Soon we all reported to our respective assignment locations. The GE Digital Office at PSN, Bangalore indeed lived up-to its billing of possessing one of the best internal decors amongst all offices across Bangalore. I was welcomed by my mentor and soon was introduced to all the HRMs in her team over the first few days. All of them gave me insights on what their expectations were for the project. Though I tried my best to factor in everyone’s inputs and come to a common ground, it got a little overwhelming in the initial days. After multiple deliberations, I wrote an approach paper elucidating my understanding of the problem and how I would go about solving the same along with the timelines. Even that went through multiple iterations and finally, an approach was finalized. Soon I went about trying to collect as much data and insights from people using a survey as well as by taking qualitative interviews. It was a tough job initially trying to understand what was significant, what wasn’t and also interpreting some of the contrasts between the findings of the quantitative survey and qualitative interviews. However, my mentor was kind enough during the initial days to set up a recurring meeting invite in her calendar and guide me each day for like half an hour on the kind of questions to ask to elicit maximum insights in the shortest possible time. Soon the time for mid-review came wherein I presented my findings until then. The 20-odd days after mid-review were the most frantic where I actually had to create actionable recommendations out of the problems identified in the exploratory research until then and compile them into an employee engagement handbook. It involved a lot of talking to business leaders, bouncing off own ideas as well as best practices from within and outside the company, identifying stakeholders to execute the same etc. After countless days of brainstorming and sleepless nights of rumination, the engagement handbook with all the mechanisms saw the light of the day and it pleased me no end when the HR Leader of GE Digital appreciated my recommendations as well as the width and depth of research that went into it.
In hindsight, although I wasn’t very intrigued initially, the project gave me an opportunity to work across multiple areas of HR like career path-ing, learning and development, performance management, rewards and recognition, HR analytics etc in order to drive engagement through them. The multiple team meetings with the entire HR team, administration of different HRD instruments on the team and intense debates on their interpretations, the philosophical discussions over lunch-table, the afternoon sorties around the building, or the random Gyaan that a couple of HRMs gave me whenever they could take some time off from their work are few things that I always looked forward to apart from my regular work. They gave me a bird’s eye view of how things work in the HR world and developed in me a deep sense of appreciation for the amount of effort they put in to maintain a balance between the business priorities and employees’ happiness. Another key takeaway was that out there in the real world, problems won’t always be well defined or totally black and white. There are always grey areas, uncertainties, ambiguities – and how well we account for them, connect the dots and chart out our own path is what matters in the end as the famous saying goes “The road to success is not always a straight line”
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