IS Your HR all HR?

Building an effective HR department is more than you thought and ever attempted. To get a sense of how wrong you'd been all along, ask for a tour of HR departments of companies your admire and be prepared to get surprised. They don't comprise of HR professionals alone, the senior you go you'd find even lesser of them, in my last week visit to a top corporate, I met top two layers of HR department fully comprising of non-HR executives, in fact all techies :)

 Single most reason for such a mix is clearly a need for HR department to play leading role in business goals achievement, which may not be an HR expertise area considering the kind of education HR undertakes at B'school and their limited think connect with strategy formulation. Most of early years of HR professionals are spent in operational, downline rigor like calling candidates, coordinating interviews, processing attendance or putting together training facility and logistics. Limited participation of top management, specially the entrepreneur or CEO in driving HR function eventually leads to isolation of HR teams from business strategy, resulting in HR experience being devoid of think capacity development. So a 10 years experience professional would have done more of execution rather than thinking and planning.

 Let's see what all might be needed as expertise in your HR capabilities. Understanding of business modeling, commercial modeling, key business drivers and key accountabilities. Ability to create people budgets to achieve business plans, determine key influencing factors for talent as per competitive landscape, devise key initiatives and programs to achieve competitive advantage. Create clear actionable operational plan to attract, retain and develop talent in line with 3 to 5 year business plan. Ability to drive communication programs, media plan and content for engaging with talent both inside and outside the company. Ability to listen and continuously evaluate work place relevance to team members.

 It's very clear that you are unlikely to find HR professionals who would carry such capabilities, not that the an't any; there ain't enough. So creating a multifunctional HR function is a good way to develop an efficient, business focussed HR. It would also contribute to leadership pipeline development in the organization just like any other cross functional movement.

 Not all is lost for those who have an all HR department, you can begin with some cross functional training for your HR, it may take long but it's the right direction. By the way when was last that you sent your HR for training :)

 

Tagged Entrepreneurship HR Hiring Human resources Motivation Organization Organization culture Team building Workplace performance

Proof of Performance Intention

Last month plugHR made a significant shift towards its performance preparedness. Taking leaf from Military, plugHR made some items as "issue items" in Project Manager inventory, a step that takes plugHR Managers on a different level on day one at work. It took managers a week to digest the move (possibly HR lived without them for too long) but the benefits are for all to see now.

Ofcourse these steps are simple, almost natural to a large professional population, taking it to HR was one move though. So if the idea to work at plugHR crosses your mind, here's a quick list of things you'd be expected to be ready with.

1. plugHR asks you whether you use a mobile phone with push mail facility (blackberry or their cheaper counterparts). If you don't or don't intend to, we gladly pay for your coffee and end the discussion there. In plugHR language, you are not even ready to perform even at intention level, hence we save ourselves from your long stories of imaginative bravado. Do we provide you with such phones? Of course not, just the way we don't buy you clothes, or shoes or laptops. If you don't own either of these, you were not thinking of working anyways.

2. We push lot of learning content to our team through webinars and other interactive medium that requires laptops, headphones, speakers, ability to put them together and login into interactive sessions. Here we do give you one training considering there are still business schools in India that don't give a damn to technology.

3. We use online project management tools off the cloud and you won't run a day if you can't walk in the clouds. Again we do run a demo, but running you do. Lot of it is simple, my 7 year old daughter runs some of them well, but you need to get over the freeze.

This is not an exhaustive list but this states the point that I am trying to make. For a professional, preparedness matters and we check for that. We treat your selection of tools as a Proof of Performance Intention. If you come with it, we'll ensure that you perform and grow and grow others and build organizations. Thats what HR is all about isn't it?

To check whether you fit at plugHR or not, write in prashant@plughr.com

Tagged HR Hiring India Jobs Organization Organization culture Performance Management

SMEs offer great experience - do they?

Last month, I attended two efforts around understanding human resource’s resistance towards working with small & medium industry. First as a panelist at SME mentoring session put together by Dare & Dell at Bangalore and more recently at SME roundtable held at WE School Mumbai. Incidentally while two forums were slightly different in their participation and agenda, I could see a common pattern emerging.

In both, amidst lot of democratic distribution of knowledge & sympathy, I could sense a somewhat frustrated cry from SMEs around the fact that professionals including fresh MBAs do not like to join SMEs. In Bangalore discussion, MNCs were blamed for bringing this curse on Indian SMEs while in Mumbai, way and means were being discussed to push young MBAs by force into SME workplaces.

There was talk abound, of the great work experience that awaits professionals once they join SMEs.

Somehow, I hold a slightly different view and I did raise it in both the forums but may be I couldn’t say it enough. So here it is once again.

Let’s for a moment look at a typical SME set up that one can see, on any bad day walking through some by-lane of Andheri East in Mumbai. The workplace would for sure look far from inviting and one can be almost certain to be greeted by a rude, smelly, cluttered reception. If you feel thirsty or get nature’s call, you can rest assured to catch an infection without much effort. Imagine how motivating this workplace would be for professionals to come in every day and gain that valuable experience.

Now, in most cases, during interview not much would be told about the role & career progressions, in fact the whole discussion might revolve around how part of money would be based on performance. If you expect that you’d be told about performance parameters, you’re being a typical MBA. Your interviewer may not have any idea about what kind of targets exit in business plan; in fact business plan itself might not exist.

If you join, don’t expect good appointment letters, Induction is a joke and training – you are supposed to have taken during MBA.

Now frankly, I haven’t met many young MBAs who would have slogged to get through a competitive exam and then read best of management work through two years, dreaming about a career opportunity at an SME of the kind I just helped visualize above. So my take is that rather than focusing on hiring MBAs, SMEs would do well to sponsor few of their existing employees to evening education and they’d do well by joining one such class themselves.

I am not saying that SMEs do not offer good experience, may be they do, but you can’t figure that out in absence of any communication around it. Also absence of basics and indulgence of top management in mundane stuff completely gets professionals wondering how long will the ship sail; it doesn’t sink you’d say but remember the experience of turbulence during flights; now imagine traveling like that all through.

SMEs must look inside and focus on turning themselves bit more attractive to be able to attract talent. Blaming MNCs or blaming MBAs for getting attracted to great workplaces won’t help. Good news is that its not all that impossible but that’s for another day….....

Tagged Business HR Hiring Human resources MBA Management SMB SME Team building

Slowdown can get you more garbage

So three months into slowdown now, have you started getting brilliant people easily in your company. I am not surprised if your answer is no. If I ask, have you seen clear sign on better performance from new, improved employees who are joining now and your answer is no, I am not surprised again.
There's something so fundamental about attracting & engaging talent that market conditions seldom play significant role here. You have to answer one simple question, "why should someone join your company" and this question remains valid as long as the number of workplaces in the world do not shrink down to one.
So in absence of this answer, it would remain a challenge to attract & engage talent. Do not mistake attracting & engaging talent with hiring, so may still be able to hire. But its highly expensive to run the company with just hired employees and not the "attracted & engaged" ones. The behavior of engaged employees is very very different from the hired ones and most of the time when you are complaining about your employees its this difference that you are talking about.
So lemme add a few pointers about how you can try to build attraction:
1. Its a no brainer that if you can contruct a clear strong core purpose around your business existence, nothing attracts better. NGOs, Revolutionaries use this always.
2. You can be bigger than your competitor thus can offer people learning, training, handholding, bigger team, clear growth path....or you can be smallere than your competitor thus can offer them flexibility, multitasking opportunity, nearness to top management, less hierarchy etc.
3. You can be easy to reach office, fewer day's work office, no-office, fun office, open office, food at office, green-office, garage-office, but it must be attractive for one reason or other.
4. Again a no-brainer, talented people would expect you to know your numbers right and if your numbers seem too less for even their ambitions, they may not get attracted. When was the last time you got excited because someone was a chasing a business idea that could get as big as Rs.10 Lakh.
These are just thought triggers, point is, you must find answer to "why should someone work for you" to be able to attract talent. Is that enough? I am not sure, but its the essential. Till then keep hiring :)
Tagged Entrepreneurship Hiring Motivation Organization culture Talent Team building