Organizations prospers with people being their most valuable assets. The employees working together contribute to the organizational growth enabling business sustenance in challenging scenarios. Companies scale newer altitudes of progress through phenomenal team efforts.

The role of human resources, crucial in pivoting the organizational growth trajectory is very deep-rooted and widely spread across multiple micro-level functions and concerns. With expansion of workforce, its management becomes challenging for the internal HR teams demanding constant time and monetary investment and senior management’s involvement.

The silent yet instrumental role of HR consulting firms has been a sigh of relief offering complete HR solutions, thereby boosting corporate efficiency and business expansion and development. Empowering organizations through its holistic combination of modern and scientific techniques, SYHR Consulting has been instrumental in pivoting business cultures towards a progressive work environment.

When interviewed, Kevin Dias, the Founder and CEO, eagerly unfolded SYHR Consulting’s journey, early inspirations, challenges encountered, and their vision for the future.

Kevin, please brief us about SYHR Consulting, its USPs, and how you are currently positioned as one of the best in your niche.

We are experts in defining and creating relevant employee experiences, enabling sustainability, and creating a performance culture at the workplace. We use analytical frameworks, automation, and employee experience models to design solutions, to help strengthen the work culture. ShareYourHR expertise is in assisting companies to grow by leveraging people. We develop and implement HR Technology, where our key USPs are…

• Creating an accurate understanding of the client’s requirement,
• Relevant solutions to building growth and sustainability,
• Agile and scalable tech solutions,
• We deploy proven frameworks and methods,
• We implement what we design, thereby demonstrating skin the game,
• Our delivery is simple and outcome-based,
• We bring best practices to the drawing board,
• Our team is highly proficient and committed,
• Change Management,
• We cater to the Manufacturing, Service, IT FMCG sectors.

Currently the services used by our clients are

• HR Transformation projects
• HR Advisory
• HR Shared Services
• Global Labor Governance
• Wellness

We pride ourselves in the quality and standard of service we bring to the table. We have a unique proposition to the market. We are an affordable premium HR Consulting practice. We specialize in employee experience (future of HR). We offer global capability. And our technology addresses future needs in an easy-to-use manner.

Tell us more about SYHR Consulting’s offerings and aspects making it stand out in the cutthroat competition.

We have devised HR solutions bringing positive transformation in the organizations’ basic work environment through diverse people management initiatives.

• Helping companies set up their operations in a new country.
• Designing HR Policies, compensation structures and compliance framework.
• HR Shared Services – managing HR processes, payroll, compliance.
• HR Transformation.
• Creating a performance culture.
• Leadership Development and Assessments for Growth.
• Building skill capability.
• Process Engineering for efficiency and consistency.
• Development and implementation and integration of HR technology.
• Compliance with global employment and immigration laws.
• Wellness programs.

We stand out because we can provide solutions to our customers in India and globally. In addition, we are an HR firm providing technology, legal advice, and HR advice. Finally, there is our research on employee experience. It is not only “what” we do, but also “how” we do it that makes the difference.

Please brief us about your journey and how you made SYHR Consulting excel in its niche.

I am professionally qualified with an MBA in HR and a degree in Law, both from Mumbai University. Currently, pursuing my PhD at the Swiss Business School, I’m also an international wellness coach. My rich and diverse experience in HR spans over 26 years across various industries such as manufacturing, retail, engineering, and ITES. I won numerous awards as Best HR Leader, compensation, and benefits professional of the year, etc.

I have experience in growing and managing a complex large workforce of more than 150000 employees. During my journey, I have managed and enriched every aspect of the HR function on a global footprint spanning the USA, Europe, South America, the Philippines, and the Middle East. I am equipped with a deep understanding of the business, growth/profit drivers, and industry headwinds, as an international HR Leader, and has initiated global people strategy and consistently delivered desired outcomes.  Have managed organic growth, along with mergers and acquisitions. Robust people relationships across levels along with board reporting on areas of compliance and reward.

I have developed my expertise in different facets of people strategy, acquisition, development, management, HR policies, rewards, and benefits. The necessity of speed and efficacy was brought about through HR digitization, e-governance, process integration, compliance, and building employee relations toward global mobility, inclusion, and diversity.  I focused on developing and enhancing the employee experience, wellness, and HR transformation that has enabled organizations to be competitive.

I have been instrumental in the implementation of HR strategies and responsible for driving key initiatives for business growth, and in integrating policy and standardization of cultural integration for the organization. With a background in law, I have built global labor governance models. With global experience, I developed an approach to understanding local practice and setting up the company from the ground up.

As a CEO of ShareYourHR, a global HR Consulting practice focusing on creating employee experience and delivering quality service in the key areas of HR Transformation, HR shared services, HR process engineering, HR advisory, and corporate wellness. Our commitment is to make distinctive and sustained improvements to help align business goals, optimize people costs, build employee value, foster employee engagement, and create employee experience. With the vision to build a leading global HR practice specialized in creating employee experience based on core values of simplicity, commitment, integrity, and respect,

Being an experienced leader, share your opinion on how the adoption of modern technologies like AI and ML is impacting your sector and how is SYHR Consulting adapting to the change.

AI & ML will possibly transform the work environment. Their impact on workforce dynamics along with people management is difficult to predict, however companies who have dabbled with the technology have mixed results. Yet, our basic approach to AI/ML indicates there is a significant risk that AI use will degrade the quality of work. It’s the business leaders who see AI and ML in HR as strategic tools to build future readiness. Therefore, the HR community needs to develop the skills and educate people to ensure that ethics and fairness are at the center of AI development for HR and people management.

Payroll as a critical process is a repetitive, set of transactions that run on a schedule with data points that are mostly similar over multiple runs. Especially for payroll, AI is a disruptor. An algorithm powering payroll can do multiple transactions and calculations that a human would not be able to and with a high degree of consistency and efficiency. Multiple interfaces can be made available to capture and validate data required for payroll.

Through ShareYourHR, we have envisioned that the future of HR is in an intuitive, intelligent HR process platform that can integrate with HRMS systems and intelligently automate HR transactions including payroll and deliver a seamless experience to employees. We present “HR Hovercraft” the future of HR technology designed to enable large, shared services and transactions. The platform has OCR capability, data parsing, its own NLP engine, and multi-linguistic capability for a chatbot that should support both open-ended and guided flow. It is equipped with a machine learning model which is easily visible to the technical user for configuring models on the flight, process automation engine, and capability to interact on different platforms – Chatbot, WhatsApp, Messenger, email, integrators of systems. ShareYourHR has a built-in process engineering capability, a ticketing model, and a Helpdesk ability.

Considering the current scenario, what initial challenges did you face and what are the challenges now?

We started in May 2019. As we took off as a business, we were hit with the COVID-19 pandemic with the compulsive lockdown. A lot of our initiatives had to be stalled and redone. We were very fortunate that during this period, as we grew, our clients supported us. Right from the beginning, we set out to build a large organization that is known for its values, expertise, quality, and commitment. All throughout, it is imperative that we hire people who would foster and grow our culture. To do that we spent time defining that culture and what are the critical attributes we were looking for in building the ShareYourHR family. Then came the challenge of scaling the business, for which we went back to the roots to work on our processes and delivery mechanisms properly. We carefully analyzed the risk to the way we’re going to move forward.

Today, as we look forward, we need to replicate our success stories and build sustainability. Our global capability in the HR transformation and technology has to be the drivers of the company catapulting us as a serious player in the global market. Finally, is being able to retain our speed and agility as we grow, to be able to give a common experience to a diverse workforce that will grace the growing family of ShareYourHR.

What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into your space?

I have this sound advice for young professionals.

• You Don’t Have to Do Everything

When you start out and have little money, it’s easy to feel like you must do every single task in the business. While this is possible in theory, it can be both draining and inefficient. So, set aside a small amount of money to outsource necessary but time-consuming tasks.

• Freedom is fun, but routine is important

the freedom that comes with self-employment is exhilarating at first, but it can also make things more overwhelming. A routine will keep you grounded, but that doesn’t mean you have to schedule every moment of your day.

• Your Health Comes First

Research has shown that entrepreneurs are particularly vulnerable to stress, poor mental health, and burnout. However, don’t let this happen to you; instead, commit to making your physical and mental health just as much of a priority as your business.

• If You Don’t Have a Safety Net, Build One

Financial safety nets are incredibly important in entrepreneurship. You can do this by saving for longer, taking up a part-time job, or seeking external funding.

• You Need Other People

If you are starting a business by yourself, don’t underestimate the importance of regular social interaction. Plus, you need to eventually develop a like-minded team, so hire for attitude. Plan the technology, sales, and client interfacing/ relations team. Remember that in payroll is your service that makes the difference.

• Customer

You need to focus on customers and their actual needs, especially the initial customer as they will be your ambassadors for growth

• You Don’t Have to Have Everything Figured Out

Make a minimum viable product (on payroll) and get started, using the feedback and knowledge you gain to shape your business.

How do you envision scaling SYHR Consulting in the future?

To scale our offering in the future, we need to be able to respond to questions around.

• How can we meaningfully automate our HR function, to efficiently manage onboarding, HR operations, data management, interact with employees in different locations, provide a great employee experience and improve response time to employees?
• How can we provide solutions where HR is the pivot for the growth of any organization?
• Can our HR shared service technology aid HR outsourcing as the future for HR operations?
• Can we be the HR firm that is the one-stop shop for global HR knowledge and Legal HR governance support?
• Our tech, analytics, and process engineering-led solutions need to educate and aid HR professionals take strategic decisions.
• Our research in employee experience will deliver HR predictive and qualitative models in ensuring employee outcomes.

To do this, we will invest in the technology development, products – HR Hovercraft, DIYHR and RPA tools, team capability building and team skilling, research and certification, business development, social media, events, sponsorships, and alliances.