Yojana Gawade has 15 + years of experience across the Business Partnering and Center of Excellence verticals of the Human Resources/People function.
She is presently serving as Director (People & Organization) at Mars Pet care, India
Prior to Mars, she was working with Mondelez India Foods Pvt Ltd. where she most recently was the Capability lead for the Asia Pacific & Middle East region. She was responsible for design & deployment of leadership roadmaps across 6 business units and has also worked on embedding future forward capabilities like agile & digital.
Before her role as Capability Lead, Yojana was Organization Effectiveness Lead and anchored various culture & diversity programs for Mondelez India. She extensively partnered with Integrated Supply Chain & Sales function on transformation & change management agendas. She also worked in Malaysia as the talent management lead for the business unit & and was pivotal in establishing commercial career paths & entry talent programs.
Yojana joined Mondelez India (erstwhile Cadbury) in May 2007 as a Management Trainee post completing her Master’s from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TESS), Mumbai. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Management Studies & has also studied Law.
In this exclusive interview with People Matters, jana talks about key considerations for leaders as they explore worktech investments in 2022, navigating the change management curve that accompanies worktech adoption and how to overcome the biggest barrier to a digitally ready future-fit workforce.
Here are excerpts of the interview.
How do you see the role of work tech in the emerging hybrid ecosystem? How is the need for work tech influencing Mar's business model?
Hybrid work represents the biggest shift to how we will work today and tomorrow. As they say, this has been the biggest reset. The work tech infrastructure for hybrid work design is unique and a new element and we are all part of this big experiment. And it will work only if we are listening to our employees to understand their fundamental needs and requirements. For us at Mars Pet nutrition, collaboration has been our true strength and this has enabled the business and our associates to embrace this shift relatively easily.
We have always invested ahead of time in technology in functions like Supply, Sales & Digital Commerce and this new era has really pivoted our thinking about infrastructure, policies, and programmes to enable this shift both for our employees and the organisation in a mutually beneficial way.
Fundamentally, Work Tech is making business leaders be in a ‘design thinkers’ mindset.
The technology ecosystem is fundamentally shifting:
- The way we size up business opportunities and define disruptive scale
- Investing in tools which allow for data-based decisions with best-in-class sales technology
- Freedom to access tools from anywhere and at individual convenience
- Agility not only in processes but also in individual behaviours
There are four key measures that we have aligned our worktech practices along:
- Disruptive scale: Our Global Onboarding Module is standard across all markets and drives consistency of experience
- Data based decision making: Quarterly review of Talent Metrics help to proactively manage retention risks, measure actions Vs intentions
- Accessibility: We have redesigned our recognition platform "Oorja" as an asynchronous platform and accessible as per convenience
- Agility: Celebrating Agile test and learning in open forums; Embed Agile behaviours and drive collaboration in a hybrid setup
This new era of technology and hybrid ecosystem is essentially pushing us as HR leaders to pause, think, reset and try to design solutions keeping in mind the above factors.
We have been making conscious investments in the technology space to ensure we have fit-for-future people management practices across moments that matter.
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