On this episode of The Shape of Work podcast, our guest is Ranjith Menon, Sr Vice President Global Human Resources at Hinduja Global Solutions.

In his two decades of experience in the HR function, Ranjith has lived and worked across five different countries helping several businesses with some notable HR initiatives. In this episode, he shares the differences in HR practices across countries.

In addition to sharing his thoughts on the future of work, he talks about employee engagement strategies for remote and hybrid teams and the top challenges of diversity in the workplace, with some real-world examples.

Differences in legal landscape from country to country

The labor-landscape in developed and developing countries are very different. Communication structure is different from country to country. For example, In Indonesia where national labor law mandates positions that require certain skills such as quality management, HR, cannot be held by people from outside the country. For an HR professional who wants quality management skills, you will have to look at the local market. You cannot hire from outside as you will not get a work permit. The solution was to bring an expert in-house and train the employees.

The difference in termination policies from country to country

When you terminate people in India, you will have to serve a notice period and provide severance packages to the employees.  In Europe, you will have to start communicating with the labor union to downsize. You will have to go through the whole process before you can approach employees. In certain countries, if someone is the only breadwinner/physical disabilities, only parent/etc., they cannot be the person to go in case of redundancies. In developed countries, there are other policies such as last in/first out where people that have joined the organization recently will be the first ones to go.

Maintaining diversity in companies

Companies need to be diverse to move forward. Diversity helps the company get fresh ideas and perspectives. However, maintaining diversity in certain sectors is difficult. For example, in engineering (mechanical, electricity), it is tough to have gender diversity. In finance, marketing, HR, it is relatively easy to maintain gender diversity.
Diversity should not be there just for the sake of it. You have to make a plethora of changes to have diversity. If you looked at the top 500 companies in the world, less than 5% have female CEOs. Companies single out stories of some successful women to show that they have maintained diversity. However, diversity is more than that. You cannot just have one woman on the board of directors and say that we have diversity in the company.

Work from home challenges in India

Implementing WFH policies comes with a certain set of problems in India. Our country has a lot of interstate migration. Due to that reason,  it is a very different challenge to get people to WFH. For example, employees provide the city address that they work at instead of their home address. When HR wants to ship the necessary equipment to them, it gets sent to the wrong addresses. Power outages are another problem. Companies have to ship UPS as well as with internet dongles. Problems such as internet bandwidth are also there. That’s not a problem you find in the USA, UK, etc.  It is another learning curve to figure out how to do things virtually such as work-related business practices, employee management, etc.

Follow Ranjith Menon on LinkedIn

Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast host: Lokesh Gautam