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Medidata Solutions - HR Executive of the Year

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2021, Click to Enter The 2022 American Business Awards

Company: Medidata Solutions, a Dassault Systemes company, New York, NY
Company Description: Medidata is leading the digital transformation of life sciences, creating hope for millions of patients. Medidata helps generate the evidence and insights to help pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device and diagnostics companies, and academic researchers accelerate value, minimize risk, and optimize outcomes. More than one million registered users across 1,400 customers and global partners.
Nomination Category: Human Resources Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Human Resources Executive of the Year

Nomination Title: Naveen Bhateja

Naveen Bhateja is the Chief People Officer at Medidata, a position he has held since October 2019. He drove a people-centric approach during a challenging year to ensure that the company’s deeply beloved mission-driven culture remained front and center in five key ways:

  • Driving transparent employee communication and guidance: Under Naveen’s direction and leadership, the global security and workplace solutions team worked endlessly to manage and communicate office closures and re-opening, keeping employee safety as a primary goal. The re-opening has been managed with an “optionality” approach, offering employees flexibility about returning while also ensuring that each location stays within the local government’s capacity guidelines. When formulating the plan, Naveen asked the team to view the situation through the “life in a day of an employee during the pandemic.” From when he/she wakes up to taking care of kids to schooling at home to traveling to work, and all the safety precautions that are required. This approach helped the team create better programs and experience to support employees.

 

  • Reimagining Employee Engagement with a Connection to Leadership: Naveen realized at the onset of the pandemic that the events in 2020 were going to weigh heavily on people and launched Medidata C.A.R.E.S. (COVID-Actioned Resources Enabling Support), designed to provide additional tools, resources and activities to support employees. As part of this program, the company created virtual engagement activities around the world. For example, in the U.S. they celebrated Cinco de Mayo virtually during a happy hour. The team also leveraged technology solutions such as TaskHuman, a cutting-edge app that connects employees 1:1 over a video call with life coaches, yoga instructors, physical fitness trainers, etc., on 1000s of topics related to wellbeing, to help employees.

 

  • Enhanced Diversity and Belonging Strategy: Diversity and Belonging has always been a core part of Medidata’s DNA and Naveen’s partnership with the company’s business resources group (BRG) helped Medidata to create a Diversity 2.0 version of its journey. Naveen conducted listening tours with all the BRGs to learn what was working and what needed to be changed. As part of this effort, he:
    • Engaged researchers and facilitators to train Senior Leaders RACE -- A Framework for Leading Race Conversations -- and LEAP -- a Framework for Becoming a Better Ally to Black Employees
    • Engaged a professional diversity expert to facilitate an open “Courageous Conversations” session giving employees a forum and the opportunity to share thoughts regarding recent events
    • Assigned executive diversity coach to the executive sponsors of various BRGs so that they can guide/help the charters appropriately
    • Fundamentally reshaping core talent attraction, branding and other HR processes based on lessons learned.
    • Expanded recruitment and development initiatives to focus on hiring and promoting racially diverse talent.

 

  • Connecting Company Mission to the COVID Vaccine: Medidata has revolutionized the way that companies ran clinical trials by collecting patient data electronically and storing it in the cloud. The company’s platform has been supporting COVID-19 Vaccine Clinical Trials with its Rave Clinical Cloud Platform. As a result, the business has seen a significant opportunity as the company has been at the forefront of the mega COVID trials with customers. All functions and teams have been working hard to deliver the mission despite facing 2020 challenges in their personal lives, including the People Team virtually hiring and onboarding over 800 people in 2020 to accelerate Medidata’s mission.

 

  • Sharing Best Practices with the external HR Community: Throughout this time, Naveen continued to publish best practices externally to support the broader HR community as there was no playbook for HR practitioners to manage the pandemic.

 

The success of these efforts demonstrated by the fact that Moderna created the COVID vaccine leveraging Medidata clinical trials platform. Additionally, talent attrition for 2020 has been the lowest ever and employee engagement scores were some of the highest scores ever, exceeding US tech industry benchmarks.

In bullet-list form, a brief summary (up to 150 words) of up to ten (10) of the chief accomplishments of the nominee since the beginning of 2019.

  • Employee engagement scores of 87%, above the tech industry benchmark
  • Attrition trending way below the tech industry benchmark of 21%
  • Significant YoY growth in sales performance in 2020 and double-digit growth in revenue
  • Virtually hired 800 employees in 2020, increasing headcount by 20% compared to 2019
  • Trained 70 senior managers on RACE -- a Framework for Leading Race Conversations -- and LEAP -- is a Framework for Becoming a Better Ally to Black Employees, and 250 senior managers on compassion.
  • 100% score in Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index for the third consecutive year.
  • Launched first-ever virtual internship program with 40 interns
  • Bronze Stevie Award for Best CSR Program
  • Great Workplaces in the UK

 

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