Employee engagement in the time of COVID-19

Employee engagement in the time of COVID-19 with Swarna Selvaraj

Sustaining employee development through continued engagement

I'm excited that you're joining me for an interview with my friend, Swarna Selvaraj. Swarna is the Head of Talent Development for Tata Consultancy Services or TCS in Europe, the UK, and Ireland. Swarna has nearly twenty years of experience and has led assignments that have transformed challenging scenarios into result-oriented opportunities. We're going to talk all about connecting learning to the business and everything related to that. Swarna, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Andy.

It’s great to have you on. We've developed a fast friendship and I'm excited to talk to you. You're working for probably one of the largest professional services, if not one of the largest companies in the world. You're dealing with a lot of people. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of people are working remotely. You were probably in the middle of scrambling to support a lot of that. I’m interested in getting into specifically how you've managed that and driven engagement during these times, as well as talking about making, learning, and development, more of a business imperative. Before we get to those things, may we start with a little bit of background. Who are you and how did you get to where you are now?

I'm Swarna. I've always been that. There's no change in it. I’m a simple person who likes to work with and understand people and see how I can learn and share. That's what I am. I'm from India, born and brought up in a city named Chennai, which is one of the metro cities in India. I studied there. I studied social work as part of my Master's course. I was campus recruited by a company named Murugappa Group of Companies. I was there for four and a half years, working with them on different assignments. I joined Tata Consultancy Services in 2006. From then on, it's no looking back. When I was in college, I was interested in working for both the Murugappa Group and the Tata Group of Companies. I'm glad I got my dream quickly. Even though I am a qualified HR professional, I've been completely specialized in learning and development. I love doing learning and development with a lot of employee engagement linked with it.

For your role, describe what you do at Tata.

I manage the talent development programs for employees in Tata Consultancy Services Europe, UK, and Ireland. As for the business structure, the continent of Europe is all the same, which includes the UK and Ireland as well. As part of the major markets unit, we have Europe, UK, and Ireland separately. We have close to 40,000 employees in these geographies. I have to be looking at how talent development needs are met for these employees. They are spread across different streams of technology. Their business domain, process-related aspects, behavioral aspects, or cultural language aspects, it's an all-rounded development that I need to focus on. There are multiple teams working from across the globe who offer different programs. There are people who contextualize. There are people who conceptualize it. We all come together and deliver these programs for these associates.

Big Shifts

You’re overseeing talent development for 40,000 employees across Europe, UK, and Ireland. What were the main components of the development programs you've had in place before COVID? What big shifts have you made since the pandemic?

I would say that the programs that we've had, we had the calendar programs published as to the plan. When the COVID scenario stuck, for us, it was different in different countries. In Europe, we are in operations in 21 countries. We all know that the situation was different in every country. The calendar programs were available. For us, these are the monthly programs that go and all that. People know that in a particular year, they have their competency sets. They know what are the programs that they need to take. What had happened was, with all these regular calendars already available and this COVID situation striking, prioritization coming to learning became a little lesser in the beginning. We could quickly feel that the learning days were going down.

It was because of multiple reasons. Basically, you need to be safe first. That was their first. We know of employees and their families getting quarantined because of the situation. There were several things that they needed to be careful about. We had to form cross-functional teams within geographies, which were agile teams looking at how we could first engage our employees. From doing talent development personally, I moved into doing employee engagement. I led the team of virtual engagement in the United Kingdom.

[bctt tweet="Especially when working remotely, you have to find different ways to engage with employees." via="no"]

I will take this example of the United Kingdom. We brought together well-being, learning, coaching, and all the aspects where people can learn. There are three categories of people. We started looking at categorizing employees into people who are quarantined, vulnerable, and needed support. We also categorized them into people who already settled down at their homes and started working. The third category of people are those who are at home safe but they're not able to start work because of a lot of information security reasons. We needed to have laptops. There are a lot of security violations. We had to plan engagement differently for all three categories of people.

From doing a learning calendar, I think the role transformation or the way we looked at it was, “How can we get employee engagement, first of all, and how do we get learning integrated into it?” The engagement had a lot of learning from virtual learning because learning was mostly digital. In TCS in the last few years, we've been doing more than 90% of our learning in the digital mode. People could learn from anywhere. The concept of work from anywhere came newly for a lot of people. It was almost 100% of people working from home. We picked up a lot of learning from virtual digital journeys into virtual engagements and then applied them. The difference was from learning, we go into engagement as a whole and then bring learning into it.

You didn't start by saying, “Let's take a look at the learning we have. How do we convert that and keep it going?” You started with, “How do we keep our people engaged with the three different tiers of people and how do we use learning to help drive that engagement?”

I did not tell you about the results we had. While doing employee engagement and integrating learning with it, we launched a learning challenge as well for employees to engage them differently. We did an analysis of how learning has been. We took the month of April and looked at what had happened. Between April 2019 and April 2020, we could see clearly that learning has improved and not decreased.

What you're saying is that a lot of companies put things on hold. They’re saying, “I don't know how we're going to do this work on converting things. While people are remote, the learning went down.” You're saying that after COVID, with people working remotely, learning days or the amount of time people have spent learning has actually gone up.

It went down at the beginning when we were looking at the situation. Our strategy of clubbing engagement to learning works.

Can you tell me a little bit more about that challenge and how that works? I want to learn about some more creative things that you did. I want to give people ideas they can do in their own organizations.

I can tell you that the learning challenge was launched at a global level. Every geography, business unit, and region in India, which are big regions, could design it the way they want it. We were trying to build learning stories of employees who are able to learn something, and help business or help themselves. It depended on the number of learning stories we were getting from different places. We have something called a competency development plan. How many people are able to gain competencies, even at this point in time? There was a special recognition for that. People work on projects because it's an IT consulting firm. Even accounts, we named them as the best learning accounts during the new normal. The awards that we had in Europe and the UK were the new normal learner and the new normal learning account. Different geographies had different ways of doing it. There were a lot of creative things that were happening. Overall, as an organization, we were able to see a good jump in learning this.

Using the challenge to engage people. They call it a peer-based social proof or social pressure to see what other people are doing and making it competitive. I have a long history of that in running business simulations for clients. When you make things competitive, it becomes a lot more engaging. People can see the rewards you're giving and they’re competing with each other, even if there's no actual prize on the line other than pride and ego. People will compete to try to do things especially if they see their friends doing it. You see a lot of consumer-based apps doing that stuff. It's cool to see you doing that in learning and development. What other creative things have you done as an organization to keep the engagement going during these times?

Employee Engagement: There has really never been a time in history where we’ve all had such a shared global experience.

Webinars are becoming common. We all know that. That's not something new. I can tell you that the creative learning methodologies that have come in, especially the live event. I had written an article for one of the magazines about the emerging learning methodologies and the new skill that talent development professionals are picking up. In terms of moderating an interview, how can you make it like a real market event? What are the kinds of skills that people pick up? We ran a lot of panel discussions with people on how they are coping up with the situation. We ran events like “A Day in the Life Of” where a COVID recovery patient came in to talk about how they did it and things like that. We did debates continuously. Some of the topics were interesting in terms of the roles people played. Whose job has changed the most? Is it the people in a particular role or somebody else? We brought in leaders, middle managers, and junior people to come and talk about that.

It's not just regular calendar programs, it's also additional things that were introduced. For example, our organization introduced weekly hackathons as a practice for all newcomers. People who have never hacked, you could hack now without any pressure. If we categorize it as people who've not done learning, we started applying data analytics to see what's happening. Another interesting thing I've heard from other geographies is they pledged the learning hours to charity. There are different things that different geographies did. It’s something to do with data analytics, going deep into what else we could do and how best we could do? That's one side of it. On the second side, linking learning to the community. That was also happening, and then coming up with newer learning methodologies to engage people like the live event debates, panel discussions, or a TV show. I even was part of one of the sessions named COVID Coffee.

Was that a live panel conversation?

It's like regular coffee with a celebrity or something like that. This is not just talent development. As an organization, you would have seen on LinkedIn, Twitter, and social media that #OneTCS. We were living the spirit of TCS. We came together as teams in engagement. We divided ourselves into social collaboration, learning, work collaboration, and doing different things in different places because people may be interested in different things. Even that, #OneTCS became popular. We had our employees become more active in social media as well. Many people like me became active in the COVID season in social media.

We've talked about that. I love asking people and I should be doing this more on the show. I've been hosting virtual summits, virtual roundtables for people in talent development. I've been having a lot of conversations and running client workshops. One of my favorite questions to ask is, “What's been one of the silver linings from COVID-19?” When you and I first started talking, you said, “I've never been on social media before but now I am connecting with a bunch of great people and it's been awesome.”

I got a nice friend as well, straightaway. I don’t remember talking to somebody outside my organization so much in all my years in my career, I would have done that. I think COVID has taken away my shyness of being within TCS and doing things. Now, I'm opening up and talking to people freely. I don't know what has changed but it has definitely given me confidence. The fear of moving out of TCS has gone. I'm seeing myself as a different person because of COVID. When I talk to some of my friends, they also tell me, “We see you writing more. That's unlikely of you.”

You’re posting on LinkedIn.

I've told myself that in a day, I have to do at least 50 words, if not more.

A Personal Brand

Let's stay on that because you're touching on two things that are important for helping your career. One is building a network and talking to people. The other is building a personal brand by putting some content out there from time to time and showing people some of the things that you know. On the networking angle of it, there are probably a lot of people out there like you who are like, “I work in a big company. I know enough people here rarely branch out of that.” If you are someone reading this and you've been thinking about branching out to network with people outside of your company, I can tell you that during this time, there has never been a better time. I'm finding that people are much more likely to book conversations, virtual coffees, video calls, and phone calls. They're more available because they're traveling less.

[bctt tweet="Launch programs for the benefit of your employees and their families, their children." via="no"]

I was explaining this to some clients, there has never been a time in history where we had such a shared global experience. There have been a few. Look back at 9/11 or World War II. Rarely has there been a time where everybody in the world is going through the same experience. We all have something to talk about. When you think about the essence of what a conversation is, it's a dance in trying to find common ground. We've already got it right away. We have that to jump from. It's easy to start a conversation.

I would agree. I remember my experience of traveling to the US to receive an award that was given to me by Training Journal. I was told that it is rare for a person to get that award because they award the top 25 people in the world as emerging training leaders. Every year, they do it. They named five people number one and I was one of them. I still can't believe that. I was so reserved when I went to the US. It was in Disneyland, Orlando. I went there and was comfortable inside my room. I think about it and I'm telling myself, “If it had happened next month, I'd have been a different person,” because of the time that I've got of not traveling, which is true. It's a great opportunity now to get global and to talk to people, that mindset.

When I went there to receive an award, a lot of people came and asked, “Can we do more sessions? Can you write?” I did write articles but I don't remember saying yes for even one conversation outside that event. I can't believe that I did that in spite of winning that award and being named as number one. I did talk to people when they asked me, “What I did in the organization that was so different?” This was the time when we moved from physical to digital completely. We were moving into digital learning itself and I was leading the largest region in TCS. I was given the responsibility to launch the first digital course in governance learning program in which I had to bring all business stakeholders together and convince all the people. The participants were global and multilingual. It was a clear business challenge that I had.

The situation was critical because the business head called me and said, “We are moving from manual testing to automation testing. This is the skill that's going to come in. We have more than 6,000 manual testers in our organization across India, Mexico, and Spain. We have six months. How can you get them all to become automation testers? We need to certify them. How can we do it?” That was the challenge. At that point in time, there was no specific course available in the market for that. You need to build a global course that you can launch. Until then, we've not heard about a course that is global. We do physical learning. The maximum is eLearning WBT. That's it. Talking to stakeholders, getting the subject matter experts, and training them as a virtual faculty, which was not heard of then, was something different. It was catching up in K-12 in the US where there were online schools and all that.

In fact, I took a course in Coursera, which was actually for teachers, on emerging technologies for virtual teaching. I went through it to understand how it can be done. I went back to my organization. I started with the business heads and told them, “We could try something like that and see how it works.” We had to do guided coding. We had to make sure that people were comfortable with that. It was a great experience. Six months was the time but we made it happen in four months with more than 6,000 people trained. All of them got placed. As a person, I always think that we need to have business alignment. Businesses should get benefitted. It was because we held the business of automation testing and we retained it. For the business, it is a huge benefit. For people, redundancy was completely gone. We did not have to send anybody out saying, “You don't have the skill.” It was a fulfilling assignment and I was awarded for that. I went there and I didn't talk to anybody.

You mentioned a couple of times this idea of connecting the business impact of getting the business involved or aligned. I know that's something you've been big on in your career. I'm going to guess and assume that has been a big contributor to your success. There's a lot of learning people that come up through learning organizations and build learning programs because they sound cooler and feel right but don't get the business involved. They end up not having that support. They're being seen more as a cost center. I've been on a mission to help talent development professionals become more strategic parts of the business. Tell me more about the importance of connecting programs to the business, involving all the stakeholders, and why that's so important.

You have said it, Andy. You cannot be a silo. You cannot be running something because it's nice to do. It can be a fantastic program but your people have to take it. Personally, I have always been part of the organization's development. It is never in a position where you have to keep building programs and somebody else sells it. I have not been in a role like that. If I have to develop a program, the thought itself has to come from, “What is the business problem?” or, “What is the future of business? How can we help?” That's where the thought of the program comes from. It also depends on the roles you have played. For me, I've always worked closely with business.

I've been part of the strategic business plan. When I sit there and hear, “This is their revenue. This is the profit. This is the margin they're looking at. What are the business problems that are coming up? What is the Customer Satisfaction Index saying? What is the feedback? What is the expectation from the top management?” All of this comes into play. You think about, “What can L&D do in this?” If L&D can play a part in that, then you have resolved your place in business. When you do something which is aligned to the business, it is easy to sell it to the people who have to take it. To the people who have to take it, you have to be compassionate and considerate about making them do it. You’ll have to explain to them the why part of it. Many people actually focus on the what. “This is what it is, you do it.” It's important to bring the why part of it, tell them, get them buying, and they also do it.

The Critical Factor Of Success

Many business organizations could be matrix organizations. They could be horizontals or verticals. All of them have to come together. Nobody should be focusing on whose stuff it is. When it comes to learning and development, it's learning for people. People are organizations. How do we do it? How do you keep the balance even when you are talking to business unit heads about why this is important and how it can be done? All that also matters. The critical factor of success lies in how business-aligned you could be. As far as people like me in the roles of business organizations like this, it makes a huge difference. If I have to give you an example of a strategic priority turned into a business program. I could give you probably two examples.

Employee Engagement: You cannot be a silo. You cannot be running something simply because it sounds nice to do so.

One is the first assignment of mine when I joined the Murugappa Group of Companies where there was a shootout in front of the factory in ‘91. I was recruited after ten years. Between the community and the organization, the trust had to be built. Employees used to come and go. They wanted someone to come in to see how we can build trust between employees and the organization because employees belong to the community. That was my first assignment and, by far, my best assignment. It's a clear business case that business wants employees to feel that we're all one. Employees do not want that. They're saying, “You've come here anyway. We're just working for you.” How do you do that? I made mistakes in my first assignment as well. They let me launch some programs with employees and did it. I got the business buy-in but it didn't work. I failed. The first 3 to 4 months were terrible.

The business is okay to try out whatever you want. You’ve done your analysis and you come back. You’ve studied something great and you just want to do the theoretical aspects. It doesn't work that way. You have to step back and think, “What more can be done?” Learn from your counterparts and other people. Come back with what you could do. Launch a program for employees, families, and their children. Bring them together, win their trust, and then later bring employees together. That approach works better. That's keeping all stakeholders involved and making the business meet its objectives. Also, people benefit from it. That's one example.

The other example was when I was leading the largest unit in DC, which is BFS. It was coming out in their Customer Satisfaction Index that the business domain knowledge required was not satisfactory. The clients were not happy about it. What do we do? We knew that we had a lot of subject matter experts. It had to be a complete strategy of how to bring in banking experts into technology or technology experts to learn banking. We built a domain competency framework for the organization, which can be helpful. When we built that and launched internal certification courses on domain, people were happy to do it because they knew why they were doing it. The business was happy to sponsor it because they knew they'll get value out of it. The business measure of Customer Satisfaction Index went up in terms of domain knowledge of people. That's the result. It's satisfaction as a person working on talent development. There's been something which business achieved and there are people happy about it.

Create something that engages and benefits people. You can make a business case for it. You're much more likely to get support from the business. It benefits all stakeholders like you said. You want something of benefit for everybody. I appreciate you sharing the two examples. What's been your biggest success or proudest moment in your career so far?

The proudest moment is definitely my first assignment where I was a fresher. I was asked to work on an assignment where I have to build trust between employees and the organization. It was not easy at all. I got beaten the first few months by making mistakes and learning the hard way. When everything started coming together, employees trusted me, followed by the complete HR team and the organization overall. It made me feel special because I had to remind them that I also belong to HR. They thought, “No, that is different. You're different.” It was with blue-collar workers so it's not that they are all highly educated and all that. They started trusting and I had to talk to them about a few things. That was the best experience I've had. I felt proud. Also, representing TCS on the world stage, winning that award of Emerging Training Leader of the Year. Amongst many applications that came and not just in the top 25 but being the number one representing my organization and my country in a global platform is a proud moment for me.

You must be proud of that. Congratulations. On the flip side, what's been your biggest mistake or biggest failure in your career, and what did you learn from it?

I can give you two examples. One size fits all doesn't work at all. From physical, we moved to digital. We launched an automation testing program and it worked well. I went with an assumption that this is the way forward. We could go with the same style for all programs. It didn't work. When we launched some of the courses, there was a question of, “How can we say that this is authentic? It's a TCS certification. That's not acceptable.” Many questions that came disturbed us. We went with an approach of one size fits all to start with. It didn't work but we quickly understood what was not working. We did some data analysis to understand the differences that we can bring in the faculty and content, how we should benchmark with external organizations to show the differences and similarities, and how it is better. So much work had to be done to customize solutions and learning programs for people.

One huge learning that I've had is that if one thing is successful, it may be anything, we cannot assume that that's going to be successful forever for everybody. It is different and it has to be customized. Even in my role, when I talk to my head of talent development globally, I keep telling him that my approach is simple. It's the three C's approach because I manage the most diverse geography in 21 countries operating in Europe and the UK. Actually, it's four countries. In football, we are four but for other reasons, we are one. I will definitely collaborate to get the best of resources from everywhere. I will customize because that is something that I have to do otherwise, I'm not going to get the buy-in. The third C is celebrate. Everybody likes celebration. Everybody likes applications. The three C's are collaborate, customize, and celebrate.

One size does not fit all, the mistake of taking something that works well and assuming it's going to work in other places. Of course, we know what happens when we assume. It's almost always a mistake. We want to collaborate but we also want to customize and then celebrate those wins. Are there any major trends in talent development that you've been following?

[bctt tweet="Everybody likes celebration. Everybody likes appreciation." via="no"]

Learning and development has become more open. When I say that, it is not necessary that a learning and development team has to give learning to people anymore. It's become open. It's available on the web. It's available everywhere. In fact, I would say that it's an opportunity and a challenge. How do we streamline and bring about what is required? It's a beautiful terminology in learning and development we have come up with called curation. The major trend that I see in learning and development, especially from creating content, we have completely moved to curating content. I see that as a major trend. That is only going to continue more and more. Content is available everywhere. That's a major trend. In terms of learning methodologies, there's going to be more coming up in terms of engaging methodologies because digital learning is the new normal. We might see a lot of new trends in terms of learning methodologies that are coming up and the skills required. It could even be acting more.

Is there a book or a TED Talk that you highly recommend or has made a big impact on you and your career?

As far as TED Talks are concerned, I like some of the Adam Grant’s TED Talks, which are interesting. There is a woman from India whose TED Talk I liked. I thought it was a good one. It inspires anybody because it's so good. The book that I have liked is Fish! by Stephen Lundin. It's a simple leadership fable but it's got a lot of meaning in terms of how you can transform situations from whatever it is, even if it's a fish market. The book talks about the Pike Place fish market and how the business goes down. Somebody comes up with this methodology and gets the business booming again. I'm a believer of transformation all the time. That book has had a huge impact on me.

Last question for you. For anybody else out there in talent development who are looking for ways to accelerate their career success, what's one more piece of advice you would give?

This is not just for talent development, it’s for anybody who's playing a role in services where you have customers. We need to clearly understand who our customers are, which is important. We need to know what we can offer and we need to set up the right team to deliver that. This is something important overall for any role. In the current day scenario and for the future for talent development, one word if I have to bring in, you should be resourceful. That's one thing that I would like to say. Being resourceful means you know where is what and what resources are available. You don't need to know everything but you need to know where what is available and bring it together to offer to business when it's required. When you create your offerings, be inclusive because it's global. We need to be inclusive of different dimensions that people bring. One size doesn't fit all, we need to remember that. Make sure that inclusion is coming in clearly. The accessibility part is important. That's it. If you're resourceful and if you're able to bring in inclusive offerings, way to go.

That's the big takeaway from this interview. Don't assume one size fit all. Remember to collaborate, customize, and celebrate. Be inclusive. Engage people with communication, empathy, and all those things. You've done some great stuff. It’s no surprise that you won that award. I appreciate you coming on to share all that experience and wisdom with us. Thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you, Andy, for this opportunity. You’re one reason for me coming out openly and saying, “I can do this.” I felt comfortable talking to you. I didn't feel like you're a new person. Thank you for making me feel that way. I am happy that I could speak to you.

Thank you so much. Take care.

• Tata Consultancy Services
• Murugappa Group of Companies
• Training Journal
• Coursera
• Adam Grant - TED Talk profile
• Fish!