Tushar Pandit

▶0:00HostWelcome 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 Tushar to the Built by People podcast. Tushar, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:49GuestThank you. I really appreciate you having me on board. I have been in the HR space for 25+ years, extremely grateful to have done it globally, domestically, public companies, private companies, PE-backed companies. And really at the end of the day, it's not only to help an organization's strategy to come to realization, growth potential, but it is about optimizing people's talent. One of the things that I firmly believe in is that a PC or a Mac does not make an organization's success or results. It's the talent in that organization. And some of the things that I look back on and I would say data don't lie. Measure what you treasure. Those are things that I have learned from so many great leaders, including the CEOs and the CHROs I worked for. And those mantras have stuck with me and continue to remain with me.

▶1:40HostTushar, as HR leaders shift from data collection to strategic analysis, what are the biggest challenges they face in building analytics capabilities within their teams?

▶1:52GuestYeah, I still think that there is still very much this focus on data collection, or rather the classic standard, what is our headcount? What is our turnover? And that's important. That is foundational though. What is being sought right now and not only into the future is, but what does that mean? What is the insight behind the data that you are telling me? And that is where we have to continuously keep doing more and more. I think that it is a two-prong process. It's an acronym that I like to use and said, or rather it's called RUR, R-U-R. The first R stands for relevancy, then comes urgency, and then comes revenue. So what do I mean by that? Relevancy, there's a lot of best practices available in the marketplace, but it is important to make sure that the relevance is tied to your organization. What's going on now? What is being asked for in the future? What is the executive team seeking? What is the board seeking? What are your leaders seeking? What are your consumers, as in your members, employees seeking? Understanding that, what's driving the business, what are the challenges as every industry, every company has them. Relevance is key. Salesforce may be doing it, or Microsoft is doing it, or Apple is doing it. All great brands, all great things. But if the size or your industry does not match, reference it, but make sure that their application makes sense. Secondly, urgency. We've gotta just operate. One of the things in supporting product teams, speed to market, and that mindset has to operate for us in HR as well, right? What are the insights that I need to present? What are the leaders looking for? How quickly can we How do we make it available? Is it in a dashboard format? Is it available on the fingertips? We need to move away from people as leaders, as customers coming back to us and asking for this stuff. We need to start making this information available to them immediately. And then revenue, revenue per employee. I know we have talked about it, but I'm telling you more than ever before, especially in the world of AI, everything is gonna be revenue per employee. I just saw another infographic yesterday and it clearly shows all of the AI firms who have got 200, 300 employees and then they're already measuring with a revenue per employees. That is going to become a new standard absolute must-have metric, not only from the board level, but it's going to be talked about across the board because the days of adding net new headcount are going to continuously keep reducing. Being more effective, being more efficient, and optimization is going to be very critical. So you take your HR data, but how do you convert it over into a possible thing? And a perfect example of that would be 3-month average attrition rate, right? If you say for your entire forecast of the year, you are expecting an attrition rate of 12%, 13%. On your first quarter, you already know what exactly that's gonna be. Take that data and then publish it out. Now, what have you done? You've projected the rest of the year. You have very clearly shown a KPI that is enterprise-wide, that the board, the executive team, the leaders completely understand what happened in the first quarter, and then what does it mean for your entire projection for your year when it comes to attrition rate?

▶4:57HostTushar, what key workforce metrics do you believe are most critical for talent and succession planning and how should HR leaders prioritize them?

▶5:06GuestI would say it's foundational and simple, but yet very critical. How many teams have their individual development plans completed? What is your career mobility rate within the organization? What is your promotion rate? These are 3 simple things, and everyone should be able to speak to that, right? So again, in 2025, what is the number 1 reason why people leave? No career growth, no new opportunities, right? Everyone coming in, and it has nothing to do with the generations. I truly have always believed believe that. It doesn't matter whether you're a Gen Xer, whether you were a boomer, whether you happen to be Gen Alpha at some point in time because Z's already in the marketplace now. When I come in, I want an opportunity. I wanna learn the stuff. What can I do next after 2 years or 3 years? That is a critical element. If you are not watching that, if you're not measuring that, if you're not reporting out on that, you have a problem. You do. And not only internally, but even when you're attracting new talent, you're gonna, it's gonna be very difficult for you to justify. One of the things that I'm so proud of for our organization at Spins. Last year we promoted 40% of our workforce and good for us, they all happen to be women and also happen to be in women leadership roles up to and including the executive leadership team as well. That's a stat, that's a metric, that's a fact. So not only can you talk to that, not only can you market to that, you clearly show and demonstrate that this commitment is actual business results and it is just not something that you're talking about because everyone else's. To me, when you see that, now people are gonna continue to retain and say, is that happening? What more do I need to do now for myself?

▶6:41HostTushar, AI and automation are transforming HR analytics. How do you see these technologies enhancing decision-making, and what are some practical ways HR teams can start leveraging AI today?

▶6:55GuestI would say that it begins with us. AI is still this unknown. There's still fear. The resistance. The analogy I use is in the 1990s and 2000s when offshoring was taking place, that, that standard line was being said for some of us who are old enough to remember all of that. It's gonna take my job away. And we need to help people overcome that fear. I just shared this great study a couple of days ago. 89% of the leaders are now clearly saying that the skillset that are needed for the next 3 to 5 years we are not doing anything with our workforce and helping people to understand that. We need to encourage people to start playing with it. We need to encourage people to say, your kids are already doing it. Why don't you get into it? Copilot, Gemini, it doesn't matter which one. You just start playing with it. Just get comfortable with it. There is no expectation that you will get it all. But what you have to do is you have to overcome this because this is going to be the new skill set. The days of physics and chemistry will still be part of the curriculum, but understanding or having a good solid knowledge of Python, dashboarding, AI, these are going to be the new critical skill sets. These are things that the future generations are going to have to clearly show that they have already built it. And as the future generations are coming into the workplace, their expectation is that you as a company are already embedded in all of this. So when you're not able to demonstrate that, great talent is gonna think twice about considering you as an organization. So your talent acquisition strategy and your brand is absolutely at stake. With your current team, allowing them to experiment and seeing how it goes through, you now overcome this. And then once— it's just like taking kids to the candy store. Once they've tasted it, they're like, oh. And I just had a member of my team doing that as well. We have opened up Copilot. We are starting to drive a lot of the stuff in the entire team by making it official. They're now getting to see, oh, I drafted something up, and then I just put it there right through, and it came out something even much more better. So that is there. And then the championing of it. And as HR leaders, that is part of the knowledge that we have to drive in our culture. That is allowing individuals and then measuring it. Again, I go back to measure what you treasure. Utilization. So when licenses are given to the teams, you've got to come back and report out, not from a big brother perspective, but saying, hey, we see that this team is only using 20% of this. What do we need to do more for you to get you more comfortable? How do we drive that utilization rate up? Because that's where the train is completely heading towards. That's the role that we have to play. And we have to continuously keep championing it because the thing that keeps me awake is the skilling of our workforces at a pace that we have not seen before to deliver the expectation. And that expectation is not only at the board level. That expectation is across the organization. People and talent and leaders are coming back and saying, how are you giving me AI skill sets quickly?

▶9:47HostTushar, can you share a real-world example where data-driven insights had a significant impact on employee experience or helped predict critical talent trends?

▶9:56GuestI'll use this as a simple example because it was one that really got me my taste of value of data analytics and insights in the world of HR. Still a classic People Partner, and we ended up getting 2 sales resignations in the very first quarter. Still remember walking in. And speaking with both the VP of Sales and the VP, and we had to act quickly. And the reason why we needed to act quickly, the first immediate thing that came to my mind was, my goodness, Q3 quarter is at stake. And when we, and this is all prior before all of the wonderful tools and technologies available now today. But when I went back and I sat on that, it just made me realize, wow, you can just get to see when you receive a surprise or you are not expecting a decision, how much revenue, business operations, risk, all of these things are going up or going down or settling in. And so from there onwards, it started to be why we have to do things differently and we cannot wait for these results or these curveballs to arrive because we're completely caught off guard. And how we have now started to do it is really ensuring that we are in touch with our people. We are in touch with our leaders, asking the questions. Do you anticipate risks in everything that we are planning for? How are your one-on-ones going? So again, the important thing about all of this is, especially when one-on-ones are documented, if you're using great HCM platforms, you can now do this. Automatically you can start to see. What I'm excited about now is, again, with AI, it's coming and giving you back a recap, right? Like when you, in the old ways, you would have to keep reading it and you go back and follow through. Okay, it's been 3 months. If I'm gonna do my OKR review now, let me go read all of that. That time is now gonna be coming back to us very quickly. That redundancy is going away. Why? AI is gonna be able to give me a very quick recap. Give me a recap of the last 30 days. Give me a recap of the last 90 days. Now, very quickly, I'm going to be able to see as a leader what my trend is in my one-on-ones with my individuals. And that should be able to gauge me, hey, do I have risk? Am I seeing this individual moving around? Are they ready for the next opportunity? Hey, they haven't moved in about 2 years. What do I need to do? I need to have a discussion with my people partner. Let's bring in this individual. Can I give them a stretch assignment? I see this as a whole full circle coming back as long as platforms are being utilized effectively. And then you're just getting the insights analysis coming through even furthermore.

▶12:30HostTushar, when presenting workforce analytics to executive teams and boards, what are some best practices for crafting compelling narratives that drive action?

▶12:39GuestI used the attrition example earlier. We've used that with our board. My message here is, at the end of the day, it has to be enterprise KPIs. It truly is enterprise KPIs, right? As we continue to evolve, I would not say that there is an expectation of each function and each team or each ELT member coming and talking about what specifically they're doing now. That is there. I'm not saying that is not there. What I am saying though is the expectation now is, okay, with the efforts and the commitments that are getting delivered upon, how are they tying back to what are the annual priorities for the company? How is this tied to, again, growth? It is all about growth. I think we all can safely say in 2025, a lot of the layoffs unfortunately have taken place. Net new business is more difficult than ever before with all of the macro and the microeconomic factors that we all are overcoming at a global pace. And so that has to be the case. Whatever you are trying to show, you have to tie back to enterprise KPIs. You have to tie back to growth. You have to tie back into revenue. And that's going to be the thing for us. We've got to convert the headcount into FTEs, into productivity. Into capability, into future that has a very clear meaning back for ROI to be achieved. That is going to be expected out of HR, legal, marketing, sales, finance, operations. I would say that it is a minimum standard now for all functions across the board. And I'm grateful because I work with great peers and I'm now starting to see how we take our HR set. And converting them into business enterprise, because that's the way we are all heading towards.

▶14:25HostTrishar, what advice would you like to share with our community?

▶14:28GuestIt's a great question. Okay. So I would say on two fronts. The first thing is there's always change. Change is constant. I think we've all heard this, up to and including change, then there's change fatigue. I'll be a little bold to say that is going to get accelerated even more. I don't think the collective global workforce landscape or society is heading is where we can now say that there's just too much change fatigue. Why? We now receive information in the morning that could be ancient by the end of the day. Technology, data, insights, we are getting over-bombarded on a day-to-day basis now. That's change. So we all are dealing with it personally and professionally, whether we have signed up or not. So I think that is going to continue on and rather the train is even and picking up the pace even more. If it was going at 300 miles, it most likely is gonna get to 480 miles now. The second thing that I would say is I'm predicting that in the next 2 to 3 years, corporate cultures are gonna be talked about in a very different way. And what I mean by that is, see this visualization of it raining and we have an umbrella. That umbrella is this entire new sphere called AI. And then under that, every team, every function and that respective head is going to be the lead when it comes to intelligences. I see a cluster of many intelligences within an organization. They will be finance intelligence, marketing intelligence, sales intelligence, HR intelligence, procurement, supply chain intelligence, et cetera. And each team that is in within that function is going to have to be an expert in their intelligence sets. They're going to have to be able to provide what's going on, how it's helping moving forward. And it's going to be fantastic because now that level playing field is going to be in existence for every team. It's exciting. But again, it goes back to there's so much more to do, how we go about doing it, how do we embed that. And build that and cultivate that into our engagement, our culture, it's going to be absolutely fantastic. There's going to be a lot of case studies that are going to be coming through positively. And from there, we will get to learn what's working, what's not working, and how can we avoid it. But to me, that's where I see how the world of data and insights is just now going to be foundational and the core focus. Our objective for the future is going to be several mini networks of intelligences collaborating across the organization. And that's what corporate culture is gonna be talked about.

▶17:19HostTushar, thanks so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶17:24GuestThank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.