How to keep communication open for remote employees with Amit Malik

Welcome to the Vantage HR Influencers Podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Vantage Circle, the leading employee benefits and engagement platform.

Rohit: Hi everyone, this is Rohit from the Vantage Influencers Podcast, and today I'm excited to have Amit Malik, who's the Chief People, Operations & Customer Services Officer at Aviva Life Insurance. He has over 19 years of experience in leadership roles at companies like American Express, Bank of America, and others. He's an alumnus of Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune, and Said Business School, Oxford University. Welcome to the show, Amit.

Amit Malik: Thanks, Rohit, and thanks for having me on the show.

Rohit: So, how did you get into the role of HR, and what got you excited to pursue a career in it?

Amit Malik: Well, you know, I'm an engineer who decided to pursue HR. Two years into my engineering course, I realized that wasn't something I wanted to do, and I definitely didn't want an engineering job. At that time, in the 90s, options were limited, and an MBA was one of them. When I decided what to specialize in, it was between sales and marketing, and human resources. HR at that time was making the transition from personnel management to human resource management. It was at a real inflection point as a function, and I spoke to a couple of people who inspired me. When I got into SIBM Pune, which had one of the top HR programs in the country, I decided to pursue HR. So I'm sorry to disappoint your listeners if they were waiting for an "I love people" kind of answer, but that's how it is.

Rohit: You've been with Aviva India during the times of the coronavirus. How have you been looking at engaging with your employees during such times?

Amit Malik: So, like you said, I do multiple roles at Aviva India. I handle the people function, and I also handle operations, customer service, and retention. As a function leader, I have one set of responsibilities, but as a people function leader or an HR leader, I have a different set of responsibilities.

When we looked at engaging Aviva India employees, we looked at it at three levels. The first level was communication. We changed the whole style of communication we had, post-COVID. It all moved to WhatsApp, short videos, videos from our CEO and MD, myself, and other leaders, very focused, short communication that leaned more towards the customer, focusing on doing the right thing for our customers and our employees at that time. So it was a very positive, focused campaign from a communications standpoint.

The second was we started to look at how we help employees manage at home. We called it the "Work Feeling Happy" campaign, rather than work from home, WFH, we said work feeling happy. Here, we looked at four themes: health and well-being, mindfulness and gratitude, building resilience, and economy and finance. We built activities, quizzes, and knowledge sharing around all of these for our employees so they could engage with them.

The third level was learning. We decided there was an opportunity to get people at home to start learning, so their minds could be focused on something other than anxiety. My learning team curated over 8,000 learning resources for our 1,800 employees quickly, covering all fields, from coding to finance, photography, social media advertising, mindfulness, leadership, and upskilling. Whatever interest people had was the content that got curated and shared. We also had specific webinars for our senior management, our frontline, and our customer service teams. So while there was a "horses for courses" aspect to it, there was also a lot of focus on what interests people had, and that's how we decided to engage our employees during this time and interact with them.

Rohit: Got it. And as you mentioned, along with being the head of the people function, you also look at operations and customer service. How did this transition, which happened two years back, help you lead during the COVID times?

Amit Malik: So, I think the move happened, for 18 years of my career, I was purely an HR professional, and then one day the organization decided I could take on operations and customer service, so I went along with it. I think what helped me is that it created a direct linkage between the customer and the employee. During COVID and the crisis, when we started focusing on the customer, it helped me understand what the employee was going through and what the customer was going through, and how to educate the employee to build that whole customer perspective: you are anxious and at home, so is the customer, and the customer is going through the exact same thing. So how do we deal with the customer, what script do we use at this time, what communication should go to the customer, what are the important customer touchpoints? I think that whole people orientation helped me bridge that gap and bring empathy and compassion for the customer into the teams, and to be able to share how we bring that in for our own customers.

I think that's what helped. The brand also stands for a lot of compassion. If you look at Aviva during the time of COVID, you'd see how much empathy and compassion we articulated as a brand, about staying home, doing the right things, and how important safety was. We took that up, and I think that whole understanding helped me communicate as a leader and say, this is what we should focus on, this is what we need to do, this is how we need to manage our customers, how to handle customer queries that come up, how we need to approach things differently. I still want to run my business, I still want someone to pay for the renewal, but how do I ask them, how do I get them to do it, that was a different angle that COVID needed, and that's what helped me bring it. So I hope I answered your question.

Rohit: Absolutely, especially because you're handling different functions in the company, you talked about doing short communications and speaking to stakeholders, be it customers or employees. And interestingly, you mentioned the "Work Feeling Happy" culture. But are there any downsides to working in a remote culture, and do you see that kind of setup, remote work culture, working forever in a big company like Aviva?

Amit Malik: That's a great question, and a tough one, because the jury is still out on working from home and remote culture. But let me take a first stab and give you my view. I think COVID has helped break the whole mindset that employees can't work from home, or that if we enable employees to work from home, there's too much risk. We're an insurance company, a heavily regulated company, there's a lot of data regulation, and every time we wanted to try something, we'd be told there's data privacy, there's regulation, we can't do it. I think that mindset is broken, absolutely, and that's a positive.

Is work from home here to stay? Yes, because both the organization and the employees have started to see the benefit. But my personal view is that it's not going to be 50% or 60% work from home. I think it will settle somewhere between 20% to 25% of people working from home at any given time, and the rest, 70%, 75%, 80%, working from office. Because it's also shown the other side to people. Everyone, myself included, thought that working from home was equivalent to work-life balance. But I think that myth has been broken. Working from home is not equivalent to work-life balance. Actually, work-life balance is a mix of working at the office and working from home, that helps you balance a little more. Because once that whole integration happened, working at home and working from home, it made people realize it's not that easy or simple, especially if you're a caregiver, or a mother with young kids, or if you have a long commute. So I think it will be different for each person, whatever works for them.

Rohit: Right, so Amit, how can leaders and HR managers boost the morale of employees during such times, and what are your thoughts on that?

Amit Malik: I think first and foremost, we all have to begin by acknowledging the situation. That's number one. Second, do an honest assessment of where each function is, and where each employee is, organizationally. And third, we ensure we give out hope and connect with people regularly, because I think that's very important, that's the first step.

If you look at the employee scenario, there are three parts to it. There are 20% or 25% of employees who are doing 120% to 130% of their work, they're actually going above and beyond in this scenario. Then there's 20% on the other end of the spectrum who aren't able to contribute beyond 30% to 40%, for whatever reason, maybe the organization hasn't been able to enable them, or they need systems that are only available in the office, not their fault, but the organization's. That leaves the remaining 55% to 60% of people who are working as they were before, but in a productivity range of about 70% to 100%.

Leaders need to handle each of these categories of employees with a very different mindset and approach. First and foremost, if you're a leader, you need to acknowledge and appreciate the people who've shown great willingness to step up to the challenge and go above and beyond, that's very important. Second, you appreciate your middle category of people for keeping their head above water and doing whatever they could in a regular day's work, and tell them that even if they haven't contributed over 100%, the 70% or 80% they have contributed still holds a lot of value for the organization, that whole piece is important.

But the trickiest and most difficult piece is the bottom 20%, employees who wanted to do more but couldn't contribute, and who are also anxious about it because they see their colleagues and peers performing. I think that's where you need to make sure you make them feel included. You continue to talk to them, continue to share how you'll help increase their productivity and get them to contribute at a quicker rate. That's where leaders now have to come together and make their plans, business continuity plans or whatever, and as people start coming back to the workplace, which we're now seeing, this is the category we should try to bring along, so we can get rid of that anxiety.

So, underlying all of this, what I'm saying is empathy. At Aviva, that's the theme we launched in May and June, coaching conversations. We have five coaching conversations, just to be able to get people to boost their morale and have a conversation about where they've been and how things can improve. We started this whole May and June, right up to the end of June, as months for our coaching conversations, where we're telling our leaders to talk about stability, security, and social connection, so that whole conversation and those messages start to land.

Rohit: Right, very interesting. And what can companies do to make sure employees safely return to work, whether it's in June, July, or whenever employees are ready to come back?

Amit Malik: We already started coming back to work two weeks back. We obviously moved slowly, because we're an insurance company, an essential service, and we got permission during lockdown 3.2 to slowly start our office. But even though the government is allowing us to do 50%, we're at 10% to 15%, because first and foremost, we want to build confidence.

How did we build confidence? First, we prepared the workplace. Following government guidelines is one thing, but we did everything we could, more than what the government required, to prepare the workplace, and then communicated that with our employees, whether it's taking away doors, changing the taps, doing all of that so social distancing could come in. What we also did was we used the back-to-work document, but with humor. We started to talk about coming back to work with humor, for example, saying "all superheroes wear a mask," so when you wear one, you're a superhero because you decided to come back to work. We brought in a lot of humor to kind of ease people back in, and we got feedback that people loved reading those back-to-work guidelines. That's the first part.

I think the second part is behavioral change. How do you get people, once they're in the office, to change behavior? How do you get them to wear masks the full day? How do you get them to not gather together and share stories? Because we need to understand they're also meeting each other after 50 or 55 days. How do you make sure the coffee-point congregations and conversations don't happen, because you don't want that? So we've worked on that behavioral change.

And I think the third and most important piece is setting the tone, and it always starts at the top. My CEO was the first person in the office when we opened, and as a leadership team, we've all constantly visited the office and shared our own experience with the team, because you set the tone. When you ask someone in customer service to come to the office, their point is always, you want me to come in, but you want to work from the comfort and safety of your own home, so how do you tell them, "I'm with you in this, we're in this together"? That's the leadership setting the tone. That's how we do it.

Rohit: Very interesting. And during the COVID time, or even otherwise, if it's a remote work setup, how do you keep communication open between team leaders and other employees?

Amit Malik: So, what we did during COVID, actually, this question gets me thinking, the existing communication architecture had collapsed. Town halls, huddles, floor meetings, all of that was gone. We were in a new normal, and we all had to think of new ways.

So what we did during COVID, apart from everything I told you earlier about the organization, was we made it mandatory for all people managers to check in with everyone over the weekend and report back on employee well-being every Monday in a conversation. We simply said, you have to reach out to all your team members, all your directs, and everyone reaches out, so there's one line of communication. We also tasked our HR business partners with speaking to the workforce. We covered 100% of employees, and then we went back, and now we're in the second round of conversations, individually calling every employee to check on their well-being, family, challenges of working from home, anxiety levels, any other issues. We've done that.

There's also been a lot of connect activities, we told leaders to lead this and get on a call with their team, whether it's a phone call, a Teams call, or whatever mechanism, to connect on activities, bring in the family. We got into social bonding, we got people to do quizzes and games and stand-up acts, and we brought the social element onto the platforms and did it with families too. So we started doing that.

But I think, having said all of that, as we look forward, the degree of open conversation is always a factor of the culture of an organization, and I'm very proud to say that at Aviva, we've been able to build that over a long time. That part can't be built overnight, you need to build it over time. Just like I told you, the idea of having coaching conversations in May and June is now being extended to people working from home, to get that moving there too. But I think that's what one needs to fix.

Rohit: Correct. Do you feel engagement scores are rising for companies? I've heard a lot of people say productivity levels for some employees have definitely gone up, but have you checked the engagement scores across all verticals? Have they increased?

Amit Malik: I'm going to be a little provocative here. I think engaging employees is important, but doing an engagement survey right now is not a priority for me, because at the moment, it's about connecting, being there, and helping employees make sense of the new norms. And I've said this before, business metrics cannot triumph over people metrics at this time, both have to go hand in hand. Everyone is trying to find order in this chaos, and we have to find the right yardsticks.

The time for engagement scores, performance metrics, and surveys will come, that's the next step, once we start to assimilate people back to work. Because if you start doing that now, like I told you, of the three categories of employees, you'll immediately lose the bottom 20% to 25%. That's not what you want at this time. You don't want to lose that whole chunk of employees right now. You need to be there for them, and you don't do that by surveying them. So that's where I stand.

Rohit: Right, you've talked about culture and values, which are the foundation blocks of a company. Is it possible to refine such company values during a crisis, not just COVID, but generally during a crisis? What are your thoughts on how to refine a company's culture?

Amit Malik: I think the acid test for any purpose and values comes at the time of crisis, whether it's COVID or not. Because that's when you start to look at how you'll behave and what you'll focus on. I think that's the acid test for every company. Because when we say our value is "care more," how are we demonstrating to our customers and employees that we actually care more?

I'll give you an example. We were one of the first life insurance companies, I think the first, to decide that we would honor our appraisals, promotions, and bonuses on time. We didn't defer them, we didn't get caught up in that hurdle, we just decided to honor them, and that was our way of saying we will do the right thing.

On the engagement side, we did something called a caregiver policy, we gave five days of leave to all women employees who had kids under five, and said, even if it's lockdown and you're working from home, take five days off, no questions asked. That's our "care more" in action. Similarly, for customers, when I say "care more," I'll give you this example. When we started looking at COVID and digital enablement, the issue wasn't enabling the customer digitally, we always had the tools. The issue was how do we educate the customer to use those digital tools? We have a wide range of customers who aren't tech savvy, who know the tools are there but aren't using them. They're far more comfortable coming into a branch and handing over a cheque than doing it online, even if they have a net banking account, or going into a chat rather than calling, because if the call center isn't functional, they need to use chat. So how do we do all of that? That's where we started educating our customers, and for me, that is "care more," that's going the extra step. That's how I think we redefined our value of care more.

We have four values, one is "care more," another is "never rest," which is about killing complexity, and creating a legacy. Look at "kill complexity," we simplified our processes. You can't come home for a medical exam, you can't come to a medical center, but you want a life insurance policy, and we can't come to your house because it's locked down and your society or apartment block won't allow it. So what did we do? We had a video medical examination process already, we simply expanded it and said we'll now do video medical examinations more broadly, we introduced cashless issuance, we dropped some paperwork requirements. We simplified things for our customers as much as we could. In normal times, this would have taken a lot of debate, discussion, and risk assessment, but here we redefined it immediately, in line with our values.

I think a lot of organizations would have gone through a similar process, but I think the challenge for all of us is, when we go back to the new normal, how do we sustain this spirit, how do we make it a part of our everyday life? I think that's the real challenge.

Rohit: There's going to be a lot of onboarding of new employees in the next couple of quarters. What's the best way to communicate with remote workers who join a company?

Amit Malik: So, Rohit, we had the same conversation and challenge within Aviva, end of May, early June, and I'll give you an example from two ends of the spectrum. The first was our summer internship program, which was supposed to start in April. The summer interns couldn't join physically due to lockdown, so we decided to onboard them virtually and get them started on projects remotely, and went ahead with the plan. We did typically what we would have done in a classroom setting, right from having our CEO and other leaders update them and help them understand the organization, but we did it differently, over two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening across a few days, and we inducted them just as we would have in person.

On the other end, I had an IT leader based in Bombay who had to join us during lockdown and couldn't travel, and we did the same thing with him, not just enabling him to work, but also to understand the organization, do the whole handover, meet the teams, meet key stakeholders, and go through that whole process end to end so he could start being productive.

I think that's what it is, but more than the induction itself, I think this will start to impact the recruitment process, where candidates will start asking, "why do I need to come and meet you?" If I'm joining you, I'll come in physically eventually, but why do I need to meet you in person first, even if we're in the same city, when we could do a Zoom call or a Teams call and get that done? So those steps will start to get eliminated, and that's how I think the shift will move.

Rohit: All right, and Amit, Vantage Circle is a rewards and recognition platform. Are there any tools that Aviva, as a company, uses to reward its employees?

Amit Malik: Rewards and recognition are very important for us at Aviva. We empower our managers to reward and choose, and we have a full-fledged program where the focus is also on choice. When it comes to rewards, we give people a lot of choice in terms of what rewards they choose. For us, that's a logical extension of the philosophy that recognition should come with a choice for effort. That's how we use the philosophy.

Rohit: Great, so what's your favorite business book?

Amit Malik: Well, I'm an avid reader, Rohit, I've read over 40 books this year, but two or three books have actually influenced me a lot over the past few months. One was a book on leadership and how work actually gets done. The other book was Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan, and I think both of these books have influenced me. And one more, I don't know if you've heard of it, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Those are the books that have left an impact on me over the last six to nine months.

Rohit: And do you have any favorite HR leaders who you follow?

Amit Malik: That's a tough one, but I think I've started to follow a few people recently.

Rohit: And any piece of advice you would give to young HR leaders who want to get into the HR profession?

Amit Malik: Yeah, I always tell young HR leaders never to believe that you're a support function. I always say you are a function that drives the achievement of business objectives, you make the business future-proof. But I also tell them that for this, they must know the business and the challenges it faces going forward. That's my advice.

Rohit: Great, amazing. What's the best way people can reach out to you and know more about you?

Amit Malik: I think the best way is, first, Twitter. I tweet fairly regularly, so you can reach out to me via Twitter, and LinkedIn, I'm there too. So just find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Rohit: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. I really enjoyed speaking with you.

Amit Malik: Thank you, Rohit. Thank you for giving me the opportunity, and thank you to the listeners.

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