EX Matters: Ensuring Meaningful Work for All

Q-1: Everything has been changing and evolving over the last couple of years- from marketplaces to business models, from the workforce to workplaces and technology; the list is never-ending. A rapidly changing scenario has implications on employee expectations and aspirations leading to Employee Experience (EX) taking center stage. What are your thoughts on creating meaningful work and workplaces as a key lever for employee experience?

Bhaskar: Meaningful work is what everybody is talking about. And the more we talk about it, the clearer our own thoughts will be. I think it's important to learn from each other. Meaningful work is no more placed in the narrow context of work at a workplace. Increasingly it's about a meaningful experience. It's not just about what you do but how you're empowered to do work. It's also about linking the work with the company's ESG goals, like social causes or the industry. Knowing the social impact of their work gives employees a sense of value.

The second aspect is that what's meaningful for me might be different from what is meaningful for my colleagues. What works for a sales representative in my organization might not work for an employee on the shop floor. Also, what was meaningful work for me last year might not still hold value for me today. Think from an employee's perspective - does the workplace connect with what I want to do in life?

Q-2: The definition of meaning work is changing every day, every year. And it's different for different employee groups with unique personas. Is it actually possible to give meaningful work to all? What is it that organizations can do to create meaningful experiences for different employee personas and different employee groups?

Bhaskar: What lies at the base of creating meaningful work and workplaces for employees is empathy and understanding. And therefore, listening to employees is extremely important. I can tell you by experience that when you listen, you will find there lie different triggers to varied employee groups. For some employees, meaningful work means stability and job security, as these give them certainty in life. For other sets of employee people, it can be constantly changing projects that provide intellectual stimulation or having flexibility to be able to do work in their own way. For women employees in our organization, having a work-life balance can be important. Others might question whether they are getting recognition in the workplace. Keeping track of evolution outside the workplace is important.

Communicate the right purpose of work to employees. For example, we tell our employees, you don't do quality assurance just to get the batch of medicines ready, but your assurance of quality is helping us as an organization to keep our promise to patients' safety. If you don't do your job well, then there's a possibility that somebody out there might not get the desired effect of the medicine, and it won't help them cure as it should. I think one of the most important things that leaders must do is to keep connecting back. The larger purpose of the organization is towards the people and to keep bringing back their focus to how they contribute to the larger purpose.

Q-3: You rightly mentioned what constructs meaningful work oscillates between stability, intellectually stimulating work, non-monotonous work, and stability. Considering that Dr. Reddy is a pharmaceutical organization, and you have both white-collar and blue-collar employees. The workforce constitutes various employee personas. Anything specific that you are doing to cater to different employee personas to provide meaningful experiences? Any best practices or use cases?

Bhasker: I think knowing how your job contributes to the organization's larger goals gives you meaning. We want people's experiences to be connected with the larger purpose of the organization and with each other's goals; this is to give them an understanding of how they are contributing to the totality.

Second, we want to be efficient because one of the biggest causes of the quality of experience going down is a lack of efficiency. The ability to provide efficient ways of working creates a better employee experience.

The third one is creating a joyful experience for external customers. Joy for people comes in different ways. It's aspirational to get. At Dr. Reddy, we say that our purpose is to make available affordable and innovative medicines for people because good health can't wait. Our teams are working on very complex products, but if they're able to crack the code for developing these complex products and get it soon to the market, imagine the benefits it may extend to the customers.

As part of our governance and social goals, we want to touch the lives of 1.5 billion patients by 2030. Recently, with the help of the Gates Foundation, we introduced female contraceptive products for low and middle-income countries. This way, we reached where the big companies don't want to enter because it's too little profit for them. When I spoke to people in our manufacturing facilities about this, they got charged up. They find so much meaning in it.

For HR, it's about the social goal such as fair living wages for everybody. Minimum wages are not only about what is defined legally, it is what allows one to lead a good life with reasonable education and good health. Scaling the scope of work for each individual is another important part that HR needs to play.

Good health can't wait. For our employees, we have put together a beautiful program called 'My Health Index,' which cuts across several 1,000 people in many of our sites and units. We are helping them look at the holistic definition of health, such as food and nutrition.

Occupational health can trigger anxiety in workplaces. How can we address those trigger points? The trigger at various touch points can be addressed by dwelling on various problem statements. How to address unplanned shift changes that are triggering disharmony? How do line managers talk to their team members? Are they taking care of employee development? Are the line managers taking responsibility for creating better employee experiences? If you don't address these triggers, employees affected by these will not be able to give their best at work.

We have deployed a new-age technology tool which is an AI-enabled chatbot to learn about employee experiences. In the last 5 months, the bot has proactively made about 22,000 conversations. These conversations are made at various phases in an employee's life cycle, starting from their completion of 30 days in the organization. People flag all kinds of concerns while conversing with this AI tool. We ensure to put these out on the dashboards of line managers to apprise them of their team's aspirations and needs.