IIM ROHTAK HUMANE-R CLUB
Presents
IMPRESSIONS November edition
humane.r@iimrohtak.ac.in
CONTENTS People Management for new age Organizations Data-Driven HR Decisons
People Management for New Age Organizations Employees are a strategic asset. Organizations that start with this premise get the best of People and the best of their People! A new age organization is also considered to be a new organization, while the article may be relevant to all organizations it is more pertinent to new age organizations. Let us start by defining New Age organizations: Last 5 years of being founded Establishing topline and bottom-line i.e. setting up systems, processes and people to run the business Continually evolving product/services to cater to market demand Relatively less known What could be potential People related challenges in such an organization? We examine by taking an Employee Lifecycle view Employee Lifecycle The boxes with red text are processes when the employee is outside the organization vs the rest is when the employee is inside the organization. I am using the term ‘Employee Decommissioning’ deliberately, this is analogous to a situation where we demission a machine and take extraordinary care to do that. Same way, we must take extraordinary care for an employee too. What would be the key areas to focus in each of these stages, with respective challenges and strategies to overcome those?
Post Partum
Talent Acquisition & Onboarding
Talent acquisition and onboarding: The organization is not well known, is building strengths and in the process failing too! People are joining and leaving at a faster pace and there isn’t sufficient time to talk about career success stories. This is where the ‘Purpose’ of the organization takes importance. When an organization has clearly defined Purpose as to why they exist, that instills a sense of pride in the employees/prospective employees. People to whom the Purpose motivates are willing to join and work towards a common cause. E.g. Digital Payments, E-Gov Services, Holistic Healing, Primary Education are some examples Therefore, the Vision/Mission of such an organization, that identifies and articulates its Purpose becomes an important tool in Talent Acquisition/Onboarding ventures. Making Employee productive: It is safe to assume that a relatively new organization would be ‘experimenting’ , with business models, products/services and its own management processes. In such a high paced and often chaotic environment making a new joiner productive poses significant challenges.
TRUST is not just a five lettered word. It is a very important ingredient at this stage. During the acquisition process, the talent acquirer ‘interviews’ the candidates not only to ascertain their hard skills needed for a job but also ‘fitment’; from a cultural and mindset perspective. When the acquirer gains Trust in the candidate an offer is made. More importantly, the candidate is also evaluating the acquirer and Trust becomes important there too. The candidate would Trust the acquirer on their Purpose, Vision/Mission and the promises made during the evaluation process. It is a two way street! Similarly, when the successful candidate joins, a Trust equation is set across all directions, with boss, with peers and with subordinates. Hence this Trust forms a Grid that supports the organization and helps the new joiners understand ‘how things are done here’ and become productive. I am not undermining the need for formal training , either through classroom, virtual, or on the job. Those are very important, though Trust is what binds all of it together. Employee Performance Management and Rewards & Recognition: When there is Trust, it is safe to assume that it is a culture of transparency. Seniors provide constructive feedback and insecurity has no room. Transparency helps. Let us not fool ourselves with ‘anonymous’ 360 feedbacks and tight process guardrails on performance improvement. They help in large organizations but for organizations in consideration here, Transparency is the name of the game. A culture of Trust ensures Transparency. The organization wants to grow and wants its people to grow with the common sense of Purpose. Rewards & Recognition may necessarily not be financial, esp it the organization is trying to establish itself. In those cases, Recognition takes precedence and Rewards like public appreciation help motivate the employees. Careful thought on these areas differentiate a “people centric’ organization vs others.
Employee Growth is all about Learning. New skills, their application, new technology and understanding the dynamics of the business environment. With these skills comes organizational growth, in terms of role, title, pay etc. Organizations who evolve continually are able to provide such opportunities. Key question is this evolution, can it derail the organization from its path of Purpose? Potentially yes! Therefore, the Organizational Leaders keep a close eye on how they are evolving. Growth is also about building skills that are ‘market relevant’. And the culture of Transparency ensures that an organization acknowledges that employees will leave at some point. Hence skills imparted to the employee and acquired by them need to have an inside-out and an outside-in view. This will come naturally when an organization is establishing itself in the marketplace. The Trust factor decides whether an employee will leave or not. High Trust ensures the bond between employee and employer. In cases where the employee decides to leave, the decommissioning process, when overridden by values of Trust and Transparency becomes a pleasant experience , for both parties and also keep the path of return open! Last but not the least, just like we keep in touch with our friends and neighbors and acquaintances from long periods of time, similarly organizations that remain connected with the employees who have left would potentially benefit that the organizations who don’t. Finally, an important aspect to consider is, what is the Cost of doing all this? And is that Cost justified? Acknowledging that employees are strategic assets and articulating that through company values is a great way of allocating budgets to People programs. I was fortunate to work for an organization twenty years ago who were aligned with this thought process and committed 50% of their profits to People related benefits, therefore I can say first hand that the philosophy works!
To summarize, for a new age company, key elements of success with People are 1. Articulating a Purpose, leading to a sense of pride in work 2. Fostering a culture of Transparency 3. Building a Trust grid 4. Continually evaluating their ‘reason to exist’ in light of organizational evolution 5. Learning, with an inside out view as well as an outside in view As organizations scale up, challenges of a different kind start to creep up. In other words, the points mentioned above start to become difficult to execute and hence focus shifts to execution. Building scales of economy and overcoming physical laws that govern scale e.g. A founder cannot meet every employee personally after the organization attains a certain size. For New Age Organizations, focusing on these basics will help them attract & retain the best talent.
Sameer Mathur
DATA-DRIVEN HR DECISIONS Data is the new oil and HR domain is inching towards a new revolution‘HR 4.0’. Industry 4.0 is starting to change the face of the technology and the world and HR is following suit. As we may call it, HR 4.0 is all about data and information. Today, HR is seen not only doing transactional work analysis but also transformational one. According to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2016, 77 percent of the executives consider people analytics as a priority, this number is up from the previous year.55% of organisations have not taken action to create a clear narrative about the future of their workforce and automation.According to a Linkedln article named “People management: Data and Analytics will change it forever”, recent research has shown that only 23% of companies have HR systems that can provide sufficient data for measuring the execution of their business strategy.Data drives the processes in HR such as Recruitment and Selection, Compensation strategies, Human Resource Planning, absenteeism, Training and Development and any more. But data and technology can have blind spots also. Let us see how data helps and how it doesn’t help.
1.DATA IN RECRUITMENT Data has made the recruiting easier, some companies such as those in hospitality or airlines industry which employ a large number of people, these days use bots to shortlist the resume and CVs butthere is a catch. For example, an HR can come across a doctored CV wherein the data and the numbers would show the resume is perfect but the HR has to analyse in depth, the CV with his subject-matter knowledge and interpretation. An example can be “ Software engineer at YYYY Company, Hyderabad from August, 2016 till date”, this till date can be taken up as the present date, if not mentioned in the algorithm and then the HR needs to find out what the till date mean, and if the till date is a back date then the reason of prospective employee for leaving the last organisation, if at all worked before would need to be analysed.So, CV shortlisting decisions must be based on the data collected plus the analysis put forth by the HR subject specialists.
2. DATA IN SURVEYS Some big IT giants conduct surveys once a year to know about the morale, working conditions, supervisor, team environment and issues of the employees. The data collected through the survey is then worked upon and suitable actions are taken to mitigate the employees’ concerns but the surveys cannot be completely reliable since some employees may not fill the accurate data or can fill the data with all positive things just because he/she has recently got the highest grade in the performance appraisal and the situation can be reversed if he/she has got the lowest grade.So before deducing and making decisions basis the authenticity and accuracy of the survey, all the factors, positive or negative affecting the employees’ reaction to the survey need to be taken into account. However, report by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that 82% of organizations planned to either begin or increase their use of big data in HR before the end of 2018 because data makes HR decisions easier in many aspects.
3. DATA FOR PEOPLE’S MANAGEMENT An article in the Forbe’s magazine says that Google gives staff free meals, paid holiday allowances, access to ‘nap pods’ for snoozing. All these decisions were taken by Google to increase employee satisfaction. And these decisions were made basis the data on theemployees of Google. Here the data has been successfully analyzed to make decisions on people’s management. An article in Linkedln says that the companies make sure they are using correct data to find out the right talent, with the right skills and competencies and technology and retain the valuable resources and keep them motivated and happy.
4. DATA IN EVALUATION OR PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT The proponents of algorithmdriven data decisions would say that decisions made through data such as those in performance management and evaluation are bias-free but there is another dimension to the algorithms. It says that the algorithms can be trained to act in a specified way by its creators such that biases can also come up even when making a and analyzing decisions by the algorithms. For example, a person from a particular race can train the algorithm to show high performance of a person from the same race, thereby giving rise to biases in performance management. The same can be true if a particular organization is male-dominated and thus there can be data-driven biases against the women in performance management.
5. DATA IN HUMAN SENSE-MAKING OF EMPLOYEES An article published in Journal of Business Ethics provides an insight of how data-driven decisions can have effects on human sense-making. An increasing reliance on prescriptive data decision-making can make the employees doubt their intuition, cognitive abilities, validity of self-generated data, critical reasoning and emotions thereby impacting their belief in their own capabilities. As a consequence, it can harm a person’s integrity as there can be heavy dependence of the humans on the reliability of the machinegenerated data and related results.
6. DATA HAS OBJECTIVITY BUT LACKS MORALITY AND CREATIVITY Data -driven decisions provide for objectivity in handling various HR-driven decisions such as employee absenteeism and presenteeism, recruitment, candidate attractiveness to the organization through various social media channels and it has quite been successful but the decisions which require morality, understanding human behavior, circumstances and context , inspiring leadership, morality, providing alternate solutions (when the data shows only a particular set frame of solutions), should have a human and ‘personnel’ thread to it. Machines give numbers from a scale of minus infinity to plus infinity but it leaves behind the emotions that come into picture when a person is subjected to minus to plus infinity.
Machines lack emotional intelligence and that is where human takes the lead. Humans can understand the dilemma, situations, background and context in which the other human is standing and thus can delve deep into his aspect while relying om machines can only make that human stand in the round-boundary of never-ending numbers.
7. DATA IN SOCIAL MEDIA Social media handles and websites generally target active job-seekers since they actively search for the jobs on the social media portals and their history in the form such as cookies can be traced and give insights and inkling to the organizations / employers about the people looking actively for the position(s) opened in their company.A report on recruitment trends found that 48.8% of recruiters had trouble placing candidates in the IT, engineering, healthcare, and manufacturing industries. And making passive jobseekers to apply for the job would require decisions which are not entirely data-driven, such as decisions about ‘talking’ to the passive users about the culture of the company through word of mouth, building relationships with the passive job seekers so as to attract them to their company. Also, when a social crisis happens, data can show you how many users are affected and how people are responding to the current situation’s gravity and problems. The data can show how many people are feeling what kind of emotions currently, by taking the help of social media data but all this has to be accompanied by a sure-shot, humanitarian(in some situations), ‘connecting’ to the people strategy to rebuild the brand or for that matter, save its reputation, if need be. For example, if there is a plane crash, then the airlines company can be at the target spot with the those affected, the kin of the victims, the general public, and also the whole world. The data can give us the information about the emotions of all the stakeholders and the general public, how people are reacting to the unfortunate situations, how the general sentiment is, but the strategic decisions as to how to handle the situation
and thus the crisis depends on the various abilities and stabilities and collaboration of the leadership and the whole lot of the employees of that company. Pwc conducted a survey of 1246 business and HR leaders in 79 countries. The survey found out that the capabilities that respondents rate as the most important are building trust, human skills and wellbeing- the ones where they are taking most action. There are several things that separate good decision makers from bad ones. One such difference is taking time to challenge what you thought you knew. Everything, from measuring needle’s appropriate radius to monitoring the launch of the spacecrafts, data is used and decisions are based on the appropriateness of the data. Also, in everything, from CV shortlisting to monitoring the learning and development and attrition analysis, decisions are made taking data into consideration. But decisions based only on data sometimes may not be sufficient since Human Resources is also about giving a ‘human’ touch in all its decisions for all stakeholders and thus be strategic in helping the organization grow indirectly by managing the most important and critical resource of the organization, that is, ‘THE HUMAN’. Data-driven decisions in Human Resources should also be accompanied by a ‘personnel’ touch. After all, if DATA IS THE BOSS, THEN HUMAN IS THE LEADER. IF DATA IS THE OIL THEN HUMAN IS THE LUBRICANT.
-Oshin Dewan Xavier School Of Human Resource Management