D&I Results In High Return On Investment, Says Shiben Moitra, Senior HR Director, IQVIA

Written By: Ungender Blog Team

Shiben Moitra is a strategic Human Resources (HR) leader with broad international experience spanning India, Middle East, Africa and the APAC. He focusses on significant organization transformations leading to improvement in market share and productivity & engagement of workforce. He currently senior director HR at IQVIA.

In conversation with Ungender Legal Advisory’s CEO and Founder, Pallavi Pareek, Shiben Moitra talks about how a data science company in the field of healthcare, with a large employee base, is looking at building, strategising and creating an inclusive workforce.

COVID Challenges To Large Companies From An OD Lens

Pallavi: COVID has affected every business. From an organisational development perspective, what kind of restructuring and budget planning could be necessary? 

Shiben: IQVIA is a health data-science company and has about 65,000 plus employees across the globe, in 100 countries. In the India and South Asia region we employ 15,000 plus people in 14 locations.  IQVIA is the result of a merger between two large companies, Quintiles a market leader in the CRM space on the healthcare clinical side and IMS Health, a data-science leaders in the healthcare business. The two entities came together four years ago. In some sense it is an amalgamation of the clinical and the therapeutic side.

One of the things we have done well is we have moved a lot of these things on to our technology platform, and this is a journey, which we did not take only because of COVID. It has helped.

Pallavi: Though you may be less impacted, there must have been several challenges?

Shiben: With COVID, a lot, in the natural natural course of business has got disrupted. We plan in five stages:  the  overall business plan; then we look at how the delivery is going to work out. And then we also look at  how the things are going to work out from the perspective of  structuring ourselves right — how do we hire, if there is a particular financial that you need to meet, how do you ensure that we hire and retain talent, then we have to plan that deliveries meet clients requirements. And then comes planning for implementing various programmes.

One major challenge has been the way we interact with clients. business projections have changed, delivery models have now suddenly changed because of COVID.  The main question is how do you deliver in the new paradigm? You may not get clients any longer… client business development is all online today.

Earlier,  candidates come into our office to do  a set of interviews and we would close offers, one cannot do a bulk hiring anymore. Internet connectivity or broadband connectivity was not an issue, for several employees, because very good infrastructure in offices… we don’t have that any more. Now wellness too has become a big factor from HR standpoint.

Employees are very, very concerned about the insurance programme. So we have had to make our insurance programme robust and have built communication around this. We do regular webinars on how to remain healthy and for all segments of employees. Mental wellness has become one big concern area, especially in lockdown and not being able to go out.

We also have programmes to help employees adapt, men to adapt to home chores, women and parents to manage kids because kids are now doing their schools from home, and that’s a very different paradigm. We’re doing sessions on  parenting. Many of these issue did not have our attention before…but now we have to focus on such issues too. Globally we have launched a lot of programs and we have seen a very, very positive response to that from our employees.

Pallavi: If IQVIA is a data company, surely, from an HR perspective,  you do believe  that data is the key to building anything. How do you extracting learnings from your own HR exercises? Are you collecting data internally, as a learning process?

Shiben: Data-driven decision making is key.

We have data on retention, on hiring and then we forecast based on this data. We look at demographic data, millennial composition, diversity composition and so on. If there is attrition we try to find out where and in what pockets, which location or which skill sets? We also look at things like the hiring roadmap, which are the skills which we will hire more, what’s our typical timeline to hire and what’s our typical cost to hire?  Where do we get the candidate pool?

Compensation is a very important place where data comes handy, one draws conclusions around the investments that the organisation needs to make. We use a lot of data in how we handle payroll or how we handle claims. We look at handing HR queries through a through a chat bot for example…

Pallavi:The COVID experience has shown that  just because you’re working from home does not mean that you’re not an effective resource. Now the new strategy is ‘Inclusive Hiring’  where gender and diversity has matter. Do these concerns make it to the hiring philosophy at IQVIA ?

Shiben: From a hiring standpoint, our hiring is spaced out across the entire gamut of skillsets required and available. We do a fair bit of hiring from the campuses, and we do a fair bit of hiring as a part of the lateral inductions.

At IQVIA our women are 49% of the workforce which is phenomenal. This has been the scenario in IQ for a fair bit of time. Its in the DNA of the organisation. Now, when we look at hiring, diversity and inclusion is something which we don’t think of twice honestly,because we have always done it. Is there no challenge with respect to diversity and inclusion? There are challenges, particularly at the senior levels. That probably is one of our areas of focus.

Now we are increasingly trying to focus on building an inclusive mindset around LGBT rights. We’re also looking at areas where inclusion of PWDs is possible.

ROI On Diversity Hiring And Training, Is It Worth It

Pallavi: There’s a lot of costs that goes into identifying these talents …a lot of legwork required. It isn’t enough to publicise opportunities.  What’s your experience around this?

Shiben: Organisations have differing levels of maturity and eveyrone needs to define the return on investment.

I think setting the mindset of an inclusive organisation should start probably at stage one, because enough amount of you know, research has already shown that an inclusive and a diverse organisation is more likely to be successful than a non-diverse organisation. Setting the mindset is very critical right in the first stage of the maturity curve.

Global organisations have already, in some sense, committed to different countries and different markets. However it is important to understand the gaps. In India, you see women dropping out of the workforce after they enter a family life. Having policies to include women who have families and also participate in the workforce, is something organisations have to put in place. There is a high return on investment if you focus on diversity and inclusion.

Pallavi: What are the key metrics that you have been measuring to see that you are on track? Have you also identified what kind of diversity you want and how diverse?

Shiben: The first step for us is to look at the overall diversity percentage, which we do regularly, globally.

Then, based on markets, we define a local charter that focusses on local diversity issues. For eg. we have a charter from an India standpoint which looks at what we would want to pursue here. So it’s a mix of both. We also monitor attrition, for diversity, we want to know when we are becoming less diverse. However, we are trying to  look at diversity a little more closely from the point of view of a  technical organisation.  We are trying to focus on diversity, especially at senior levels.

Pallavi: What are the smallest steps that an HR leader can take to introduce this culture of diversity and inclusion in their workplace?

Shiben: The first step is to look at the data. Scrutinize the data and ask,  are there any areas of concern?

If diversity is a focus,  one is looking at diversity within the organisation and related data. Is there diversity or is it at lower levels than previously known or expected? Then look at what the inflow is from a hiring standpoint. What’s the diversity of that which we are hiring from the market? What is the composition of diversity we are getting? Are we getting enough candidates?

In diversity studies, typically we find, attrition levels are higher where we are not able to provide enough flexibility. Particularly in India, flexibility is very, very important to nurture diversity.

Dealing With Diversity Acclimatization Issues

Pallavi: Burnout rate is high in India, any thoughts?

Shiben: Absolutely. That’s one way of looking at it. Data can be an eye-opener for management. First look at the data and then that opens up the first channel of discussion with management. If management is committed,  then the investment and the mindset make it down and across the organisation.

You might need to look at a different way of function, for example, if you’re looking to provide flexibility, you know, as an organisation, then we may need to be okay as an organisation that employees come in at any point in time and go at any any point of time. The measure of productivity matters instead of a measure of time spent at work…

There are bound to be difficulties. When you have a manager who is used to the team present in office and delivering work and suddenly the team is working four hours in office and four hours from home. HR needs to set up policies and procedure to deal with disciplinary issues too. HR has to be proactive.

Watch the full video on Ungender’s YouTube channel here.

Video Highlights

• • 04:55: On CoVid Challenges and Preparation
  • 14:15: On Using Data in HR Work
  • 21: 13: On Measuring Diversity at IQVIA
  • 31: 05: On Defining Diversity Metrics
  • 35:52: On Getting Management Buy In

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Ungender Insights is the product of our learning from advisory work at Ungender. Our team specializes in advising workplaces on workplace diversity and inclusion. Write to us at contact@ungender.in to understand how we can partner with your organization to build a more inclusive workplace.