How Novo Nordisk are Reimagining Talent Mobility

🎧 Subscribe on your favourite platform iTunes | Spotify | Google | TuneIn

In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, I’m joined by Prince Abraham, Vice President and Global Head - Rewards Development and Mobility at Novo Nordisk.

We discussed how Novo Nordisk is reimagining talent mobility and moving away from traditional relocation to more flexible, employee-focused approaches.

Prince shared how they introduced virtual work options, where rather than relocating talent, they enable work to move between countries based on where employees want to live. This provides more agility for the business and caters to employee priorities. They have set up virtual hubs in 21 sites globally where employees can feel a sense of belonging even if not co-located with their team.

A key success factor has been involving stakeholders across functions in co-creating policies, ensuring buy-in and clear roles. Prince talked about adapting policies continuously based on evolving business needs, being curious and open to change. His advice for other companies on a similar journey is to bring key stakeholders along and be ready to iterate based on learnings.

It was fascinating to learn how Novo Nordisk as a 100 year old company is reimagining talent mobility. The focus on employee experience, flexibility and sustainability is the future of work. I look forward to seeing how their journey continues to evolve in coming years.

Let us know your key takeaways on how we can reimagine talent mobility in this new world of work.

Episode Highlights

How Novo Nordisk is shifting from traditional talent relocation to more flexible virtual work options where work can move instead of talent being required to relocate
How they have set up virtual hubs with local ownership in 21 sites globally to enable flexibility for employees while maintaining a sense of belonging
How shifting mindset from policies fitting talent to tailoring policies based on evolving business needs and talent objectives is enabling their agile approach to talent mobility

Recommended Resources

Follow Prince on LinkedIn
Learn more Novo Nordisk

Learn the 2023 Global Hiring Trends

In an age of evolving worker expectations, unpredictable economic conditions, and questions around the ever-changing future of work, talent leaders must keep their sights on attracting and hiring the people who will build and shape the future of their organizations.

Access the Trends

🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript

Prince 0:00

From a mobility point of view one of the good examples of that is how we have evolved our processes around virtual work options as we call it right which is instead of moving in a traditional mobility you move the talent from country A to Country B. In virtual work options we don't move the talent because the talent doesn't want to move and rather we enable the work to move from country to country.

Chris Rainey 0:29

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the HR leaders podcast and today's episode I'm joined by Prince Abraham, Vice President and Global Head of rewards development and mobility at Novo Nordisk during episode French shares Nova nor this global talent mobility journey from traditional relocation of talent to more holistic talent mobilisation, or about talent and jobs or mobile press also shares why moving jobs to where talent is based is a key enabler for achieving future business and Tanner objectives. As always, before we jump into the video, make sure you hit the subscribe button, turn on notification bell and follow on your favourite podcast platform. But that being said, let's jump in. Prince. Welcome to the show. How are you?

Prince 1:11

I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.

Chris Rainey 1:12

Nice to see you. Nice to see you. Before we jump in, tell everyone a little more about yourself personally and your journey to where we are now.

Prince 1:20

I sort of divide my whole career into maybe four buckets of experiences, right? I started my career in organisation development. That's that's where sort of I started right after my college in a company called Infosys, a huge company in back in India. IP IPS organisation started my career there focusing on performance management, career frameworks, and sort of broadly org designing and then moved on to my second bucket, which is primarily business partnering. That's sort of something that I've done then in the mid part of my career where I was HR partnering, starting, starting in Infosys, and then later on joining Novo Nordisk AS A HR partner few years into Novo Nordisk, there was an opportunity to jump into rewards total rewards. And that came that came as an opportunity due to somebody leaving and my boss asking me would you want to learn and pick up something at the same time along with your existing HR partner role, so it was sort of a hybrid role that God created for me. And so I then sort of moved into rewards, and have then stayed with rewards for the last eight years, nine years now, doing multiple roles started in India move to Dubai, managed Africa, Europe later on, and sort of have grown into roles where I've managed mostly all parts of the world in some capacity either as a partner or later on as a as a leader, managing different rewards partners across the organisation. And then of course, my last bucket is what what I call as a mix hybrid again, which where today I'm heading up two roles. One of them is rewards development. So that's primarily focusing on global rewards, processes, benefits, insights, technology experience,

Chris Rainey 3:13

I know something you're really passionate about and working on now is is looking at how you're digitising the employee experience.

Prince 3:20

Overall employee experience, as we have seen at least in Novo is sort of at the centre of what and how we do things specifically in rewards, and mobility as well. Right. And what I mean by that is that, you know, if you look at it from a p&l process point of view, when you come to rewards or from seeing from a mobility point of view, these processes can't work in isolation, they're quite entangled with whether it's talent acquisition process, or whether it's a talent management process, which has an outcome that needs to then have have a an impact on a process in the mobility processes as well. So there's that there is no process within rewards and mobility that can stand in isolation. And what that simply means is that if you run processes and silo experience is going to be quite broken. Seen from a manager's point of view seen from HR partners point of view and and of course, in the unseen from an employee point of view, whichever sort of experience they sort of see on a day to day basis. Over the last few years, we have had focus on ensuring that we digitalize as many processes, standardise them, build them in a context of experience that's globally focused, but also locally relevant in a way that makes sense for everyone. And this is not seen as a silo process, but more an end to end experience. Right. And we've been trying on many things a few years back, we tried a job levelling tool that was designed using artificial intelligence, where you could type the title and the AI would do the job in the backend give you a job description and sort of a levelling around it right so There's many things that we've been trying in the past around it. Same with, let's say Insights where we have now democratised data, as I call it towards leaders to be able to take day to day rewards decisions, right? Whether that's in the context of building sustainable teams, which is around fairness, transparency and equity, but also now taking that to next step to see how do we become fair and transparent as an organisation when it comes to employee? So how do we ensure that employees are able to have access to certain information where they are able to experience you know, these three principles that I just mentioned, which is fairness and transparent and equitable processes? Right. So I think within rewards, we have a lot of global processes now over the last three, four years where we have been working to ensure that that experience is at the centre of it,

Chris Rainey 5:50

when you say, employee experience has to be at the centre of it, what does that mean?

Prince 5:54

In my view, it essentially means how you integrate different processes across different COEs or different functions within p&l Right? So how do you ensure that you come from a recruitment process into an offer process go out into a very operational contract process and then go into very second element of operational aspects of onboarding and so on and so on. So on? How do you digitally enable it in a way that it is not sort of broken, but connected from one flow to the other flow in a seamless way? Right. That is, of course, the journey we are on, I would not say that we have reached it, as you can hear it is quite complex to build that. Because of course, traditionally, we have all built in each of our functions, you know, systems that that makes sense for us as a function. Yeah. But when you look at it from an employee's point of view, we need to ensure sort of we come together and see what what makes sense. And how do we streamline this experience from end to end seen from an employee point of view, rather than from HR point of view, because traditional systems are built for from an HR point of view, and not necessarily from an employee point of view. From a mobility point of view, one of the good examples of that is how we have evolved our processes around virtual work options, as we call it, right, which is, which is nothing but you know, instead of moving in traditional mobility, you move the talent from country A to Country B, in virtual work options, we don't move the talent because the talent doesn't want to move and has other priorities from maybe personal front, or whatever it is, right. And rather, we enable the work to move from country to country. And of course, it's a bit more different in the pharma industry, because it's much more regulated, yeah, around the risks that we have around permanent establishment around patents and so on. But but this is something that we have been working over the last two and a half years to see how do we evolve that process, and from an experience point of view, to ensure that the end customer, that's the employee manager, HR partners are able to see a seamless experience rather than sort of a very broken experience from an employee point of view.

Chris Rainey 7:58

What's the outcome been of that? How long have you had that in place two and

Prince 8:00

a half years back is when we started it. And of course, a lot of it was because of COVID. Because COVID came and and in many ways disrupted the way we work in many France, right. And this was one of the things that, you know, people who had gone back home, they were not able to travel, and some of them who thought that they couldn't have dual career suddenly said, Okay, why can't I just continue working from where I'm working, because my partner is able to continue to work, and so on, so forth. And what we started was with what we called as the first level of virtual work policies, where we enabled that for business reasons to start with to say, Okay, if you have certain reasons, and there is a business need, and that sort of combines together, the personal need and the business needs, then we will try to make that happen across all the locations. One of the things we very quickly learned was that, you know, when when you have this virtual work options, a lot of these employees who don't have the manager sitting with them, the teams sitting with them, started losing that sense of belongingness started sort of this, you know, see themselves as Where do I belong? Because I don't belong to the local unit where I'm actually sitting, but my manager is not here. So we started sort of looking into how do we then ensure that we take it to a next level, where belongingness, the cultural element that the employee has to sort of, you know, be around is not lost. And that's sort of when we evolved that policy into what we call as now the hub virtual hub strategy, which enables employees to work out two virtual hubs in 21 sites. It's not 21 countries because one country could have multiple sites, depending on sort of how big the country is. But we have 21 sites across the globe where we've had talent in the past seen from a you know, easiness of hiring seen, of course, from a talent marketplace point of view, where do we hire from? Where are we losing people in the market, we build that sub strategy where we sort of have created a role with what we call as hub owner, who then is accountable for local ownership, ensuring that there is a belonging is built towards the employees who are maybe not locally reporting, but still part of the broader Novo Nordisk family. So that has sort of where we have landed now, where the intention is that, of course, 21 sites would continue to be our key focus. So that's where we have around 80 to 75% of our talent. But of course, we don't say that you cannot do it outside. But there's a governance that we then follow to ensure that that belongingness is equally focused on and not sort of left. As as the last thing to focus on,

Chris Rainey 10:36

have you seen an A decrease in attrition, since moving to the strategy both in terms of moving where work is done as opposed to people and also having those hubs

Prince 10:48

attrition has not been a big concern, broadly speaking, in Novo Nordisk as an organisation we have sort of stayed at the same percentage for many years. So I would not maybe sort of say there's a direct impact there, but where we see the impact is in being able to get talent, quite faster. Ish skills that we are able to get right when you

Chris Rainey 11:11

when you speak about before about rather than having the employee move to where the work is the work moves to the employee, who makes that decision, wherever that happens,

Prince 11:21

it is of course, the starting point is the line manager who needs to decide where the talent is. And if that talent is not able to move, and due to whatever is the reason, and and if it is a talent, that is a niche skill that we would not want to lose out on. Right. So of course, the starting point is always with the manager who needs to take the call as part of the talent acquisition process, right? And then the talent acquisition process, the talent acquisition partners reach out to us in our team, who then sort of ensures that we do some risk assessments because like I said, we are in a very regulated highly liquid regulated industry, within Pharma. So we do some assessments along with a corporate tax team to sort of assess what what are the risks of this particular role sitting and working out of out of, you know, where the reporting line is? Yeah. And then, of course, if there are sort of, we've created certain levels of risk, depending on that it goes to different categories, right. So if it is certain high res, then it goes to the business unit heads. If not, we try to see if it is possible, that we get some approvals from the hub owners and so on. But But essentially, the hub owner is the place where that person has to accept because again, it's not just that you give a you know, a seed and a laptop or person to work, you need to enable the employee to have that belongingness towards the local organisation, and ensure that you invest in it as a as a hub owner. So that's, that's, of course, the key approval process.

Chris Rainey 12:55

Is there a certain amount of days that they have to visit the hub per month? Was it like two days a week or, you know, what's the process, and

Prince 13:02

that's sort of left up to each hub. So what we follow is a very Market Fit approach, very similar to what we do in our business side, we don't try to put one hat fits all, sort of scenario on everyone, what what we say is what works best for the hub, right? There are hubs where, where there is already policies that enable employees to work out of home, and you know, in different cities, if you are, let's say, in Spain, you could work out of any city, and and so on. But if you're in India, you have a policy that you need to be in office two times a week. So then you follow that policy. So it's essentially built in a way that you fit into the local reality, to ensure that again, the belongingness is there.

Chris Rainey 13:41

Yeah. I'm glad you said that. That makes sense. A lot. Many companies, I feel I've made that mistake of doing a one size fits all approach, not not thinking about the context, you know, we've we've such a huge portion of your workforce going hybrid, how are you in a team helping support your managers, it's already a tough job. But then when you have people in different locations, or different time zones, different hours,

Prince 14:03

from my team point of view, we have also evolved our structure to sort of fit into the new reality, right? One of the things that we did in our function is to create what we call as a mobility partner role. Mobility historically has been a very operational role. You sort of come at the last point once all the decisions are made, and you're told, okay, now you move the person or move the, you know, the world from one, one country to another, and whatever it is, right. So what we've done is we've tried to sort of move that conversation much ahead of the curve and created a set of partners that are regionally focused. So we have three broad themes, one focusing on my own Americas that's based out of us reporting to me, one we have focusing on EMEA based out of Zurich slash Denmark, and then one focusing on what we call as headquarter functions, because that's quite large, based out of Denmark. So I think Business proximity is one of the things that we have tried to build into that model so that when when a manager comes to our shop, we don't sort of say, Okay, this is traditional, this is virtual, you choose what you like, but sort of partner with the manager to advise them on what is the situation at hand, and what are the policies that fit into it into that reality into that need into that individual sometimes, because we have sort of tried to move away from this one hat fits all approach, and sort of being as a function that SOT sort of just tells this the policy go do it right. And moving more towards an organisation where we are a more business consulting firm, we are a more a unit, or a team of people that are focused on advising, consulting, looking at sort of the situation and deciding which policy fits best, best, right. And, and for me, I think one of the things that I will see that evolving for us next, as the next step would be that we would need to then look at hybrid models of policy. So some, you will probably start with moving the person to the country for few months, and the person learns, builds that cultural belongingness, whatever, sends them send them back for few years, they learn and maybe again, do some bit of hybrid. So there's going to be many of those things that we will evolve into over a period of time, which is again, built not as a one hit fit all but more sort of how do we ensure that we are looking at it from not just from an individual point of view, but also from a point of view of, you know, the huge focus that we have on sustainability, you know, whether that's from reducing the travel to ensuring that, you know, we don't sort of fit one policy to a traditional policy of, you know, a family of two, husband, wife and kids to somebody who also come from a traditional family setup.

Chris Rainey 16:48

It also allows you as a business, right to be a lot more agile.

Prince 16:51

Absolutely, I think and that is one key thing when you grow and of course, the latest numbers of Novo Nordisk, if you see, if you grow at that pace with which we are growing, you need to be agile, you need to be able to adapt, be agile, and see what sort of fits the best, right, of course, you need to have certain basic things in place, which is the broad infrastructure, broad policies and stuff like that. But you also need to be able to evolve because we are working, not just growing in the same segment that we've grown forever, but also going into new therapy areas, which means new skills, you know, very niche skills, time to time, that that's not necessarily something that we've been hiring in the past. So I think that's where it becomes extremely important that you are able to be agile and move away from being operational to being more advising consulting, move away from, you know, just setting central in headquarter as a function to being more business proximity. So move people out there into the business to say, Okay, where is our business need? And you would sort of, then, you know, partner with them on the ground so that we build that business.

Chris Rainey 17:58

I love the it's kind of similar to the HR business partner model, right, but you have the mobility partner model, I know,

Prince 18:04

I have very probably stolen it from the HR.

Chris Rainey 18:09

No, I think, yeah, I spoke to multiple companies like Unilever and others who have a similar role, they all have different names for these roles, but essentially, is acting in the same way that you described, we're gonna see that continue to evolve. What from about from a talent perspective? Do you have like an internal talent marketplace? How are you thinking about how you look at what skills exist in the business and how talent moves throughout the business,

Prince 18:35

it is a huge focus, you know, ensuring that if you look at the way we are structured as an organisation, it is structured around the pharma value system, right. So we have, you know, early research and development all the way to sales and marketing, and those are sort of the pillars. And of course, one of the key focus is how do we ensure that we move talent across these different value chain aspects, right to ensure that they are able to get that experience but also when they go back? They are able to collect connect those two things together. Right. And that is a huge focus, right? To be very honest, I don't think so, from a mobility point of view, we have been able to crap that yet completely one of the things we are discussing is how do you ensure that your talent outcome is tied quite closely to what the mobility decisions are at least right from a manager's point of view. So for example, if I have three talents, who I think are going to be taking up some very critical roles in the future, what what talent mobility is needed for them to be able to get ready for that role and that's the Connect that we are trying to build. And one of the things we have done not yet gone live with yet but we are working towards is that we are building sort of a talent and intent from a point of view of managers needs into our system when managers come to our shop, right? So the way it would work is that when manager comes to our shop to say okay, I have this need would be sort of a questionnaire using AI where we would work with managers to say, okay, are these elements of talent outcomes that you are expecting, and then direct managers towards the policy that fits them the best rather than trying to sort of fit what managers would be already aware of as a policy that which may be that the manager knows maybe only 20% of the policy, because they've never done or will never move somebody as an example.

Chris Rainey 20:25

Ideally, they don't need to come to you whatsoever, right? They could just ask that the system. So we

Prince 20:30

are working with to enable AI in a way that you know, the managers go and put some key words, and that's going to be around talent intent, what is your intent to move this person? Where is this coming from? What do you want to achieve, the tool will sort of generate a mobility assignment for you that makes more sense for that need, basically. So that's the thing that we're working with right now. We built it ourselves from scratch. So it's a tool that we have built internally. Now, we are in a place where we are doing some testing looks good, at least the initial test, but of course, mobility is a very complex process. And and like I said, what we are trying to do now is to connect it to different existing policies and processes and systems basically, right. So for example, managers should not be going into a system and thinking I want this but but as soon as the recruit process recruitment process is over, should just be automatically going from there to to the next step, right? If there is a mobility element should be triggered, it should be

Chris Rainey 21:29

nudging the managers as well, right? Well, as we look towards sort of the next couple of years ahead of you, what are you most excited about in terms of what you and your team are working on?

Prince 21:37

Excited to see how you know, this virtual work options evolve, I can see many countries are now started going into that space with you know, Spain coming up with Visa specifically for working out of Spain, and and not necessarily in Spain and so on. The UAE. Just recently Dubai has come up with a visa for that, where you can work out of Dubai but but not be in Dubai as an example. Right. So I think there are many countries who are looking into this elements. So it would be interesting to see how that sort of evolves and becomes part of the much broader framework. Firstly,

Chris Rainey 22:12

I felt like, we need to do a part two, to see how this journey evolves. As though it's going to be super interesting as how this evolves over the next few years. Right? So I'd love to do that. But what you know, having started the journey and being on it, you know, there's obviously challenges along the way, right? What advice would you give to our listeners that are going to be on a similar talent, mobility journey, and then we'll say goodbye.

Prince 22:35

For me, one of the things that I have learned and changed also, from my point of view, in this journey is how you take along people with you, right, and when I say people, it's not necessarily just mobility team, or or your own team or your own function, right, I think if we have to enable that end to end experience, you really need to work across different stakeholders, right, whether that's in talent acquisition, whether that's an HR partners, so what we did is what we call as CO creating this with without many different stakeholders, right. And that really helps because that helps in two ways. One is that it helps different stakeholders to understand where you are coming from what you're trying to do, but it also enables them to understand their role into it, because you cannot, as a function, just work on this alone, because of the nuances it has in it. When it comes to mobility as a function, right? One of my advice would be to, if you want to go further take, take your key stakeholders along with you. And that would help you not just in being successful, but also ensuring that you are building that, you know, understanding across different layers of the organisation and across different parts of the organisation. So that would be one and the second would be, be open, be curious and be ready to change and adapt because we had this policy started in 2021. We've rewritten this policy probably six times already, not because we didn't know many things. One, of course is that but it is also that the need of the business has evolved. We have also sort of been very open to say okay, now if this is what business needs, how do you then evolve that policy into a place that makes sense for the business rather than sort of sitting with a policy that doesn't add up right,

Chris Rainey 24:18

amazing. Well, that that is a perfect way to end your prints. I appreciate you taking the time to join us and congrats to you and your team, all the great work that you've done so far. I know you've got a lot ahead of you. But it's always about celebrating the wins along the way. And I wish you all the best until next week, but I appreciate you taking the time to come on the show.

Prince 24:37

Chris Thanks for having