Lessons from IPL

As the first IPL,or the Indian Premier League draws to a closure,around the world cricket fans are amazed on the quality of " unknown talent" this tourament witnessed. Likes of Shaun Marsh, Manpreet Goni,Siddharth Trivedi,Shikhar Dhawan and many more have not only left an impression with their astute skills, they have also made a strong claim for the national team slots. This is indeed a good time for world cricket, with talent abound.

One sits up wondering where these people have been all this while ?
A look at some of the musical contests on the idiot box ( american idol, tvs saregama ) and so many other examples makes one wonder whether some kind of talent hunt is required even in corporates?

We would have read so much about Talent crunch, lack of successors for key positions and so on and so forth. However there is little organizations have done out of the box to change the things the way they have been. Employees still continue to be labeled within their job definitions. Very few organizations actually encourage innovation. More importantly the following lessons from IPL can help.

1. IPL benefitted youngsters because they rubbed the shoulders with the best, enabling the best to come out of them. In corporate world, we need to give responsibilities early to groom leaders. This would enable the identification of future leaders.

2. IPL gave new meaning to cricket. Life is not always about a long innings. If we had time, a lot can be achieved. Its however stars who perform best under pressure. We need to identify star performers by measuring the pressures they have performed under. Not easy to do, though not wishful thinking either. Using a performance metric that also considers this parameter, it can be measured.

3. Last but not the least, organizations have to give some freedom for innovation, learning from mistake often is the best way to achieve this. Organizations that allow employees to make mistake, also stand to gain from innovation.

Times are changing, so is the ecosystem. Wonder when organizations would wake up and realise this and for their own benefit, Change !!!!

Work Life Balance

Disclaimer First - I am not an authority on this subject. However like everybody else, I have my feelings and i thought i would share my thoughts and experience.
I think every website that you come across would boast about maintaining a healthy balance on Work - Life front. However a look beyond the skin would reveal there is little organizations can do to maintain this balace. Such is the intensity of business, pace of technology and pressures from competition.

First of all thanks to the mobile phones, now blackberry's you are always hooked on mails and yeah while response times are faster it also means people are actually spending more time on work than they used to previously. Result - Burn outs. A point also echoed here

This is also becoming evident as a lot of people at the top of hierarchy are suddenly leaving their jobs across the world. This makes one wonder what organizations can do best to something which has become a verbal promise ?
Any answers? As i said before am not an expert, so seek your opinions.

Challenges of Unified Talent Management

Talent Management, a term used or misused very often by HR professionals defines the set of processes which an organization adopts to manage the life and development of its workforce.
I found a very nice blogpost on the challenges of Unified talent management in UK.
The article states that

89% of respondents indicate that talent shortages are impacting or highly impacting leadership development in their organizations.
76% expect the current talent shortage to remain the same or increase (40%) over the next 12 months.
And less than one-third (30%) have a talent management strategy in place.

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Scary situation really, and that makes me wonder whats it like with the rest of world and results are not too assuring.
Why is Talent Management failing in the first place? Is it more of a theoritical rheoteric that finds very few buyers in the organization ? What can be done to bring about an increased focus on this area?

First of all if we look at organizations, today more or less most of the organizations are in some stage of automation of their HR processes and systems. I had highlighted this in one of my previous, so this could be one reason for failure on parts of organizations to unify talent management.
However a bigger reason is the amount of analysis that goes behind setting up the " RIGHT TALENT MANAGEMENT STRATEGY", which is not easy.
Organizations need to first understand what kind of strategy would work best for them, for this they need to discover what is their Talent lever ? Is it recruitment, attrition, performance or compensation or still competencies. With the talent lever identified, strategies need to be defined in such a way that they address the talent levers and the issue around it.

This may not be so perfect and easy, organizations really need to bite and chew gigabytes of information which their systems are generating to be able to do that.
As the article quotes in end

“We need to be better at integrating a talent management approach across all aspects of business. We also need to have a well documented approach which is then owned by the business but co-authored/driven/facilitated by HR. This should be one of the major functions of an HR department.”

Reaching that perfect Talent Management state is a long road ahead and unless organizations bring all initiatives together, it may go down as yet another Jargon that HR Fraternity invented to keep itself alive, something that no HR Professional would like to hear !!!

Temporary Staffing

In view of the ongoing recession, companies are in a pressure to cut costs. One of the areas apart from cutting infrastructure and maintainence costs is to lower down the cost on Human Capital. In such a scenario, organizations have resorted to hiring temporary employees and the trend is picking up, for one it gives the employee the desired flexibility to balance their work - personal life.If you look at this relationship in a bit more details, its a Win - Win for both employees and employers.

As per an article published in a leading daily, Temporary Staffing is an industry which is around 200 Billion $ worldwide. What is really making it an attractive option ?

From Employees perspective, it gives them a clear defined deliverable to work on, they can also decide how they go about achieving their goals. The results / outcome are measurable and they can use their skills effectively to influence the outcome. They also have the choice of doing other things which interest them. Also flexibly managing the duration of the employment.
From an Employer's perspective, they do not have to worry about investing too much on the employee. It helps them manage their employee pool without bothering too much about things which rarely happen in practice - Career Plans, Development. So its hiring employees, assigning them goals, monitoring performance and rewarding them.

However this has no real impact on cost savings, as pointed out by Subhash Khare, VP (central staffing & productivity), Wipro. Sometimes, specialized skills means extra cost, however if that could mean lower cost of HR administration,companies would be willing to consider this model.
However on the hindsight, traditionlist would question the impact of longevity on performance impact and also the strategy of the organization. The right model perhaps would be a combination of both !!!

Changing HR with 2.0

Somehow I cant resist from talking about what I would like to herald as THE NEXT WAVE OF MANAGEMENT, Web 2.0 or however you would want to define it would change HR and the way HR contributes to the organization. In this article i would look upon some paradigm changes and what they would mean for HR.

1. Communities development - Its no more going to help if you worry about employees, its going to be about communities spread across organization.Community Development would be the order of the day.

2. Recruiting through networks - Recruitment would not happen the traditional way, recruiters would use social networks more and more to quick hire top talent.

3. Performance Management - Change onto a more ongoing , regular form of appraisals. Appraisal would not be an annual exercise only. Also it would be real time collaborative assessment as compared to a linear exercise.

4. Knowledge Management - One function that would really become important and transform a lot from its current form. Managing information and communities would get integrated into the KM function.

5. Compensation Management - With real time information being available on compensation, expect analysis to be precise and therefore more realistic benchmarking on compensation.

Thats not all, this all is happening at a time when the Generation Y of employees is getting ready to explode in workplace. So challenge would be on how to balance a new found Ecosystem with the aspirations and ambitions of a transformed workplace. Exciting times indeed and we would all see it in the times to come !!!

Talent Glocalisation

McKinsey Quarterly recently published an article on why MNC's struggle to manage talent. Some of the very interesting findings of this study indicate that the biggest problem faced by MNC's is in moving their employees across geographies. So in effect organizations are practicing Globalization but when it comes to Talent, its Glocalization !!!

This made me think on how best organizations can leverage their talent globally . I present some thoughts below

1. Talent Visibility - Talent Visibility to the leaders is still a big challenge. Consider this, you have a top performer, he may be at best be known to your country or region management. What beyond that? How do you nurture and leverage this person more effectively across borders. Not many HR Organizations would have answer to this

2. Skills Development - Its essential for MNC's to focus on identifying top performers who they would want to train on cross culture issues so as to train them better for global roles.

3. Global Roles - A lot of times, organizations do not develop proper succession plans and therefore global leaders to be are left struggling. Proper Leadership identification and giving a feel of global roles to top talent is essential.

4.Talent Pools - HR Organizations should have complete visibility into the top talent of the each of their businesses across regions. There should be special focus dedicated to these specific groups.

5. Cross boundary exposure - This can be defined in as many ways but the focus is on ensuring that top talent gets international exposure in multiple roles. This is the best way to ensure that enough exposure is given and gives a person also enough challenges.

Having said this, all along this article I spoke about top talent, but what should be the measure to assess the same ? Potential or Performance ??
I believe a combination of both, however more stress on Potential would definitely help.

Competencies - The Essential Evil

A reader yesterday mailed me asking me what roles competencies play and how important they are in the current environment.
Good Question Sanjeev, your question got me thinking on two lines

1. What have organizations done to implement competency models ?
2. Have they done it correctly and how best they are using it ?

First of all competencies in itself is a very intricate subject, just like Balanced Score Cards (something i would be talking about soon in my next posts)
First for the uninitiated, a very simple definition of competencies is

Competencies are Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes that define a successful behaviour at Workplace.

So there are three elements (KSA), Successful, behaviour which can define what a competency is. Organizations face a tough challenge defining competencies on their own. Once they have done that, the next big issue is identifying and quantifying those successful behaviours and rating them.
Once an organization tries to achieve this, the next challenge lies with identifying and rating these behaviours with the individuals who occupy these positions. So for ex : If there are 10 managers, each of them has to be rated on these behaviours. QUITE A TASK !!!!
Why then are competencies at all important ?
Well if you look at the Talent issues that organizations face today, competencies form an essesntial toolset to identify, deploy, develop and retain talent.
How do organizations go about setting a competency based system. Some of the essentials are

1. Begin Small - Its a change in the way you measure, first take a few jobs. Set up the model for them and then take it to other jobs.

2. Have your own structure - Many versions exist, Competency tree, competency unit, competency, behaviours. Choose the one that best suits your requirements.

3. Use your own definitions - Definitions of behaviours are important as they need to be consistent with the business of the organization.

4. Use a suitable scale - What works good for others may not be good for you, chose your own scale - Weighted, rating, evaluation.

5. Strike a balance between Soft Skills and Job related skills - You would definitely want the best guy in your organization to have a combination of both.

Lastly, do seek professional help. Competency Management is a domain area where lot of HR Consulting folks are doing a lot of work. Its best to use their skills than venture onto a trip of your own.

Silos or Integrated System

I would like to quote an interesting study which states that most of the organizations do not go beyond implementing base transaction systems.This is after organizations invest a huge amount in procuring and implementing world class systems. So are they not suppose to use it fully ?

In my experience, I have seen very large (20000+) employees organizations that have more than 20 systems in their HR Environment. Now thats a huge number, I always wonder why do organizations invest in a world class solution and why do they still love to live in a multi system environment.(One for HR, One for recruitment etc)

It all begins with legacy that an organization brings along. Lets see how this happens. When an organization is small, they have perhaps got HR as files / excel sheets as medium of storing employee records. However, as the organization grew in scale so did the needs and they decided to get a system on need basis, so if recruitment became a need, IT would design a system to handle it. What happens with this ? systems keep getting added to organization landscape and there is no escaping the fact that overtime with growth in the organization, these systems become unscalable and difficult to manage. However how do organizations do away with something they have been so comfortable with for years ? (Change is not easy).

So today its not uncommon to see hetrogeneous landscape where multiple systems are order of the day. However little is done to finetune the landscape or switch to a single source of truth. Till that happens, multiple versions of employee information would continue to exist and hamper the process of effective decision making and maximizing returns on workforce.

The Fallacy of HRMS Evaluations

Are you evaluating HRMS ? If yes, this is a must read.
I recently met a friend of mine, who was wondering what went wrong with their HR Implementation ? They started in the right earnest, allocated all resources, yet the HRMS project failed to impact !!!
Who is to blame ? Software ?? Implementation partner?? the organization implementing it or people who are behind it ?

A lot has to do with the preparation that goes into identifying which system would best meet the requirements. Lets see where it all starts.

An organization identifies its need for HRMS and the IT / HR team starts interacting with Vendors and implementation partners (System integrators or SI) as they are called.
The process of creating requirement is the first step, normally referred to as the RFP or RFI. This is the first and most critical step, however Organizations are in a fix here...they dont have an iota of idea what the system can do for them, so the best method is to get a system study done by the SI, what is not however kept in mind here while creating the RFP document is how the system would potentially impact processes in future. So system is made for today, while the organization is looking at the future when it wants to implement it !!! Quite a Paradox, isn't it ?

It does not end here, based on these RFP specs, Demo requirements are identified. Vendors and / or Implementation partners use their skills and knowledge of the product to do the demos. However,when an organization actually implements, its user requirements and not features that take precedence. Another case of incorrect evaluation.

If thats the case, how should organizations actually evaluate systems ?

1. Whats best for others, may not be the best for you !! Select your own criteria and define your own needs.

2. Define the outcomes and work backwards on what would fit best.

3. Set up a dedicated team early enough to aid the project.

4. Identify a project sponsor (internal) for project to run smoothly.

For the project to be evaluated successfully (also rightly), the following must be adopted.

1. Identify a core evaluation team.

2. Identify requirements (current and future) and create a RFP based on that.

3. Give weightage to the product evaluation, implementation partner skills and the resource utilization. (After all you want a successful implementation).

4. Define a total score taking into consideration various factor and weightages for evaluation.

5. Identify a system evaluator (if you dont have the skills inside your organization).

A successful project has its foundation on strong evaluation. What organizations need to do is to balance their current environment with future requirements. If thats done, implementations would be more successful.

Blogger in Command :)

Gautam has written a post on Chief Blogging Officer here. Sounds fascinating !!! ? Yes, it does and if you look at how some organizations are also investing in it, it also seems realistic.
However, there is a need to inspect this more.
The question is not "Do we really need a CBO " (If thats the acronym or whatever other name we might use), but how best we can use such a person both for internal and external purposes. I would like to touch upon former, as a lot has been written about external purposes here

We do see an increasing number of people connecting around the world with blogs. Blogs are being seen as a powerful medium of connecting. Organizations are dedicating space for blogs on their webesites and encouraging information exchange. This would create virtual communities of thoughts, this is where a CBO would be playing a role- How to channelise these communities in a meaningful way for the benefit of the organization.

Another aspect would be Blog Information Management, blogs would produce a lot information, expert opinions. A Chief Blogging officer and may be his team (Lets call it Blogging Department for now) would need to identify experts, there may also be a need for a corporate guideline on blogging and policies related to blogs. Once done, there would be a need to sync it up with KM initiatives so that information is available in a systematic manner. Not to forget how to create Social communities (internal and external), manage them and also at the sametime identify newer sources of connecting, communicating and sharing.
Now what kind of skills would be required. Would the person who would be made a CBO need to have a blog of his own. Well that may not be a real criteria, but somebody who understands blogging world would definitely be a right candidate, coupled with a lot of other competencies including the likes of networking.
Quite a task ? But thats why roles are created, isnt it ?
So definitely a good career option for those who want to extend their careers to a new dimension !!!

Employee Engagement

I saw this and it made me remind of something I had presented on one of the conferences in India. It was about Employee Engagement and what would be really critical for managing this aspect in future.
Lets look at the definition in the article and why it is rated as best in the blog.

WHEN THEY ARE THERE,THEY ARE THERE.

This is because Employee Engagement is a measure of a critical metric, retention. Studies done by Cedar Crestone, Tower Perrin have proved beyond doubt that higher the engagement level, less likely is the employee to leave the organization.

Even more interesting is the fact that this study points to the fact that over 62 % employees globally are only moderately engaged. This is alarming, may be this is also the answer to the attrition problems organizations are faced with. But what this certainly points to a big way is that ENGAGEMENT is an area which HR Organizations globally have not focussed so much. Now, Engagement itself could have many meanings and interpretation and i find this one good.

"A heightened emotional connection that an employee feels for his or her organization, that influences him or her to exert greater discretionary effort to his or her work".

I think this definition above (taken from an unquoted source) puts it in clear terms how positive engagement can be for the organization.
However, how can organization use engagement ? Are there tools that can engage employees productively. Organizations globally have embarked upon different initiatives including KM, Collaboration for engaging employees. However the technology on offering has not been supportive of such initiatives.
However, Web 2.0 holds a promise to address some of these. Why ? Simply put its participatory web and the way it would be able to connect and leverage the connections is beyond comprehension.
How well Organizations are able to leverage the capabilities of participatory web to tackle attrition and bring about a heightened state of engagement remains to be seen..