationships and a sense of community when you demonstrate appreciation for others.
- Being inclusive: Congratulate and show appreciation for team members from other departments, too. Thinking across departments builds a more inclusive, supportive environment.
- Demonstrating empathy: Strive for a balance between empathy and realism. Showing you understand colleagues’ feelings while being realistic about their work requirements and challenges helps build stronger relationships.
- Being boundless: Create short-term assignments in different aspects of your business and encourage people to choose them based on their interests. This practice exposes employees to other areas and makes it easier to develop a 360-degree view.
- Fostering an entrepreneurial mindset: Think of your work as your child. How can you help it grow? How can you make it better? What risks are worth taking for improvement?
Batra uses these qualities to achieve his HR team’s biggest goal: creating a true feedback culture.
“In a feedback culture, feedback is constructive, reflects performance, and provides immediate recognition for good performance,” he said. “It is not easy to do that, but we enable it by being conscious and focused.
This year, Batra’s team will focus on creating a mechanism for feedback, communication and recognition. They are already ahead of the curve by putting the right frameworks and tools in place. “Everything we do at Centric India we do to do it better,” said Batra. “But the only way to do that is to receive constructive, honest feedback about what we did well and what needs improvement so we can do it better next time.”
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