Where Have All the Employees Gone?

I keep bumping into people who are completely uncool. I swear there are some who have not realized that our function is not called Human Resources anymore. We are about Talent Management. You do not hire fellows anymore. And you get a minus 5 if you think that it is the folks in Staffing or Recruitment that give you jobs. That department is now called Talent Acquisition.

My friend Prof Madhukar Shukla says that the term "Human Resources" tends to dehumanize people and views the employees as one of the factors of production at par with land, capital or enterprise. I explained to him that for a while the trendy things was to refer to good ol' employees as Human Capital or Intellectual Capital. That must have made communication difficult. Imagine someone saying, "I will join you for lunch at the Human Capital's Cafeteria". Just now as we speak the new term of endearment at the workplace is "Talent". Even those employees who can best be described as possessing only enthusiasm unfettered by talent are also now walking in the workplace with a swagger. Everyone is behaving like the little monarch who needs constant attention and fussing only so that they stay on your payroll and do not walk away for a 40% pay hike. Now that there are no more employees left in the workplace, just raw "talent", the rules of the game are changing.

Talent is defined as an "endowment or ability of a superior quality". It is an innate ability to accomplish stuff that is beyond the ken of an average person. The person in charge of Talent Acquisition is impacting your business way beyond what you realize. Hire the wrong people and that not only impacts morale, but also impacts your firm's competitive edge. Hence the task of the interviewer is to spot such talent and lasso them in to the organization. This is not a job for the faint hearted. When a sports coach goes from village to village to spot children play street football, they see a large range of players and then spot that exceptional person who goes on to become the next God of Soccer. You need to have that soccer coach in your organization who can sift through a million resumes and sit through numerous interview meetings until they find the person who has that ability of a superior quality.

This is a vital job. So do not leave it to an ape who hires your next CFO by asking deep probing and dumb questions like, "If you were an animal which one would you be?" These questions may be cute conversation starters if you are trying to make a quick impression at the office party, but do not use it for choosing talent. Make sure that the person entrusted to spot talent is trained to look for gems amidst millions of badly written resumes. Talent Spotter has to be able to look for the right fit without getting distracted by glib talk. So before you look for more employees ... er... talent to hire, make sure you have the right person in charge of Talent Acquisition.

See you for coffee at the Talents' Cafeteria of our office.

If the World were my Classroom

We have this hugely successful open program called the Big Ticket to High Performing Teams. Trainers from all sectors use the instructional design (ID) techniques imparted to construct interventions in technical, process, sales and behavioural training.
We encourage our participants not to take themselves too seriously despite the pompous sounding title of the program. The very first session asks folks to reflect on their most significant learning event ever and share it with the class. As they talk we write it down on a flip chart. Then we ask them to see any common threads. "Look deep because in the flipchart/ mirror is framed a painful truth." Slowly everyone gets it but no one says anything; they look around sheepishly waiting for somebody else to utter the uncomfortable reality.
It never fails. We've done 125 plus Big Ticket programs with an average 15 participants (you do the math) and only once have i had a trainer participant cite their most significant learning being derived from a classroom event. It's a painful but unarguable truth. All of the rest learn best from real life.
"That means our classroom based training programs are a waste of time?" Someone will finally ask the question uppermost in every mind. Few of them who've just moved from an opertional or sales role into the function begin rueing their luck at having agreed to the HR guy's spiel citing a great career in training. A discussion will start.


Let's leave the Big Ticket participants to get on with their class while we of the real world ponder the same question. Is training really a waste of time? To answer that let me invoke the expansion of the acronym ID. It Depends. And it depends on one thing alone - how close to reality your sessions get; the methodologies have nothing to do with it. Suffice it to say that the most successful trainers are able to get a slice of life into the cake they bake in their classroom ovens. With that slice of life in it the cake looks good, certainly worth having. But can you eat it too?
Not yet. Knowledge seeps from your head into your heart, then flows into your feet and only when you walk the knowledge does it become learning. Even the best of trainers can only help you get real world insight but to internalize it you have to practice it back in the real world. The limits of classroom training are revealed starkly when we try to evaluate its impact (an act that is surprisingly a rarity in itself). A handfull of participants actually change behaviours as a result of training, fewer still impact the organization. Interventions that include projects and coaching apart from classrrom sessions have shown better results but here too actual life and its competing priorities wreak havoc with the structure of the intervention. In the flux of the scorching growth in Eastern economies, no one has time for learning.
Isn't that a great paradox? For it is the very same eastern philosophies which condemn us to being born again and again till we obtain enlightenment. Their contention is that the real and only purpose of life is to learn!
The only way to resolve this paradox, I believe, is to have all of life declared a learning process. Officially. The game changes. No nitpicking on what's more important - learning becomes the paradigm in which you choose between priorities. As critical as the declaration is the need to create technologies to learn better from life experiences. We discovered a while earlier that our most significant learning events are based in life experiences. But is there a method to that learning or is it just serendipity? All the research in instructional technology today is skewed towards making the classroom a better learning space. I haven't heard of too much work in the area of helping people to learn from real life. I've yet to come across processes that transform your entire world into a learning space and every experience into a potential development tool.

Meanwhile the situation back at the Big Ticket program is potentially developing into a riot. Remember we warned them not to take themselves too seriously. Well it seems they decided not to heed our warning! A heated debate has been raging sparked by the incendiary question "Is classroom training a waste of time?" Ambitions are burnt, dreams go up in smoke and reputations are being razed to the ground ( mainly ours). The new converts from operations and sales are the ones making the most telling points aginst the profession they've just entered.
"Hey, break it up", I intervene before any blood is let. "When I said don't take yourselves too seriously I didn't mean that we make laughing stocks of each other. This debate between the world and the classroom is a waste of time. Isn't the classroom a part of the world? Is it the walls that hassle us? Your office, your home, the factory shopfloor, they have four walls too. But we don't think of them as apart from the real world? So what's it about a classroom that sets it apart?"
Complete silence!
"It's because we've positioned training to the participants as time away from real life. What if we were to declare all of life as a training program? Call everybody Learners for Life and the whole world a classroom. Won't it change the way participants percieve clasroom training?"
Silence. And then a voice pipes up from the back, "It depends."

Work Life Balance - Walking the Tight Rope

I know the young kids will never believe me when I tell them that I never had an X-Box or an iPod when I was growing up in various towns across India. Somewhere along the 90's, globalization happened. Salaries started to rise. Productivity and Quality became important criteria for survival. As companies started to face competition not just from Indian companies but also global behemoths, the treadmill started. That was the beginning of corporate India's "Get In Shape" campaign. We got on to the treadmill and felt good as we saw our fat melt away. Corporate India stepped up the speed of the machine and we started to actually get in shape. These were exciting times. If you felt giddy with the speed, you were not good enough. The layoffs started to happen but the treadmill started to go faster and faster until every ounce of fat had been shed. Every extra headcount had been trimmed and outsourced. Every little piece of change that had rolled off under the bed was reached out to and put back into the balance sheet. Meanwhile we had forgotten about Corporate India that was still running on the machine.

There is no time to waste. So we have added one more TLA (Three Letter Acronym) to our vocabulary. We are finding ways of achieving WLB (Work Life Balance). So what does getting that WLB mean? Is it driven by the individual or the organization?

We all play multiple roles in our lives – that of an employee, a parent, a spouse, a friend, a sibling, a son/daughter, a neighbour etc. When any one role takes precedence and prevents tasks related to the other roles being done effectively, there is need to fine tune that balance between various roles.

As employees we all want faster promotions, more money and live the lifestyle that Bollywoood stars do. Organizations need to be more competitive and deliver more with less resources. In a growing economy like India’s salaries are going through the roof. To be ahead of the competition, we are all putting in longer hours at the workplace. How many of you still pursue the hobbies and sports that gave us so much joy and meaning when we were growing up. If we revived them today, those would rejuvenate us and prevent burnout in the workplace. WLB means being able to find the time for the roles that rejuvenate. That could mean being with family for some or listening to music or going for a trek to discover Nature.

Sometimes the problem is different. I was talking to my friend who is the head honcho of a big corporation which has put managing WLB as a key priority for every people manager. He was talking to me of his team member Soumya, who comes in late everyday because he drops his kid to day care which doesn't open until 9:15am. Then he has to go home for lunch and inevitably gets late because of traffic snarls. In the evening Soumya leaves at 5pm sharp everyday because he has to go for his evening MBA four days a week and on Fridays he takes language classes. Soumya refuses to work weekends since the "organization is telling the employees to push for Work Life Balance." His boss asks me, "Isn't Work the first part of the WLB equation?" Yet this employee will compare increments and career opportunities with all others who are busting their gut trying to meet office deadlines. Isn't that unfair, my friend asks.

When I look at my neighbour's daughter who is all of twelve and has to come back from school and immediately rush off to take Tennis/ French/ Ballet on weekdays and has to go for Karate and Theatre classes on weekends, that makes my workday seem light in comparison. Her mother told me that during summer she will take classes on creative writing as well, since she will have more time. All this is needed to make your child an all rounder I am told. Last Sunday I saw her punching her day's schedule into her cell phone as she walked in to the elevator. I am getting a PDA for my birthday, she told me.

PG Diploma in Common Sense

Everybody has an opinion on HR.
After trying to convince a client of my subjective views on yet another fuzzy HR topic (it was career pathing i think), i said exasperatedly to him, "I thought you called me in because i am the expert in HR."
He said, "Expert? C'mon, HR is just common sense. And by definition everybody has it. It's common after all. So how can you claim to be at the top of a common sense hierarchy? There is no such pyramid."
He was right but all the same i came crashing down from somewhere pretty high up. And it hurt. Fool on a hill? Maybe. Since then i started searching in earnest for the HR holy grail. Something that raises us above the status of 'commoners' into the esoteric world of 'experts'. Like those Six Sigma black belts. Soft leather and shiny buckles have always fascinated me. Maybe my pop being a cop has something to do with it.
But this is not about me. It's about us. And about HR's need for a Six Sigma like top notch holy grail. And come to think of it the quality function was once pretty much like us, wandering around lost, searching for an identity in the business. For eons, they'd been sandwiched by production on one side and sales on the other. Lip service would regularly be paid about quality being the most meaty part of the sandwich but in reality the business invested just enough to spread the function thin like butter. Essential to the sandwich but not really adding any taste/ value to it. In the nineties TQM gave the quality folks some respectability but the hard core production and sales guys weren't really convinced by its mere 'feel good' intangible tools. Then in the naughties somebody cooked up Six Sigma, catapulting the quality folks into the board room and overnight they became business stars.
Meanwhile HR was already there in the board room (mostly taking minutes) struggling gamely to reach the status of "business partners". The closest to Six Sigma we had was the 360 degree appraisal. But pitting 360 against Six Sigma was like pitching a carousal against the Taj Mahal in a poll for becoming one of the great wonders of the world.
So what's my point? That's another slur we've always had to deal with: "You HR guys are forever beating around the bush." And my reply to that everytime somebody says it is: "We are looking for that second bird, the one that flew out of your hand, Mister." It stops the other guy in his tracks. "Profound!" is normally the reply. Do drop me a mail if you understand the depth in my remark because i have no clue.
Now to get back to the point - the bird in hand - We need to architect an exclusively HR Taj Mahal. That mecca of concepts to which a business leader will approach, stare in wonder and then get down on her knees and pray. Come, see and concur. No gyan. No opinions. Just agree to the Taj Mahal of HR. End of common sense.
As i said earlier, i have been doing some study on the topic and its not going to be easy. This business of building Taj Mahals. The problem is really acute because we don't have a solid foundation. Let me explain. Six Sigma is based on statistical tools and sciences. Rigour and precision is the basic building material. But all we have is shifting sands and non methods. Take Individual Behavior theory for instance. Do we really know what motivates somebody? Yes, we have a menu of guesses and 9 million by the no.of items on the menu times the combinations in which the variables could play out. And then there are the thousands of individuals inside an organization whose behaviors combined in another million ways produce the organization's vyaktitva, character or culture. Phew! Take that for beating around the bush. It could take years to just determine the "real" culture of a place let alone drive it. And as i argue in another piece, three months is all we have to "build" a new culture because in a blistering economy HR has to build @ speed of light.
Woudn't it have been super to have a tool which could tell you the culture of your organization? Just wheel it into a series of group meetings and other conversations. Let it film, tape, absorb the dialogs and process it internally and spew out the cultural differentiator's of your organization. A 'Culture Analyzer' if you please (remember you heard it here first, i'll call upon you to assist me in any copyright disputes). Not such a fantasy - you have machines that do it for a powder for example - precisely detecting the elements that compose it.
So once you know the old culture accurately, and you envision the new behaviors you require, you only have to make the necessary changes in the individual's mindset. And you still have 60 days or thereabouts left to complete your intervention.
What do you do? Simple. Just whip out your array of "Tuning Folks" (ditto advisory on copyright). Now go forth into the kingdom and resonate. Oh and don't forget to calibrate using the "Culture Analyzer" once you've finished.
Fantasies apart, moral of the story is that until we have some robust theoretical foundations our Taj Mahal will never be built. Its time the HR academics took over and gave some solid material for us practitioners to build the Taj Mahal with. Professors are you listening? You sent us forth into the world with good intentions...and nothing else. PG Diploma in Common Sense? What good is that in a world full of PHD.s in the same subject? Sorry don't mind the ranting, we all know it's not your fault either. It goes much deeper. Into that elusive, impossible to hold entity called the human psyche. They say that once you can measure it you can manage it. We humans know how to make everything else measurable and scientific but our emotions and thoughts. Those we can't control.
The very last point of this piece and i think i could have done away with all the other points if i had announced this one right at the top: basically you're all invited to a party on my hill. If you are foolish enough, you could even find a place to live up there. There's ample space for everybody. And we'll be able to see the Taj Mahal from the top once it comes up.
So after you guys are done taking minutes in the boardroom, do come up for a drink.
All are welcome. Dress code - no belts please! Nonsense is highly appreciated, but common sense you shall use only at your own peril.

HR @ the speed of light –
Building to last or ...to finish last

I know of an organization that has been doing Institution Building for the last 10 years. Everything (and almost every body except the top layer) has moved on. Their cash cow is on the verge of being milked dry, phased out due to new technologies; and their flagship business hasn’t yet quite sunk but is under severe margin pressures. The management response: they’ve just announced yet another round of institution building workshops – “These processes take time. We are ‘building to last’”, says the HR Director.
Or does he mean “… to finish last?” Agreed it takes time. Unfortunately the business has run out of it.
I myself have been guilty of recommending long drawn out HR interventions with foggy outcomes and ‘feel good’ intentions that meander like an Atal Bihari Vajapayee speech in his later years as PM. In fact, I’d like to argue, that in general the HR fraternity, as a whole, strongly believes in the adage that human processes take time to flower. They have to be planted deep. Nurtured carefully. Protected from the chaos and politics.
Maybe for a stable economy there might be a kernel of truth in that viewpoint. But in one that’s blazing along like India’s unfortunately the gardener doesn’t have that kind of time – dallying around trying to build to last is a surefire way of turning the garden into your businesses’ graveyard. And yours. Sure HR talent is in great demand. But unfortunately the market is looking for gardeners not undertakers. We can keep lamenting that we tried to partner with the business, that we wanted to hold their hands but they just kept running right on ahead.
I believe it’s time we stopped trying to hold the business back and ran, rather flew, along with it instead. We’re hopelessly out of rhythm with the business. If you think of an arrow formation of jets (the different functions) we should probably be at the nose leading the show. Right now, to be honest, we are watching the flypast from the ground and trying to control its turns and twists with a remote that broke down long back.

And I believe its beyond repair. Tinker with it as much as you will, it won’t get us to fly. We HR folks need to invent a brand new machine! A vehicle that delivers HR processes at the speed of light. As a benchmark I throw down this gauntlet - from concept to implementation to evaluation of the most complex HR intervention shouldn’t take more than three months. Most should aim at being completed in one.
An inventor of such a vehicle will first need to jettison sacrosanct mindsets embodied in pet HR keywords like, ‘accountability’, ‘retention’, ‘career planning’, ‘work-life balance’ and shift instead to new ways of thinking that might propel us on.
I propose ‘ownership’ in place of ‘accountability’, ‘contracting’ and ‘freedom’ instead of ‘retention’, ‘aspiration management’ for ‘career planning’ and ‘joyful work’ as against ‘work-life balance’.
My counsel to the ‘institution builders’ is to stop being so self-indulgent. Take a lesson from kings of yesteryears, illustrious rulers of our past, who built ornate palaces for themselves that became merely pretty curiosities, years down the line. A hard look in the mirror will convince you of the reality – that ninety percent of the people in a vibrant business are going to be moving on within a couple of years. We live in a world of instant utopias. Maggie noodles, instant coffee, two minute videos on Utube – pitch your institution building against that and figure out for yourself who’s going to live in those institutions?
Get real folks! More than just our survival depends on it!