On 28th October 2017, MBA (HRD), Department of Commerce, Delhi School of Economics had the pleasure to welcome on the campus, Ms. Ruchi Bhatia, University Branding Specialist – Senior HR Manager at IBM for a Guest Lecture. Ms. Ruchi carries more than 10 years of experience in the HR domain and is associated with IBM from past 7 years.
The topic of the session was ‘The Future of Work’. The lecture began with Ms. Bhatia emphasizing on how the old models of work have now been transformed with the fast-paced technological advancement taking place across the world. The first major impact has been created by the Social Network which has completely changed the dynamics of how work is perceived by the employees as well as how people interact with each other. She talked about SMAC which is an abbreviation for Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud Computing as the major game changes in the work environment.
Ms. Bhatia told the students about how fast the work we do and the technology we use is constantly evolving that we can’t predict what new jobs may come up in the next 5 years. Also, with the amount of data being generated and its easy accessibility, the work is set to become transparent. Employers and the employees are no longer separated from each other by the opaque doors, be it in the offices or outside offices. Employee Engagement is seen to be a major challenge even after all the progress made across various domains and the future managers must take it as a challenge to improve on it. This can actually help the organisations save millions of dollars wasted by the employee downtime.
Talking about the Talent Acquisition, Ms. Bhatia said that a company’s culture is like its brand. To attract the best talent, a company has to develop a culture with which the prospective employees can relate and align. In addition to this, quantifying the employee’s work can be of great help to identify how much impact the talent of a company is creating. Further, she touched upon how the future of work is going to be flat with the level of hierarchies separating the employees continuously reducing. Also, the work hours, as well as the location, would become extremely flexible which will help in empowering the employees giving them the freedom to work from the place they prefer and would also help companies save up on the infrastructure costs. However, the communication would be the key in this pursuit which till now has constant support of the technology. Work-Life balance is set to be a thing of past and shall be replaced with Work-Life Integration.
Lastly, Ms. Bhatia talked about various other challenges and key learnings for HR managers. She is of the view that HR needs to become a value adder more aggressively than ever to enhance its relevance. For this, HR can learn a lot from Marketing. And, with the clouds of doubt hovering over employees with new technology constantly replacing people, HR needs to stand up for its employees to find ways to protect them and become an Employee Champion. This can be done by constant reskilling and proactively thinking of the ways to ensure that their employees are up to date with their competencies.
We sincerely thank Ms. Ruchi Bhatia for her enlightening session and look forward to having her on campus once again.