Joji S. Gill is the Director for Human Resources at Microsoft India. She is responsible for driving the overall people strategy and building synergies for Microsoft across its six distinct business units in India namely: Microsoft Corporation India (Pvt.) Ltd., which is the Marketing Subsidiary, Microsoft India Development Centre, Microsoft Global Technical Support Centre, Microsoft Global Development Centre India, Microsoft Global Services India and Microsoft Research India. She has over 20 years of HR experience.

How has HR changed over the years?

HR has evolved from the classical ‘personnel administration’ support function to one that helps drive business growth through planned talent acquisition, development and retention. In any good organisation today, HR is the trusted advisor to business. It is a transformation that has been driven by intelligent leaders who realized that the secret of great organisations is great people.

In your opinion, do most professionals see HR as a business partner or as an administrative function with relationship skills?

I think this depends to a large extent on how each HR professional etches out her or his role. Today, what businesses seek of HR is to: a) understand the talent needs of the business b) help develop strategic plans regarding employees c) identify talent issues before they impact the business and d) very importantly, help identify new business strategies.

At Microsoft India, our HR growth model is based on ‘one solid infrastructure’ to grow through flawless execution into leading change and becoming strategic business drivers. Execution excellence is important and lays the foundation for HR to grow – relationship building is important but it needs to be supplemented by a real value to the business.

Microsoft India – HR Growth Model

Is HR seen as an effective function?

Yes, I believe it is increasingly being seen as such. Of course, as HR professionals, we need to establish the effectiveness of HR by clearly defining metrics to track success. For example, at Microsoft, we make ourselves accountable for maximizing the value of our people asset to drive business success. We work on it through four strategic pillars:

How does one draw returns on HR investment?

Investment in HR, as any other function, needs to be driven strongly by the needs of the business. Measurement of the impact of HR practices is essential to keep re-evaluating the areas of investment and aligning them with business needs. At Microsoft, we invest in the development of our employees and their optimum career growth as well as a facilitative organisational culture. This fetches us the right talent – passionate, capable and growth-oriented – which becomes the driving force to meet business targets.

What are the key metrics that leaders track to measure effectiveness of HR?

Improving HR effectiveness is and should be one of the top-most priorities of an HR Leader. Evaluation of the critical people metrics is thus essential to ensure consistent measurement of important people information, to be used for benchmarking, management insight, trending and future goal setting. And finally, it guides strategy development and enables us to measure progress against People Commitments. (HR metrics evaluated at Microsoft to track value to business, are shared below).

What prevents most organisations in having effective HR? Is this an Indian phenomenon?

In some organisations, HR has still to outgrow the administrative role. HR needs to build sound business acumen, deliver on business needs, and most importantly, question decisions, as that helps think differently and drive change. The latter part – questioning those older or senior to you – is not part of our Indian social milieu, but I think we’ve begun to see such actions as constructive inputs rather than challenging authority. The emerging group of HR talent has both the grit and the intelligence to drive meaningful change. At Microsoft HR, we believe that it is our job to say no when the situation so requires, and the leadership encourages that.

What aspects of HR are measured at Microsoft?

At Microsoft, we measure all critical people metrics. They can be categorized as:

• Organisation: Organisation size, open positions, line HR ratios
• Organisation Health: Workgroup Health Index, Microsoft Pulse Index, Microsoft Culture Index
• Staffing: Hiring stats – types of hires, channel wise hiring stats, positions closed internally, hiring spends, lead time, % of hiring plan, net adds, offer acceptance rates, reasons for offer decline
• Talent Management: Good attrition, bad attrition, YOY and Qtr-on-Qtr tracking, reasons for bad attrition, % retention of high positions, % of promotions, succession panning indicator, succession planning usage
• Diversity: % of women (target vs. actual), % of women hired, % of women talent losses, reasons for bad attrition, % of women in leadership succession slate, % of Managers and employees completing MS Diversity training programs, % of other diversity hiring (differently abled)
• Manager Capability: Span of Control, Organisation Depth, % of Managers
• Learning & Development: Field Readiness Index, number of employees trained on employee development programmes, number of managers trained through management excellence framework (that provides for management development through career events, continuous learning and building connections)
• Leadership Development: % of leadership hires, % of leadership attrition, succession planning index (% of successors in stages of readiness for a Leadership role)
• Rewards: % of budget used on rewards

Besides this, we periodically run market surveys to ensure our competitive positioning on compensation.

What are some of the HR processes where metrics have been used to increase their effectiveness at Microsoft?

While tracking the above metrics has shown more robust action planning to improve scores on each of them, there are two that that have made our People Review process much more meaningful ensuring both organisational readiness and talent management. These are the SPI and the SPU:

• The Succession Planning Indicator (SPI) that is designed to help measure how well the organisation is positioned with weightages assigned to Ready Now and One Move Away successors for leadership positions.  
  
  
• The Succession Plan Usage (SPU) is an index designed to assess both the quality of the previous years’ succession plans and whether an organisation is effectively leveraging its succession plans when filling open leadership positions. It indicates the percent of leadership team positions that were filled during the past year by someone who was on last year’s succession slate.

Which HR challenges keep you awake at night?

Our organisation is growing at a humungous pace. HR needs to ensure that we have the right talent to drive growth whether it is through growing talent within or acquiring afresh. It is equally important to maintain the Microsoft DNA as we induct new and more talent. The enormity of both these tasks helps make the life of an HR professional at Microsoft more exciting!