I hunkered down in the starting position, hands poised on the track and back arched for a leap. "On your mark! Get set!" And the starting gun boomed. I launched myself forward, adrenalin running high, with complete belief that my honest efforts, hard work and a strong will to win will get me to the Finish Line successfully.

This is exactly how I felt when our CFO asked me to work upon an idea to create a global delivery center (GDC), a shared services unit that provides business process support and knowledge-based services to the Tata Motors group. As the first and only employee of the GDC, I worked upon this challenging and exciting concept which was to establish what it will entail and how the group can leverage its value proposition. Gradually we enrolled a few more people and formed the core team. That was the time, when we used to frequent the drawing board, charting out strategies and plans – conceptualizing, designing and deploying. It was an opportunity to create a one-of-a-kind organization and it gave us immense pleasure to be the core team that created it.

 

 

 

 

Fast Forward to 2020

I am proud to state that, today, Tata Motor’s GDC is one of the best-in-class shared service center. As a large multi-dimensional centre, it supports end-to-end SLA driven transactional services such as Procure-to-Pay (P2P), Order-to-Cash (O2C), Hire-to-Retire (H2R), Record-to-Report (R2R), Ideate-to-Produce (I2P) and Taxation (indirect and direct). GDC also handles global controls & compliance, digital transformation, contact centre operations, Process Excellence and Master Data.

The GDC has become the business process backbone with superlative process benchmarks & service quality, housing expertise for niche skills like new age technologies, controls and innovations.

It has delivered productivity, standardized operations at scale over a period of time and has deployed multiple transformative business process changes to deliver business value to the group. To leverage GDC’s strength and collective capability, Tata Motors decided to hive it off as a separate legal entity. While we were gearing up for the separation, Covid-19 hit us. The kind of uncertainty and urgency to react to the new normal invoked the same sentiment that we experienced while we first set-up the GDC.

We are all dealing with this unprecedented pandemic situation and with the impact of the same in our personal and professional lives. Much has changed in last 7-8 months; and future remains uncertain. We have a challenge to withstand this possible prolonged crisis, and when it ends, emerge from it as a strong and healthy economy.

I would like to share what we, as an organization, have collectively done during this period; how Covid-19 has changed GDC’s role; and what have I experienced as a change in my personal leadership.

The GDC – A Big Leap

While GDC always played a pivotal role in Tata Motor’s strategic initiatives, the pandemic gave us an opportunity to look ahead through a new, transformative lens. We realized that we need a culture, process and talent to weather this storm now and beyond. It is indeed difficult to formulate a strategy in the face of uncertainty. However, it gave us an opportunity to completely transform our business, our processes and the experience that we create for our customers and stakeholders. The crisis brought the urgency to the longstanding challenge of adopting digital and analytics into the core of doing business, and we were able to quickly act on the transformation.

If we, as individuals, can embrace virtual replacements for accessing physical products and services, with minimum physical contact, the same can apply to every corporation and the world at large. Access to digital infrastructure has now become a basic requirement for doing business. Therefore, if we can withstand and fulfill the demands posed by this situation and address the business pain points through reimagined processes, we will emerge stronger from the crisis.

Consumer behavior has majorly changed towards the use of digital media, and low-touch processes are here to stay, even in the post-pandemic life. Towards that, we are gearing up to embed digital technologies to transform legacy processes or build new ones.

With the help of the digital transformation service offerings from our digital team, we are currently building greater safety, flexibility and productivity into operations and hope to powerfully accelerate the Customer Experience (CX) Quotient across vendors, dealers, employees and end-customers eco-systems.

Without limiting these super innovative solutions to within the group, the digital team has made the same available to the world at large so that communities and other corporations can benefit by their adoption. Some of the Covid-led digital solutions such as mask detection (to ensure correct usage of mask), social distancing (for adherence of social distancing norms in meeting rooms or office spaces), book-my-seat in office (to ensure safety and flexibility for employees visiting office), facial recognition (to avoid queues and swipe cards for attendance and access control), work-life-balance app (to capture WFH stress in a timely manner) – have been developed and are classic examples of how to support people on their current critical priorities.

If anything, the GDC has shown that come pandemic, or any crisis, through grit, determination and teamwork, all odds can be overcome.

Clearly, creating a focused service organization and allowing it to prosper professionally will bring about rich dividends for the group as well as collectively for our workforce. It is bound to give us a certain identity; help us create value; bring about a sense of professionalism; and above all, further improve our service delivery.

Lessons About Talent

Shared Services business is all about its people. All aspects of hire to retire life cycle, namely, finding and hiring the right people, learning and growing, managing and rewarding performance, tailoring the employee experience, and optimizing workforce planning and strategy changed significantly during the pandemic. Here’s how we dealt with this change.

AOn Hiring Talent

We managed to create remote interviewing and digital on-boarding experience for the new hires. For a shared service centre like ours where on-boarding and initial induction was face-to-face physical activity, this was a great transition. All new hires on-boarded during these 3-4 months have successfully integrated with the teams. While they are yet to physically meet their colleagues, they already seem comfortable in remote team interactions. Thanks to the excellent teamwork and culture that already existed in GDC, we never faced any issue in accommodating new members in already close-knit teams.

BOn Learning and Development

At Tata Motors, we believe that the race for excellence has no finish line. During this situation, not only our company, the entire Tata group has latched on to a very rich virtual content and delivery mechanism. To our surprise, most of us have effortlessly adapted to that and are enjoying the flexibility that this canvass offers. The variety of topics ranges from functional, technical, behavioral to pure-play personal, such as ‘art of parenting’ or meditation. This has immensely helped the teams, who earlier had a struggle finding time for classroom training attendance.

COn Performance and Rewards

We closed our performance cycle recently, albeit, delayed by a few months. However, the effectiveness of the performance conversations and calibrations did not change. At GDC, quarterly rewards is a big thing. Teams complete fiercely and juries have a hard time in eliminations. The trend continued during this cycle too. Apart from these scheduled reward and recognition cycles, we saw a huge surge in ad-hoc competitions, quizzes and challenges.

DOn Employee Engagement and Wellbeing

As a company, Tata Motors is extremely sensitive about this topic. There are specific group guidelines and aids for handling wellbeing of the employees. The group also encourages community service along with psychological and medical support system for families and communities associated with us.

During these testing times, many team members volunteered to support the community, migrant workers, and impacted population of the society in multiple ways.

I have found myself in awe of, and thanking them who persevere through this crisis, many of them risking their health for the society.

Like every other organization, we also underwent apprehension, frustration, and helplessness at all levels due to the prolonged and unending pandemic situation. Wherever teammates or people managers sensed the distress or panic, people reached out with organization and personal support systems. We continue to deliberate on the topic of what we as leaders can do to support our people as they face new stressors and safety concerns.
However, at an overall level, our employees experienced more positive effects on their daily work and are thriving than struggling.

 

 

 

EOn Workforce Planning and Strategy

Work from home (WFH) has been the single biggest opportunity that the pandemic unveiled for us. Like everyone else, it was an unplanned and urgent shift. However, it helped us realize its potential soon thereafter.

We learnt quickly by latching on to the opportunity and created a business case for WFH. It was about not only IT assets, bandwidth and processes; we considered emotional aspects of WFH, such as – feeling of being disconnected, new pressures of managing expectations around office and family, etc. We have now raised the productivity expectation baseline while offering far more flexibility and support during WFH.

Given that we see increasing trend in transition of new work to GDC, we are confident that we will be able to optimize the investments in facilities and other fixed resources while providing ultimate flexibility to our workforce and come-back opportunity to many who could not join/ continue due to physical or family reasons.

A New Leadership Experience

In the early days of Covid-19, at times, I found myself struggling with being prescriptive vs. soliciting inputs and building consensus on ideas. It was easier (and certainly faster) to simply take unilateral decisions. However, I soon learnt to bounce my ‘gut feel’ with the teams and communicate things honestly without any sugar coating. It helped. We communicated not only decisions, but also the rationale and trade-offs amongst the alternatives. Being inclusive and honest worked – particularly during team meetings with the workforce. Sharing personal vulnerabilities and experiences openly with the teams and simply listening more than usual has helped me personally in connecting the dots. While communicating with employees and other stakeholders, if one has to demonstrate positivity and bounded optimism, one should not fake it. Only if one is true to one’s own feelings and conscience while dealing with them, will one exhibit the trust and empathy they are seeking during this uncertain time. Personally, I see abundance of opportunity in adversity and believe in our collective ability to seize it.

During the pre-covid period, my leadership role was about business and culture. However, during these trying times, it is about helping people in the face of uncertainty and being in the crisis along with them. Apart from coping up with uncertainties of the uncontrollable, I have a role of ‘steering’ my team in their respective journeys. Our people experienced two significant changes in their lives. One, was the change from being a part of the function to being a separate entity. The second was the pandemic-led uncertainty and the drastic changes it brought about in their personal and professional lives. This was further compounded by the fact that the two changes happened almost simultaneously. I soon found myself playing the role of a ‘trusted advisor’ with several members of the team.

The one thing that certainly helped was the positive outlook and the achievement orientation that was kept as a backdrop in every one of the group or individual discussions. Without fail, as a team, we have come out to be both resilient and adaptable to change.

Purposefulness and Collective Capability

We experience purposefulness when we strive or work towards something personally meaningful or valued. During this crisis period, there is a possibility that our employees’ individual sense of purpose towards work may not align perfectly with the organizational purpose. As leaders, having empathetic and people centric plans will be crucial for the success of organizational economic turnaround. Reliability, credibility in the eyes of the employees and our intimacy with them will be at test during this time. If they find trust and connect to the common belief system, will we be able to take them along to deliver the desired results.

At some point, the Covid crisis will be gone; but for now we have no option but to endure. Some of us will continue to have the adrenaline to face it and some will probably lose their shine and energy. It will all depend on how we deal with this extended period of disruption as well as opportunity. Winston Churchill once said – “Never let a good crisis go to waste” – we must use this once-in-a-lifetime event to consciously evolve the very nature and impact of our role and believe in our collective capability to deliver the purpose of our organization.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arati Desai

Arati is a Chartered Accountant, Cost Accountant and Certified Information Security Auditor with 25+ years of professional experience She heads TML Business Services Ltd. (TMLBSL), recently formed a subsidiary of Tata Motors. TMLBSL aims to deliver world-class business process solutions that drive superlative customer experience. Prior to heading TMLBSL, Arati was heading a Global Delivery Centre (GDC) that supported the TML group in end-to-end business process management and knowledge services. She has been responsible for formation and growth of the GDC, implementing transitions strategy, overseeing business development and value creation initiatives for the group of companies which include JLR–UK, Tata Technologies, Tata Marcopolo, JLR–India, Tata Motors Finance, and other smaller group companies.

Views expressed in the article are personal views of Arati Desai and do not reflect any official statement or views of the Tata Motors Group.