The fundamentals of human resources play a crucial role in shaping the workforce and organizational culture across various sectors. It focuses on aligning HR strategies with overarching business goals, ensuring compliance with regulations and fostering an inclusive and performance-oriented environment.
Modern-day Human Resources plays a pivotal role in developing policies, processes and practices that support organizations’ broader needs while staying abreast of industry trends, best practices and emerging technologies.
Samir Kaul, Senior Director of HR Excellence, is a distinguished leader in this field. Samir’s role is to design and drive enabling initiatives and programs where People, Process, and Strategy intersect to deliver company’s business agenda. Known for his exceptional leadership qualities, Samir is dedicated to cultivating a culture of collaboration, innovation and customer focus. His ability to build and lead high-performing teams, coupled with his strategic approach to human capital management, has significantly influenced the HR landscape. Samir’s commitment to staying updated with industry advancements and his knack for aligning HR strategies with organizational goals make him a prominent figure in the HR domain.
stc Bahrain is recognized for its maturity around innovative global HR practices designed and developed inhouse and is completely aligned with the needs of scalability and sustainability. Noteworthy initiatives include developing an organic talent pipeline for emerging business areas, leading up/reskilling transformation, operating mode review, building COE core competence focus on corporate governance and compliance, digital adoption and transformation and corporate performance management has positioned him as a leader in the industry, driving high performance and fostering a culture of inclusivity and excellence.
Let’s explore how Samir has built high-performing teams and fostered a customer-focused culture!
Inspiring Path to Human Resources
Samir has always been captivated by the remarkable ability of individuals to thrive in challenging circumstances and transform these situations into success stories. His career journey has been driven by a desire to collaborate with such individuals, to understand their motivations, and to uncover the sources of their energy. This passion has fueled his commitment to continuously recreate these success stories in both professional and personal contexts.
Elevating HR and Business through Strategic Initiatives
Samir has been working in stc Bahrain for 14 years. As Senior Director of HR Excellence, he predominantly operates as a generalist who connects business strategy to people and people to performance. Samir’s role stretches across Corporate & HR Excellence, Business & HR Investments, Transformation and Change, Technology Adoption & Transformation, Total Rewards and EVP, and People and Organizational Health. Samir shares, “My role is to design and drive enabling initiatives and programs where People, Process and Strategy come together and deliver business agenda.”
Building Stakeholder Confidence through HR Strategy
Samir plays a pivotal role in the development of HR strategies; he keeps it simple and agile to align it with the broader goals of the organization. Samir believes, “If the organizations keep the business strategy and goals very simple to understand, simpler will be the enabling tactical strategies to deliver it.” “Long and Complex strategies lose their tenacity, and people feel over-exhausted in the process,” he added.
A Tactical HR Strategy roadmap focuses on enabling initiatives and KPIs, influenced from the Corporate Level plans. This helps to build trust in business stakeholders as HR plays a collaborative role and, at the same time, makes people believe in a very simple journey for 2-3 years.
Philosophy for High-Performance Team Leadership
Samir asserted, “Team leadership is all about two-way guidance and trust.” He believes that teams deliver their work effectively if they have clear guidance from their leaders, and if leaders show trust in the ability of their team, they reciprocate the same. Samir observed that corporate culture demands executives to breed this environment of trust and guidance. Organizations that have leaders who foster trust and guide their teams are highly risk-proof and run without chaos.
Managing Multifaceted Challenges
Throughout his career, Samir has faced many challenges and believes every HR leader encounters the same. Primarily, he observed that while leaders, being closer to CEOs, have bigger objectives and a complex agenda, yet they stay underinvested, affecting their personal and professional growth. He highlighted that while HR leaders are on one side expected to maintain a healthy cost structure and ROI at the same time technology is putting pressure on recreating new age workforce.
Samir shares, “Challenge for HR leaders is to establish a Value Generating unit than a Value Facilitator.” “I feel organizations are trying to target too many variables under pressure at the same time, and this is posing a very heavy load on us as leaders,” he added.
Building Business-Centric Solutions
Samir believes innovation is an inherent organic capability of an organization to think, cultivate and drive new experiences for customers. He always ensures that his HR practices remain innovative and ahead of industry standards. For that matter, he reiterates that HR initiatives and practices must be unique to their own environment and mature to a level where these get labeled as best practices. This demands HR to develop business centric solutions.
HR executives should adopt the core competence of Research and Development, which is today labeled as Data Analytics in decision-making. Samir suggests HR needs to build its appetite around studying human behavior, analyzing patterns and data sets, driving unique prototypes, testing them, and then launching them rather than merely making sentimental decisions.
Embracing the Technological Tides in HR
There is a little HR in everyone at corporates. Everyone looks at HR through their own lens. He enjoys conversations with such people and learns from them. Samir actively participates in business forums and panel discussions. He has an extraordinarily strong team of young and dynamic professionals who work on digitization and transformation. Their experiences and exposure, enables him to stay abreast with latest trends and emerging technologies in HR.
Samir recognizes that technological evolution is aggressively overloading HR and demanding too much. There is so much chaos, and it is only helping the intrapreneurial revolution, while people are not ready to let machines make decisions and take control of their lives.
Finding Peace Amidst Pressure
Samir tries to practice many of his personal life principles at work. He believes, “If you have a peaceful personal style of managing yourself, you can manage any pressure at work.” Corporate life is full of beautiful people, friends, guides, and mentors, and there is so much to learn from everywhere and everyone. It cannot be boring or overwhelming unless people do not overcomplicate it and overload their minds.
A Blend of Passion and Acumen
Samir advises aspiring HR leaders, “This stream is no longer emotional and only people-centric. It’s a business role and will demand from you a bit of everything, be it finance, technology, sales, production, marketing, etc.”
In addition, for those who aspire to make it to boardrooms, “It is one of the most critical roles within an organization, with time, you will need to build leadership trust, business acumen and stakeholder confidence.” “At a personal level, you need to be a role model of ethics, sincerity and passion,” he added.
A Journey of Growth and Innovation
stc Bahrain has completed 15 years of excellence and the organization is ready to take a Big Leap. Samir shares, “Its growth strategy is a giant step in changing the future of the country and the telecom space.” He believes this will inevitably change the way of doing business. It will also change the way people experience HR. At Personal Level Samir has been with stc Bahrain for more than 14 years now and all these years have been rewarding. Samir shares, “Every single day has been contributing to my growth and development and confidence. As long as the organization believes in my abilities, I will keep on scripting success stories,” he added.
