Niraj Nanda, Anglo Eastern: "Culture is the most important"

At this year’s CrewConnect Global, we spoke to the leaders and stakeholders of this industry, and found out about their views on the changes in the maritime industry and their impact on crewing and seafarers.

Niraj Nanda, Senior Manager at Anglo Eastern, shares his vision of the future of marine HR, and the role culture and even technology play in it.

How and why do companies need to change in order to future-proof maritime businesses?

“For me, the organisational culture is the most important thing. It sets the context for everything that the enterprise does. It is the culture that determines the results, grows performance, and ensures that the organisation fulfils all of its objectives.

It is the culture, and not the processes, that define what we can achieve. Processes cannot motivate people; culture can. It is the shared values and beliefs and the principles set by the organisation which can help the employees understand what needs drive and what needs to be achieved.

For us at Anglo Eastern, we feel that we need to move from a compliance culture to a desire-based culture. The industry has put up a lot of regulations and policing the various aspects of shipping, ship management, crew management, marine pollution, etc. The tools are available, the knowledge is shared, but the desire to still comply with it lacks sometimes, and this is where people falter. We are all human beings and we like to take short-cuts. We like to take the easy way out of things, and we sometimes feel it’s okay to not do everything the way it should be done. So that’s what needs to change. And that cannot be changed by anything but the culture of the organisation.

It is the organisation which needs to give a platform to its employees, and the strategy and structure to have the desire to do the right thing when no one’s watching. You need to get the people inspired to do the right thing at 3am in the morning when there’s nobody around them, just their conscience, beliefs, and principles they follow. All this can be put into context by the company’s culture.

If we manage to change this, I’m sure that we will have a better maritime future.”

What does a successful marine HR department look like?

“A successful marine HR department is the one which can attract the right talent, help to retain the people, develop them, grow them, and give them a career path that they aimed for. A successful organisation is one which can match up its long-term goals with those of their employees. Having done that, one grows, and the other one grows automatically. So it’s very important for a successful HR department to have the recruitment, retention, and internal mobility of its employees embedded in the principles and goals of the organisation.

They need to use the right amount of HR and the right amount of technology. As they say, human beings can experience touch, and technology is best experienced touchless. So it has to be the right mixture of both. You need to touch people where they need to be touched and you need to be using technology in a distant and seamless way to execute that touch. That’s what a successful HR department would be focusing on.”

What are your views on internal mobility? How do you ensure it in your organization?

“For me, internal mobility is one of the most important principles that organisations need to follow to ensure its success. Your people are best known to you. Recruiting from outside can be attractive but there’s always a risk if the person is not fully known to you.

We are a company of 27,000 seafarers, and we’ve grown this talent mostly from within. We do a lot of things for internal mobility at Anglo Eastern, like recruiting the right talent. When we recruit, we are looking for a fit for the potential of the individual, and also for a fit within the company culture. We retain them by communicating with them regularly. We also engage with them via various forms, for example through the Mariner App which provides us with seamless connection with our seafarers on board and on shore. This is very useful for them, as they’ll know what’s happening in the company through announcements. They’ll know what their next planning is, when they join their next ship, and what their schedule is, plus operational information.

We have a very intense career management scheduling, where we have open career discussions with our employees. We are able to tell them what our plan is to develop them through training, which is also a very comprehensive value addition programme for each level of our employees.

We promote our employees – we completely believe in that. That’s something we do for internal mobility. But apart from that, we also cross-pollinate a little bit. We try to get away from the roadblocks of the industry, for example by promoting the tanker people on bulk carriers. Since we have the volume, we are able to do a ‘stretch assignment’ for them and create an opportunity for promotion.

We also run projects and conversion programmes where there are specific skills training assigned to interested and deserving candidates to be able to experience new trade and new opportunities. For example, we had a conversion programme to LPG where we suddenly had to take away LPG ships 2 years ago. We were able to convert a couple of hundred people from different trades to the LPG trade, and they’re happily serving that now. That is internal mobility for us.”

What does the marine HR department look like in a digitalised maritime business?

“Well, you cannot escape technology. All of us have our mobile phones, laptops, desk computers… It’s all about staying connected to technology on the move seamlessly. This applies to the HR department, too, which needs to engage with potential and current talent while scheduling them to move up the ladder.

There are various platforms available today: mobile recruitment, video recruitment for acquisition of talent, social media… Basically, you are able to reach people before you engage with them. At Anglo Eastern, we are very happy with the Mariner app that we’ve developed. It helps us to send push notifications to people for new opportunities that may be there. We are also able to connect with a larger audience through our app. Even passive user become interested when senior opportunities are addressed. It’s very useful for our existing pool of seafarers; thousands of people are using it. Their families are connected to the app as well, so they get to see events and what we do.

So we have embraced digitalisation. We are trying to up the agenda further by introducing new features from time to time. Technology is going to drive the future, so digitalisation has to be a part of your HR strategy.”

What do you think the impact of data and analytics will be in maritime HR departments?

“Predictive data analytics is everywhere today. If you need to draw a loan from your credit card company to buy a new car, you are compared with millions of other users from across the world and their potency to pay back the loan before they decide on yours, and this is all based on data prediction. It’s a science that uses existing data, predicts individual behaviour and it’s very specific.

In marine HR and HR in general, there is a lot of scope. We know companies that do predictive data analytics. Google, for example, has a fully automated interview process with computer generated questions based on research on the potential candidate. Best Buy uses engagement programmes and they arrived [to the conclusion] that increase in employee engagement increases profit.

We at Anglo Eastern, we have developed something we call a talent matrix. In short, based on existing data that we have of our employees, we predict their performance and derive the attributes that we would like to see in seafarers and use it as a tool for future recruitment. We have 3 categories: perception, potential, performance. Perception is your experience, rank, ship type, company, completed contracts, etc. Potential is the grading and assessments you have when we recruit you, what added value training you have undertaken, appraisal reports, and any special projects measuring performance. The actual performance is the scientific data that we pick up from the performance of the ships, measuring how many successful port calls they have had, how many incident-free days they have had on board, what has been their performance in external inspections, etc.

This is all put into a comprehensive matrix for us, so that we can grade an individual. This matrix is also used to decide on their career development.”

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