New metrics for people

Post pandemic, people health has become a major metric to gauge organisation health. It is no longer business health or supply chain health or leadership vision or financial health.  

• Policies have got changed to facilitate remote working
• Performance is getting gauged from deliverables and not job context procedures and work behaviours.
• Employee health is seen as Employees' family health as well
• Percentage of employees vaccinated is seen as a safeguard to pre empt disruption. 
• People valuations to drive up insurance costs and hence change of preception on risks.
• Gains from real estate and establishment overheads.
• Development accountability has got shifted from employer to employee.
• Training allocations will no longer increase operation costs.
• Compensation packages could be redesigned to increase savings by reducing work related expenditures like Travel costs.
• Has increased insurance awareness amongst employees
• Costs on Canteen, Pantry, housekeeping, laundry, refreshments, beverages at work, communication, stationary, office equipments, asset maintenance costs etc all have come down.
• Employee availability and utilisation - beyond office hours.  - flexibility and consistency
• Automation thru applications and web & cloud based services -increased speed 
• Hiring & onboarding related cost and time - reductions.

adapting to new work norms

COVID19 is giving new challenges on a daily basis these days for organisations, challenging its ability to capitalise human resources for its business objectives. It is even challenging the viability of certain existing human interaction models, which we were taking it granted all these days. Major changes will be needed in areas of recruitment, training, communication, performance criteria  and in coaching and supervision methods. New protocols for attendance, interacting with fellow colleagues. meetings and other group work interactions will need to be framed and existing ones modified to allow remote contributions/participation wherever feasible. Compensation practices need to get delinked from physical attributes at work place viz designation etc, if the work can be accomplished from a remote location of the employees choice. Job descriptions will need a complete overhaul and can impact valuations substantially as Job context and challenges might have drastically changed. At the same time where human interactions are vital in controlling/monitoring other physical assets especially in manufacturing, process industries , the same above mentioned regulations need to be reviewed to assess its continued need. Meetings need to be virtual. digital controls of operation will enter in place of pneumatic controls. Supervision will move away for minimalistic controls. Paperless workflow based services will be inevitable even in Govt offices in place of notings and files. All these will demand review of IT services, communication technology, remote operation gadgets, technology based surveillance controls, automation, AI based analytics and new data sources for decisions at higher levels along with new metrics for accountability.  Travel will be reduced. Home based working will gain acceptance with occasional office presence. Only direct man machine interactions will continue in old order, if absolutely essential. They will demand higher compensation rates, higher insurance cover, risk liabilities perhaps even more than equipment costs. Such jobs will provide shorter career life and will be less mobile. Demand for precision and accuracy will be more as decisions may need to be taken remotely, based on data and less through discussions and group reviews. Systems should be in place for audit trails, gauge risk levels, secure gates, secure networking environment.

Learnings from a pandemic

Currently the world is going through a pandemic, the worst of its kind since WWII. Millions have died and more lives are at stake. We have been playing too long chasing commercial profits for too long that we forgot to strengthen institutions values, practices,  for basic human care and survival. Even in this pandemic, many institutions are arguing against making payment of wages to people who work for those institutions at low rungs who need that money for survival. Institutions still haven't learnt the value of people , need to take care of them in these times, instead of hoarding cash as profits in reserves or for more investment in business for profits later. Even Learning institutions where such sensibilities are expected to prevail fail in taking right decisions in such instances. This highlights the total failure of business organisations to correlate its vision to an ethical context of community well being. Promoting such businesses , nurturing leaders for success of such businesses are counter productive to humanity in the basic sense. Schools of thought coming from educational institutions , whatever may their world standing, based on the learnings of such business organisations, is like a cancer, fuelling further negativism in society. They are tumours to vasudeva kudumbakam.

Management schools and People practices

While we come across critical analysis of various people practices, benchmarks, surveys prevalent in industry and commercial institutions in general or even in NGOs for that matter, rarely we see any such academic interests on people practices prevailing in business schools. Are faculty and non-faculty seen as equal stakeholders in such institutions ? or are learners' customers ? What happens to values and ethics as subjects for greater appreciation than SCM? How much the business school graduates are oriented towards social responsibilities of businesses ? what is the visibility for priority shown to resources like people and community. How are knowledge resources and infrastructure resources are integrated to improve administrative quality in schools? are the hr practices benchmarked internally and externally ? or are they seen as mere administrative service areas? It's high time that business schools practice innovative hr practices at home and recognise that hr functions cannot be seen any longer as an administrative service as it exists now. For e.g.: a business school with no regard to quality health and safety practices cannot be an excellent learning centre. Similarly quality education will get reflected in the people practices that the institution is committed to. That then will differentiate top business schools from the rest.

HR practices : quality standards

Hr practices vary significantly across sectors within Industry even though they all are having a common scope to cover organised labour. Sectoral(business) priorities are often seen to over ride the people  priorities in many cases;  unlike say for e.g. with Finance or other resources.  Unfair practices with own employees exposed recently in sectors like IT and Realty.

The disturbing fact was that such unethical practices were being done by Industry leaders with the connivance and unethical stand by their own HR fraternity.

Few areas that got exposed that too in Industry leaders :

1. Rampant outsourcing of hiring actions resulting in unscrupulous agents and third parties exploiting prospective talents; demanding upfront service charges, fraud employment offers, fake interviews, fraud email communications to attract and trap.
2. Unsafe onboarding practices with scant regard to statutory obligations, social security coverages, no background checks, no medicals, no orientation, training not even for safety and occupational risks.
3. Blurred payment norms, lack of communications, neglect to living conditions of employee/family.
4. Unethical performance assessments, imposing of non-negotiable work standards, unfairly stretched   objectives for performance etc
5. Retrenchment without giving reason nor reasonable time and without proper communication or regard to employees families/dependents.
6. Unfair replacement hiring practices without exploring training and development options of existing talent.
7. Coaxing employees to adopt unfair trade practices to push business gains; that too often at employees own risk of exposure to violation/punitive actions within laws.
8. Abysmal Industry quality standards on employee engagement standards.

There is a strong case for regulation through legal options in all above. Unfortunately the present labour laws are unable to prevent above instances.

basic game..

In any organisation, especially commercial ones, business strategies to capitalise opportunities are often leveraged on two basic resources, though there are more than two as you know. Finance and People. HR is a function that carries the potential to synergise. Recognising that formally, focusing on interfaces, valuing the 'influencing' elements, evolving metrics and measurements to monitor are all part of game.

emerging options for candidate screening

With rising human value replacement costs, health of employees handling key portfolios has gained significant concern these days. While there are limited safeguards for covering costs in the event of any unfortunate event or detection of any critical illness requiring hospitalisation and prolonged absence the vacuum such an absence creates in operating environment, be it shop floor or service field, could be catastrophic. Performance pause is a real gap. It then becomes all the more critical to pre-empt such situations as best one can by scientific screening tools.

Currently the recruitment industry in India is ill equipped for conducting such screenings. nor there are any credible tools available too. The most common method followed is a pre-employment third party general medical health check up report which will just produce a health report based on current health condition.

Predictive diagnosis is an emerging medical field and in that molecular science is showing some promising in roads. There is a need to tap this method for effective medical screening of prospective candidates identified for key positions so as to gain insight into their likelihood of staying healthy for long term career. Genomics shows us the way.

Hiring Quality Index

Given the diversity of recruitment practices prevalent in industries, for corporates especially , there is a need for a hiring quality index to preserve integrity of people management practices. It will also add accountability to hiring managers, making them responsible  from unethical hiring practices.

Some key factors that need to be taken into consideration:

The Stage:

• external hiring points available across hierarchy.
• prevailing attrition rates and causes.
• Exit interview data management
• Referal scheme for employees.
• Availability of Job Descriptions.
• Availability of a standardised candidate profile input data tool; for candidates
• Company brochure exclusively tailored for new comers.
• Availability of tests for preliminary screening.
• Availability of Hiring Quality Index
• Participation in any study during last one year.
• Availability of candidate data bank.

The Process:

• disclosure levels of employment details; extant and coverage.
• disclosure levels of Job description.
• disclosure levels of contract terms and conditions including salary bands etc.
• disclosure levels of hiring ethics, practices and equitable measurements.
• adoption of free recruitment practices.
• communication to disqualified/rejected candidates.
• Weightage to Interview within overall measurement index. 
• F2F Interview panel composition and intrinsic scales applied.
• application of psychometric tests.
• medical and physical health screening.
• verification of antecedents, social behaviour verifications.
• verification from previous employers
• verification of qualification certificates
• verification of social networks
• verification of volunteering, charitable, social service works undertaken.
• on-boarding support and facilities extended.
• Collection of family details of the selected candidate.

Hiring Quality Index need to be developed to cover all the above, at Industry level, for employment markets can then be defined based on Industry's HQI, duly benchmarked.