IIM ROHTAK HUMANE-R PRESENTS IMPRESSIONS MARCH 2021 HUMANE.R@IIMROHTAK.AC.IN
THE TRIPLE R's STRATEGY: RECRUITMENT, REWARD, RETENTION
THE TRIPLE R’s STRATEGY (Recruitment-Reward-Retention)
INTRODUCTION “If you don’t have competitive advantages, don’t compete-Jack Welch.” Competitive advantage may lie with any FOP-factors of production. It sounds more if it lies with the human resource, “The People.” The country’s ability to compete effectively with the human potential is of so great and broader opportunities for growth. As the countries become more interdependent and rising globalization, it is highly important to look into strategic human resources in the limelight. Human resource lays the foundation for the success and effective functioning of any business organization. People make the country, process, business, profit, and everything. For business success, it is the strategy it innovates and the people-the workforce it has in formulating such strategy. Trade act as the source of wealth acquisition in terms of wealth as well as resources. It also brings interdependence among the nations because wealth is not equally distributed. A country that has an advantage in producing a particular good possesses a competitive advantage over the other. Thereby we get in to trade with other nations. Liberalization, Privatization, and Globalization give entry to global trade. Recent organizations find their performances both locally as well as globally. When you say the company’s performance is leveraging, it is because of the people it puts in process. Strategic human resource management practices focus on linking people with its strategies, goals, and processes to fit themselves into the success space. Global competitiveness brings new challenges to the companies in profiling their manpower and in the process of execution. The article’s idea is to shed light on the triple R Human resource strategy that an organization must consider to compete globally. In the current scenario, the business world is highly competitive, and organizations spend huge costs on identifying competent personnel to be more competitive on a global scale. The issue does not end there. The on-boarded personnel needs to be motivated rewarded for their long tenure in the organization for their sustainability to ensure the organization's better fit. Inconsistent employees cost higher to the companies and significantly collapse the performance and pull down the competitiveness on a larger scale. Hence, efforts need to take better to strategize the recruitment, reward and retention strategy to win globally.
STRATEGIC RECRUITMENT The strategic recruitment focus on employing the skilled professional for the key positions in an organization. The pandemic and technological integration transform the entire process within an organization, far from how they operate earlier. There is also a skill gap between the job applicant's job market and the designation that companies offer. Increasing population, availability of job opportunities, and a competent workforce for the openings do not correlate, and hence there is a gap. For the global position, a company cannot recruit a fresher to foresee the operations. Companies must adopt strategies to recruit skilled employees to manage their operations globally. A quality raw material gives a quality output, as such a well-competent employee deliver great performance. Recruitment is the basis for which a company needs to work a lot to source competent workforce across the globe.
Organizations are under stress to source right fit. Recruitment is the initial stage wherein an organization can map its talent pool for further plans and strategies. Though corporate companies do recruitment functions, the companies shouldn't source their employees through outsourcing agencies. It is just for filtering candidates, but we may have the possibility of missing prospective candidates to be on-board due to time. Hence, strategic recruitment stressed identifying and recruiting people for the critical positions in an organization must be at the organization's cost, personnel, and requirement as programming languages shape the entire world; the recruitment process has also been tuned to online. Green recruitment trends, video conferencing, and other online software help the recruiter source prospective candidates. Strategic recruitment must validate the person-organization fit of the job applicants. It focuses on how an individual employee fits closely with the organization's mission, vision, values, culture, and environment and with their peer groups. It is identified the people who closely fit with the organization probably will have a longer tenure with the company. Therefore, placing personnel for the organization which competes on a global level must have a strategy to assess the P-O fit for better competitiveness and growth.
REWARD Human resources of any concern can be group under two categories. They are skillful employees and willful employees. People who have skill may not have the will to work because there are not recognized promptly or on the other side, people who have will not have the talent to work efficiently, for them a beautiful concept in HR, training is required. The reward is a form of accomplishment and making the employee feel valued for the work they deliver. A traditional human resource practice follows a system of bi-annual appraisal or annual appraisal. But, by the time, an employee might lose their hope and probably locate themselves with other organizations. Hence, modern strategic HRpractices focus on rewarding the employees in time as an HR strategy to keep them motivated and active to see a very well-committed performance. A slight pay increase will not accelerate the employees much, but intermediate reward gives employees a sense of recognition, motivating them for a higher-order performance level. It is not required that an organization must consider its competitors to fix the reward plans. Business runs with the profit motive, and also it needs to be shared with everyone who induces the growth. Therefore, global companies that compete on a broader scale can look into their profit margin and establish strategies that harness the employees. The personnel will be more committed and contribute to the organizational success. A well-structured and fair reward plan will keep the employee's momentum and focused.
RETENTION The success of the organization lies with the employee's extended stay in the organization. Money matters, but it is not the only matter. The corporate value an employee's potential, and in the same way an employee value his own boss. It is observed that people quit an organization not only for pay but also because they are not happy with their work environment. Especially designing retention strategies will not work out, I hope. It has to come from the DNA of an organization. In general, a higher percentage of turnover incurs massive costs to the organization infill the gaps. In line with the global operations, it is a curse for the companies to give up their employees. It is the organization's wholesome responsibility to keep efforts on assessing employees' satisfaction level concerning their value is of utmost concern. The more employees feel happy with their organization, the longer their stay inside the company. Sustainable employees are the prospective employees of an organization's journey. Though a company requires fresh minds, it should not lose its in-grained wisdom. Often, Human resource is all about feelings and emotions. It is a tough job to understand and measure the sentiments of employees. One of the best retention strategies for global companies is to hire the right, sustainable applicant. In the initial process itself, we could do great work. Profiling the candidates from their home nations helps a lot in managing work-life balance. Engaged employees are more productive. Work-life balance brings a high level of productivity. Hence, a successful company's retention strategies must start with recruitment.
CONCLUSION Competitiveness on a global scale is highly appreciated to enhance a country's wealth. The more companies are emerging globally, the more the strength of an economy, employment opportunities, trade, relationships, etc. This article contributes a conceptual knowledge of how strategically the Human resource functions need to be streamlined for sustainable survival. One of the best resources a company must have is its human resource. Identifying them, nurturing them, and making them stay with the company involves very complex strategic thinking. The triple R concept of strategic Human resource practices put forth Recruitment-Reward-Retention, if strategized well, will have a long way to go and win globally. Business is interdependent, and to win globally; best HR practices will help. World-class HR practices work out for the companies, which would like to be competitive and sustain for a more extended period. "India is ranked 43rd on the annual World Competitiveness Index compiled by the Institute for Management Development (IMD)" Strategic human resource practices bridge the gap between the organizational objectives and employee performance. It is essential to understand that a company must have customized HR practices in line with the global scenario to compete across the world. Policies and strategies are not written documents. It needs to be realized and appreciated. Stretching a bit into these practices of HR will help the company a lot there by achieving competitive advantage. The digital world has brought spaces for innovative ideas to work out. That could be possible with the support of an effective blueprint that can correlate with the employee and organizational goals.It is not that I grow; it is that we grow together, for that the triple R-s strategy will work out and yield the best results to compete globally.
Name: Dr. R K Prema, College: Archarya Bangalore Bschool
The DuPont Bradley – Curve: Establishing ‘Culture of Caring’ and social security as a Business imperative
DuPont Chemicals – Miracles of Science, Finance and EHS? As future managers in the post Covid era of sustainable growth and ESG linked business operations we shall all be responsible for more than organizational goals and strategies. We would also be responsible for the physical, mental and material well-being of our enterprise and the people who make the enterprise what it is. This idealistic concept of sustainable growth with employee centric policies does not seem plausible in the business context but what if there were a scale available that made measurement of the impact of EHS possible. A scale that demonstrated that these ideals made good business sense as well? Is there a business value to EHS? Do firms that stress on EHS and employee wellbeing reap disproportionately high benefits in operational excellence? These are the questions that plague HR managers the most while considering innovative and ground breaking EHS policies that can set their enterprise further along the road to prime sustainability. Most HR managers would also consider maintaining the highest level of EHS compliance without impacting the bottom-line to be a Kobayashi Maru Scenario. For the uninitiated it is an unwinnable scenario introduced in legendary science fiction saga – Star Trek – with the sole aim of teaching future space captains the value of prudency in battle and that sometimes given the proper context a strategic retreat even at a heavy cost may be a better option than a pyrrhic victory). All these questions (and more) have been answered by the chemical giant DuPont de Nemours colloquially known as DuPont and known best for its ‘miracles of science’. The company is almost legendary with its history of innovation in the science of chemicals dating back to the invention of Nylon as the first thermoplastic polymer and the diverse applications it had in the Allied war efforts in the second World War. Having revolutionized the world of chemistry DuPont went on to revolutionize finance with its utilitarian DuPont Ratio which breaks down the financial metric Return on Equity into a series of ratios that quantify how well the company is performing in the spheres of taxation, debt interest, EBIT margin, asset utilization and financial leverage.
In the early part of the 1990s Environmental Health and Safety considerations started gaining prominence in organizational management philosophies. The CEO of DuPont, Ed Woolard, and his team decided to embark on a transformational sustainability project at DuPont that endeavoured to improve organizational safety. A specialist team called the DuPont Discovery squad was assembled to research, develop and establish a system capable of corelating improvement in organizational safety to an improvement in organizational culture. Using data collected from a designed DuPont Safety Perception Survey over a decade, the DuPont team came up with the DuPont Bradley curve in 2009. The curve is transformational because it proves that a successful safety culture empowers employees at all organizational levels and improves quality, productivity and profitability across business units and teams. What is the DuPont Bradley Curve? The DuPont Bradley curve helps enterprises map the level of safety culture present in their organization against the rate of injury events (frequency). If an organization knows its exact position on this curve, that knowledge can help the organization determine what changes (incremental or transformational) they need to implement to achieve an effective safety culture. Over time the Bradley Curve has established itself as a leading indicator of the maturity of organization safety culture based over the axes of Leadership, Organization structure, Processes and Activities. The curve establishes growth from a REACTIVE state (corrective action taken post incident) to an INTERDEPENDENT state where corrective actions are anticipatory. In the ultimate state employees are well aware about what constitutes EHS, what standards they have to maintain and how safety ties into the organizational goals and profit. Employees and companies in this state are said to have been ‘Safety Empowered’. The value proposition of an organization operating in this state are now more apparent given the strict health hygiene norms implemented by most enterprises as a part of business continuity in the face of the pandemic. Is the curve based off statistics and good science? Or is it something contextualized to DuPont and not applicable elsewhere? Yes, the curve is based off a decade of research and statistical analysis (that has continued even after the curve was first introduced) and has become an industry standard. The designed Safety Perception Survey introduced 24 questions and elaborated responses along the three main axes of Leadership, Process, Organization and involved employees across every level of the organization. By pooling together data from different verticals the team could determine the extent to which safety perception and culture is shared or permeated within the organization. Why should the curve matter to an MBA student curious about Industrial Relations? For an IR student the Bradley Curve is important because it establishes an undeniable link between safety culture and performance not just for the chemical industry or for manufacturing firms but for all firms at all levels. Safety has always been taken seriously in the process, construction and chemical industry but with the stricter funding considerations like UNPRIs and ESG being taken into account, all companies have realized it makes good business sense to empower the employees in EHS considerations. In any mature enterprise with a self-sustaining culture of safety, EHS is well permeated and results in a ‘culture of caring’, work-related injuries (physical and mental) are infinitesimal. Employees are empowered to put safety and well-being above profitability without fear of reprisal and the organization gains long term business value creation through increased quality of outputs, higher productivity, lower attrition and improved profitability.
In the early part of the 1990s Environmental Health and Safety considerations started gaining prominence in organizational management philosophies. The CEO of DuPont, Ed Woolard, and his team decided to embark on a transformational sustainability project at DuPont that endeavoured to improve organizational safety. A specialist team called the DuPont Discovery squad was assembled to research, develop and establish a system capable of corelating improvement in organizational safety to an improvement in organizational culture. Using data collected from a designed DuPont Safety Perception Survey over a decade, the DuPont team came up with the DuPont Bradley curve in 2009. The curve is transformational because it proves that a successful safety culture empowers employees at all organizational levels and improves quality, productivity and profitability across business units and teams. To conclude with a personal example: The organization where one of the authors was an employee (in the field of construction consulting) made an organization wide decision to incorporate safety as a major strategic driver not just in its work in client projects but in every aspect of its business from finance, funding, procurement to office administration. The result was the creation of a ‘culture’ of caring that propelled the organization, to the top of the ENR Top Engineering Consultants list (the definitive metric for the industry) dethroning the incumbent for the first time in a decade. Retrospectively many senior leaders from the organization have spoken about how it was this implementation of a safety culture that led to a culture of caring that led to a domino effect of improving productivity across all segments, improving project delivery, improving client perception and satisfaction, increasing repeat business and improving industry ratings. There are similar success stories across the industry at organizations like Bechtel, Honda, Komatsu, Caterpillar, Jacobs proving again and again that EHS is more than an HR compliance point, it makes good business sense at all levels of the organization if implemented in a strategic manner and monitored utilizing scientific methods and models.
Sources: 1.
Kaczmarek, M. (2015). ‘Behaviour Based Intervention for Occupational Safety – Case Study’. Procedia Manufacturing
2.
Tomei, P., Russo, G. (2019). ‘Workplace Safety Culture Model [WSCM]: Presentation and Validation’. International Journal of
Advanced Engineering Research and Science (IJAERS) 3.
Proprietary information on the DuPont Bradley curve at https://www.consultdss.com/bradley-curve-infographic/
4.https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetstemwedel/2015/08/23/the-philosophy-of-star-trek-the-kobayashi-maru-no-win-scenarios-and-ethicalleadership/#1ace421d5f48
Name: Akshay Pai, College: SCMHRD