We can’t assume one communication strategy is going to land with everybody: Sujatha Maniya

Sujatha Maniya, Chief People Officer of EssenceMediacom APAC, describes her journey within the organization as fulfilling, likening it to the process of building a house from its foundation. Since the agency's establishment in January 2023, she has focused on nurturing a strong sense of belonging among the team.

In an exclusive conversation with exchange4media, Maniya delved into her experiences, challenges, and key learnings during the merger of Essence and Mediacom in 2023. She highlighted the importance of effectively managing change and ensuring that employees understand the rationale behind organizational shifts.

Maniya also discussed the agency's initiatives aimed at supporting the mental health and well-being of its employees. Through various programmes and resources, EssenceMediacom APAC strives to create a supportive and inclusive work environment conducive to personal and professional growth.

Excerpts:

How has your HR journey been so far at EssenceMediacom, and what were the key challenges and learnings from the merger?

I am going to use one word to describe it - fulfilling, that's probably been my journey in EssenceMediacom. EssenceMediacom was a new agency that came alive in January 2023, and for me, if I have to describe it, it's like building a house where you put a foundation, create a structure, buy furniture, beautify it, have people in the house, and then it becomes a place where people feel it's a sense of belonging, and to me, that's exactly how I would describe the journey.

Rather than calling it challenges, I am probably going to take it as key learnings. It's very complex and it's not something you can do overnight, because there are so many different aspects to it. The one key learning I would say is change management. It's very important because we have to help people understand the why, what it means for them, and what would be the outcomes or benefits for them as well. Now, this process is not about sitting in a room and leaders thinking about what is this change that we're going to create and that's why we have to be able to listen to our people of what they want as an experience going through this change.

In EssenceMediacom, we had a global people voice forum where it comprised of our people, who we call essentials. It was a group of essentials who came together, i.e. people from all walks of the departments to then go through a series of workshops with the HR team and they helped us to understand, what exactly is it that you need to do in order for EssenceMediacom to lend this change seamlessly to the people. It's progress, not perfection but how can we make the employee experience memorable for our people and not painful? And part of this is also about putting communication strategies and the key is to be very authentic in your communication.

The other thing - we are a service industry and we have service clients. While people are a very important aspect, clients are equally important. In fact, it is absolutely critical that, number one, whatever we do behind the scenes, it cannot compromise our work commitment to the client. So, that was something that we were very mindful of. Third - take care of your people. The duty of care is so absolutely critical because.

We cannot assume that one communication strategy is going to land with everybody. I feel personal touch is so important in the integration. Otherwise, it just becomes like a paper exercise.

It has been a year since the merger of Essence and MediaCom. Please share with us the efforts in creating the EssenceMediacom culture.

We listen to our people and from listening to our people, we have created a lot of the programs. We have a Let's Talk survey that we roll out in all markets. It's basically like an employee engagement survey. It's a little bit more personable to our people. And through that survey, we ask people what it is that they want to see more and this was specifically for last year. One of the things that came out very strongly was mental health and well-being. It's not new news, I think most organizations are talking about it.

What initiatives has the company undertaken to address mental health and well-being of employees in APAC markets?

This is something big for EssenceMediacom because we created a community of  mental health and well-being allies. This is basically a group of people, volunteers who come forward to be part of this cause. They do go through a two day training, to be trained as a well-being ally. So they are taught tips on how to support another colleague who's going through either stress at home or stress at work.  We also train these individuals such that they keep everything in confidence and a lot of trust in this whole community as well. We have well-being allies globally and in APAC markets that employees can actually reach out to. We also created well-being toolkits.

The other thing that we have done is well-being webinars that we've rolled out globally, accessible to all employees globally.  We are a company that cares, we have made these global webinars APAC time friendly as well. This is to make sure that every essential in every market is able to actually join these webinars. They are meant to be like additional guidance to our people on how to navigate through certain challenges. And there's one other initiative which I feel has been quite powerful which we launched last year was the well-being stories.

What are the key challenges you face in managing the workforce across countries in the APAC region?

As much as we are choosing our talent, our talent is choosing us. The times have changed and we see more GenZ and want to be managed differently.  Let's just accept the fact that times have changed. The Gen Zs are going to rule the world. So we have to think ahead and that's one of the reasons why for our leaders and our managers, we have put training programs on how do you manage Gen Zs. How do you prepare yourself for the future? Because the role of a people manager is very different now.

Yes, managing a very different set of workforce is a discovery. Have we cracked it? We haven't cracked it. But we are making sure that our people managers and our leaders understand how to engage your Gen Z, how to coach them, how to mentor them, and how to also shape them to be the future leader.

How does EssenceMediacom attract and retain talent?

I truly believe that attracting and retaining talent is with our managers. People join managers, not organizations. In EssenceMediacom, we've taken that commitment to make sure that we are making our people managers- the ambassadors. They have to be the voice to candidates, to talent internally. We've seen how a very good manager and leader can make the difference in retaining and attracting talent. We want to take our managers to move from just a management role to a leadership role. I'm very confident that when we get to that space, people will want to come, join and stay.