I am on Twitter Now

Now this is something big and yet not so big. Yeah, finally I have also hooked on to microblogging.
Every discovery has a sub discovery which leads to bigger benefits. I guess, its the same with Twitter. With just what I am doing ? People can actually share so much information and thats what I find interesting about Twitter. I have just begun adding followers.
Check this and start following me on Twitter.
Now why Microblog when blogs are meant to be expert views and detailed. I found an explanation here, for me its all about connecting and sharing. I feel twitter would change the way people assimilate, understand and use different concepts. It would also bring some discipline on becoming objective, yet on target while sharing your thoughts. For once I feel that its not difficult to express and thats why I am on twitter.
I feel this would encourage communities of thoughts which would be more purposeful and definitely a stronger medium of engagement.
See you there soon !!!

Web 2.0 - McKinsey Survey

Here is another interesting insight on Web 2.0. What promises to be the biggest change thats going to embrace our business environments after the World Wide Web, A change yet unimaginable and a change thats very encompassing on the basics of the way business is conducted.
In the above survey McKinsey talks about how organizations are embracing Web 2.0 tools to increasingly collaborate with their internal and external environment. I would restrict my comments to the internal environment. The survey brings out in a nice way how the variation in usage of tools exist- Asia is more skewed towards Networking and Collective Intelligence , in large cos whereas America and Europe more towards Blogs,RSS and Podcasts in media and telecommunications.

Is there a lesson going forward from this? How does the HR Organizations leverage these tools on a global scale and how would they be able to make an impact with these variations. These are some of the questions that emerge from this survey.

My take, its still early to really call these trends, the organizations that have invested in such technologies are already at the high end of value chain. However going forward we would see many new users emerging. For example it would be interesting to see how a small organization is able to build to its competence leveraging some of the information available on these social networks. Early times still but promising as i said before !!

Referrals - A Paradigm Shift

Employee referrals or word of mouth is the best method to Hire . There is no doubt Word of mouth is most trusted and best (sometimes even the most economical) source when you want to hire.
However, there is always a need to use this judiciously and along with other methods. For example, while referrals may give us a view to the available talent in the organizations, its often not the best source. Employee referrals are a way to get a view to the talent outside the organization, yet for some reasons they are still not the best way.

Have a look at the communities and sources like Bluechip Expert, Linked In and Too Steps and you would know what I mean.These are all communities where networks are being created, jobs are being advertised and candidates are being found. Referrals has undergone a complete change, its no more about employees. Today Social Networks are being leveraged to get the best of talent available globally.
However there is a small qualifier, for such networks to be the most effective source of recruitment, there is still some time. This is primarily because Social Networking is still to catch up in a big way. Most of us would have our profile on Linked In and Gautam spoke about LinkedIn for Career insight here
There are others that are slowly becoming very popular. Look at TooSteps and you would know how powerful communities are in the offering. As professionals we must leverage this extended source of communities / networks to extend our careers, knowledge and skills. As HR Professionals we must keep our eyes open to the next wave of Referrals, which would really make expensive advertising for vacancies redundant in future. Good times in waiting ?? Perhaps Yes !!!

Employee Relationship management

Employee Relationship management(ERM), as the term may suggest is a concept drawn from CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Its interesting to note how a concept like CRM can apply to the workplace.
I tried checking many other blogs and discovered that not much has been written on this topic. May be this was dispelled as a fad or may be its something people view more as a hr technology jargon. Whatever the case may be, I felt it apt to spend some time on this very important HR Mantra.
First as I said, its CRM applied to employees in layman terms. So does it mean its maintaining preferences and choices of employees just like you would do for your consumers.
I would first like to present my views which are explanable through the slide i use here to explain this concept.



So if you look at the slide above, its the way you are able to manage multiple relationships in the ecosystem that an employee is surrounded with given the different capabilities that the organization can offer in terms of networking, collaboration, technology etc. So it really becomes very organization dependent. Yet its all encompassing.
So how does Organization create an ERM strategy
1. Identify the ecosystem - what resources, get connected to whom and in what ways.
2. Identify People, Processes and Knowledge that needs to be leveraged.
3. Identify technology that can best support those processes and knowledge requirements.
4. Start an initiative around those and benchmark it against similar in industry.

A lot of you would be wondering, whats new about ERM in any case, How many of us as HR Professionals can say that they have kept Employee in mind when designing processes ?? Probably no and thats where the difference lies, In all ERM Strategies - EMPLOYEE IS THE KING !!!
Thats good for HR isnt it ? Finally some focus on real employee stuff

Reporting Blues

I got interested in this very nicely thought article on " Reporting in HRMS Systems" by one of the leading global bloggers - Jim Holincheck's Blog and I thought it would be nice to share what I have observed on reporting front with my experience working with the two largest vendors in this area in India, my views expressed below are global though they may have some local flavor.

First from a customer perspective, Reporting is a definitive need, no denying that but beyond that how many of us do actually realise / understand what reports are required ? Yes, we may have customers saying they require X,Y,Z fields and may be in the form of a table, graph, but thats the visualization of report and not a report itself.
Lets look at the Genesis of the problem, HRMS is a huge repository of information. Imagine maintaining systematic data of your thousand employees, different aspects - Wow thats huge information , but wait how much of this is actually updated (Ah yes, was updated sometime back) and how many of this is consistent (We can't live without multiple systems, can we ?). So If you ask me there are not too many customers who would be using a HRMS system to its potential and therefore expecting them to know reporting needs would be asking a bit too much. I go by a report by one of the Analyst which says even today organizations who implement HRMS do not go beyond 20% of the system usage (So low), I think all of us have been struggling to answer this.

So obviously the next question that comes to one's mind is - are these systems not usable enough ? Well if we compare to the interface of some of the systems we access in our personal space - mails, blogs etc ...the answer would be yes !! However without getting into specifics, Web 2.0 would hold a promise to answer some of that and address usability issues.
Coming back on Reporting blues, Often organizations miss out on analytical requirements when preparing an RFP for evaluation.This results in a good system but not necessarily a system good for reporting. Once ignored on the evaluation stage, these reports later take the form of user requirements which are very user specific and really not driven towards the objective of leveraging humongous HR data that such a system maintains.
So all reporting seen is what an organizations wants to report on ? It still remains to be seen when Organizations would become capable enough to take on to high end reporting tools, till then reporting in present form would not only satisfy requirements, thats what would also be delivered as solution from different vendors ( After all its customer who is the king) !!!

India Shining

Today is a big day for World cricket, IPL, the first official Cricket League kicks off and that too in India. Before you start wondering why I am talking about Cricket on this HR blog.......there is a change thats happening at all levels, Shift in World Power Equation moving to emerging powers like India.
Be it cricket,Formula One, outsourcing,Steel, Automobiles, Software...Indians are all on top of it and why not, we are in the process of realizing what our Former President APJ Abdul Kalam said on India 2020 Vision

Is this Good News ? Well yes if we , as a country are prepared to handle it.
What does that really mean ? India is already recognised as the Intellectual Powerhouse of the World, with some of the best brains either being employed from India or are of Indian origin. It does not stop there, India has a culture which really helps Indians adopt to global environment with ease.

However with all the opportunities, there are also some challanges. With a country as diverse as India,the visibility and development of talent at all levels is not managed properly.
What makes me say that? Look at the following statistics
As per a study, India produces the following graduates in different disciplines every year
Doctors – approximately 25,000 doctors
Engineers – over 400,000 engineers
MBAs – approximately 100,000 B-School Graduates
Yet look at the quality of talent available and more often than not we cannot go beyond the IITs, RECs and top 20 B-Schools and Medical Institutions.
Our Vocational Training institutes produce only 6 million students each year. Thats in a population of 88.5 million people in the age group 15-29 who need such training.

These statistics reveal something alarming. While we move towards our goal of India Shining, we also have a talent problem at hand.
Without really getting into Micro and Policy issues, we might need to do the following to provide for the quality of talent we would need to maintain India as a Superpower.

1. Linking Education to Real life application of it - A lot has been said about Industry Education linkage here. , However the point remains, until we consciously set upon getting industry to be involved in curriculum design we may still be far from achieving our goals.

2. Talent Profiling early at the industry level would help. We would need to identify the exact skills that the Industry would need and design education programs to meet those very requirements.

3. HR would have a huge role to play, both at the ministry level embarking upon a broad level talent profiling to organization's talent management and growth would be critical parameters to how India lives up to the challenges that would be forced upon it when it really grows to that level of supremacy.

Till that happens, this would still remain a mission. However from Macro as well Micro, there are signs of progress which Every Indian would be proud of.

Attrition Focus

If the poll on my blog page and other sources are to be believed, organizations are still grappling with the issue of attrition and why not ? Talent comes for a price and is not easily available. Interestingly from the employee perspective there has been a change in the way they perceive their jobs. As it is said, Employees nowadays are more loyal to their profession than to their organization.

Having said this, why do organization really bother about attrition ?, when they can spend this time and resources on better things. Thats what we would look at now.

Typically Organizations look at recruitment and training as investments into getting the right talent into the organization. There is nothing wrong with it, but sometimes we in the HR department get so much obsessed by this that we forget about the individual " the employee". This leads to a mismatch of expectation and somewhere this mismatch leads to discontent. I am not saying that this is the only reason why employees leave organization but i strongly believe that the amount of effort that organizations spend on managing attrition can be directed towards better activities.
I talked about how HR Organizations have been obsessed about attrition in my previous blog, where we saw how we are not really looking at the cause and yet worried about the impact.
HR Focus on attrition is not wrongly placed however time has come for HR departments to look and focus on Employee Engagement and Employee Relationship Management, something I would take on in my next few blogs.

Social Networking

How many of us would not have visited LinkedIn ? Orkut ? Facebook etc ?. Well if you have not, you are way behind times, because on these sites we are experiencing something that holds the promise to change the way we communicate.

Imagine those good old post days, when communicating used to be through letters. With the introduction of e-mail, people could read or write hundred letters in a day, then came Mobile messaging and people could connect with hundreds of people within few minutes.
Now with these social networking sites, you can connect, express and share with people across globe and at the same time make new connections !!!. So people who you never knew before or who you lost touch with are all on the same network and connected and all this in a few clicks. Isnt it amzaing.
Now for the wow effect, see the impact this can make on your life . For example, my LinkedIn profile 205 connections gives me access to 2383300 people and since April 8th I have added more than 40,000 people in my network !!! Thats an astonishing number, if I am able to directly connect with even 1% people from this network, I would have made enough connections that would have sustained my earlier generation for a lifetime !! Sounds fascinating , doesn't it ?
Thats not all, the way this would impact workplace would be even more interesting. While organizations still struggle with the issue of letting free access to the web for employees. Outside the workplace, this is already becoming their biggest medium to connect.

There are organizations which block access to websites for fear of productivity, however there is already happening outside workplace which if systematically introduced into the workplace can actually raise productivity and innovation.

The problem is how to harness the power of social networking ?

1. To begin with lets give up this fear in our minds and let the access to internet be open ( I know i am raising more than a few eyebrows by saying this ) but control in all forms leads to more exploration (human tendency). So while organizations may do all they can to prevent employees from accessing networking, job sites the truth remains that outside work employees are hooked on to these sites, and its happening at all levels.
2. Another fact is that with the advacement of technology and the next generation of web, technology would become as pervasive as mobile and any effort to block it would only lead to loss of productivity.
3. As I have already pointed before, the promise of this remains much bigger than the challenges it would create and it would be really interesting to see how organizations are able to move grey matter from an organizational context to a wider context. Sharing of expressions and opionions through blogs, chats and wikis would be difficult to stop and therefore the employees of next generation would be better informed and networked.

Having said this, some challenges still remain
1. What all employees should have access to ?
2. Should organizations restrict blogging and networking to internal employees or throw it open to the world wide web or should it be a combination of both ?
3. Does it have a security or competitive threat associated with it ?

A lot of these questions would soon find an answer, but Social Networking is here to stay and the impact would be more profound going forward than what we can imagine today.

HR Outsourcing

Can you depend on a service provider to manage what you used to traditionally manage? Thats the question that crosses one's mind when HRO is talked about?
Before we answer this question, lets look at primary drivers for HR Outsourcing.
1. Cost reduction
2. Process Synergy / efficiency.
3. Standardization.
However any attempts to bring changes to the model or processes leads to a huge amount of rework. Reason - the base of HRO is standard technology.
For HR0 to really be successful, HR0 vendors need to look beyond process approach, they need to think supply chain and have an offering around that. In not so distant future, we may hear about call centers handling candidate queries. To bring true value, data protection and flexible offerings would be the need of the hour. Organizations may outsource off and on, but to declare it as a fad is a bit early, so is to term it as a revolution. Outsourcing would continue to happen in phased manner till then.Going forward, we would also talk about role of IT in BPO.
Wait and watch!

Web 2.0 and HR

Following on a nice article by one of my favorite blogger, I would like to share my views on this very interesting phenomenon of Web 2.0 and how it promises to change the way HR uses technology.
First some basics, Web 2.0 is a combination of a lot of collaborative tools and technologies ( some of which have been there for sometime) and some which are new, to name a few - chats, wikis,blogs,rss,mash ups and many others.

For a layman, these are all tools to connect, express and share. How does this impact HR ?

Some ground realities :

1. Awareness and Knowledge are at a different level today, thanks to the world wide web and the wide access to information and with this collaborative Web (Web 2.0), we would see this grow further as it would also provide a larger access to experts.

2. This would impact the thinking and behaviour of individuals,which in turn would certainly impact the productivity (positively).

3. The tools would also mean faster exchange of information, referrals and jobs amongst these networked individuals. Thus making Organization Climate and Culture sound like Jurrasic Era terms.

How can organization leverage upon these capabilities

1. Knowledge Management - Imagine drawing upon the talent pool of not a few people in your organization, but entirely huge population of networked experts. Knowledge would grow by leaps and bounds. Imagine an employee today who can discuss his work problems in a local context with his peers, and then imagine a scenario where is able to do the same in a global context with a large number of people. Definitely the broadening of perspective would mean better information. How do you manage Knowledge then ? A new challenge which HR would have to seek answers to.

2. Recruitment - This is one function that can really benefit. Imagine you put a vacancy and give a link to share it on Facebook, Digg and many other such networking mediums. What happens ? Your reach increases multiple times and all this at really no cost of advertising. This is tremendous, then you have sites like LinkedIn and Blue Chip Expert which allow you to network with a number of professionals known to you or your friends. This is the power of Collaborative Web, something never seen before. So finding a Job through a jobsite or referrals may well have its own benefits but it does not offer the reach of the collaborative network. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as we go ahead,

Networking would become an important skill in the organization, so would be the individuals who are able to leverage the power of collaborative networks and contribute.

A lot more would be talked about this by me and other bloggers in coming days. The potential is huge and so is the promise.

Measuring HR

Something that most CEO's have always desired, making HR accountable. HR has traditionally been seen as a cost function, only recently some tangible deliverables and value addition has been found to be associated with the function.

HR Departments constantly struggle to show how valueable their role is in the organization.For that to happen, HR needs to be measurable and for that to happen we have to attach tangible deliverables to all the HR outcomes, thats not tough. Whats really tough then ? How to interpret these outcomes.
For ex : A simple attrition report would tell say 10 people left from Location A, Department X. However if you were to further investigate you would find that out of the 10, may be 6 were males,4 females all aged between 20-35, so I know which age group.....Hold on, go further deep and see what Skills , what reasons people are leaving for and a completely different picture emerges. What this points to ?

1. HR is using Analytics (Analysis) the plain way, if we were to dig deeper we would be able to fight the problem, rather than struggle for solution.

2. To make HR measurable, its important to attach tangible deliverables (SLA's or otherwise), For ex : Performance Management is completed in time only when everything including normalization and rankings is done in say a month's time from receiving the appraisal forms. What this means is it would put backward pressure on making the forms available in time and hence improve service delivery.

3. Sometimes, its bad to rely on too much data or trends, on the other hand Analysis is something that most organizations would rather live with than chose to remain away. So investment into tools that enable these kind of analysis helps, however for that to happen the base (Core HR Solution) needs to be well managed.

4. Well begun is half done, Analysis has the potential to give capabilities like modelling tools and simulation tools. These are the predictive tools which make the life of HR easier in a chaotic environment.

5. Finally, organizations would need to grow beyond XLs(not to say XLS is a bad tool), but beyond this would lie predictive analytics tools which would enable them to really leverage all the Gigabytes of data they collect on their employees.

Lastly how would it be to imagine a world, where HR is able to give a view on what the business needs would be going forward, then using collaborative tools, get the right talent in, fitment based on market trends, and then enable assessment and development of talent on a ongoing basis using predictive tools. Suddenly life seems so much better for HR, for real ? Only time would tell, when Organizations embrace such solutions in a real manner.

Learning - the future

Learning is fast replacing what traditionally was training. Though the two terms sound similiar, there is a difference in the basic philosophy.
Learning to begin with is self paced and dependent on the individual capability. Learning need not be driven and its often easier to assess the impact of learning.
Having said this, organizations tend to spend a huge amount on training employees only to realise that they have improved outside prospects for these people( not to say that training is a waste). What really becomes important then is to see how to leverage upon a talent pools collective learning. Thats where organizations need to look at enabling collaboration using blogs, wikis, discussion threads and boards. If thats done, first step towards learning is taken, yes the assumption here is that we being social by nature would like to connect via these social networking mechanisms.

Managing Creativity

in a seemingly connected world, access to information and thoughts is boundaryless. This leads to broader horizons and higher quality of thought generation.
This is paradox for HR function, which traditionally believes in control, how to manage this boundaryless flow of ideas?
In such a scenario, managing creativity becomes extremely important.
How can organization go about it ??

1. Encourage flow of ideas, incentivise creative ideas that lead to successful results.
2. Encourage mistakes, a lot of creativity at workplace is hidden because of fear of failure. Encouraging people to contribute even if they make mistakes would help them overcome this fear.
3. Encourage offtime activities- Google Labs , an experiment by Google actually asks employees to spend a percentage of their time on innovative activities, result is a whole new range of products and services.
When organizations are able to harness creativity, would we see efforts towards initiatives like " creativity management" coming into existence.
In a highly socially networked workplace, creativity management and knowledge management would assume a different meaning (more on it in later blogs) and thats the challenge HR would face.

Workforce Aging

40 % of the manager population would retire soon.
Most of the organizations worldwide are facing top talent crisis.
Workforce average age is declining sharply.
This is perhaps the only time when four generations are going to work together at workplace.

These are some of the facts that are staring on us going forward,the truth is dawning - we may not have enough talented people to work for by 2012, this talent shortage coupled with leadership crisis is a situation HR professionals have never been through in the past.
While organizations have been focussing on talent management for a while, still some questions remain unanswered.

1. Do we know where the most critical talent would come from ?
2. Do we have policies that can align to the needs and demands of these four diverse generations ?
3. How do we manage the so called " generation gap" at workplace ?
4. Do we have enough visibility on what our business challenges would be going forward ?
5. Whats the most important parameter for measuring the success of my talent strategy ?

While we answer this, its also important to look at talent crisis from a global context and the impact its going to create on composition of workforce.
Any thoughts ??