Skill Flex

Day by day, there's increased pressure on customer experience teams to retain customers. This is not always supplemented with adequate support from the organization. Tejasvi Kushwah, Head Doctor - Growth & Retention has been working with frontline teams for over a decade now and believes that it's critical to make the lives of frontline teams simpler to see business outcomes. Listen in!

🎙Something Anika Tanwar, Lead - Growth & Strategy at Zomato, made us think about this week was the level at which #frontline teams need #enablement. We often talk about enablement at the surface level but forget that companies actually really struggle with enabling their frontline teams. Why? Anika spoke to Iknoor Kaur about how frontline teams need enablement at all levels and that training then typically becomes a subset of that. Something she said really clicked, "If I am a salesperson and I'm good at selling, I have the skills, is that enough? We must also enable a good salesperson with the right tools."

Organizations across the board are exploring the different ways in which generative AI can enable their teams. One of the places where that shift has been significant is L&D and enablement for frontline teams. Srinivas from Pristyn Care decodes this big shift for us.

This week we explore a different point of view. Amidst the big tech revolution in the world of L&D, one of the things gone ignored is the big adoption challenge that organizations that are typically immersed in traditional forms of learning step face. From a sense of overwhelm to resistance, there are several challenges related to this switch. Arjun Sharma of Penguin Random House India speaks to Iknoor Kaur about some of these challenges he's seen through his career across ed-tech and now publishing. Listen in!

We spend a lot of time decoding the shift in the way we sell today, but how does this unravel on the ground? Mehar Singh is a customer success professional who has worked across startups like Yelp and Lyft. She talks to us this week about not only how the landscape has shifted but what organizations can do to make this shift smooth. Listen in!

The way organizations use technology to develop their teams is ever-evolving, but linking back initiatives to business outcomes becomes a challenge for most. This week we spoke to Naveen K. Manshani of UnitedHealth Group to understand how companies can reverse engineer their people initiatives from the business metric they're solving for.

We've spent a lot of time speaking to leaders across the globe about what it takes to build high-performing and enduring sales teams. Today, we discuss why it's important to do so. How has selling changed and what do we need to do to stay ahead of the curve? We speak to Mihir Ghandat of The Good Glamm Group. Tune in!

The fact that there is a need to train frontline teams is something we know, but is it adequately implemented across organizations? We discussed this and more with the Founder of Red.Health Prabhdeep Singh this week. Tune in to him talk about how learning must trickle top-down and be implemented at all levels above frontline teams as well in order to deliver high performance.

Alok Shukla, Sr VP HR and D2C talks to us about what it takes to train frontline teams and why they play an extremely critical role in business success. Tune in for a deep-dive on how frontline teams function, what's the best way to train them and how investing in them can scale your business rapidly.

Learning is not often prioritized in the early stages of a startup. However, Suhail Narain, Founder at Hudle, in this chat with Iknoor Kaur emphasizes upon equipping teams with the right skills from day one! If you're at an early-stage startup figuring out the push and pull that prevents you from implementing L&D initiatives at scale, this one's for you!

This week we caught up with Priyanka Peeramsetty, Chief of Staff at InFeedo about the real-world challenges organizations face when it comes to implementing learning. Tune in to understand the points of friction in the process, what's the way forward, and how does on even get started when it comes to implementing learning.

Join experts Swati Gupta and Dipali Pallai from the world of work to discuss how organizations can implement skill-based systems. ✅ Challenges and opportunities ✅ Importance of power skills✅ Equipping customer-facing teams✅ Long-term benefits✅ The way ahead

This week we caught up with Rakhee Chachra who leads Global Sales and Business Development at IBM. She comes with over 2 decades of experience in sales. Tune in to understand why client relationships are fundamental to sales and how investing in learning leads to solid business outcomes.

We speak this week with Vardan Malhotra, Business Development Head at AON HR Learning Centre about everything related to upskilling sales teams in fast-growing organizations. Listen in! 

We’re back with our Case Study Analysis with Geetika Dang. This week we talk about how Fundamento helped a leading ed-tech company cumulatively increase team potential by implementing a skill-based, data-backed learning design. Geetika Dang speaks with Iknoor Kaur to deconstruct Fundamento’s approach. Geetika is a Management Consulting Principal - Talent & Organization Consulting, Accenture Strategy and has around 9 years of work experience. She has worked with CEB and Bersin, Deloitte Consulting where she authored several case studies in the HR domain and led case studies, advising the C-suite on people best practices.

Building a sales team is incredibly hard, and ensuring that the team delivers high output consistently is harder. We spoke to Pranav Bajaj, co-founder Medulance, about how sales representatives need what we call power skills to perform well.

An individual’s success and purpose have always been deeply linked because of their ability to enable each other. In any organization, in order to build a high-performing workforce, it is critical to embed a shared purpose within the organization. We’ve in the past written a lot about purpose. This week, we got together with a panel of experts to discuss how enabling a sense of purpose in organizations can overall impact organizational productivity. The conversation was with Rachele Focardi, multigenerational workforce strategist and Geetika Dang, Management Consulting Principal (Talent & Organizational Consulting) at Accenture Strategy. Both speakers brought in a unique perspective about the world of work and the importance of power skills in building workforces that are equipped for the future of work.

One of the most trending words in the world of work - quiet quitting - is up for discussion this episode. We have Evelyn Kwek, the Managing Director of Great Place to Work ASEAN & ANZ, who comes with over 26 years of experience in human resources and organizational development, sharing her thoughts. 

Job cuffing has been trending all winter, but what lies at the core of it. We speak with a coach who's traversed from Sales to skills coaching over 23 years of her career. Kavitha Alva is a Gallup strengths and performance coach with 23+ years of experience working with individuals and corporates across large organizations such as LnT, Deloitte, Asian Paints, Airtel, and many more. Listen in!

Neena Bhaskar of CooperVision and Vibhooti Gupta of Lenovo discuss the evolution of corporate buzzwords like Quiet Quitting, Quiet Constraint, Productivity Paranoia, and most recently Job Cuffing and what they say about the future of work. Iknoor Kaur speaks with them about how these trends impact business, what companies can do to beat them and the importance of Power Skills. 

Companies today are adopting a skill-based approach to hiring but the basic filtering of candidates continues to be a problem especially in organizations that hire at scale. Measuring power skills is crucial to break this bias. We speak with Soumya Gupta, an organizational psychologist about Fundamento's data insight that shows how individuals from tier 2 and 3 cities outperformed those from tier 1 in essential power skills. 

The world of work is changing and organizations are trying to build teams that can sustain this change. Listen to this LinkedIn Live where Mark LaScola speaks with Ankit Durga, and dives deep into what's driving this shift, 21st-century leadership and the need for skill-based business models.

A big thank you for tuning into Skill Flex in 2022. We promise to come back bigger and better in 2023. Here's a fun teardown of everything that we've talked about in the last year and what the key takeaways were. Do spot the bloopers! 

This week we take a look at what organizations need to focus on when it comes to maximizing the performance of sales agents. Fundamento conducted an assessment exercise with 1500+ sales agents working in a fast-growing tech startup. We analyze this data with Kalpana Sachdeva, HR leader with 17+ years of experience, formerly the Head of HR at Lindström. 

There's yet another buzzword in town, quiet constraint. This capsule, we speak with Vibhooti Gupta, currently working as the Learning and Talent Development Manager at Lenovo with around 10 years of work experience. 

On this month's episode with Ankit Durga, we'll be discussing the big dark cloud hovering over companies - attrition. Joining in is Gauri Anand. Gauri is a seasoned HR professional, with a solid background in strategy, consulting, and HR program management with 10+ years experience at Accenture, EY, and most recently Gartner. For the past 5 years, she has been at Gartner in a key specialized HR innovation role with the mandate to improve the HR function’s productivity through innovation, automation and scale of processes.

Every four weeks, we'll showcase some of the work that Fundamento's been doing and we've got an expert to analyze our approach for you. This week we talk about how Fundamento helped a leading health-tech company increase their Show Rate by 4% in just 3 months.  Geetika Dang is Management Consulting Principal - Talent & Organization Consulting, Accenture Strategy and has around 9 years of work experience. She has worked with CEB and Bersin, Deloitte Consulting where she authored several case studies in the HR domain and led case studies, advising the C-suite on people best practices.

For this week’s episode, we’re going to uncover a topic that’s had quite a lot of discussion around it - Resilience at the workplace. However, we’ve got our own twist to it. Resilience and Change Management are critical power skills for the future of work, however, they play out very differently across roles. Iknoor Kaur dives deeper into this with Natasha D’Souza.  Natasha currently leads people and culture at leap.club. She’s previously led and launched multiple sales, people and L&D teams at Zomato for 8 years. She’s passionate about decoding the art and science of sales, investing in leadership of the future and contributing to all things people!

This week on the Skill Flex Capsule, we deep-dive into findings from the data we collected at Fundamento after assessing 1866 Sales Agents working at a fast-growing startup. We speak with Swati Gupta, who is the global head of learning and development at Evalueserve and has previously led L&D for PwC, EY and KPMG. She is a talent development leader and strategic people executive with a career spanning over 16 years. Listen in to understand positive correlations we found between Emotional Self Control and Result Orientation in Sales Agents and how certain micro behaviors contribute to it. 

Introducing the Skill Flex Capsule! Short episodes. Targeted deep-dive. Power skills focus.  We kickstart the Capsule series with the latest buzzword in the world of work - Productivity Paranoia. Joining us is Nandita Mehta, a professional wellness coach. She runs her own consultancy that offers strategic hiring, people strategy and advisory services. In fact, Nandita has played several leadership roles across industries, around people strategies, transformation & community building.  Organizations today are in a bind. On one hand, employees feel burnt out and working hours have gone up, but on the other, employers don’t look at this as translating into “productivity”. So what's the missing link? Listen in! 

Companies have been navigating the "Great Resignation" for the last couple of years, but how do you beat it? What do companies need to do to enable flexible development that increases stickiness and productivity. This episode we catch up with Neena Bhaskar, an HR professional with 16+ years of experience, currently heading HR (Southeast Asia) at Cooper Vision, a billion dollar revenue arm of the Cooper Companies and one of the world’s largest manufacturers of soft contact lenses. 

In the early 90s, a Stanford researcher conducted the "tappers" and "listeners" experiment which recognized an ongoing communication imbalance between leaders and their teams. Even today, this raises a fundamental question, what do individuals and organizations need to do to build leaders of tomorrow? Nikhita Pabreja, People Development Expert who's worked at companies like Better, Genpact, Uber and host Ankit Durga break it all down in this episode of Skill Flex. 

Did you know that Gen Z hate the term "leader"? Leadership in the post-pandemic, multigenerational world is a huge challenge, but therein also lies a massive opportunity. Rachele Focardi, a multigenerational workforce strategist and host Ankit Durga break down the various aspects of talent development, organizational productivity and leadership in the new world of work. 

The idea behind Skill Flex is to help companies create teams and organisations that are not just able to survive the future of work but thrive in it. We do this by making objective data on behavioral skills available to companies and individuals but what are these skills and why are they so important and relevant to the future of work? Ankit Durga, Co-founder & CEO at Skillr speaks to Dhairyya Singh, PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania.