Ritesh Daryani

▶0:01HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. I'm excited to welcome Ritesh Daryani to the Built By People podcast. Ritesh, thank you so much for joining us. As a starting question, I'd love to ask you to tell us a little

▶0:54Guestbit more about your career journey. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me to this podcast. Looking forward to our conversation. I usually start by saying that, you know, I had about 20 years of experience. My first 13 years had been in a very large company. So I worked with companies that had 200,000 employees, 300,000 employees. Even when IBM, I worked with IBM during 2005 to '10, they were almost like 500,000 employees. And that was all about scale, how to build organizations with lots of robust processes and all that. But later in my career, after 30 years, I thought, I'm going to go to a little bit smaller organizations. And then when I joined Expedia, which was in my resume, the only B2C company. Most of my career has been in enterprise companies. And you will think Expedia is not small, but relatively when I was moving from large companies, it was a much smaller organization. So I worked with them for about 3 years and then edX happened and I never left. Many times I tell people that, hey, unless They fire me, I can retire from here. It's been a beautiful journey being with AdFX for about 9 and a half years. I lead the people function and build our team and people organization in the last 10 years has been amazing journey. Little bit on the functional side, the way I designed my career was very deliberate. I spent first 8 to 9 years in my career being a COE. So worked in talent acquisition, product effectiveness, compensation, learning. I was also in the chief of staff for a head of HR once in my roles and then transitioned to more generalist roles like people business partner and then started leading organization. It's been great. I also worked in my different roles in almost all different continents. More than Asia, North America, Europe, interacting with teams in more than 40 countries. It's been quite good. It's been quite rewarding career and really enjoying my journey. And people sometimes ask me, hey, if you have to relive your life, will you be in human resources? And I say without even blinking my eyes that yes, this is the career I meant for and this is the career I'm going to pursue, even if after a year it gets bad.

▶3:41HostKesh, I know one of your areas of focus and expertise is around wellness strategy. What's your perspective and approach on an organization's wellness strategy?

▶3:54GuestYeah, that's a very relevant question for an organization like Edifex. I'll take you a little bit on history of Edifex. Edifex isn't, you know, in a healthcare company which started in 1996. Our founder actually started the company after working for a couple of years in the corporate world. And then he decided that, hey, this is, you know, I think corporate world is not for him. He's more of an entrepreneur and he started the company and he started the company in the EDI space. But fast forward when he got his first customer that happened to be in healthcare. And how that, you know, Edifex became a healthcare company. So it's, if you talk about any plans, any rules, pretty much, you know, we work with all of them. And one of my founder's passion was wellbeing. While he was running Edifex, he also started a company called Roundglass, which is primarily focused is wellbeing. And we adopted some of the philosophy at Edifex of Roundglass, which is Things like how to look at employees from the lens of wellbeing, and which is things like financial wellbeing, physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, career wellbeing, social wellbeing, and community wellbeing. And we call this whole concept, which many companies people call it total rewards, we call it wellbeing plan. And wellbeing plan is a very holistic approach around how you think about employees. So, you know, whatever we do for employees, you know, we always look from the lens of this. Okay, are we thinking about employees, you know, physical well-being? Are we thinking about people's well-being? If you're doing anything about— most of the companies say, okay, financial well-being means pay, bonus, equity. But we go beyond because they are reeducating our associates, we call our employees associates. Are we educating them on the financial well-being? Are we thinking about how they can very generational health. For example, next year our focus is going to be in the financial well-being space, and specifically we're thinking about how to think about assigning each employee in the company, you know, a financial planner, which usually is a luxury for people when they grow in their career and make some money, and then they have a financial planner. And we want to start employee, then give this opportunity if they were interested in to enroll and assign. So we're thinking about a lot on those. And even things like, it'll be funny, like we have in India as well as in our US offices something called Wellbeing Center, which provides services like free services for massages or spa services and nutrition counseling and live sessions with a very well-trained trainer on how to build your strength. We also do on Tuesdays in the onsite for onsite employees, we do things like a healthy soup. So we have a garden in our office where we have fresh vegetables and just our nutritionist actually picks up some of those vegetables, makes soup in the office and on Thursdays we have different kind of flavor of, you know, we can do chai tea and those kind of stuff in the office. So we really think about well-being at the core. If you visit our offices and you'll see that we don't serve sodas, we have alternative drinks of sodas so that no sugar and more healthy drinks in the office. So it's like almost kind of in our DNA in the company, right? Well-being.

▶7:40HostI love that perspective and thank you for sharing it. I want to switch gears on the top and drive to the topic of being a remote-first company. Talk to me a little bit about why you decided to stay remote-first.

▶7:55GuestYeah, like everybody else, we also transitioned during COVID to become a fully remote organization. We have a concept of something called HPE. We call it High Productive Edge, which means we want people to be productive and people to be engaged. So we give empowerment to our associates to decide where they want to work from. So a lot of companies say, hey, we are a hybrid company, but for hybrid company, you have to be co-located because if you're going 2 days or 3 days, you're like, example, if a company is headquartered in Seattle and their office is in Seattle, you cannot move out of Seattle. So we are, that's why, you know, we call it a remote and we give, there are people actually who come to our onsite office almost every day. There are employees who work hybrid and there are employees who work completely remotely. Our transition in the US was, just to give you a little bit background during COVID was quite easy transition because we are, even pre-COVID, we were 30% remote in the US. Whereas in Eastern Europe countries and India, We were absolutely an onsite company, but we decided to move and make completely remote. Now fast forward when everybody started and COVID went away and everybody started calling people back, I thought it is not the right thing to do because we want to make sure, first of all, start thinking about this, why we are doing it, why people work remote, why people work in the office, what are the some of the drivers for that. Some of the drivers you can think of is how the company is doing. We are, as a company, financially doing very well. We are quite profitable. We are a company where employees are quite engaged. Our customers are happy, they're doing well, and they speak good about Redefex. So what is a driver to bring back the employees? When we start, when you start to look back and sit back, do you want to follow the herd mentality and follow everybody else? Or you want to stay, go back and stay back and think, hey, do you really need it to change? And our answer was absolutely not at all. There's no change in the productivity to employee. There is no change in the customer interactions. There is no change in, you know, the, you know, and if you look at the other side of it, it's mostly all positive. Like if we keep people remote, we are providing flexibility to our associate to integrate their personal and professional life, which in turn will help them to be more engaged in the organization, be more productive, be more efficient. And if you look at all these different aspects and read all the research, right, you know, and that's why I've experimented in my career with that affects quite a different thing. Even Bahaula's management at one point in time, we removed their performance funds and we said, okay, let's experiment. And we see, you know, we are a company which tests and learns. If we do something, it doesn't work out, we have no shame and no problem in pulling those things back. But we personally see where flexibility is important. It is one of our differentiators for our employees. It is the right thing to do. And we thought, you know, in the future, we have no intention to go back. Or do the onsite model.

▶11:17HostRitesh, what would be some of your key recommendations to HR leaders who are seeking to elevate their culture and drive employee retention?

▶11:28GuestYeah, culture. I know for the benefit of the people who are listening to this podcast, I'm a big fan of Edgar Schein. If you know Edgar Schein, one of the most important corporate culture organization. And what he says is the cultures are created beneath the surface, right? If it's a bigger analogy of an iceberg, that at the above the water you have most of the things which are like your policy programs, culture, how leaders model, whereas, you know, under the water is more about how people perceive culture. So cultures are not created how you want the culture to be. The culture is usually created how people perceive the culture to be, and it's a sum total of— I personally feel that not one thing, you know, makes or breaks the culture. It is a sum total of many actions of people, leaders, managers, which create the culture in the organization. So the one easy or difficult way, both ways, is to really ponder and think about how you're going to build culture in the organization is coach and develop managers, the right kind of managers in the organization. And if you do that and if the managers, because if you look at from an employee perspective, in a remote world, for, it's basically for an employee, the company is nothing but the team they work on. And a manager plays a very important role. If the managers are giving the right kind of engagement, the team and listening and talking and not just talking about personal, like the professional stuff, but also knowing the employees personally. So we provide a lot of tools to managers to equip them and constant learning through that. And one of the other important thing is at a senior level, leadership level, role modeling works very well. If the leaders are doing the role modeling the way they want the culture to be, it automatically— so for example, some companies say, I want to have an open culture in the organization. But if the leader is not accessible, It's almost counterintuitive. Even by writing on the walls that you want to be an open culture, you cannot create an open culture. The only way you can create an open culture, you should show, the leaders should model it and show it in their actions. So I think our, I personally feel that our team and senior leadership team does that really well. I will not say we are perfect, but we tried We do the right thing. And, you know, even if we made some mistakes, we learn from our mistakes and then try to get up and then go and run again.

▶14:28HostRitesh, you've been at your organization for nearly a decade, so you know a thing or two about strategic planning. And that's the next topic I want to jump into. I'd love for you to talk to us about your process for building a 5-year strategic plan.

▶14:46GuestYeah, we have quite a linear process in building a plan. And what we do is we put together usually a 5-year plan. And then once you have that directional 5-year plan in place, then every year we look back and say, okay, what are we going to do in a particular year? Like in future. For example, now we have already completed planning for 2025, and once you do the planning and then it all feeds into the budget cycle and everything else. So just to give you— so I think a typical way to work on a 5-year plan is, first of all, I read a lot, like all people who are in these kind of roles should know what's going on in the external world. So do a lot of research on various aspects of human resources and read and where the trends are, what other companies are doing, what best practices are looking like, what next practices are looking like, and think about all that. I also think about when you're doing your 5-year planning to talk to the CEO or talk to the internal teams and look at what are directionally What are we going to do in next 5 years? And we are in a company, you know, healthcare, and we are not a B2C company and we can't be. So if you have to think about something launching in terms of a product and let's say 2 years from now, you have to think now. So you cannot think 2 years from now when it's your plan. And so the good internal discussion with the CEO directly knowing where the business is headed, And then specifically doing one-on-ones and talking to our senior leaders and understanding how they're thinking about next 5 years. And once you have all these aspects, then you go back to the drawing board, talk to my own team and do a kind of a strategy session for a day, really think about how— do a little bit of bottoms-up approach and thinking what things are working, what things are not working, what can we do in future? What I've realized that I created a plan in 2020 for 5 years from 2020 to '25, which I just refreshed just now for next 5 years. And what I realized that your broad themes don't change. Your broad themes quite remain pretty much similar, but your yearly plans will change. So for example, like one of our goals are to provide the world-class people experience to our associates. And we have created a model where the heart of the model is I am well and I belong, which is how is your wellbeing and do you belong? And then there's a whole full lifecycle of it. And then when we build this people experience model, now your model will remain very relevant for next 3 to 5 years, but what you do each year in growing Providing the kind of experience you are given to your associates, what will enhance experience, what you improve, what you don't want to improve in future. It changes every year. So what we do is once our 5-year plan is ready and ready to go, we usually do both things. We write about 25, 26 pages, a draft of a whole strategic plan and convert that right up into a presentation. And once we have that, Every year in the month of September, we plan for next year. Then we break that 5-year plan into this and then decide based on the market scan what we do every year. We do, okay, what's happening externally, what's happening internally, what direction you really going, what are some of the people imperatives in the organization. And once you have all that, then you build a plan for the next year. So 5-year first, then broken, We break the 5-year plan into each year plan. And then once a plan is ready, we assign budget to if we are doing anything new, anything which is steady and you're doing repeat rhythm of the business, we continue doing it. Anything new, additional stuff we're going to do, we add to that. And then that feeds into the budget. And then, you know, we present to some of the key leaders in the organization, to the CFO and the CEO, and the final our plan is ready to use, and I don't do any planning in the next year. All the planning happens in a year and like a few months in advance. And as soon as the year starts, we almost create on an Excel sheet a project plan. Our goal is to just execute. And we also are an execution-based company. We spend about 10% in strategy, 90% on execution. So once everything is ready, it's all about it.

▶19:34HostRitesh, any parting advice you'd like to share with our community?

▶19:39GuestI think the advice is that whenever— take time in thinking first, whatever, you know, you're thinking about your own managing day trading plan or running a program or, you know, introducing a new practice. I think the best thing is to take time before rolling out anything and think through all different angles, think systemically. I'm a big fan of systems thinking, how one part of the organization impacts the other part of the organization. So think about that, taking time early. And then once you roll it out, something, or whether it's practice or policy or program, then stay through it. So do less,, but do well. So, you know, some of the things which are on these lines that work for me, and I'm pretty sure these are like fundamentals, and if people do these, follow these principles, I think, yeah, they'll do well.

▶20:43HostRitesh, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure having you involved.

▶20:49GuestThank you so much. Thanks for having me here. I really enjoyed the conversation and yeah, looking forward for more of such events and interactions. Thank you so much.