HR must leverage technology to champion change: Polycab’s CHRO In an exclusive conversation with People Matters, Suresh Kumar, the Chief Human Resource Officer at Polycab talks about how the company adopted HR technology in a phased approach By Jerry Moses
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expectations of future technology solutions. Here are excerpts from the interview.
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uresh Kumar is the Executive President and CHRO at Polycab. Previously, he was the President – Strategy and Human Resources. Prior to Polycab, Suresh worked in various HR roles at companies like Mafatlal, Polycab Wires, Hindustan Unilever Limited. In a conversation with People Matters, Suresh talks about Polycab’s journey towards HR technology adoption, key challenge areas, navigating the COVID19 pandemic, and his | APRIL 2021
Can you talk about the journey of deploying the HRMS? At Polycab, we were looking for an integrated HRMS system for over a year. And our focus was to identify a system that was both – integrated and employeefriendly. As a company, our goal was to move away from manual work and our thought process then was to make the HR department into a paper-less function by the upcoming financial year. And the HR technology system had to support the company’s growing vision. It needed to address the concerns that employees already had – whether it was providing seamless support and giving employees the information that they needed. Adrenalin was chosen with that intent.
According to us, it had the capabilities which matched our expectations.
What were the top challenges in your journey to integrating technology into your HR function? And how did you overcome it? The biggest challenges we faced in integrating technology in our HR function were • Managing the transition – HR is a very sensitive function. It contains critical information such as payroll and employee performance records among others. Accurately migrating such confidential data was a herculean task. • Maintaining compliances – We operate in a highly regulated business environment. It was important for us to ensure internal and external compliance to meet audit requirements. • Training the staff to adopt the new module – This was compounded by the recent COVID – 19 pandemic that disrupted us all. Fortunately, we have an able workforce that knows how to overcome adversity. Our employees showed great
