Exploring The Future of Work

A couple of days ago I was talking to a HR regional manager who works in the non-alcoholic beverage industry. He was bemoaning the fact that finding great salespeople was becoming more and more difficult at the fronline level. It was tough to imagine that, as most sales organizations had been on an expansion spree. It seemed like he would have more of a talent pool to hire people from. He disagreed, saying “Sales folks who have worked in the consumer-facing industry, which is cyclical, is what I am looking for. These kinds of people are tough to find!”. Talk about specialization.

As the HR and Recruiting function evolves and complexity creeps in, HR professionals struggle to make sense of this new age, and though they welcome it , find themselves awfully short. The old assumptions hold true and yet, the contexts seem to have changed. The skills that they have built up over the last few decades as Personnel became HR , seem to have lost their potency.

HR will need to open up its silos and soak in skills from other functions, especially those skills of the Sales and Marketing functions. This will be a natural corollary of viewing employees and senior management. This will also mean that to succeed, Recruiters and other HR people will need to change their mindset. An “internal service provider” mindset will only reinforce the current perspective of the function. A “partner” approach however, also needs internal strength to sometimes say “no” to a client, or to specify what one wants from them, to be successful. A lot of us have made successful transitions to that state, however, more as individuals than by any process.

Why is there such a need and challenge for HR and recruitment?

The people who are their raison d'etre, prospective employees as well as hiring managers, are getting more demanding. They demand more in less time. They demand better service and without the frills. Faster turnaround times.

Organizations and senior management want them to contain costs, track metrics regarding employee productivity, morale and come to conclusions as to what they need to change/ do better so that they can control not just the bottom line but also increase the top-line. They want better people to do the jobs recruited at less 'total cost of hiring', they want their best people to stay put and the bottom ones to leave with a minimum of fuss.

And increasingly, the organization's customers want to know about HR policies and how they impact quality of work, because it is becoming increasingly difficult to choose vendors.

What does HR in such a scenario [and these are getting more and more complex and demanding everyday] do? What path must it tread, what roles must it play, what skills must it gather to excel all these demands and satisfy them?

HR needs to structure itself differently, to move from the current functional silos of recruitment, compensation and performance management, training, employee and employee relations to a new paradigm of focusing on projects which are purposes. HR people no longer can make choices about whether they will be 'generalists' or 'specialists' in organizations. They have to be both.

HR's learning curve has to take into account not just today but tomorrow while keeping an eye on what yesterday has left behind. It has to focus on processes, customers, employees and discontinuous change. The question they constantly need to ask themselves is "what if all the knowledge and skills I hold becomes redundant tomorrow? What then?" and build a mindset in their organization where everybody asks this question about themselves.

HR has already been an reluctant adopter of technology and now it has to show how to leverage that technology, not just save time and money.

HR careers will soon become specialized and super specialized. HR vendors will need to offer services like "How to make an FMCG company which is focused on female products a learning organization"

Internally also Recruiting and HR will keep on specializing according to industry based knowledge.

Specialized HR people will work within organizations and yet will be part-free agents advising competition too, as they find a balance between what the job demands and what satisfies their inner strengths.

HR departments will lose many of the administrative work, as employees will take it into their hands and the corporate intranet rids them of standardized processes. They will soon be able to draft their own salary heads, leave structure and keep abreast of legal trends [all the work that HR does today!]

It's going to be an age of change and lots of HR professionals would themselves find the chasm a difficult one to cross.

Image via Wikipedia

1. Listen. Give tools to your employees to make them heard. Use ideation platforms, question and answers, wikis, internal blogs for employees to connect with each other. Figure out what has their attention and time.
2. Acknowledge. When someone contributes a great idea - borrow it and give him/her credit. Make that employee an owner of that idea and support him/her to implement it. The same away acknowledge the employees who contribute answers and contribute to building the knowledge base.
3. Understand. With the data generated in the first two steps organizations can figure out (using Thomas Gladwell's Tipping point lingo) who are the mavens, connectors and salesmen. This would be possible using Social Network Analysis tools.
4. Engage. Using the data from the above step organizations should figure out the highly engaged employees who are mavens, connectors and salesmen and empower them as internal advocates (using the methodology of social influence marketing) 

1. I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
2. My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.
3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day.
4. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.
5. My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well.
6. I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.
7. I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.
8. One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is "what happens after people make a mistake?"
9. Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too.
10. Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.
11. How I do things is as important as what I do.
12. Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

Current social computing and social media policies range from an outright prohibition of employee participation on the social Web, including at home (yes, some firms do this), to the more open - and very much informed - use of social media by Zappos, Dell, and IBM. Zappos encourages employees to participate. Dell builds disclosure into the social media handles of employees: "@StefanieAtDell" runs @DellOutlet. IBM's policies clarify that employees using social media should refrain from using "we" and instead use "I" when publishing posts or comments that might relate to the workplace. At SAS Institute, employees using Twitter include a statement to the effect "these views are (mine) and not those of SAS" in their profile.

These are all solid examples of how to smartly approach social media and its use by employees. It's essential that your employees understand the rules, ahead of time. Situations involving employees and social media will arise. If you don't have social computing policies in place now, consider making this a priority.

Where do you start? First, visit IBM's page on social computing policies. Social computing policies are not a "one size fits all" proposition, but reviewing IBM's and other firms in your own industry is a great place to start. Then, go meet your legal team: show them the policies of other firms like yours and the best practices of firms like IBM's and ask them to draft a set. Champion this effort and sell it in through HR.

Not only will you do yourself a lot of good - in the process, you will become the organization-wide go-to person for smart decisions involving social media - but you'll also set in place a larger team of people within your organization that understands how social media can be responsibly brought into the business. That's a huge win, and it sets you and your team up for further advances as you push from social media-based marketing to a more holistic social business.

With your policies in place, the next hurdle you'll likely face is what to do about employee social media in places like Facebook, where individual pages or pages of their friends may or may not reflect the kinds of activities that you want your customers seeing. I'm not saying...I'm just saying, as the expression goes.

In a recent workshop in Toronto, we talked about this very issue. Up, Inc.'s Catherine Sturm suggested connecting the business social Web presence to employees' LinkedIn pages, and then specifically connecting the "About Us" or a similar social page on the corporate site - where holiday party pictures might be posted, for example - to the Facebook pages. This provides the flexibility employees and employers need, and sets the correct expectations for what one might find - as a client, for example - when visiting these larger, related social postings.

Finally, think about an oversight policy. For example, use your listening tools to monitor mentions of the brand. When you find them, affirm that any postings by employees are appropriately within your policies. If not, work with employees constructively to address any issues. Should you choose to go down this path, disclose this to your employees.

• What are the work and HR related conversations that people are having? These would be linked to an employee’s personal work or a prospective employee’s perception of work in the organization.
• What are people mentioning about the Organizational Culture?
• What are people mentioning about the Leadership/Leader of a firm
• What are the news items around deals, results that are being mentioned and referenced on the social web?

• TCS HR issues were mentioned the most followed by Infosys
• Negative mentions in this category were most for Infosys

• Culture gets defined externally by various organizational activities from CSR to Sports
• Such activities are mentioned in an overwhelming positive tone on the social web

1. There is a lot of discussion about IT firms related to work and HR related subjects .
2. There is little or no engagement that the organizations are taking to connect with influencers and to drive the conversations
3. Whatever the representation these firms have on the social web , is primarily driven by corporate communications
4. We believe that HR and Recruitment groups who own the perception of the Employment Brand must engage with the conversations
5. These conversations should be linked to an online platform where people can connect with subject matter experts and recruiters and to get to know first hand information about the firm.

HRO - growing popular each day
by Monarose Sheila Pereira


The concept of human resource outsourcing is growing popular with each passing day. However, there are disadvantages to this concept too along with the numerous advantages, say experts.

Human Resource is now the golden career option. Companies are realizing the importance of hiring, training and retaining their employees, therefore giving tremendous importance to the HR Portfolio. HR outsourcing has been picking up in a big way too. Teams of highly experienced professionals provide clients with customised HR solutions which range from short-term based solutions, to an on-going HR relationship with the client. However there are advantages and disadvantages to HR consultancy.

According to Consultant Gautam Ghosh, the advantages of HR Outsourcing are of different types - because different types of HR work can be outsourced. “Payroll Outsourcing helps freeing up HR and Finance people from doing operational work and to instead focus on high end work. C&B Survey outsourcing is the norm because competitors are comfortable sharing information with a third party and not with organisations directly. Third party recruiters and Executive Search Consultants have huge databases that internal recruiters rarely posses. Training outsourcing, specially for high end training means using the high cost resources only when needed and not spending a salary or management time for trainers on the time. Coaching outsourcing is critical because often employees need to share information that they would not be comfortable sharing with an internal employee,” he expresses.

Consultant Trevor Ferandes believes that in order to become more responsive to the needs of the business, HR must increase its strategic capability, or pursue alternative models that will free resources to support business strategy. “Delivering an integrated and compliant HR service is highly complex. HR commonly scores poorly with the business, since its focus has traditionally been on transactional and administrative processes. In most cases, building a world class HR function is not a core competency or strategic priority for most organisations. Outsourcing gives them access to world class skills and allows them to focus on what they do best – product and service innovation,” he says.

HR can deliver the right mix of core and non-core HR services efficiently and effectively. By allowing the organisation to keep in-house what it does well and outsource what it does not, the outsourcing option facilitates access to proven ideas and solutions and thereby increases performance through disciplined use of standard processes and solutions. This helps maintaining the HR focus on value-added activities in sync with the organisation's requirements.

However, besides the advantages, there are disadvantages to HR outsourcing too. Ghosh informs, ”The disadvantages of HR outsourcing is that it forces HR department to rethink its core role, and give up the earlier comfort of being ‘administrative expert’ and build new skills, which many are not able to do; and their business sees that they are no longer adding any value or stepping up to the ‘business partner’ role.”
Fernandes says “Cost is a critical consideration, but it is a mistake to evaluate HR outsourcing primarily on the basis of financial savings. Companies should consider broader enterprise requirements.”

Personnel and HR Director Tulsidas B Patel, believes that besides the cost of consultancy being very steep as compared to hiring your own staff; the most important factor going against companies opting for consultancy is that HR is a very confidential field and many companies would not like to compromise on this important aspect.

So with the field growing, the pros and the cons fighting for viability, companies now have a good low down on information to help them make their options.