Mridula Rai brings decades of HR leadership across Pharma, Healthcare, Retail, Media, and Finance. At Labcorp, she leads People Strategies and Business Partnering, driving global talent innovation, diversity, and employee experience, earning accolades like the Global Women Inspiration Award for her impactful contributions.
In an engaging interaction with Women Entrepreneurs Review Magazine, Mridula shared her insights on evolving talent strategies, inclusive leadership, compliance-driven culture change, and bold HR transformations essential for fostering equity and advancing women leaders in the rapidly shifting medical and diagnostics industry.
Given the current shifts in the medical and diagnostics industry, how will talent strategies evolve to meet the growing demand for specialized skills, particularly for women leaders in technical roles?
The evolution of AI based tech revolution in health care and medical diagnostic industry has increased patients’ awareness exponentially. Digital diagnosis process and point of care testing methods, has opened up innovation and newer opportunities, giving rise to shifts in market strategy and forced us to develop specialized skills to meet the needs of ever-growing patients’ experience and expectations.
Tech disruption in wearable devices, transdermal sensors, self-diagnostic testing kits, and smart phone based predictive diagnosis has changed the landscape of how health care solutions are delivered to the customers today. App based customized service with smart supply chain is essential in delivering an engaging customer care. An engaged and satisfied customer can become a social media influencer to optimize marketing investment.
So, the personalized health solution is driving the demand to continuously re-skill the talents in digital proficiency across Analytics, robotics, predictive diagnosis and innovation in product development.
I believe that women leaders should embrace the unknown, open to challenge the self-belief and develop curiosity test and adopt the change. Awareness of customer behavior in the marketplace, emerging AI tools, trending technologies and Customized product ideas should become a way of life to seamlessly transition to the world of technical leadership. ‘Learning ahead is Staying ahead’,
With increasing regulatory scrutiny, how can HR leaders integrate statutory compliance into culture transformation initiatives without making it feel like just another corporate mandate?
Statutory compliances have a strong reason behind why they are formed. For many corporate, the statutory mandates are mostly looked at from the point of compliance than the framework of safety, security, equity and social justice. Mostly because they see this as a cumbersome documentation. Hence, breaking down the reasons behind each of the statutory requirements and creatively communicating the benefits of meeting each of them would open a fresh understanding and appreciation in the minds of people. As a part of culture transformation, aligning the goals of ESG, local sourcing and reducing carbon footprints are vitally important. In brief, powerfully communicating the benefits of compliance of statutory areas internally and externally can create an identity of being a responsible business house will surely facilitate this change.
As the industry adopts AI-driven diagnostics, what innovative L&D approaches can help women professionals stay ahead, ensuring they are decision-makers and not just implementers of technology?
The women leaders should develop a 360-degree understanding of the AI based technology disrupting the industry. The ability to see ahead of the curve is the most important vision the women leaders should develop. The data driven trends in patients’ behaviors and the emergence of newer technology will always help us focus on the new and relevant skills to be learnt. Women as a specie is highly multi-functional and posses’ greater ability to adapt and innovate. Hence, to be a decision maker, women must have key awareness of emerging trends in patient care, As mentioned AI based technology, Telemedicine, Wearable medical devices, remote monitoring devices, regulatory updating and how the business is staying relevant to the changing customer behavior.
There is massive daily content being added across online and social media platforms. There are many online networking communities to stay ahead of the next curve and propose creative ways to challenge the status quo, they can play a vital role in helping company strategies to develop an early mover advantage and move to blue ocean ideas.
How can talent management frameworks be redesigned to ensure equal visibility and influence in strategic discussions?
Unconscious bias is the reality of life. However, as a woman with awareness, we can develop an internal check to validate our thoughts before it comes out into actions. This requires conscious efforts and a certain amount of practice. However, in a high-stake decision, this could certainly be avoided when we start rationalizing our decisions by using data, trends and information. Women are built with relatively higher level of emotional intelligence and sensitivity, but disciplining ourselves to use reason and data for key decisions is a great way to stay objective and balanced. A talent Framework with clear and dynamic performance and behavioral metrics will be a key to capture the meritocracy of talents across timelines. Also, a 360 degree or stakeholder feedback is another great way of staying objective in assessing and rewarding talents.
In a high-pressure, compliance-driven sector, how do you balance organizational development with employee well-being, especially for women leaders juggling professional and personal responsibilities?
Today we live in much better times in terms of women empowerment and freedom to choose. However, the expectation from women professional to be a value creator is continuing to rise. Traditional responsibilities in personal and social life are and will remain an integral part of life for a larger section of women professional. There are compliance and governance challenges, deadlines and high-pressure expectations drive a constant challenge to mental and physical health.
From organizational point of view, we must embrace the personalized well-being of women employees as the differentiation. Forward-thinking workplace can become a source of support and care by channeling multiple wellbeing services that are available in the environment. A continuous dialogue, free flowing feedback, co-created work priorities that is aligned to the business objectives, hybrid work and multi model job contracts are some of the next level initiatives to foster a culture of balance between business priorities and well-being.
The biggest challenge in work-life imbalance is the mismatched priorities and timeline issues. Today, the technology and connectivity offer huge opportunity to women professional to balance their work and personal priorities. An inculcated habit of switching priorities with smart management of time will massively create opportunity towards work-life balance.
Looking at the future of HR in medical diagnostics, what bold, unconventional changes would you advocate making workplaces truly inclusive and equitable for the next generation of women leaders?
The women leaders of tomorrow are made today. The biggest challenge to the status quo is our inner ability to challenge, in a connected world, the concept of glass ceiling doesn’t exist. In my opinion and experience, there is no substitute to passion, focus and hard work.
The clarity of vision is the foundation of empowerment, this clarity in priority, career, aspiration, sacrifice and discipline will form the crux of leadership for today’s women. I have seen women leaders break through the challenges in workplaces across gender inequality, bias, differentiated compensation and conscious bias, only because they believed they can do it.
From organizational culture point of view, there should be an intentional, consistent, process driven mandate, widely communicated and visibly driven, will surely bring in the change of equitable and inclusive opportunity for developing women leaders.
