Home > News & Events > The role of an HR Head is highly pivotal for the growth of a business: Ranga Reddy, CEO, Maveric Systems

Maveric Systems, a leading digital transformation player for the banking and fintech space, has witnessed 20% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) in the financial year 2020-21 and over the next three years, the company plans to achieve 25-28% CAGR.

“To aid this growth, I’m looking to augment the workforce of Digital Transformation unit by 350, DataTech by 250, Quality Engineering by 200 and Temenos Core Transformation by 100 associates. These hires will be across the experience levels and technology stacks,” Ranga Reddy, CEO, Maveric Systems, told ETHRWorld in an interaction.

Reddy further said, “At Maveric, the financial year 2021-22 is seen as a year of reframing and reorganising to align ourselves towards the Rs 1100 crore vision. Towards this, I will also look to strengthen the leadership team. I’m looking to add 10-12 senior leadership roles across functions, such as business development, technology consulting and delivery for DataTech, Digital Transformation and Temenos Core Transformation.”

What have been the biggest learnings from the Covid-19 scenario?

At Maveric, I’ve been building and practising a culture of transparency and free communication at all levels of hierarchy. I was fortunate that because of this cultural alignment, situation like pandemic has had a minimal impact on us. Adapting to a remote working culture was easy. However, there have been a few learnings –

Investment in culture pays: Our organisational structure, roles and leadership style have always mooted individual freedom and ownership at workplace as against focussing on some sort of supervision and oversight. The policies and the operating procedures are designed with trust, transparency and free exchange of views as compared to top down approach of implementing them. This has enabled us to adapt to remote working with zero quality and productivity loss.

Choosing to be strategic: Choice of projects and depth of customer relationship keeps you closer to the customer even in difficult times. The more strategically you are involved with the customer and the transformation projects that you choose to work on, gives better ability to cope with situations like pandemic. This is my second learning.

Associates add value: Associates have shown that they have an inherent need to add value and they can endure any amount of difficulty especially when they have ownership and freedom at work place.

How are you prioritising diversity and inclusion at the workplace? How the important metrics in this regard have changed for the company in recent years? In terms of achieving gender diversity, which of the company’s initiatives has been particularly successful?

Maveric has been an advocate of diversity and inclusion for the last 20 years. We have a good 35% to 65% male to female ratio in the organisation. Having said that, generating and hiring female leadership team members has been a challenge over the years. However, we are working towards overcoming the same with various initiatives.

Also, inclusion has been on top of the agenda for the leadership team at Maveric. We have been constantly working to hire associates from different categories such as different economic backgrounds, differently-abled, army veterans and candidates from areas such as North East. We have proudly achieved 60% of the target and currently have 8% of our workforce constitute the associates in the categories. We are working towards moving this needle to 15% over the next one year.

What are some best practices that have been implemented at the company to keep the employees motivated amidst the pandemic?

Working from home has become a new normal for all of us during this pandemic and as an organisation, we at Maveric Systems have always ensured to support our associates, with the best that we can. I would like to summarize two key things here –

Communication: The only key thing that we have done is to pay exceptional attention to enable teams to collaborate through various forums and platforms for project and support requirements. Enabling correct and timely communication not only helped teams to work productively, but also helped maintain the cohesive work environment during the remote working scenario.

Taking good care of the associates: The leadership teams across all levels were collectively working towards taking exceptionally good care of the associates. We have tirelessly worked towards assisting associates with respect to their travel, accommodation and preventive healthcare requirements. Right from arranging and managing their accommodation to, in few cases, providing them with hospitalisation support.

Do you think the post-Covid-19 world will see greater decentralisation and independence in team management or will companies look to stay uniform in their approach?

I believe this pandemic has shattered the myth that working from home impacts the productivity of a professional.

Going further, I see two things happening as we move on with the new normal:

  • Except for the areas which are under the regulatory focus, in all other areas companies will continue to adapt and enhance distributed/remote working models.
  • Companies will be required to relook at the entire Learning and Development process considering remote working, especially for young associates.

How do you think leadership can be nurtured in companies during stressful times?

I believe leadership is about applying self to higher level of complexity. At Maveric, we always believe that leadership development is all about getting people to face higher level of complexity with reasonable effectiveness.

One of the key ways in which we develop leadership at Maveric, is to find such complex context and assign leaders to apply themselves while the rest of the organisation supports them during the process to become more and more effective.

In the context of Covid, we focused on areas such as customer relationship development, technical engagement, delivery oversight and associate engagement. We assigned leaders to handle these areas and now my leadership team is experienced and capable to handle these complex situations apart from other key responsibilities.

What are the company’s hiring plans for this year? In which roles, most of the hiring is likely to take place?

Maveric has seen satisfactory growth pattern in the past few years. In the FY 20-21, we have achieved 20% CAGR and over the next three years, the plan is to achieve 25-28% CAGR.

To aid this growth, I’m looking to augment the workforce of Digital Transformation unit by 350, DataTech by 250, Quality Engineering by 200 and Temenos Core Transformation by 100 associates. These hires will be across the experience levels and technology stacks.

At Maveric, the financial year 2021-22 is seen as a year of reframing and reorganising to align ourselves towards the Rs 1100 crore revenue vision. Towards this, I will also look to strengthen the leadership team. I’m looking to add 10-12 senior leadership roles across functions, such as business development, technology consulting and delivery for DataTech, Digital Transformation and Temenos Core Transformation.

What’s your expectation from the company’s HR Head?

3Cs – Culture, Competency and Capacity building are the key tenets that differentiate Maveric from others. Off late, I see that most of the HR professionals are being dragged or are increasingly focussing on the operations of an HR function, rather than focussing on the 3Cs.

The role of an HR Head is highly pivotal for the growth of a business. So, in my opinion, the HR head or an HR professional should be one who can efficiently focus on the 3Cs and help build the organisation and let the processes take care of rest of the tasks in the function.

This News article was originally published in ET HRWorld.com

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