|
How important is it to align your HR objectives with the overall business
objectives?
Contrary to popular belief, HR today is no longer a back-end transaction. It
is becoming imperative that smart manpower planning is perfectly aligned with a
company's overall business objectives. And it is the HR manager, not the
business manager, which allows that. Today, HR managers are as much on the
street as are business managers. As a consultant and partner to the company, the
role of top HR managers has metamorphosed from just traditional body shopping,
going beyond the usual suspects of managing attrition and retaining talent, to
building pride in the company. That's what CEOs and line managers are asking
today. I believe that in an intellectual capital-driven knowledge economy like
ours, where people have unlimited access to information, the only differentiator
between a successful company and an unsuccessful one is how you manage your
people. It is important to get to the DNA of a company, that one source who can
galavanize its talent pool. This is where HR gets a huge perspective.
What are the key issues confronting you as a top HR strategist?
Finding the right people at the right time is core to my business at CSC and
that without a doubt is a great challenge. If you follow the trends in the
industry, it is clear that companies are looking at very smart people to do
those short-term domain-specific hirings-getting those 20 programmers with
specific expertise. A big challenge is that this has to be backed by a robust
and transparent performance management system to retain the best. At CSC, there
is a deep understanding that it will have to keep innovating to provide a
stimulating and leading-edge environment. Today, employees are looking at
statistics like job content, resources and fair evaluation processes. While my
job is to ensure that all these parameters are, more or less, met, it's also
vital that we tap into people with high emotional intensity.
How important is employee branding?
Employee branding is a key tool to attract and retain the best talent
available. At CSC, we have laid emphasis on building value through training,
development and reward programs. But we realize that superior technical
competence will have to be backed by emotional balance. It's important to
build the thirst for intellectual net worth development, which, in turn, will
give you the next wave of thought leaders in the company. It's important for
employees to ask themselves: Am I at that level? CSC also looks for soft skills
which are, unfortunately, very scarce today. That's a key priority.
How do you calibrate HR best practices?
I'd like to highlight an immensely popular and effective human resource
program that we've put in place at CSC. It is a capacity-building technical
incubator called innovators at work. Here machines are installed with software
and employees are allowed to tinker with the technology. While, this has no
direct connection with appraisals and is not compulsory, it has become a key
driver of innovation within CSC. It has allowed employees to think beyond their
work, bonuses, appraisals and promotions. We've learnt that best practices
needn't always be straight-jacketed as they often are. We'd also like to
believe that our other programs-a sabbatical policy for study, or 6 months
work in an NGO of choice with salary and assessment; individual training
programs; PhD and management programs with institutes like BITS Pilani and XLRI;
domain-specific certifications-are all industry benchmarks in their own right.
What key HR trends do you see in 2004?
Campus recruits in the IT sector never had it this good. Trends indicate
that both domestic global service providers and large MNCs appear to be bullish
on recruitments. Recuitment will continue at a fever pitch both at the campus
stage and in the lateral positions. The ratio is 60:40 in terms of campus and
lateral recruits. Freshers will be the biggest gainers. Bonuses will go up
drastically, but will be performance driven. The IT sector, which is a
high-stress space, will resort to traditional stress busting techniques like
yoga and meditation. In BPOs, gender sensitivity will become a big issue as more
women join the ranks of India's swelling back-office army.
mail@dqindia.com
Page(s) 1
| 
Print
Comment
Email
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Twitter
