Second year students, specializing in Human Resources (HR) at Jaipuria Institute of Management, Lucknow had a privilege of gaining knowledge from a Guest Session that was a part of the course on Training and Development. “CFO asks CEO ‘what if we invest in developing our people and they leave us’ and CEO said, ‘what if they don’t, and they stay?,” was the catchy theme of the session held on 12th of November. As expected it had many real life anecdotes and learning experiences for students.

The session held under the guidance of Prof. Pallavi Srivastava, Assistant Professor, Area Chairperson, HR & OB, Jaipuria Institute of Management, Lucknow brought Mr. Vinod Chaturvedi, Chief Human Resource Officer and Head, Group Centre of Expertise – Employee Relations, Aditya Birla Group, Mumbai to the campus to share his vast experience with the students. Thrilled to be amongst young minds from the institute he set the discussion up with a session on the crucial topic of “Strategic role of HR in Employee Development”.

Mr. Chaturvedi highlighted the importance of HR strategy in the development of employees. He then spoke about strategy when he said, “What you want is vision and how you want to achieve that vision is strategy. You have to understand that today HR strategy has to be aligned to business strategy.” According to him, Business Strategy is divided into four different elements for Manufacturing, Finance / Cost, Marketing and People.

He then went on to talk about employee needs and employer needs, which are quite different. He believes understanding employee psychology is important for development. Mr. Chaturvedi said, “Two things should be seen in strategic employee development – the employee gets satisfaction in the form of employability and the organization in turn should get some value (ROI). 10% attrition is healthy in an organization as new ideas should also come in with fresh recruits.”

While sharing his experiences Mr. Chaturvedi tried to instill amongst students the fact that employee development is important as there is cost associated with employee turnover. “It involves direct cost of termination, vacancy, recruitment, Selection and Hiring, and Orientation and Training, while indirect costs are for productivity of the worker, co-worker, the supervisor, increase in defect and cost of productivity of the new hire during transition,” he spelt out.

Mr. Chaturvedi then touched upon a crucial differentiation between intelligence, which is information stored while talent is delivery of that information. He used performance-potential matrix or inverted-L model diagram used for Talent segmentation to good effect. He also added that training is task driven and development is goal driven. He then shared 70-20-10 principle of Do (results) – Share (Skills) – Learn (Knowledge) with the participants.

Finally, the expert with years of experience shared tips for those who wanted to carve a niche for themselves in the world of HR. “To be a Star HR professional you should understand the core subject and learn the core concepts taught in Organizational Behavior and HRM in the first year. You have to be human engineers because you have to understand human minds,” he ended his interactive session on a high note.