Time to get proactive

India’s pharmaceutical sector is slated to touch $ 45 billion by 2020, according to a report by McKinsey & Company making it the sixth largest market in the world. Manpower is crucial to bring about this change. Currently employing a cumulative workforce of 45,000 people, the industry will need to sharpen its HR strategies in the light of the recent regulatory turmoil as well to take into account newer business models that give a fillip to innovation with most drugs going off patent in the next few years. We find out how.

Managing talent

One of the major challenges undeniably across the board is a rapidly shrinking talent pool of ‘skilled’ scientists and engineers who can keep pace with newer scientific advancements. With more companies exporting to regulated markets like the US and Europe, this demand is going to be further intensified in the coming years specially in areas like R&D, QA/QC, process development and manufacturing in order to meet strict regulatory guidelines. Says Amitava Saha, Head, Human Resources, Biocon, “The skills deficit is turning out to be a major challenge for the Indian biotech and pharma industry and it is impeding India’s emergence as a leading global innovation hub for bio-pharma. It is also pushing up the costs of companies on account of the investment they need to make to train fresh graduates before they are job-ready.” The company under the aegis of Biocon Academy, a one-of-its-kind Centre of Excellence for Advanced Learning in Applied Bio-Sciences, collaborates with leading academic institutions globally, to bring world class training programmes for biotech students in India and thus develop a new cadre of life sciences professionals with specialised skills. Training manpower to make them industry ready, then seems to be a viable solution.

“In order to address the shortage of talent, organisations will have to adopt innovative recruitment practices to attract quality talent from academia and non-pharma industries.” Jayesh Pandey Mng. Director, Talent & Organisation at Accenture India

Not only this, companies will have to broaden their focus to address the three Ts- Talent Attraction, Talent development and Talent Engagement and retention. “In order to address the shortage of talent, organisations will have to adopt innovative recruitment practices to attract quality talent from academia and non-pharma industries. This will be especially in field force, as well as technical areas like R&D, QA/QC, process development and manufacturing,” says Jayesh Pandey, Managing Director, Talent & Organisation at Accenture India.

“Building global and world-class leaders, driving innovation, ensuring integrity, quality and compliance and fostering a culture of continuous improvement will be the top priorities of 2014. The HR function must actively analyse the root causes of compliance failures and find ‘culture’ level answers.” Dr Sripada Chandrasekhar President & Global Head of HR, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories

An emphasis on developing talent specifically in the sales, R&D, quality and manufacturing functions would be crucial since those recruited may have little or no pharma expertise depending on the company’s sourcing strategy, he adds. So even as acquiring talent will take its normal course, the real long-term need of the industry is to create new talent pools with pro-active investments in skills creation, opines Dr Sripada Chandrasekhar, President and Global Head of HR, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories.

“The skills deficit is turning out to be a major challenge for the Indian biotech and pharma industry and it is impeding India’s emergence as a leading global innovation hub for bio-pharma.” Amitava Saha Head, Human Resources, Biocon

“We have to add a layer of ‘employability’ to our science, chemistry and pharma graduates by enrolling them early on into industry-relevant skills. New investment must focus on modernisation of plant and equipment, IT enablement and overseas growth both organic and inorganic,” he echoes. In the light of a dynamic business environment, finding, developing and retaining the right talent will be a great challenge, especially for niche technical and leadership skills. Even as companies adopt practices discussed above, they will also have to ensure better management and optimisation of talent costs, in a scenario where talent demand exceeds talent supply.

Transforming for the better

Chandrashekar reiterates how the HR function has matured over the years from being merely focused on hiring, remuneration, rules and employee welfare to designing and deploying leading-edge practices and more importantly enabling managers to step up on owning and driving exemplary people leadership. “Improving productivity via more tailored skills training, deploying continuous improvement plans, hiring more talented sales leaders, coaching managers to ‘anticipate’ better and helping the organisation generally be more pro-active in its risk mitigation approaches are some of the ways in which HR is facilitating ‘transformation’ on the ground. As we move up this value chain, HR will transform itself into driving business far more from the centre of the company than managing from the margins,” he enthuses. Perhaps this is how the HR can help develop coping strategies in an increasingly dynamic environment beset with regulatory and pricing challenges. As Pandey enumerates below, a few such ways the HR could drive the change include:

• Leadership development: Promoter driven pharma companies will have to build a pipeline of professional leaders at the top to manage the growing complexities like product portfolio expansion, enhanced need for innovation, tighter regulatory norms and geographic diversification
• Expand reach to deliver seamless employee experiences: As organisations are expanding across different geographies, HR will have to span disciplines and cross boundaries to deliver holistic employee experiences across its workforce. Organisations will focus on improving performance of diverse, knowledge-oriented workforce by customising people practices to address employee needs.
• Workforce analytics: With growing scale of operations workforce analytics can provide competitive edge to organisations. Analytics models today can predict talent aspects like future manpower requirements, key drivers of attrition, strategic roles assessment, health of recruitment function.

At the same time companies will also have to tackle attrition amongst the field force, which has witnessed exponential growth in the last couple of years. This demand supply pressure is likely to continue and impact business continuity along with cost of recruitment and training .Bringing in engagement strategies to increase employee belongingness to organisations, as well as leadership will play an important role in this aspect. Further, building a compelling Employee Value Proposition, could help retention.

A world class culture

Even as Indian pharma comes under closer scrutiny of US FDA, there has to be unflinching commitment to best- in- the world quality standards. And such enduring compliance can be achieved only through a deep institutionalised culture and strongly ingrained ‘values’ across the firm-led through the personal examples of the top leaders, feels Chandrashekhar. The role of HR in defining and building such a culture by working closely with the rank and file is crucial. “Building global and world-class leaders, driving innovation, ensuring integrity, quality & compliance and fostering a culture of continuous improvement will be the top priorities of 2014. The HR function must actively analyse the root causes of compliance failures and find ‘culture’ level answers,” he adds further.

While there will be a tremendous demand for candidates with niche skills in technical areas like R&D, process development, quality assurance, quality of skills will be the prime concern for the pharma industry rather than quantum of hiring. No single function can be singled out as less important, says Pandey. Hiring will be critical across functions: be it R&D, sales and marketing manufacturing, regulatory, quality, safety or enabling functions of Finance and HR. The pruning, if any, will happen not around function’s but around low value-adding jobs and tasks in each of these functions

Grappling with ingraining a robust culture of high integrity, deepening the habits of compliance with world-class standards of quality, fostering respect for IP- challenges which require round the clock attention, companies need to lead from the front to ensure regulators worldwide of our commitment to quality and patient safety. Apart from this, the industry needs to raise the bar on competitiveness over the long term through more impact seeking R&D that understands ‘patient’ needs across the world. Efficient and timely drug design and delivery are the most critical success factors here. “The twin challenges of quality and effective product development can be handled only through pro-active talent strategies. As always, hiring world class talent and building a culture that fosters uncompromising quality standards while designing and manufacturing essential medicines will remain at the fulcrum of future strategy,” sums up Chandrashekhar.

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