HR Talent Shortage

Well, I was quoted in the Economic Times' Mumbai edition yesterday saying the talent shortage in HR (blogged earlier here here and here) is not an unsurmountable problem. The article was written by Ambika Naithani and called "For HR talent shortage is a personnel problem" :-)

As the HR function develops more and more specialisation, there will be specialised skills needed for the various sub-functions of HR. More and more specialists are choosing career paths that don't go anywhere near generalist functions. Today's HR talent crunch is about the shortage of specialist skills like recruitment, training and compensation expertise. So the solution is to hire people with specialised skills and develop them as HR experts.

After a reader read the article he sent an e-mail saying:

But then how HR professionals must improve their skills so that they can create and maintain their demand in market?

What are the core HR skills and functional/business skills? We can acquire core HR skills once but how to acquire different business skills as we can work in any kind of business/industry?

What is the future of HR?

To answer that question, I'll merely point to the comment on my previous post that one of India's stalwart OD consultants, Sushanta Banerjee had made:

HR texts (mostly set in the american context) offer action solutions but fields such as org theory and the basic social or behavioural sciences are rarely tapped by the HR professional. we all say knowledge is power, how does the HR community use this for itself ? secondly, while HR keeps organising and managing developmental work for others in the organisations, i have come across very few that do the same for themselves. I believe that HR ought to be the holders of valid and uptodate knowledge,understanding of people and collective processes which it must deploy for the good of the organisation including the people,as individuals as well as a community. this will however require HR to powerfully deploy its audit as well as advisory roles.focussing merely on managing systems is not enough,it will inevitably lead to a sense of low power.

That's true. HR professional hardly ever "develop" themselves. The skills that are lacking in most HR professionals (and that they hardly ever invest time in developing) are coaching and facilitating skills and consulting skills.

Update: Interview in the Hindu Business Line of Dr. Madhukar Shukla Professor, OB and Strategic Management and Chairperson, Alumni and External Linkages, XLRI on similar topics.


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The unfocused area of learning

I was talking to someone today and the person asked, "what do you think needs to be done by learning and training people to move to the next level?"

I thought about it and replied "You know, learning people have developed expertise on how to make the 2-3 days of learning programs effective. However, the critical factors to making improvements in performance is what happens prior to the program and what happens after that."
If learning people really have to develop effectiveness they need to look beyond the program and focus on the process :-)


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Yes we are support

Now can we get on with life?

Rick pointed me to his post called HR - too wimpish to drive organisations

It's true. I am quite sick of HR striving to "be a business partner", "getting a seat on the table" etc etc.

In my view there are only two "businesses" in organizations: making and selling. Everything else is "support", that includes everything from marketing to customer support to quality to top management :-)

However, I don't see other parts of an organization whining about "How can we strategically partner with the business to add value" in industry talk forums.

Instead of doing so, HR must concentrate on its core responsibilities: acquiring, developing and motivating exceptional talent, for today and for tomorrow. If the nature of work is pathetic, it's not in HR's hand to change that. If the employees don't see a long term future for themselves in the organization it's not totally HR's fault too.

So can we forget the big things and just focus on the core areas?

What is web 2.0?

Interesting video by a anthropology professor at Kansas State University

Delhi's OD Collective

Apparently some high-powered HR folks in Delhi have launched an OD collective. These include Bhaduri (HR head of Frito Lay India) , Vishwanathan (NIIT), Raja (Varadarajan, HR head of Quatrro), Sanjay Singh (Whirlpool), RV Ramanan (Metlife) Piyush Mehta (HR head of Genpact), Pavan Bhatia, (HR head of Pepsi), RV Iyer aka Venky, Gagan Adlakha Ashraf, Arjun Shekhar (all from HR consulting firm Vyaktitva).

In a very web 2.0 way they even have a blog :-) Abhijit with his post People Are Our Greatest Asses (oops ...Assets) takes a scathing look on the HR function and I hope the rest of the group also takes to blogging. This should be a fascinating conversation if it picks up.

Some snippets:

"People are our greatest assets" - usually put on posters all over the organizations that least believe in that philosophy. Ask anyone why they wanted to choose HR as their major in Business School or as a career and you get another cliche that makes me groan.

I guess those days we had to handle the animals in the zoo ourselves, unlike the new kids who get computers to do it all. No more human contact. We can now outsource the contact part of it. Someone told me that anything that can be templated can be outsourced. So I guess human contacts have just been so classified.

I am just curious. Do all functions manufacture cliches like HR does or is it just us? Do all other blokes have self doubt like we do? Well you know every now and then we will hear seminars where people ask "Is HR a Business Partner?" The answer is obviously expected to be yes if you are to be let in to join the party. But truthfully speaking the jury is still out on that one.

CoHR is up

The latest edition of the Carnival of Human Resources is up at Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership blog.

Go check it out !

Satyam's HR head to lead Marketing now

From ZDNet on Satyam's top level executive movements:

S.V. Krishnan will lead Human Resources; Pavan Kumar is Chief Technology Officer; Vijay Prasad is Chief Information Officer & Head of Soft Infra group and Hari T (former HR head) will lead Global Marketing and Communications.

Now that's a change. There's been a trend in the middle management levels of large IT and BPO firms for people from operations, sales and marketing moving into HR (specially Recruitment), but it is one of the rare occasions when a head of HR is taking over a function like Marketing.

So from the big four Indian IT services firms (TCS, Wipro, Infosys and Satyam) the only HR head who's still doing the same role he was during the Y2K madness would be Wipro's Pratik Kumar :-)

Mobile Phone Blues

It was a tough weekend for me as I managed to dunk my mobile phone in water and therefore lost most of my contact list :(

So just mail me your contact numbers at gautam.ghosh.1999 at alumni.xlri.ac.in

I utilised this opportunity to upgrade my phone too :D. That I did by scrapping two good friends who work at Nokia and giving my requirements (which basically was "reliable phone under Rs 10,000") - their verdict was unanimous - Go for the Nokia 6300. It's a sleek phone and comes with email and a free Opera browser too.

This model also has a Nokia PC suite so backing my address book and other data onto my PC and then on to the web shouldn't be an issue :-)

The other thing I noticed the two days I was without a mobile ("immobile" ;-)?) was that I didn't have too much idea about the time because my mobile phone also doubles up as my watch, alarm clock and notes application. Hmm, are traditional watch manufacturers seeing mobiles as competition? I don't think so...

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Naukri.com group launches social networking site

Well, technically Brijj has been launched by Info Edge India Limited, the holding company for Naukri.com, 99acres.com and Jeevansathi.

But seriously.. another social networking site? I'm already getting social networking fatigue managing Linkedin.com, Orkut, Facebook. I hardly check Myspace, hi5 or Minglebox these days. And no I haven't yet joined the plethora of other sites like Jhoos, Bigadda ad infinitum.

Bill Ives pointed to an interesting survey:

Doug Cornelius posted an interesting survey on his KM Space blog. He conducted a survey of law school summer associates. He said that these are preliminary results:

More than 80% have a Facebook account
Of those, 2/3 check Facebook at least once a day
Only 25% have a LinkedIn account
Of those, only 10% check LinkedIn once a week, with the rest answering rarely
Only 20% have a MySpace account
Of those, 1/4 check it once a week, with the rest answering rarely

I now have a Facebook account and recently wrote on The Emergence of Facebook for Business. I am likely to check it frequently as I like the rich context it provides. I never “check” LinkedIn but I do respond to things that come through it. I opened a MySpace account because of a friend but never check it so I guess I correlate with these findings.

Yeah, that sounds around the same things that I do too.

PwC India Audit partners in a soup

from Moneycontrol.com

Sources say that ICAI Council has referred PwC partners to disciplinary
committee in Global Trust Bank case. ICAI Council has found PwC partners prima
facie guilty of professional negligence in GTB case. Three years back when GTB
collapsed RBI has written a firm communication to the institute saying that PWC
has under provided for non performing assets. Later in an RBI inspection, it was
found that the level of NPAs were far more higher than PWC had provided for.
Pricewaterhouse partners were referred for auditing GTB in FY02
and FY03.

Three years ago Global Trust Bank, the Hyderabad based bank, collapsed amid a lot of speculation and lack of credibility - ironically, trust was its middle name. Here is a refresher.

Finding out the best consulting firms

David Maister wants to find out the same thing he did more than 20 years ago. Only, this time he's wondering if being online can help it be better.

Go ahead, if you're a consultant, tell him which firm (apart from yours) is the best managed in the industry.

Back in 1985 the results were as follows. I wonder if things have changed in 22 years

• McKinsey in strategy consulting
• Hewitt Associates in HR consulting
• Goldman Sachs in Investment Banking
• Arthur Andersen (now Accenture) in accounting-based consulting services
• Latham and Watkins in law.

HR Industry News

Mercer HR Services names COO

Hewitt Associates Report Reveals Organizations in Asia Pacific are Gearing up to Manage Employee Performance and Rewards

Employee retention is the biggest challenge in India: Accenture Indian CEOs gave the highest percentage of votes to HR as a top-three function — even higher than from what HR heads rated themselves.

India Inc is waking up to work stress

How career plans drive business

World Human Resource Outsourcing Market to Exceed US$78.8 Billion

Airtel's big email blunder

Today I received an unsolicited email from Airtel touting its Indian Independence Day based Jayahe commercial promotion. Normally I delete such mails without a second thought, but was stunned to see that Airtel's mass mail to its customers had sent such an email with email addresses visible in the to field.

Take a look (I've obscured/erased the email ids for privacy) at the screen shot of my email. Over 500 email ids were visible to potential scammers and spammers.
I hope this fiasco is limited to Airtel's AP circle and hopefully is more minimised. If any of you know higher ups in Airtel I hope you'll escalate this potentially disastrous issue to them.

Psychometric tests are useful?

Came across this post on McArthur's blog:

92% of the 200 plus recruiters surveyed find psychometric testing to be either “useful” or “very useful”. This, the report claims, is down to the suggestion that academic qualifications give little indication of how graduates will perform in the workplace especially in “soft skills” areas such as communication skills.

I for one am very very sceptical about using psychometric tests for recruitment. For one, even "well-known" tests like MBTI are advised not to be used for recruitment purposes. It presupposes that the firm has achieved to understand that only certain "types" of people will do well in certain roles. What they forget to remember is that psychometrics is not an infallible science. It mostly points a direction to a person's preferred sets of behaviors. Using it for selection and recruitment is not very different from using astrology to recruit people.

Selection must always be on the basis of a candidates' past record of achievements in similar or related roles. Tests or simulations that give a result on a job-related skill would not technically be a psychometric test.

On Collective Intelligence

On a HR egroup that I moderate someone asked recently if I knew anything about Collective Intelligence.

I had heard of swarm intelligence and discovered that collective intelligence is something similar to it.

As one can see collective intelligence is an emerging field of study, but the crux is that parts of the whole acting out of their intelligence demonstrate that the larger system acts intelligently as well.

What implications does it have for organizations. Well, I did my dissertation during my MBA on something similar - Chaos Theory - which also similarly stated that a self-organizing system which follows few very basic 'rules' can respond to complex situations.

In fact Dee Hock, who was chairman of Visa International and the systems he introduced there he is now seeks to replicate through a group called "chaordic commons"

Hock has been active in developing new models of social and business organization. He has been particularly interested in forms of organization that are neither rigidly controlled nor anarchic, a hybrid form of consensus decision-making he terms chaordic, and is author of a book on the subject, Birth of the Chaordic Age.

Out of control turnover

Kris Dunn of the HR capitalist blog points to his article on workforce.com on Good vs Bad Turnover (or employee attrition as we call it here in India).

Well, as one of my ex-bosses used to say, just that piece of data is not too useful. Managers and HR professionals must need to understand how to minimize the "bad turnover" (attrition that the organization does not want) as different from the "good turnover" (thank god the guy left!)

How to do that? Simple, my ex-boss said.

Classify the bad turnover by really going down to the reasons and seeing how much of a leeway the manager and the HR professional had in controlling that reason.

The high performer in quality wanted to make a lateral move to sales, and you couldn't give her a decent answer why she couldn't? Sorry, both the manager and the HR professional have to take the blame for that bad turnover.

However if that excellent performer in marketing needed to move to Delhi because his parents' health is not doing too well, and your organization does not have a Delhi office, then it's a case of "out of control" turnover. Don't fret.

So as a manager and a HR professional your goal should be to ensure that all the bad turnover that happens is "out of control". Perhaps one of the rare cases of Out of Control being good :-)

Where to look for innovation

Good idea - everywhere.

Except that it would be so painstaking and so time-consuming. So we look for ideas from people who (we think) should be best suited to give that idea. Someone with the rank of a VP or someone from a big name consulting firm.

As the Evil HR lady says - Sometimes the wrapper makes all the difference.

We constantly under-estimate people's capacity for being innovative and creative. Even our own.

There can be various ways that searching for the great idea should not be either painstaking or expensive. It calls for a little organizational innovation :-)

India's pampered talent?

According to Businessweek's article India's Talent Gets Loads Of TLC Indian talent seems to prefer Indian IT firms compared to MNCs like Accenture and IBM.

The article quotes:

"When I heard IBM's presentation at a job fair, they talked a lot about their brand and innovation but not much about training," says Sanjay Joshi, 22, a graduate of MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology in Bangalore. "That's why being at Infosys is the Indian middle-class dream." Building showpiece campuses the size of many U.S. colleges is just one way big Indian employers are battling to hold on to budding engineers, designers, and finance specialists. Not long ago, India's skilled labor supply seemed limitless. Today, companies face high turnover, escalating salaries, and shortages of qualified workers and managers. Less than a quarter of companies surveyed in 2006 in India by McKinsey & Co. said they were meeting recruiting needs. By 2010, McKinsey predicts, India will face a shortfall of 500,000 staff capable of doing work for multinationals. The scale of the human-resources challenge is dizzying. Six years ago, for example, Accenture Ltd. had 250 workers in India. By this fall, it expects to reach 35,000. To keep staffers happy, Accenture assigns each a career counselor and offers some 10,000 online courses, from languages to Harvard Business School classes. "People here are driven," says Rahul Varma, Accenture's senior human resources director in India. Satisfying high career expectations can be tough. Just a few years ago, IBM , Microsoft , Hewlett-Packard , and Coca-Cola could lure all the top Indian grads they needed on the strength of their names. "Now multinationals are losing talent because they made false promises about careers," says Soumen Basu, who heads Manpower's India office. Some companies have grown so fast that it's common to find 25-year-olds managing 23-year-olds who are managing 21-year-olds. But as India's tech services industry matures, such rapid advancement can't be guaranteed.

I think that's oversimplifying things. The employment branding of an MNC is nothing to sneeze at. Even the quality of work being done in India by Accenture, IBM, Cisco, Texas Instruments is very high in the value chain. In fact, a European consulting giant after moving its Technology and Outsourcing back end to India is now toying with the idea of having some Finance and HR consultants travel on work for its UK practice but be based in India.

The Google R&D team in India apparently came out with the Google Finance application. TI's high end chip design work happens in India. The enterprise application consulting business of a large US Big 4 firm is dependent on India to survive. If the Indian office were to shut down they wouldn't be competitive in the US on cost basis.

I am still not willing to give a thumbs down to the MNCs. Most of them are taking the battle straight to the Indian outsourcing firms.

UK firms start focusing on non-financial measures

“Companies begin to reward ‘green’ execs” in Accountancy Age (6 August 2007). “Companies move to non-financial measures for executive pay” from PriceWaterhouseCoopers Media Centre (via EZ Executive news service)

TRENDS
Executive compensation: firms weight bonuses towards non-financial measures

A growing number of U.K. companies are rewarding top executives on the basis of non-financial measures, according to a recent report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The trend is moving away from purely financial targets to include broader corporate activities like customer satisfaction levels, employee engagement and environmental measures. The study of executive pay at the UK’s top 100 FTSE companies revealed that 31 percent of executive pay packages were based on such criteria in 2006/2007, versus just 13 percent in 2005/2006. Conversely, the number of top UK firms offering annual bonus plans based exclusively on financial measures has halved in the past year, falling from 33 percent in 2005/2006 to 17 percent in 2006/2007.

This was bound to happen. Organizations are moving away from purely financial performance (which at the best is post-facto) to more comprehensive performance measurement like Balanced Scorecards (which take into account customer feedback, employee engagement and learning and innovation too). Once that happens it is quite natural that executive variable pay also starts getting linked to more than financial measures.

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Hiring good people

Prasad raises an important point. The thinking that the way to manage knowledge workers in turbulent times is to "Hire good people and get out of their way" is flawed.

That's because the definition of "good" is influenced by the history and context of what has happened in the past.

That's my essential grouse against approaches like competency mapping. Even when it focuses on the future, it relies on 'experts' to forecast the future. And we all know how reliable forecasts about the future are :)

Incredibly, the prescriptions of hiring on strengths and competencies and a working definition of "good" will help most in organizations that can extrapolate their growth from the past, and not those that are experiencing non-linear discontinuous growth.

In fact, I was talking recently to a HR leader of the telecom space in India and he said "You know, if an organization moves from the project stage to the consolidation and then to the maintenance stage, the fastest growing industries in India - telecom, insurance and banking - are always in project stage, for the last 9 years!"

Conventional thinking would have hired people who are good at consolidation and maintenance after the first 2-3 years in such industries, but that would have slowed growth.

Have you handled growth at places that have grown discontinuously? What approach worked the best?

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Penelope is a Cool Friend

Even Tom Peters thinks so :-) Penelope Trunk, blogger and author of the Brazen Careerist has been added to the list of Tom Peters' Cool Friends.

Here's her interview on the site. As she says:

I thought my audience was young people in the workplace. But, in fact, management loves buying my book. They buy it in huge quantities to understand how to recruit and retain Generation Y. So my audience is Generations Y, X, and the people who have to deal with them.

That's good to hear. Management wanting understand? Something is right with the world :-)

So looks like Penelope is well on her way of moving from being a columnist and author to being a consultant. We'll watch how her career develops now :-))

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Abhijit Bhaduri on Talent Management

Abhijit Bhaduri the HR head of Frito Lay India, author and blogger who I have interviewed earlier talks on the principles of Talent Management here.

The most profound insight in the article was this:

The leadership team’s vision of the Talent Management Strategy is the starting point. Having said that, the CEO and the HR leader need to blend the business strategy and the part that the talent pool will play in the realization of that strategy. Finally the employees need to be the brand ambassadors for the Talent Management strategy to be successful.

In most successful organizations that are admired as places to work, the leadership is pivotal in making that a reality. It is not possible for a HR leader to be effective without the support of the CEO and other leaders. The role models for all employees is the leadership. Not just in what they say, but most importantly by what they do.

If the CEO and other leaders are perceived as supporting the talent management strategy they become role models for the rest of the employees. That's because such behavior is discretionary behaviour and not hard wired into the job descriptions of people. To help people to exhibit such organizational citizenship behavior the leaders have to set the agenda.

Employment Branding and the unhappy blogger employee

I've blogged earlier about how employment branding is entering a new phase in the web 2.0 world. Employees and prospective employees who are turned away both have the option of voicing their disgruntlement and displeasure for the whole world to search online for posterity.

Another example that Matt Martone blogs about is the anonymous employee blog.

Yes, I agree with Matt that it's time HR woke up to the reality of how social media is going to shape the organization's employment brand. It's no longer enough to send out only press releases to a couple of journalists and then relax.

The workforce of tomorrow is reading and contributing to the conversation. They have much less of a respect for what the pink papers say. For them what a Scoble (in the US) or what Rashmi (in India) blog about is probably going to carry more weight.

So here's a primer on who the biggest bloggers are in India. It's time for HR to join the conversation.

Facebook doesn't want to Joiner

Sorry for the awful pun, but Harry Joiner, the Marketing headhunter invited 4600 of his email contacts on to Facebook, and the folks at Facebook banned him.

IMHO, that was a very harsh decision. Social networks, specially social networks that slowly develop into business networks will have some 'nodes' or people who connect to a large number of people. Recruiters are one such people. Others would be VCs.

Even someone like me who is neither has 1200+ contacts on Linkedin and 930+ contacts on Orkut. Facebook is not yet very popular in India, so my contact numbers are less than 200 there :)

Facebook's action seems quite unilateral without giving Harry a chance to explain himself or to see that the large number of his contacts are a legitimate outcome of his being a recruiter and not a spammer.

Learning from this episode, when you join a social network, upload your contacts list and invite people who already are there on the network. Inviting contacts who have no idea what Linkedin, hi5, orkut, facebook are can be counter productive.

Aastha's Confessions

In her post Aastha muses:

HR/OD the way they function today can get to be an incessant fight against mediocrity. All noble and everything. But there are days when its just so damn boring! Who wants to spend everyday of their lives trying to work around office-jerks, reduce the impact of management-centric thinking, and widen the crevices in the ceilings so that the people who do actually work can get some more oxygen in there! Oh well, I do.

So OD/HR folks what would be your ideal job description? What would you love to do? I think it's also skewed because of the kind of people we are. To use the MBTI typology, an INTP (like me ;-) would love to architect OD solutions, while an ENFP would love to work with people, optimistically, and make it a possibility.

But personality type is only one input to answering that question "What is of interest to me?" The other inputs are things that role models have done, what choices one has made in life and the life goal , if one has one :-)

Coworking the best of both worlds of work

A place for lots of independent professionals to get together and work. One of the first responses a friend who left 8 years of corporate work for a freelancing career said "I miss my coffee machine so much!" So for all those folks comes the concept of coworking. The PSFK blog talks about it:

According to the Coworking Community Blog, coworking is “a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents.” Though not strictly defined, a coworking event is generally comprised of a fluid group of freelancers, bedouin workers, and other transient collaborators from a variety of industries (though many or often involved in technology or media) coming together to work on their independent projects while sharing ideas, inspiration, and resources.

I have a feeling a lot more Indian professionals are looking at freelancing opportunities, so if anyone has bright ideas for a event in Hyderabad let me know :-)

The Informal Organization

Well, we all knew it intuitively but it's good to see it confirmed by a large survey. The question is, so what? What will organizations do differently if they see this report?

A new survey of American workers confirms what many have long suspected: Informal relationships, rather than formal management structures, are where work really gets done, problems are solved and companies gain competitive advantage.

The “informal organization” is also what keeps people upbeat about work. According to the survey conducted by Katzenbach Partners LLC, a management consulting firm that works with leading global companies to achieve breakthroughs in organizational performance, the informal organization gives workers confidence that they can solve problems and the encouragement that they contribute to their company’s success.

“The lesson from this research is that the informal organization – the way work gets done outside formal organizational charts and processes– is real, and that employees recognize it and value it,” said Zia Khan, a Principal with Katzenbach Partners, and co-author of a major upcoming report on the informal organization. “The question is, does management also value it? Our research shows that the informal organization is a strategic asset executives need to actively manage instead of leaving to chance.”