No HR? No problem: How ZEISS India leaves the ‘fun’ side of HR to employees!

Santana Ramakrishnan, CHRO, ZEISS India, says, “India is a very important market for ZEISS, and it’s a strategic priority for ZEISS globally. Therefore, what we will do here in the next two to three years will be deterministic, not just for ZEISS in India, but for ZEISS globally. The agenda at the time of my hiring was for me to help work with the CEO and the leadership team to transform the organisation. It’s still ongoing, and a large part of the work that we’ve done has established basic foundations, created replicable practices and reliable processes, and outcomes for employees and managers, which I think is a good midway point for us.”

“The second half of the journey is obviously much more competitive. Once the basics are set in place, it comes down to behaviour and helping people understand that there are certain behavioural shifts that need to happen as we are thinking that cultural transformation will be a larger part of the journey that’s left ahead for us. We have a significant focus on Agenda 2030, which is the business’ focus on targets, customer perception, employee engagement, and the speed of our operations and execution,” Santana adds.

And to support this business journey, Santana points out that there is a people journey that’s involved, which doesn’t deviate from the fundamental values as an organisation, but focuses on what and how those values need to be adapted for the next five years.

Santana shares that a big focus for them right now is making sure that they are creating enough platforms for people to exercise and engage to their fullest potential. “Some businesses are forecast to grow by 20 per cent, while others are expected to see deeper investment in customers, and some are set to expand further in technology and product portfolios. For the HR department, the primary focus is to support the businesses delivering the Agenda 2030, whether it’s through hiring, retaining, coaching and developing people, or bringing new skill sets and engaging them in the organisation,” she says.



Talent strategy

Santana shares the three aspects that would take a large portion of the HR team’s mindspace when it comes to delivering for the organisation:

• Bring in the right talent and retain them within the organisation.
• Make sure that the existing talent pipelines are sufficiently deep and tenured, and create an access point for them to maximize their potential.
• Ensure that people stay cohesive and connected with the global values at a cultural level, and retain the values that made them successful in the past, which are scientific temperament, rationalisation, and the amount of research and development that goes into a product launch.

“Our significant area of focus for the next couple of years will be around sales and support, expanding our footprint in markets where we’re already present, and deepening our engagement with our customers. We will have new production facilities, which will come up to increase capacity to support advanced demand requirements, both domestically and internationally. We plan to add talent there. And with all the conversations that we have around AI and Cloud Analytics, these are skill sets that we have not historically built within the organisation, so these will be a new set of skills and talent that we need to onboard into our system,” Santana says.

She further points out, “Essentially, we are digital business units, which means our technology workforce is largely R&D, digital and technology-focused. We don’t need 1,000 people at one shot. Our numbers will grow, but they will not grow at the rate at which a Global Business Service (GBS) organisation will staff people.”

Santana highlights that there are pockets within the organisation that are exploring AI skill sets. “But given the proliferation of people in the skill sets outside, it’s really not a cause for concern or worry for us. We identify people who have a base skill set, and we work with partner organisations to help optimise that existing skill set base, at the same time, top it up with what we believe is required for us, and then bring people into the workforce,” she says.

“Once people come into the workforce, each of the divisions does the functional training to make sure individuals are equipped to deliver their day-to-day tasks. The learning and development team takes the input, works with the business, prioritises them between hard skills and soft skills, and then creates structured learning interventions on a quarterly basis,” she adds.

ZEISS India goes for a combination of both lateral and campus hiring. “Our focus is on campus, lateral referrals, and programme management, where people come in as interns for a short time. As our midterm and workforce planning are underway, I am not at liberty to share specific numbers around what we are looking to hire. It is a forecasting process. There are requirements that are getting revalidated as a result of Agenda 2030,” Santana says.

“There are campus hires who come in, and we have a programme where we engage with institutions that are focused on technology, including the IITs. We work with IISc as we also hire PhD candidates and Postgraduate Doctoral thesis scholars. We also have a strong lateral hiring mechanism where we tap the market for talent to supplement our existing efforts. We encourage employee referrals as well. There are certain niche programmes where we would prefer our employees to bring in their people who are within their reference zone,” Santana adds.

Core HR concerns



Commenting on her core HR concerns, Santana highlights, “We believe in making sure that we are proactive enough to see what challenges people face across every pocket with different demographics and different priorities. For an organisation of this scale and size with the footprint across manufacturing, sales support, R&D technology, there will always be challenges with respect to employee engagement. We constantly look at, ‘How do we make sure that our dispersed workforce is still anchored to the mothership? Are we able to communicate our cultural parameters effectively?’ Because a lot of values that get in get lost in the translation phases. In an MNC, there is a certain tone that gets set in the head office, and by the time it comes to a region, there could be a bit of dilution. And then from there, there is a local culture element, then there’s a city element. So, the effort will always be to make sure there’s uniformity in understanding what ZEISS stands for.”

Santana shares that attrition continues to be a challenge. “Like every other organisation, we have a new emerging workforce every four years, and that workforce comes with different expectations, in terms of work, life, and its balance. Also, with the number of people that we hire every year at a lateral level, we make sure that we are adapting our strategy and approach around manager effectiveness, and are inculcated with the focus on culture,” she says.

Skill sets needed in blue-collar roles

Commenting on the skill sets preferred, Santana says, “Even if it’s blue-collar work, there is a certain degree of skill that is required, because the work that we do is highly technical, whether it’s dealing with the lens manufacturing process that has different stages, and processes where chemicals are involved. Likewise, there needs high precision in assembly line manufacturing for our industrial quality business, and people need to have a background in Physics, wherein they understand circuitry.”

“In the machine tooling industry, we prepare and create documents that are blueprints, which are standard across the globe. The person who is assembling that particular machine needs to be able to read that blueprint. He or she needs to have enough technical expertise to assemble a machine. All our production staff are engineers, and all our assembly line staff will have a technical background, whether it’s ITI or a diploma in managing heavy machine tools. Also, operating this machinery, which is many tons, requires people to have a certain degree of physical capability to handle it,” she adds.

D&I interventions

Santana points out that a lot of the effort that they put in from a D&I standpoint is deliberate. “There are also some constraints that we operate in. For example, the machine tooling industry does not have a very good gender balance anywhere in the world, because women usually don’t study or opt for STEM subjects, which take them into machine tooling. There are a handful of them, and whenever we go, we make sure we prioritise and give them an equal opportunity to apply for the job. Whether it’s looking at return to work programmes for women who’ve taken a break from the workforce and are looking to come back, we open a window once a year for women,” she says.

When the factory was set up about 15-17 years ago, ZEISS didn’t have many women available in blue-collar or white-collar profiles who were technically qualified. “Over the years, we can see a lot of women who are interested in this domain. I think, about four or five years ago, the conversation started having a predominantly male workforce versus having a more diverse workforce, and around its pros and cons and benefits. We introduced women in one line about two years ago. We found that they were adaptable, and they were working in the general shift,” Santana says.

There has been a significant uptick in the number of women employees in production since then. And over a period of time, the firm realised, this is a group that is much more invested in the job. “There was an equal balance in the amount of productivity. Safety was not an issue. They were trained very well. They came with a deep understanding of machines and technology. Some of them came from backgrounds where they were the only breadwinners in their families. And over a period of time, we were able to run an entire shift completely staffed by women, including the shift supervisors and the shift in-charges,” Santana says.

Currently, ZEISS India has around 47-50 per cent women in the workforce in the manufacturing operations, including more women who come through the apprenticeship programmes.

HR tech interventions

Talking about the HR tech developments at ZEISS, Santana says, “The effort, of course, is to have a digital architecture in HR, which is heavily reliant on a single source of truth. Apart from the HRIS, we have other commercial products that we use to create more interfaces with the system. We are invested in robotic processes. Especially the manual and repetitive tasks in HR, like issuing offer letters and signing forms, are done by the robot. This year onward, we will begin to explore how we can incorporate AI into some of our talent attraction practices, like resume parsing, and see if that can feed into our digital architecture.”

ZEISS leverages technology to create better employee experiences and ensure that people are not spending valuable time on doing monotonous, repetitive work. “I don’t believe in technology taking away from individuals interacting with individuals in order to have a meaningful experience. That’s why people come to an organisation. When it comes to employee queries, resolutions and engagement, I don’t think we’ve reached a point where an AI tool can coach an employee on how to write their performance assessment. Maybe we will get there. Today, we are still reliant, and we believe it is a manager’s responsibility to coach the employee and work with them on their performance assessment,” she says.

Employee engagement programmes are not restricted to HRs

At ZEISS, Santana shares that one function is not solely responsible for initiating employee engagements. “Not everyone is present in the office all the time. In the field offices, one person holds the fort while seven salespeople are out in the field. We have technology centres, which are primarily centres where customers visit us, where we have equipment demonstrations and learning. We have distribution and stock list points and have quality and fitting people who are checking the quality and sending it out to customers, like a mini warehouse. So, we don’t have the luxury of having HR people or any one individual to organise the fun parts,” she says.

ZEISS has recreation committees spread across the country. And not every location has an HR person or an admin person to run this. “Regionally, we are spread out. We have recreation committees that are created on an annual basis. It’s a volunteer-based committee for a year, and then somebody else steps in. There are bhajans that are allocated. There are certain festivals and programmes that we celebrate across the country, like Independence Day and Women’s Day. There are programmes that happen in that particular state–in Karnataka, we celebrate Kannada Rajyotsava, and that is done on a grand scale by the recreation committee. Then there are specific functional level ones, like birthday celebrations, which are very particular to that specific location or that team,” she says.

The budgets are allocated from the employee welfare budget, and the recreation committees exercise discretion. “They make a plan on how they will use it, and it works for us. It makes everyone happy. We will always have feedback. Somebody is saying we don’t get enough in Delhi. Somebody will say we get too much in Bombay. So that’s an ongoing learning process. In some recreation committees, there are HR folks, and in some, there aren’t,” Santana says.

L&D interventions

ZEISS leverages performance development dialogues to design L&D interventions. One source of training input emerges from manager and employee conversations. The second is derived from the business plan, outlining the capabilities and skills required and guiding where we need to invest and build talent.

The third input is standard functional programmes, and the business day-to-day provides the L&D team with another source of input. For instance, for people who are working in the medical service, there is a set of skills that they need to get trained on every year. For people working in vision sales, there is a certain set of optometry skills that they need to get familiar with.

The fourth source of input is the leadership development programmes that help people move through the ranks.

Work models

Work models at ZEISS are created to ensure the work-life balance of employees, while keeping in mind the nature of work that is required in the firm. The role and specific organisation define which model the individual picks. The working model caters to three groups of employees:

• Entirely remote for a handful of corporate employees across the organisation.
• Fully in the workplace: This includes the manufacturing organisation, sales teams, and service teams.
• Hybrid work is typically for the technology teams, because they have a flexible working arrangement, where three days they work out of the office, and two days they have the flexibility to work from home or another work location.

“We don’t just write code. We work on equipment. A lot of the development work needs to be done onshore, because we have machinery that needs to be developed. It’s a technology organisation, and people need to be available for sprints when they work on an agile methodology, testing, which happens on a machine, or when they have broader group calls in which they are assessing the temperament of a particular project. In that case, people will be present in the office,” Santana says.

Collaborations

Santana highlights that there are very few organisations that are run by a foundation. “We don’t have a shareholder board that dictates what should be prioritised. Some of these values, though they are 170-180 years old, are concrete ones that will drive us, and which we will continue to cascade across,” she says.

ZEISS’ re-established business in India is about 25 years old. “We started essentially as a sales and service, export and import company. A full-fledged setup like this has only been around for about 10 years. And HR policies have evolved over time. As I said, for HR policies, we get our freedom from two places: the local law of the land (the employee policies are defined by the government, and whatever top-up we do on that is our employee welfare and benefits) and global guidelines around what we need to do for employees, which is driven by Germany,” Santana says.

Commenting on the collaborations with her HR counterparts in other countries at ZEISS, Santana says, “We are a fairly integrated organisation, and practices in the HR space are not that siloed. There’s a lot of conversation and dialogue between us, and we’re able to leverage each other and our team members. There are people who are on short-term assignments and shared resources.”

“Every country has its own nuances for regulatory reasons. We take our inspiration from the good work done by the HR counterparts of the firm in other countries as well. For example, the job catalogue exercise, which India did for the technology organisation, has been fairly advanced compared to what the other countries have done. And in the recent past, China and the USA have come back and said, they’d like to take that and feed it into their organisation,” Santana adds.