People First Indeed !

Last week I was in Mumbai for the PeopleFirst HR Excellence Awards, 2018 edition as a jury member. I must confess it was a great learning experience. For the past two decades, I have observed several organizations giving a lot of importance to HR activities; yet, a lot of what I had seen till now was largely being discussed in conference rooms or as the proverbial water cooler conversation. However, at the PeopleFirst HR Excellence Awards event, I actually got to see actual implementation of initiatives that otherwise tend to get pushed into the 'Nice to have' folder!

 My initial impression on seeing the number of categories (seventeen) where organizations could nominate their work, was that there were far too many. There were 13 categories of awards for Leading Practices and 4 categories for Individual contribution. In my opinion, a few of these categories were actually the standard fare an HR function ought to deliver. I was not sure how the submissions from organizations would demonstrate anything extraordinary in the work they had done. Yet again, I was pleasantly surprised after sitting through the Jury presentations. Each nomination had a great story to tell and the effort put in by the participating organizations was clearly visible. The seriousness with which the event is taken by the industry was visible in the fact that senior HR leaders (including HR Directors and Talent and OD Heads) have personally come down to the venue to make presentations on behalf of their organizations. In some cases, the senior leaders sat back and allowed younger upcoming leaders from their team make the presentation. This in itself was testimony to sound leadership.

 I would summarize the winners in two categories:

1.  Out-of-the-Box Thinking: Organizations who have created something unique
2.  State-of-the-Art Execution: Organizations that have exhibited differentiated execution for seemingly mundane activities

 Both categories mentioned above demonstrated innovation excellence!

Every submission was a great story of how the HR function can play an increasingly decisive role in days to come. I congratulate not just the winners but all the organizations who have submitted their nominations. Even if you didn’t make it to the winners list this year, your work was still commendable. At the risk of sounding clichéd, I believe there was no loser in these awards. I only wish we could have given 'First' prize to all nominations. After all, it is 'PeopleFirst' :-)