Speaker 1: Thank you, and I promise this is the last time I'm coming up. So I'm looking forward to this very interesting session, Holly, where I think this is the real crux for any HR professional, right? How would you engineer your dream team? And I want to start with that. What does a dream team mean for you? It'll mean different things for different people. But how do you think about what is your dream team?

Speaker 2: So it's a great question. And I've heard a lot of the speakers today, and they've been saying the same things that I'm thinking in the back of my head. But really, when I think about a dream team, it's having the right people. I know people have the fundamental skills or training, but do they have the right experiences? I also don't want to have everybody that's new. I want to have people that have been here for a while, but I want to have a good mix. I want to have a variety. I want to have some diversity. I want them from all different areas of the world. We're a global company, so we have to serve as global companies. I will say, I have a heavier footprint of engineers in India, so I'm very proud of that. But that's what I look for in a dream team. I also look for people that are fitting into our culture. And it's safety first, customers, and the people. And so when you put all that together, I think it's the perfect team. Very interesting.

Speaker 1: And there's, of course, no magic formula on 20 marks for culture, 50 marks for this. So it's really dependent on how you shape it and the investment you make in your people. Let's get back to the first one on hiring. We are in a very competitive hiring cycle, and especially for technology talent. I mean, while there may be other sectors that are not facing the tech pressure, but core tech skills are still very much in demand. How do you ensure you can get access to the best talent? And what are some strategies that have worked for you? And if you can share examples, it'll really help the audience in the room understand that better.

Speaker 2: OK. So I'll give you one example, and I've been in India for a week, so that's the most current one that I can think of, is we look at issues that are real problems for us. Things that we want to solve within our organization. And then we connect with universities, different schools. It depends on what the issue is that you're trying to fix. And then you want to target the right level of individual. And we partner with them to have these people come in and do these assignments. I get what's on the resume. I know you've been through school, and you've passed your classes, and you've taken your test. But what I really want to know is, have you done some of the work? And have you demonstrated that you have that commitment and that ability to actually apply what you've learned? So I think it's really the secret success for us on the recruiting space in technology, but also in other areas, is going out there to early careers, to colleges and universities, doing internships. And it's even recruiting from within. Making sure that you're looking at people and thinking about them. Even if your project is only six months, maybe you can move somebody out of the job that they're doing today and put them in six months and have them do something else and learn a new skill. And that's something we do really well at Oceaneering.

Speaker 1: So what factor is brand and the willingness or the desire for people to work for your organization?

Speaker 2: So I know what I want them to be. And I kind of tried to start with that. And then I had to put it all aside. And I said, I need to really know what's going on here, because I actually have a good organization now. So I want to know what it is. So we went out to the workforce, and we did interviews. And when I say out to the workforce, we went to people in India. We went to people in the US and to the UK. We're operating over 23 countries. And we have 12,000 employees. We didn't go out to everyone, but we went out to the majority. We went to people that had been here short tenure, long tenure. And we talked to them. We said, why are you here? And there were a few things that really came to the forefront. Safety always came to the forefront. Wanting to do really cool things. So we do really cool things. They might be really hard, and they're in really harsh environments. And sometimes, they're really dangerous. But we do really cool things. So the work we do is exciting, and we care about our people. And I heard people talking about it, but yeah, the employee value proposition, which is, what do you offer employees? What do they get from working for you, used to be all about more benefits and more compensation. And why is Oceanair better than another company? But now, it really is about, why am I a better person, and how are you supporting who I want to be as a person and my family? And so that's it.

Speaker 1: You also talked, when we were chatting earlier, you also talked about how, when you're recruiting, you just don't look at the standard CV, but also focus on robotic competitions. Tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker 2: So that's a great example of where we go out. That's another way in recruiting strategies. We actually sponsor, as an organization, robotics competitions. We sponsor STEM organizations, organizations that get women into technology, or diverse candidates into non-traditional fields. And by that, it is, again, reaching out into the early stages of somebody's career, not just waiting until they're ready for you. Then you've got people that really want to grow, right? So you've got them all in the door, and you've got to make sure that you're growing them. We really play to people's passions once they're in the door. So if you're an engineer, but you call me up, and you say, I've got a huge interest in this employee proposition that you're talking about. Is there any way I can work with you on it? The answer is yes. I'd love to have you work with it. And then we play to people's passions, and we've had people completely change careers, because they were really, they had an education in one place, and a passion in another. So I think you need to help people do it. That's what I was talking about.

Speaker 1: Interesting. Let's get to the skill part of it, right? And I think the entire morning we've heard about AI, and the need for AI skills, and how do you make learnability an almost an essential trait in employees, right? How are you really focusing from a skilling perspective, given you have a global footprint, different countries will have different priorities. What does a constant skilling journey really mean for you as an organization? And how do you measure effectiveness? Because I think that's really the second part of it.

Speaker 2: Yeah, AI is something that I'm really excited about, and something that I'm really frightened about from an HR perspective. I feel pretty secure that there's gonna be training, whether it's online, in school, there's gonna be training and teaching people how to do AI. What I really worry about is the things that AI's gonna be really good at. I mean, just initially, I mean, it all grows and changes, but the things that AI's gonna be really good at are those fundamental, basic things that you bring in people to learn how to do the next level of work. So I'm concerned, and I have to focus on how am I gonna bring people that are new hires and elevate them so they're ready to come in at this level? Because these jobs don't exist anymore. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying jobs are gonna go away, because they think AI's gonna create more jobs, and more exciting jobs, and more jobs that contribute more to your organizations. But I'm gonna lose some of the capacity that I had for teaching people how to learn by doing some of those basic skills. So I am continually thinking about that. And it's really about assessing the talent, looking at succession plans, and that's how you measure it. We measure it through that, we measure it through employee engagement, whether people feel like they have the skills that they need. And I get feedback from leaders on what are you seeing with our talent, and how are you getting them there? But it all ties back to what I was saying you do before. You use, 70% of what we learn is on the job, or experience, or what I call action-based learning. So give people projects, engage with universities, give people experiences, more than just the fundamentals. And I think AI's gonna make that more and more important.

Speaker 1: Interesting. You know, we've all been through the great resignation period, right? Where we saw a lot of churn of talent, and I think since things are different right now with hiring being more muted, but retention of talent, and especially your high-performing talent, continues to be a key priority for most talent leaders, right? How are you thinking about your retention strategies? And, you know, anything different you've done that we can learn from and implement here?

Speaker 2: So, I can think of a couple of things. We've really increased our focus on how we assess our talent, and making sure that we're having, I mean, your basic performance reviews, but also your mid-year reviews. We've focused on the fact that it's really easy sometimes to, or maybe, it's easy sometimes to say, well, you're such a good performer, I'm not gonna give you feedback. Because I have to spend the time on this performer who needs a little help. But it's one of the worst things you can do, because the high performers need more feedback. So we make sure that people are getting feedback, and that they're being developed, and that we're measuring it through, again, the engagement survey. But we're also looking to make sure that we understand what people are looking for. It's about our value proposition. We saw a huge turnover, as everybody did, during the great resignation. But where I think I came out a winner, is people come back to oceaneering. They wanna come back to work here, because when they go somewhere else, they realize that the environment isn't as good. So the environment isn't me. This is the only company I've ever worked for where people call themselves oceaneers, not employees. And that says something. But the environment is about the frontline supervisor, the manager, and the peers, and the people that are connecting. I think back into, we were talking about this earlier, my education. I started as an electrical engineer, and I had advisors who were not like me, and nobody looked like me in the advisory program. There were two women, yeah, I'm kind of a little older, but there were two women in the engineering program when I was in there. Now, I switched out. I took an industrial organizational psychology class, so like the analytics of HR, and ended up going into business, and finding my real passion. But when I look back at that, I think about how unwelcomed I felt in the environment as a electrical engineer, and I realize how important it is for us to provide managers, mentors, buddies, whatever you can do to make people feel like they fit in. It's so empowering. And those are some of the things.

Speaker 1: I know you call this the great rehire, and how oceaneering as a company has really benefited from so many people wanting to come back. I think that's a true testament to the organization that you've built out. You're a very successful leader yourself, Holly. Tell us a few things about your journey that can inspire many other women to be there, because I think one of the issues we see in India is that we have a decent input at the fresher level, but we see a leaking pipeline at the middle, and obviously the senior management is not as well represented. It's a strong DEI focus for most organizations. One, we'd love to hear what's your journey been, but two, most importantly, how should organizations navigate this important phase in a woman's life to help them stay within the organization and continue to grow?

Speaker 2: I think, so in addition to what I talked about in making sure that we've got mentors, you can put in fundamental processes, like making sure you have diverse sites for your interview candidates, also for your interview panels so that you have different people giving you perspectives on those candidates that you're speaking to. But I think as family members, we need to encourage people in our family to continue to push. The biggest things that make me most successful in my career, and nothing was ever handed to me. I see people that had stuff handed to them, and I wish I were them. I had to push for everything that I got, and I had a very strong mother who showed me that. But I would say volunteer for things, never say no. We need to encourage people to be really uncomfortable because when you're learning and you don't know how to do something and you're experiencing on the job, you are gonna be uncomfortable. So get comfortable with being uncomfortable. As a leader, I would say that leaders, we can help our organizations be more successful, we can be welcoming to women, but we've gotta be willing to be vulnerable. We've gotta be willing to realize that we're not always right. Listen to them, listen to their ideas, listen to other people. And that's really, if you are vulnerable, you are more courageous than those people who are not vulnerable. It's one of my favorite things, and it is from Brené Brown out of the University of Houston so I have to give her credit for it, but one of my favorite offers. I remind myself about it all the time. So that's what I would say.

Speaker 1: Being comfortable with being uncomfortable, I think that's a great way of thinking about how you can look ahead. Are there any questions from the audience? I know we have a few here. Can we get some mics quickly please?

Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. I'm Dr. Damodaran. We focus on disability hiring, so I'll come to the chase of it. Since many corporate leaders are here, when you're talking about building a diverse team, right, like especially people with disability, many times we assume that they need a lot of requirements, they have a lot of requirements, everything, but the best thing to do is to just ask them what they need, right? Because I think that's the best way to do it. And I think that's the best way to do it. And I think that's the best way to do it. So the best thing to do is to just ask them what they need, right? Because somebody who's visually impaired in the middle of their life, something, they don't know to read Brails. Likewise, hearing impaired, many of them hearing impaired might be there who went to regular schools that they might not know sign language, for example, right? So one thing is today, a lot of digital tools are available, right? Like screen reader and things like that where they can get to do it. While hiring, many companies can, without even spending a single dollar, right? Free open source tools are available, which will empower them. From keeping all this in mind, like based on your experience while hiring any disability candidates for your organization or your come across, anything that you can share insights for all of us to kind of take away?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, the thing I would say is you should be open to every candidate and any candidate. And I talked to, I mentioned that at Oceaneering, it's about the people. If you go out of your way to hire somebody who isn't traditionally getting a lot of job offers, just think about how loyal they're gonna be to you. It's probably worth the investment and maybe not even the available freeware in that. I'd also say it's vulnerable sometimes when you don't know how to talk to somebody about something and I think they appreciate more. And again, you're showing that courage, right? If you're willing to say, it's visible that you have a challenge, tell me what you need to do this job. Every country is different. So I'm gonna say you should talk to your professionals in your specific country to make sure you're not doing anything. But usually asking the question about how you can help somebody do their job and I don't care whether they're disabled or they're not, that's always a good thing. So I love what you said about that. And that's my recommendation is again, don't be afraid to ask.

Speaker 1: I think very often we let our vulnerabilities stop us or our hesitation stop us from asking these questions. I know there's a question at the back. So can we just?

Speaker 4: Hi, this is Prashanth. So this is around leadership. You did mention about building exciting teams. So with the changing nature of work and more focus on tech driven leaders, how do you see the leadership skills and the kind of skills required for the upcoming leaders changing?

Speaker 2: The biggest change for leaders that I've seen so far is really, I mean, COVID forced us into it. It's about flexibility and hybrid and really meeting people where they wanna be led and leading them where they wanna be led. I think leaders understanding how to ask people about that, manage in that situation, be flexible in their style, treat every individual on their team differently to how you're addressing their needs as a person. We said, it's not about just the benefits that we offer anymore. It's about how you talk to somebody and how you treat them as an individual and how you support their community that they care about. So those are the hardest things. I think it's hard to be a leader. I love it. Even in HR, I can advise people all day long, but when I have to do it myself, it is really hard to be a leader. I know you've, there's a question up front.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that'll be the last question we'll take.

Speaker 5: Thank you for the opportunity. This is Dipterak here. I heard about your talking about the sense of belonging and the ocean here. Is it different from the having a culture of entrepreneurship?

Speaker 1: Sense of, so you talked about a sense of belonging at Oceaneering. Is it different from intrapreneurship and how do you see the two being similar or different?

Speaker 2: Oh, wow, that's a great question. Entrepreneurship is one of the fundamentals of Oceaneering's culture. I think, you know, sometimes we got a little carried away and entrepreneurship became, let's do everything different everywhere. And that's not always good for processes and other things. But I don't think that having the culture of belonging and entrepreneurship are separate. And we actually, one of the values that we look for is innovation and that's how you solve the unsolvable is by being innovative. So I don't think you can have innovation without having that entrepreneur mindset. And we have to be willing to let people make mistakes as well as long as you learn from them. But I think they go hand in hand with belonging.

Speaker 1: They can't be separate, right? So you can't just do it as a separate organization. I know I've been signaled that we are out of time, Holly. This is a fascinating conversation. I can see your passion for Oceaneering and the Oceaneers that you're really helping build out. So thank you for everything that you do and for making India one of your largest base. Really delighted to have you join us today.

Speaker 2: I'm so grateful that you invited me. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3: Thank you. For more content on tech and leadership, subscribe to NASSCOM YouTube channel and press the bell icon to never miss an update.