Through the annals of time, there are many initiatives which emerge, some of which are forgotten while others survive to establish themselves as omnipresent. One of the forgotten contributions of HR to the industry is job structuring and evaluation, as well as organization design. Reviving this is not an attempt to steal revenue from consultants; they can find other topics to provide “expertise’ on, but it will be one of the key focus areas for internal HR professionals in the next decade. Increasingly organizations are no longer required to provide life-long employment, but they should definitely provide meaningful jobs to those currently employed, which will perhaps increase the chances of having longer relationships with their employees. Somewhere the role of HR is designing jobs has been forgotten or assumed to be irrelevant which will change. The HR professional too will need to be adequately equipped to understand business realities and design the most effective jobs which will provide relief from monotony for the employee and provide opportunities for him to explore, learn and contribute. Existing organisations too will need to relook at their roles and positions once again to evaluate whether they are relevant to the current market dynamics.
Managing performance, salary increments and increments are akin to bread and butter for every HR officer. They vary between organisations, sectors, geographies and so on. HR will continue to play an integral role in all these processes, to ensure parity and fairness. Some thought as to whether changes are required too wouldn’t do any harm as well!!!
Compensation or reward is indeed one of the pivotal arms of the HR team. While historically there has been a shift from a welfare approach to sharper differentiation based on performance, the debacle of the financial markets have also shown that too much differentiation has adverse results for the business. With changing aspirational lifestyles and erosion of loyalty to a single organization, there has been a change from the perquisite filled (read car, home, allowances) to encashing the maximum possible. We have even seen a basket approach, which supposedly empowers employees to choose what they want.
Going forward, with increasing mobility, employees will prefer to continue with encashing their salary to the utmost. However in the face of high inflation, HR professionals would do well to revisit to old fashioned index of DA or dearness allowance. When one’s salary is linked to DA, the employee gets clarity that the organization is sensitive to the rising costs of living. At the same time, compensation needs be role-based and not tenure linked. Hence beyond DA linked increases, the salaries would be commensurate with the role one performs in the organization and no one would expect getting higher compensation each year for doing the same work. This move would also alleviate some of the cost pressures faced by organisations today due to the rising cost of wages against stagnant productivity.
Can the HR department engage employees and transform cultures? The answer is a clear and loud ‘no’. The work, the manager and the team engage any employee not a pretty HR professional administering an engagement questionnaire. Can we really know whether employees are engaged with the organization or not? Indeed there is a merit in knowing, but with the clear lines of communication articulated earlier, the survey results would merely reconfirm what is already known at a higher cost. Does that mean that birthdays, farewells and team lunches are to be bid goodbye? Not necessarily for these can be organized by the team independent of any HR intervention, and associated reprimands over the consumption of alcohol! Every team can and should have fun together, connect informally and it is the responsibility of every manager (hopefully groomed by a responsible HR manager) to ensure that it happens.
Similarly organization cultures are rarely the result of any active interventions but almost always a by-product of practices in response to business conditions. Infact, it is starkly visible in the service industry where the organization cultures mirror the customer – be it the organized IT industry, the hep and happening BPO industry, the chaotic Indian services IT industry, the process driven retail industry and so on. This is not to say there is no influence of organisations determining the behaviour of their employees and it can always only be a function of the external factors. The answer lies in how our parents taught us not to lie and to share – by role-modelling, by positive and negative reinforcements. All of these rest with the manager to try to ensure that a successful organization culture is built.
(to be contd...)
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