Rashmi Warange, Vice President, Human Capital Management, Arka Fincap, discusses the company’s HR strategies for a happy workforce:
The culture of a company is the sum of its priorities, values, habits, and practices. Culture has a significant impact on tilting the diversity needle and creating truly inclusive organizations. Arka Fincap emphasizes a people-first strategy, with the NBFC focusing on processes and projects centered on engaging and upskilling its employees. Arka has a highly engaged community because of its inclusive and performance-driven work culture.
Learning Journeys
With the massive surge of talent that Arka is currently experiencing at the operating grade, Arka Fincap engages their staff in their learning journeys on a constant basis. “It is critical that our managers develop the right competencies and are equipped with the right tools to ensure the success of their teams and themselves. Arka has put together a learning journey for its managers to help them do what they do best – drive, motivate and support,” Rashmi says.
Leadership & Behavior Programs
Arka partnered with the S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research to host a 2-day leadership workshop. The curriculum focuses on 5 main areas of becoming a successful manager: self-exploration, interpersonal effectiveness decoding, group dynamics, leadership abilities, and styles.
Arka’s managers were interviewed using the BEI tool in the behavioral event interviewing program, a tool that assists in creating clear criteria for applicant selection and assists them in identifying and hiring people with the correct balance of abilities and motivation.
The NBFC recently completed a 4-day business leaders’ summit that included a 2-day learning intervention dubbed ‘Iceberg – Beyond the Apparent.’ Rashmi explained the program’s goals: “The program’s goal was to enable participants to understand and better manage themselves in order to be in better control of situations and transactions at an operational and emotional level.”
Sales, technology & e-learning programs
Arka has completed 4 batches of its 4-day Sales Consciousness Program (SCP). The SCP learning module focuses on consultative selling, shifting from price to value selling, recognizing personal sales consciousness, creating good win-win results, and effective negotiation approaches and strategies good win-win results, and effective negotiation approaches and strategies. “Whether it’s technical training or behavioral training, Arka has always paved the way for success for its people,” Rashmi says.
The company has worked hard to ensure that its learning energies are proportionate to its people’s efforts to succeed. Rashmi said: “Arka is now on its way to transition to a full e-learning platform for all of its product-related training needs for its most people-intensive business function – MSME & SME team/ retail lending segment.”
Clear & Measurable Goals
Emotions influence people’s behaviors, and the correct emotions can boost or deplete employee motivation. To keep people motivated, Arka is focusing on defining clear and quantifiable goals.
Rashmi believes that a leader’s role is to help everyone understand the mission. Arka’s management team has not only held extensive Annual Operating Plan conversations and obtained sign-offs on business goals from all stakeholders but has also conducted monthly check-ins to see where it stands. This is a top-down behavior. Because of the straightforward and crisp communication practiced here, the participants can all see how everyday work fits into the larger plan.
Happy Workforce
Arka recognizes that time away from work is crucial and is what keeps the employee coming back happy to their workplace. Says Rashmi: “Work life balance is a way of life here. Be it leaving the office when work is done or taking time off, we do so without the fear of being judged or reprimanded. We have outings planned for teams that achieve/ overachieve their goals that surely is a break from their routine into a space that lets them celebrate, network, and talk of things beyond work as well. Arka conducts a yearly employee satisfaction survey to ensure that we continue doing what we are doing right and keep introducing initiatives that will keep driving up our score.”
Team Arka constantly finds a cause to come together for festivities and games, parties, or simply good food. The company congratulates its employees on their successes, big or small.
“What we believe in is recognizing people who have helped us get one step closer to our goals. When a company celebrates its employees, it guarantees that they are self-motivated and gives companies a cause to rejoice,” concludes Rashmi.
Read more:
To mentor & coach emerging leaders
