The Right Shoes

Employee retention! Wow what a concept and something which Indian companies are emphasizing and something which needs to be well in place to differentiate a good organization from just another.

We the HR will take great pride and pains in implementing it but I guess the foremost place it should be implemented should be the HR department.

In a recent interaction with an OD intervention expert he showed a research compiled document conducted by them which revealed that the Career span of a HR at junior level is 1.5 years and lesser and about 3 years or lesser at the middle level and about 5 years in the senior level position in any organization.

Long gone are those days of one organization employees where a family would have worked but these numbers present a great threat

1) How is an employee going to trust a person who has recruited him in the organization and acts as a face of it and suddenly within a certain time the person he considered as the omnipresent face may not be seen as he is lost in search of better pastures.

2) A short career span may not indicate a negative factor because good things can happen in smaller times and we could argue even the President of America has a tenure of 4 years only

3)The problem which poses is “ if these people who may not have the adequate foundation at the lower levels ! can they cope up with the rigors of middle and top management” and this brings a thought “is it one of the root causes why there is animosity towards the HR dept in some of the Organizations”

Its time we have serious insight towards it

Cheers

Arvind !

Support or Startegic partner ??

There has been a recent question on the role of HR ? is it a strategic partner or a support function and the case for strategic partner is gaining ground and during a recent event i saw this question was put to senior Hr practitioner who gave a wry smile and instead of the long swirling answer he gave a short one saying "Support". This surprised me for a minute as i was long awaiting an answer of a strategic partner and when i asked him why he gave his view point

He said that being considered a strategic partner is not something which should worry about but it is implied we should be support staff and support to the management and to the employees in his organization he pointed out to examples where the people of other departments were not able to connect with their functional heads and approached HR for the support. This support was in terms of praising their work and understanding their problems and ideas which their line manager was not ready to listen and this caused a rift but that where hr steps and gives the support for an employee to do well

And I think anyone who takes up HR does this to act as the face of the organization to the employees

Cheers

Arvind

Position or pay

The eternal question packaged in a new form which is the bigger temptation to resist or rather falling for.

Is it the paisa or the position? Which is the bigger thing to attract and employee though it has to be argued that factors which can tilt the favor are as follows

1) Age
2) Maturity
3) Experience and Need
4) Which is easier to offer from an organization's perspective?

With all these in perspective we still need find out the important weapon to attract the best talent needed for the organization and every individual who is reading might just analyze which is going to be the important factor to pull them is it the money or the position

Will they settle for a managerial role in a major MNC or will they prefer to jump ship and work with a local concern which could offer for example a post of head HR or VP HR but the pay could be substantially lesser than that of an MNC if this kind of situation arises what will be an answer?

It is like a question of Heart or Head and it’s on each individual to follow but let’s just allow that eternal question to run through our grey cells

Cheers
Arvind

The difference between a good candidate and a suitable candidate

More often than not we are unable to distinguish between a good candidate and a suitable candidate for any level or managerial positions in any form from workplaces to relationships and we need to spare a minute why it does not happen so,

I had a good discussion over the past couple of days with experts about these two things and I could get a feel of the difference and why it is not proper. The basic reason is the belief that people who are good in something should be good in everything which is a notion we need to grow over with which I can illustrate with an example

John Wright was a great coach for the Indian cricket team and was helpful in developing our cricket team to the heights it reached and he was succeeded by another great coach Greg Chappel who was not able to lead the team to achieve greater results and that truly showcases the difference

Both were great coaches but it was Wright whose interest and attitude fit well in the working system over Chappel whose culture dint fit in, Similarly people make the mistake of selecting people if they are good without analyzing if the company needs them or if they have the right factors and this could lead to a huge margins as studies show the difference between an Average Performer and Good performer is a shocking 90% which I will narrate about in the coming posts.

Its about so many factors which make an employee fit for an organization in the above illustrated. In the case of Greg chappel his style and what he wanted to do dint fit with the organization, while John Wright was not insistent on any special thing which made the difference.

Cheers
Arvind

HR from kids

Yes the conquest of observing activities and trying to learn from those to improve my skill inventory as a HR moves on and the recent place from where I observed a lot of it was on 10/01/10 or the 10th of Jan when it was the nationwide pulse polio campaign and millions of kids were administered with two drops of medicine two eradicate polio from India.

I had gone to this little suburb outside of Chennai to serve as a volunteer for one of the camps and what I had considered initially as a burden turned out to be a stress busters this was because when you deal with kids who are 0-5 alone the worlds seems such a nice place but some of my crucial learning’s were

1) Patience to ensure all the kids are administered with the dosage and thus ensuring you complete the job effectively and efficiently. Reluctance was highly there but it was persuasion which succeeded

2)A trust building process with a kid that the liquid we were giving was not bitter but rather sweet thus I wondered if an innocent kid needs quite a bit of attention and focus to get its approval how tough will it be with much matured and well planned individuals when they have to addressed for an Organizational Change

3) It’s not over till it's over - I certainly learnt that whenever we believed the crowd was over and we could take a breather! Pop the next bunch of kids came in and thus it went till the end

4) Contingency is crucial- For all predictions and levels we exceeded our targets and more and more kids coming for the dosage, it was necessary that we had adequate contingencies to complete our work as we had national interest at stake!

All in all a great day

Cheers

Arvind

Happy new year

Mother earth has been carrying me for over 20 years and I have recollected 14-15 new year and every new year brings with it the large burden of expectations which could outweigh Santa and his gift packets. The year 2010 has outweighed all expectations in terms of what is expected in all sectors from corporate, Individuals and sportsmen to name a few.

The year 2009 saw the depth of the economic slowdown and then the subsequent ongoing effort to come out of it which has been pretty successful so in corporate view they would be hoping for the demand to grow and increase and so that the business can expand and the profits can grow.

Students in colleges would also be in sync with the corporate view hoping for more opportunities in the job market
For the AAM AADMI the main concern would be on when the negative inflation which is negative numerically but is inflating more than the wallet of Sheik Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan and just be praying for the levels to be back normal and prices to go down and also he would be grimacing on the amount of potential days of rest in form of public holidays which was available is now part of the weekends
And coming to professional sports athletes!!! In specific one by the name of Eldrick Woods was craving for the arrival of 2010. 2009 was a year in which nothing went right and topping it up was has his affair list which could overtake Salman Rushdie’s list time for tiger get out of the woods and coming to our own Desi athletes they would be hoping the construction of CWG can be completed before time we don’t want to replicate an Athens 2004 and then coming to our religion of cricket all the players would just love if they just had to play IPL and then just stretch around but another full packed year thanks to BCCI.
Here is just hoping that 2010 does not lead to further demand and creation of states and hopefully some positives views on HR where it can be finally accepted as a strategic partner.


Cheers

Arvind

Employability

The hottest topic when it comes to recruiting and talent management is the term employability and quite rightfully. The current economic slowdown gave a good idea of that most of the companies spurred on by the growth recruited in large numbers and suddenly when demand plummeted so did the manpower but one thing which needs to be kept in mind was that the organization tried to ensure it had its best performing employees and thus the employability issue came even more under scrutiny.

I have not been a spectator of the recently released movie "3 IDIOTS" but from clips I could see it taking it out on the education system which has largely been at fault and am one of its most vociferous critiques, But do we at sometimes needs to question where does the problem of employability arise from ? Is it from the bottom i.e. in the education system or from the top which is the organizations who employ people?
Now this may sound outrageous but have we ever wondered during recruitment we are always needed to follow a salary bandwidth and other compliances that may make us amnesiac to the quality of the employees. During this downturn many organizations as a process of cost reduction settled for employees with lower skill sets and lesser proportions of employability because they demanded lesser pay and if this trend continued in cases where organizations have not shelled out the right amount on good candidates then how will you get top notch employees and once you get into the so called “CHALLEGA” mode then systems follows leading to reduction in skill set.
This is personally my opinion where i believe organizations should set a standard by probably ensuring candidates have the right arsenal of talents to enter into the fields and to ensure they are happy with the basic needs of money are met.
Cheers
Arvind