Technology-driven mass personalization has completely transformed how we engage with brands as consumers. However, while companies have raced to deliver tailored products and services to their customers, the employee experience has lagged behind, with most organizations still operating standardized processes that treat all employees the same. At the same time, technological, social, and generational shifts have dramatically raised expectations for personalized workplace experiences, leaving organizations vulnerable to disengagement and talent loss if they continue with outdated, uniform approaches.
So, how can employers deliver the hyper-personalized employee experiences that today’s workforce increasingly demands?
My Guest this week, Ayaskant Sarangi, CHRO at Mphasis Limited, an IT services company headquartered in Bangalore with operations across 50 countries and over 30,000 employees. Ayaskant shares valuable insights on how personalization can work at scale across the employee lifecycle and the vital importance of skills-based thinking in achieving this
In the interview, we discuss:
• [02:03] Why personalization has become the fundamental employee expectation in today’s workplace
• [04:43] How HR can shape organizational culture to support individualized employee journeys
• [09:54] Leveraging technology to create hyper-personalized experiences throughout the employee lifecycle
• [13:17] Creating a horizontal tech layer that delivers consistent personalization across traditional HR silos
• [15:19] Moving from standardized role-based frameworks to personalized skills-based approaches
• [20:50] What the future is going to look like
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
As consumers, we expect increasingly personalized experiences. As employees, we now bring these same expectations to work. Yet most organizations still rely on standardized, one size fits all approaches to the employee experience. The employers breaking this mould aren’t just creating better workplaces, they’re transforming their businesses. In this episode, I’m talking to a chro who’s implementing hyper personalization across the entire employee life cycle for 30,000 people worldwide. Support for this podcast is provided by SHL, a talent intelligence company. From hiring and development to talent mobility and workforce planning, SHL’s assessment solutions and objective workforce insights take the guesswork out of people decisions. With more than 45 years of experience and proven results, SHL’s unique blend of science and data combined with predictive analytics and AI are helping HR teams to transform their talent strategy, uncover hidden skills and potential in people, and redefine career opportunities. SHL can help you optimize performance and decision making at every stage of the talent lifecycle. Visit SHL.com to find out more.
Matt Alder [00:01:44]:
Hi there. Welcome to episode 686 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Technology driven mass personalisation has completely transformed how we engage with brands as consumers. However, while companies have raced to deliver tailored products and services to their customers, the employee experience has lagged behind, with most organizations still operating standardized processes that treat all employees the same. At the same time, technological, social and generational shifts have dramatically raised expectations for personalized workplace experiences, leaving organisations vulnerable to disengagement and talent loss if they continue with outdated, uniform approaches. So how can employers deliver the hyper personalised employee experience that today’s workforce is increasingly demanding? My guest this week is Ayaskant Sarangi CHRO at Mphasis Ltd. An IT services company headquartered in Bangalore with operations across 50 countries and over 30,000 employees. Ayaskant shares valuable insights on how personalization can work at scale across the employee lifecycle and the vital importance of skills based thinking in making this happen. Hi Ayushkan and welcome to the podcast.
Ayaskant Sarangi [00:03:09]:
Thank you so much Matt for inviting me over. Really appreciate it.
Matt Alder [00:03:13]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show.
Matt Alder [00:03:15]:
Please could you introduce yourself and tell.
Matt Alder [00:03:17]:
Everyone what you do?
Ayaskant Sarangi [00:03:18]:
I lead the human resources function for Mphasis Limited. We are an IT services company headquartered out of India in Bangalore, but we do business across more than 50 countries, have revenues north of $1.7 billion and we have more than 30,000 emphasis who are part of this journey along with me helping us grow quarter on quarter, year on year. So yeah, yeah, really excited to be part of the company and a little bit about myself being a keen student of the HR function for about 27, 28 years now. Worked across multiple companies. Prior to emphasis, I was with Wipro for some time, with General Electric or GE for some time, and Infosys for some time as well. Love the field of HR because it’s all about people and for me business is equal to people, right? So that’s how at least I see my function playing a role in really shaping how not only organizations grow, but even give it back to the community that they are a part of.
Matt Alder [00:04:44]:
Fantastic stuff.
Matt Alder [00:04:45]:
So I know that something that is really important to you as part of that way of thinking, as part of the company that you’re in is, is the importance of the employee experience. How is thinking around the employee experience changing? What’s been happening over the last few years? What’s the sort of, what’s your current thinking about the employee experience?
Ayaskant Sarangi [00:05:07]:
We actually have had, in my view, three discrete environments which kind of fundamentally got accelerated because of how all of us started working during COVID 19 and then how all of us started working post that. Three or four key shifts, right? One, there is a massive shift when it comes to technology. Second, there’s a huge shift when it comes to social or the way we work. And then last but not the least, the generational shift, right? I mean we’re talking about the beta now and I’m, I’m, I’m Gen X. So there are multiple levers at play here. And that kind of has a significant impact on the fundamental question that’s there in every employee’s mind in terms of what is in it. For me, the need to get around personalizing has become the core from an expectation perspective. And when I’m talking about personalizing it just goes beyond compensation and benefits. It’s is as much about how do I communicate, how do I build relationships, how do I move from a role based framework to a skill based framework, how do I, if I achieve a set of objectives for myself, do I have clarity in terms of what’s next for me? And I think for me the most powerful thing that has come in place is the whole openness to fail. The concept of fail, fast learn and then get it right has truly been a very, very interesting shift that I think has happened. Something that at least when I go back and look at my own career, it was about really getting it right as Much as possible, it was about having a point of view that your boss or your manager, your leader is always right and you need to learn. I think some of those have got fundamentally challenged. So instead of a classical hierarchy, it’s also moved into network of relationships. So those in my mind are big shifts that are happening which have a pretty strong impact on how work for the future, for that matter, is going to change. And all of this is also getting accelerated with tech coming in as the foundation into all areas.
Matt Alder [00:07:35]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. We’ll talk about sort of technology in a minute because I think it’s a, it’s a kind of a really interesting piece to this. But what do you think the role of HR is in this, in terms of setting this up, setting the tone, you know, creating that kind of culture?
Ayaskant Sarangi [00:07:48]:
I would say three or four things in my view. Again, I mean, I, I, beyond a point, I’m sure there could be other areas to be, to be, look to be thought of as well. I think the clear shift of really understanding how the future of business would look like and therefore the implications of that or design, the implications of that on the operating framework, the implications of that on the culture that one would like to create within the organization, that becomes very critical. Therefore, the foundation that, at least what I grew up as a professional was around HR being a conscious keeper of the culture of the company, that becomes an important part this overall journey. So how do we really get in? Build strong relationships, equations with business leaders, help them to see things from a different light around some of the areas I just talked about earlier becomes an important part. So my ability as an HR leader to influence leadership, to see how things are going to evolve, my ability as an HRM to learn from multiple scenarios, multiple situations, my ability to even build areas like being much more resilient because it’s okay to fail. And I need to take that in my stride. And last, but not the least, further honing and strengthening strong social skills. Because increasingly, as jobs get more and more complex, different types of talent comes in. Talent expectations are going to change. So it’s important for the HR leader who has to kind of get into this personalized world to have a point of view on what are these various groups of talent, what are their expectations, therefore, what should my offering look like to kind of get to the desired result. So those, in my view, would be important shifts. And last but not the least, I think the impact of an organization’s way of running business on the external world, including stakeholders, that also has to play a big Big role from an HR perspective. Right. So increasingly one is seeing HR play a bigger role in csr, in building the brand of the organization, which traditionally was not so strongly ingrained.
Matt Alder [00:10:24]:
I completely agree. I think that one of the things you said there was about anticipating what.
Matt Alder [00:10:28]:
The future of the business looks like.
Matt Alder [00:10:29]:
The skills requirements in the future and all of those kind of things. I know that’s something that lots of leaders struggle with.
Matt Alder [00:10:36]:
How do you do it?
Matt Alder [00:10:37]:
How do you sort of anticipate what the future looks like?
Ayaskant Sarangi [00:10:40]:
So, Matt, I must say that’s a difficult one. But I think there are three or four things that at least I try and do for myself. One is actually connecting with a lot of people to try and understand multiple perspectives because standalone we would know as much. Second is about being much more self aware of our development needs, especially as individuals, because we end up thinking that for a given situation this is the typical solution and that thought process of code itself should get challenged fundamentally. Right? So therefore being aware of my own biases, my own development needs, the more self aware I am, the more intuitive I will get. Third, consciously working on being more curious as a person, I kind of linked back to point number one, but asking more questions, trying to understand the why better. I think that plays a big role. And then last but not the least, I would say spending time, especially if possible, in certain roles with the end clients to really understand how the market scenario is changing, how the job scenario is changing. How is a client seeing their own growth through this partnership with the organization that they’re currently working with? I mean, especially for a B2B business like ours, those help broaden one’s horizon. I think the fundamental approach that at least I try and take for myself is am I consciously trying to broaden my own horizon as an individual, as a professional and as one keeps doing it? Your ability to IT to be intuitive, your ability to ask the right set of questions, your ability to listen not only the said but the unsaid, those play a big role in shaping more thoughtful conversations.
Matt Alder [00:12:46]:
Let’s talk about technology. So you obviously mentioned technology is playing a big part of this.
Matt Alder [00:12:51]:
How are you using technology?
Matt Alder [00:12:53]:
How are you thinking about technology to engage employees, to sort of drive that employee experience?
Ayaskant Sarangi [00:12:59]:
Given that we are an IT services company? I mean, technology from an HR perspective has to be very core to our framework. I mean, I’m not saying in other industries it is not as strong. I’ve been part to other industries including FMCG and large scale manufacturing, but because if your primary audience is a Techie, the entire framework has to hover around technology. So right, in terms of how do I engage with a potential candidate from a hiring process perspective, tech plays a big role. Is my reach strong enough? Am I reaching out to a large pool of people and getting them excited to be part of my journey? How do I create a wonderful onboarding experience? I’m not only saying onboarding for me is not only days one or day zero, it’s about maybe engaging with an individual good 15, 20 days before the person actually joins you. Right? Playing a big role. Tech plays a huge, huge role in that. And in fact it is more about assimilation now and less about onboarding. Tech plays a big role in helping assimilate an individual into the organization. Currently, at least within us as an organization, we have frameworks which really nudges talent to learn new skills. And we have been able to link those that learning into potential jobs that the people that the individual can go after. Right. So here again it’s all about hyper personalization. What skills should I build for myself? If I build the skills, how would I, what kind of roles should I ask aspire for? So using tech to create that hyper personalization experience for that individual. And the last couple of points, one would be a lot of organizations have this large HR operations or back office and that’s a place where we have been using a lot of tech to ensure that our ability to give a quality experience to an employee kind of goes up significantly, really treating the employee as a customer when it comes to the function. And then last but not the least, ensuring that tech plays a big role in a two way communication, especially in an organization of our size, 30,000 plus spread globally, we just can’t have only the leadership communicating. It has to be a two way street. And that communication is strongly getting enabled through again a strong tech framework. So for me those are holistically are all these areas, be it in terms of my ability to hire onboard, help grow the person’s career, provide our experience on the HR ops, and last but not the least for an employee to communicate and engage with the organization. Those are all foundation which are today getting touched by tech and are getting accelerated with every passing day.
Matt Alder [00:15:53]:
And traditionally all of those kind of areas, hiring, onboarding, learning and development, et cetera, et cetera. Because of the way that HR has been structured, technology has been structured, they’ve always been quite siloed in many organizations and the experience can feel quite disjointed. How are you ensuring that things are really consistent all the way through and you’re sort of treating the employee as a customer from, you know, from talent acquisition until they, until they leave the business.
Ayaskant Sarangi [00:16:22]:
Great question, Matt. And I’ll talk about us specifically here, what we’re trying to do. So most large organizations, including us, would have very strong systems, right? There’ll be a hiring system, there’ll be a lot learning system, there would be a skilled repository system. At least in our industry, getting to know what skill cluster person is at becomes very important. The entire internal movement or IJP systems, each of these systems are nothing but strong vertical systems that are there. Whereas while these give great inputs to the respective functions, what an employee would like to see is a horizontal view of it, which means how am I getting hired, how am I getting onboarded, how am I learning, how am I moving to my next role? If I have specific queries, how do I get those address as quickly as possible, how do I communicate so towards that. One of the things that we’re kind of putting in place is a, is a horizontal track. You can imagine there’s nothing but a horizontal tech layer sitting on top of each of these vertical tools to give a horizontal view to an individual. So while the recruiter is just seeing that this is how my hiring process looks like and this is how I’m trying to help, let’s say 100 employees into the potential employees in the company, what an existing employee sees is this is where I am in my own life cycle. So that horizontal tool is something we have partnered with another fairly interesting company to kind of help design that for us. And that’s been a strong impact as far as seeing things from a horizontal perspective.
Matt Alder [00:18:05]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. You’ve mentioned sort of skills and skills frameworks quite a lot in the conversation. Do you sort of consider yourself to be a skills based organization and how important is that to kind of embracing the future and really the whole kind of philosophy of thinking about employee experience that you’ve been talking about.
Ayaskant Sarangi [00:18:24]:
So I think, I strongly believe that we are definitely moving from a role based framework into a skill based framework. When I’m saying we, I’m not only talking about us, but I’m saying industry in general is moving into a skill based framework simply because tech is going to disrupt the job type itself. Right. I mean, I think sometime in Jan. 2025, the World Economic Forum came up with a report saying that some 170 million new jobs are going to get created and some 90 odd million jobs are going to get moved out of the overall job framework. And net, net what’s going to happen as tech comes in, man is the job growth would be in the high skill areas. So you will have the clerical jobs, administrative jobs going away and the more intelligent jobs coming up for people to kind of start playing more and more in the future. So with that framework, I very strongly believe that we are indefinitely going to move into a skill based framework. Therefore, towards that what we have done with an emphasis for all our employees, all 30,000 employees, we have created what we call as skill clusters, which means these are the group of skills which I’m expecting an individual to demonstrate for accomplishing a certain type of work. And this is how one is going to move vertically within that same skill cluster. Which means, let’s say if I’m learning Java, I then potentially move and learn Python, which is the next higher level language. So that’s how I build my skills vis a vis my. Because as jobs get challenged with the advent of tech, the traditional pyramid structure would also get challenged. So maybe would end up having a rhombus instead of a pyramid, I don’t know. But I’m just anticipating how this structure could look like. So therefore I believe that it is about moving from role based to skill based framework. Now areas that all of us are still grappling with is traditionally, if you look at all comp benchmarking reports, it is designed around roles. Our communication to talent has been designed around roles. We all live by roles. So that shift from role to skill would be a very conscious effort that all of us would need to play to kind of embrace the world of the future.
Matt Alder [00:20:57]:
I think that leads nicely on to the final question, which is what does.
Matt Alder [00:21:00]:
The future look like?
Matt Alder [00:21:01]:
What do you think the future of work, the future of employee experience, the future of talent, what’s it going to look like?
Ayaskant Sarangi [00:21:07]:
I think in my view the, I would say some of some of the core skills would become much more relevant. I mean, it’s very difficult to explain, difficult for me to kind of say these are the types of jobs that are going to remain and these are tops or type of jobs that would go away, but certain fundamental core areas would be, would be required. Again, going back to what I talked about earlier, the future of work, technology as a base would have a play of generational interest, will have a play of the social shifts that one is experiencing. But areas like creative thinking, areas like curiosity or flexibility, agility, resilience, these would become more broader expectations from people. Because with tech coming in, things would be changing rapidly. So each of us as individuals, our own ability as individuals to change fast, learn fast and move to the next set of challenges, in my view would probably be an important kind of shift that all of us are going to experience. I was amazed. I mean, we partner with one of our top universities in India. We kind of work with them closely as part of our CSR initiative. We asked them to come up with very innovative solution to a problem that we were experiencing. I was surprised that the best of the solutions I’m talking about tech solutions now came from the kids who were in the humanities track and not in the computer science track. Which personally for me, maybe I was biased or maybe I definitely found it unbelievable. But that’s what’s happening, right? So what’s actually happening is people are learning from everywhere today. They’re building skills from multiple places. So some of the boxes that we had in terms of okay, this individual is going down this track. Even the way we do business, that’s changing, right? Look at the way E Commerce has disrupted FMCG business as an example, right? So that’s going to change not only job types, but it’s also going to change our own mental frameworks in terms of which individual is right fit for this role. So it’s going to move into the person is able to adapt fast. The person is able to be more creative, who’s more flexible, is much more agile, will be the person who will be able to keep shifting gears and moving into different roles that will be of value to that person as well as to the organization.
Matt Alder [00:23:55]:
Ayaskant, thank you very much for talking to me.
Ayaskant Sarangi [00:23:58]:
Pleasure is all mine, Matt. Thank you so much. And I must say, very, very thought provoking questions. Awesome.
Matt Alder [00:24:04]:
Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:24:05]:
My thanks to Ayaskant. You can follow this podcast on Apple, Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
