The Shape of Work
The Shape of Work
#517: Evolution of Employee Rewards and The Impact of Predictive Analytics in HR: A Conversation with Akshansh Bhardwaj
"In the evolution of employee recognition, we've transitioned from annual bonuses to dynamic R&R programs. Today, it's not just about monetary rewards; organizations celebrate well-being with unique incentives like cars, vacations, and gift coupons. Quality and quantity both earn appreciation, marking a shift towards holistic acknowledgement in the workplace."
In this episode of The Shape of Work podcast, we're excited to host Akshansh Bhardwaj, an HR Partner in Analytics at IndusInd Bank. With key roles at Pine Labs, iTV Network, and HCL Technologies, Akshansh, holding a Biotechnology degree from Manipal Academy of Higher Education and an MHROD in Human Resources Development, offers a unique perspective on the intersection of biotechnology and HR. Join us for a captivating conversation exploring the dynamic career landscape and the evolving nature of work with our distinguished guest.
In this episode, Akshansh Bhardwaj, HR Partner in Analytics, offers insightful perspectives on the evolution of employee rewards and recognition, emphasizing the shift from traditional bonuses to well-being-centric programs. He discusses the significance of adapting to technological changes, particularly in predictive analytics. The conversation concludes with a focus on future workplace challenges and opportunities. A must-listen for HR enthusiasts and those interested in evolving workplace trends.
Episode Highlight
- The transition from yearly bonuses to dynamic R&R programs
- Embrace performance points and tokenization
- Enhancing satisfaction through personalized reward programs
- Focus on role orientation and meaningful experiences
- Anticipation of evolving workplace trends
FollowAkshansh on Linkedin
Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast Host: Riddhi Agarwal
About Springworks:
Springworks is a fully-distributed HR technology organisation building tools and products to simplify recruitment, onboarding, employee engagement, and retention. The product stack from Springworks includes:
SpringVerify— B2B verification platform
EngageWith— employee recognition and rewards platform that enriches company culture
Trivia — a suite of real-time, fun, and interactive games platforms for remote/hybrid team-building
SpringRole — verified professional-profile platform backed by blockchain, and
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Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Shape of Work podcast. Today I am delighted to welcome Akshant Bharadwaj, who is human resource partner at In this Lit Bang. Welcome to the podcast, akshant. Thank you for coming and joining us today. How are you?
Speaker 3:I am good. It's been a pleasure to be introduced here.
Speaker 2:It's a pleasure having you here. So just to set some context about you and what you do, can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your career journey till now?
Speaker 3:So it's been more than 80 years I have been in the industry. I have worked in information technology, I have worked in media and broadcasting. I have worked in banking, fintech as well being a startup part, so it's been a very good journey of more than eight years. I have covered a lot of things under my portfolio, mainly looking towards compensation and benefits and analytics as the main two pillars. Apart from that, there are many multiple things so you can go through the LinkedIn or a detailed understanding what I do. So that is a brief about myself, and in the past I have done my MBA from Delhi School of Economics. I am a 13-15 batch pass out.
Speaker 2:That's great to know that you have worked in different sectors like IT, fintech, banking, and now you are working as a HR partner in analytics role or compensation. You are interested in that. So I must say there are plethora of everything you have covered and we will get a lot of content from our conversation. So, yes, so, as someone who has worked in a HR professional role for a while now, I just wanted to ask you how have you seen employees' rewards and recognition evolve over the years? What trends do you anticipate in the future? Like, as we think about how employees used to be recognized may be an employee of the month award. Now, with remote work and different types of jobs, things have changed, and definitely you must agree. So what changes have you noticed?
Speaker 3:So I definitely agree that, yes, employer and recognition has been evolved over years. So if you look towards a decade ago, right, r&r were mostly awarded as bonus and incentives to the employee on a yearly basis, like when the financial closing overs or whenever there is a particular event like that. But now, later, it's evolved into R&R programs. So we have programs, we have award ceremonies, we have on-site ceremonies as well. So companies now take all their employees, go there somewhere or maybe book a hotel and do a proper ceremony, kind of thing.
Speaker 3:So even in addition to that, the mode of reward and recognition has also evolved. So it has been shifted from monetary aspect nowadays towards a well-being aspect. So nowadays you can see that very dynamic methods are being adopted. Some companies give vehicles, cars or bikes to their employees, some organizations give paid vacations to their employees, someone giving jewelry, someone giving furniture and a number of things. It's been a very dynamic change which has happened in the R&R aspect. Now there is one particular thing which we have seen evolved a lot, which is known as gift coupons or tokens. Right now it is very prominently visible in multiple organizations and the mode of this also varies from organization to organization, right, yeah.
Speaker 3:Although there is, in my personal opinion, employee or person should be rewarded for the work he does, right, whether it is quality or quantity. Earlier, it was just sign in to quality of work, like 10 people, 20 people, sales people used to do that, but now the quantity and quality, both are getting recognized in an organizational setup. Right yeah. Moreover, we have new concepts like performance points, which are getting introduced.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:So there has been a major shift from traditional to what we do current.
Speaker 2:Definitely, I'm a stucky with that point. Definitely, as you said, there is a shift from monetary policies to now organization are focusing on well-being of the employee more. So, yes, different organization have their different policies, different kind of recognition and rewards they offer to the employee. So, building on that, as different organization have different approaches, as workplace become, so workplace become more diverse, According to the employee point of view also, they have the different approach. Like we can see, organization, organization are focusing towards the diverse kind of employee thing and they are more focused on DEI, as you know.
Speaker 2:So, like when workplace become more diverse, employees are like unique houses in our town. So, when it comes to on rewards, not everyone like the same thing, of course, every employee or every person needs and things are different. So I just wanted to ask you, like, how do you think rewards that fit each person, or how do you make rewards that fit each person or in any organization, and how does using technologies or automation that can help to make these rewards just fit for the right person or just right for each person? What do you think?
Speaker 3:So, as we discussed, like Feminine and Spat, the concept of performance points and mode of tokenization is getting widely accepted. Nowadays, employees prefer a personalization angle. So what happens is, if we deep dive, we see that nowadays, e-commerce vouchers and travel aggregator vouchers are gaining a lot of popularity, and the main reason of this is acceptance is to tailoring and various requirements of an individual.
Speaker 2:Like earlier.
Speaker 3:If any organization used to take employees to particular location, now they do that. They give them a travel aggregator voucher and you go wherever you want. So this kind of optimization has been very much welcomed by the employees and, if we talk about the process of implementation in organization, so it is very easy nowadays.
Speaker 3:So you have multiple HRMS or HRIS tools right which monitor and automate this thing on an instance basis. There are multiple other tools as well which monitor, like your, diversity and inclusion, which monitor their acceptance ratio, which maintains and monitor their happiness index as well, which is very interesting to cover around.
Speaker 2:Definitely Right yeah.
Speaker 3:So there are multiple platforms which employees and organizations are utilizing. So, giving you an example, what happens is that there's a particular tool, so employee recognize their colleagues, their subordinates or their managers Right, and the points get accumulated to the recognized individual.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So at the end of the term or tenure, or whatever year you wanted. So from a particular team, let's say these three are our top recognized employees. These five are monthly employees, so organizations do kind of a mix and match in them. Definitely they do it on a monthly or maybe on a quarterly or a half yearly and an annual basis. That depends upon how the culture of our an organization is there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very well said, akshans. I must agree to the points. Whatever you have mentioned of talking about the e-voucher or the travel indicator voucher, the organization are shifted and trying to provide these things as their reward and recognition program. So, yes, every organization have different perspective of what their employees want and need. So, as we talked about how we can customize according to the diverse needs of employees, now let's talk about predicting the future. So, if we talk about predicting the future, I just wanted to ask you how does using prediction help figuring out what employee will like in term of rewards? Because we have talked about what reward and recognition is and what employee needs. So can you share a story about how knowing what people might want or that help give out rewards in a better way? So how do we analyze and how do we know this?
Speaker 3:See, honestly speaking, as of now, in my understanding, predictive analytics is a very nascent stage. It's very new concept to us.
Speaker 2:OK.
Speaker 3:Though that technology is evolving and opening a lot of horizons, but the ground reality is little far-fetched from what exactly is being required there yeah. Ok, so, although I definitely agree that analytics will and is proving to be a game changer, and particularly in my profile as well, as I have been working on it since long. So, giving an example, I have used predictive analysis to assess the trend and demand. So, like in one of my organizations, there was a concept of tokenization.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:So it helped me assess what employees perform most and we used to facilitate the same. So, in case, we used to provide vouchers to our employees. You know I got a lot of them, so that's nice to hear. Majority of employees used to avail e-commerce voucher. So there were multiple categories, so we had e-commerce, we had food vouchers, we had like furniture and home decor vouchers as well. Ok, particularly talking about the tokenization aspect. Ok, so people used to avail e-commerce voucher 9 out of 10. And they were covering from entire diversity or age group or category or grade level. Second one the food vouchers were only, and majorly, being availed or utilized by very senior person who are like 45, 50. So they used to give to their children let's go and have some fun.
Speaker 3:Oh, majority of them used to avail e-vouchers because yes, right the main reason you use widely accepted is that you can go and buy anything from an e-commerce voucher. You want books, you want something for your house, you want anything. You can get it, rather than just limiting yourself towards food or maybe groceries or maybe particular furniture.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:So in that sense, analytics has helped a lot. So because to provide a particular voucher to an employee, we need to avail it from a service provider, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So we used to provide our requirements in that particular ratio.
Speaker 2:That's great to know, akshans, what your analytics or what you analyze from your journey so far, talking about the tokenization, as you mentioned. So, to summarize it, as you mentioned, the employee will generally accept the e-commerce voucher, which is widely accepted, and senior citizens, or senior people, they accept the food voucher. So I think these are great insights which you have bought now. So we have covered the past and the present of what automation or what can we analyze and how do we do predictive analytics to contribute the employee needs and preferences. Now let's dive into the future of our HR professionals, and definitely the future of HR professionals might have some tough parts, but also some exciting chances ahead. So, looking forward, what do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities for HR professionals in the coming years?
Speaker 3:Okay, so interesting thing. Let's cover opportunities first. So as far as opportunities concerned, I personally and very strongly believe that whosoever will be able to adapt with the technological drift will see a huge growth in coming years. If we see, like 10, 15 years ago, nobody even heard of what data scientists or analytics on all these things were Exactly. These were like out of the blue for anyone. But now these are the new passwords. Everybody, every organization, is hiring as the tech evolved, the job roles changed, but very big. But organizations are still trying to make sense of it and that is very much evidently visible from the. If you see tech and the attrition in technology, job profiles or maybe organization, it tells a lot how and what is going in the industry as a whole Right, as we have seen in the past, that there is a shift in employee preference right Monetary to well-being.
Speaker 3:Nowadays people focus more on cultural dynamics. Right, they focus on work-life balance. They focus more on role orientation. What will I get out of it? Where is my kick? So-called Right People prefer that.
Speaker 2:Definitely.
Speaker 3:And they go through all these things when applying to a new job opportunity. They go towards organization's culture, how the organization has evolved till now. They go and talk to other people who are working there right, you all do that when you search for a job or something like that. But the problem arises that organizational management right, it's not programmed that way. Man, this is my personal opinion. Whatever I have seen till now, Management is not programmed that way. They always hesitate to imbibe new changes.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly True.
Speaker 3:And it generally leads to a drift among employers and companies. Right, older organizations which prefer a very slow pace, whereas new generation of employers prefer otherwise. They always want to start up culture, they want to establish the organization, but the culture they want is a start-up culture so that they get their hands on multiple job profiles. They get to understand a lot of things. Right, a HR person will try to hand on in finance and try their hands on something else.
Speaker 3:So people want dynamic and adaptable work environment, but I feel that organizations still need a rapid game changer to bring in, because what is required and what is going on do not coincide since of now In most of the organization. There are some organizations which do that, yeah, but in most of them it's still a challenge. That's my thought.
Speaker 2:Definitely, I must agree, if whatever changes or whatever trends we see, if we'll be updated with the trends, or if we can implement the trends or changes as soon as we can do that, then definitely it will be the great way to achieve success and be more productive in the corporate or in the organization. Even organization can do that to adapt that changes frequently so that they can be staying ahead with the trends. So very well said, akshant, and that makes a lot of sense. So, yes, I'm sure there's a lot of takeaway from the content you have shared today. So thank you for sharing this.
Speaker 3:My pleasure I've been of some assistance to you.
Speaker 2:Yes, definitely, and this brings us to the end of our conversation. But before we leave, can you tell our listeners where they can reach out to you?
Speaker 3:You can go on LinkedIn. My phone number and everything is there, whatever you need In case. If you want, you can provide my phone number and my email ID as well, in case someone wants to get in touch.
Speaker 2:OK, definitely, akshant, Thank you. Thank you for sharing your insight. It was lovely hosting you today.
Speaker 3:Thanks a lot, it's been my pleasure.