"The human mind is not adapted to interpreting how social systems behave"
-Jay Forrester
Monday, October 26, 2009
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Why HR departments are not effective in most organisations?
Is the 'HR' department an administrative or strategic arm of an organisation? While numerous books, HR practitioners and business leaders will vouch that HR departments have a strategic significance in an organisation's DNA, the evidence on the ground says otherwise.
Just for the sake of empirical data, let me try to list down the interactions I have had with the 'people's department' across the various companies I've worked with:
1. During campus recruitment and subsequent interviews (including scheduling interviews).
2. While joining a new organisation and the induction program.
3. During the Exit Process.
4. While clarifying HR policy issues like Leave Encashment, Higher Education policy etc.
5. During team outings and team building exercises.
6. During 'informal activities' conducted in the workplace to add the 'fun' element at work.
7. Carrying out yearly routines like Performance Appraisals, Skill Assessment etc.
8. Filling out 'employee satisfaction surveys' (I am not sure whether the results of these surveys form the basis of evaluating the performance of the HR departments, I hope not!)
I am sure that a lot of you would have a similar list of 'encounters with the HR team'. None of the items I've enumerated point to the fact that HR plays a strategic role in the workplace. Why does HR departments fail to come out of their cocoon of carrying out routine and monotonous administrative activities and why do they monumentally fail to connect with the employees?
I found this article in the Strategy and Business magazine titled 'The Talent Lie' to be a penetrating analysis of the issue. An excerpt from the article which nails down the real reason for the failure of HR is given below:
Just for the sake of empirical data, let me try to list down the interactions I have had with the 'people's department' across the various companies I've worked with:
1. During campus recruitment and subsequent interviews (including scheduling interviews).
2. While joining a new organisation and the induction program.
3. During the Exit Process.
4. While clarifying HR policy issues like Leave Encashment, Higher Education policy etc.
5. During team outings and team building exercises.
6. During 'informal activities' conducted in the workplace to add the 'fun' element at work.
7. Carrying out yearly routines like Performance Appraisals, Skill Assessment etc.
8. Filling out 'employee satisfaction surveys' (I am not sure whether the results of these surveys form the basis of evaluating the performance of the HR departments, I hope not!)
I am sure that a lot of you would have a similar list of 'encounters with the HR team'. None of the items I've enumerated point to the fact that HR plays a strategic role in the workplace. Why does HR departments fail to come out of their cocoon of carrying out routine and monotonous administrative activities and why do they monumentally fail to connect with the employees?
I found this article in the Strategy and Business magazine titled 'The Talent Lie' to be a penetrating analysis of the issue. An excerpt from the article which nails down the real reason for the failure of HR is given below:
"The best people coming out of business schools typically do not choose careers in HR. The field pays lower salaries and is not seen as a great starting point for the career of any would-be senior executive (except, of course, for HR executives). As a result, human resources is not a preferred concentration in most MBA programs. Almost none of today’s top executives have ever worked in an HR department. (A couple of exceptions are Anne Mulcahy at Xerox and John Hofmeister at Shell Oil.)
In most organizations, the HR function itself is staffed with competent professionals, but few have had middle or senior management jobs outside HR. As a result, they don’t have the experience that helps them think of their work in the context of the larger business and its priorities. This in turn means that they often have difficulty providing the kind of strategic direction and advice that is needed. PepsiCo, General Electric, and IBM are often cited as leaders in the deployment of HR, but even these companies do not systematically rotate their top management talent into the HR department. (They do, however, recruit top talent into the HR department.)"
'People management' is not an activity that can be centralised and left to a team that has not worked amongst the people slogging on the shop floor - they will always remain disconnected from the realities of the workplace, the true aspirations of the workers, their needs and more importantly the solutions that can be put in place.Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Measuring the RoI on Entry Level Training Programs
Organisations spend a fortune on training fresh recruits from campus (as well as on other organisational learning initiatives which is such a fad in this 'knowledge economy'), but I wonder whether they ever measure the return on investment that they get from these trainings?
Even though I do not have empirical data to prove my case, I would safely bet that most organisations do not measure their returns on trainings and more importantly do not even have a methodology to do so. I perceive this as a serious faultine in an organisation's HR and learning processes, because the organisation is fundamentally not measuring whether the huge amount of money, time and resources spent on training are contributing to organisational effectiveness and growth. What is the point of training if the employee is not able to contribute to the bottom line of an organisation? I am convinced that there are serious faults with the way training is being imparted currently, especially to entry level employees (I had touched upon this point in a previous post), because there is a glaring disconnect between actual project contribution of an employee and the training that is imparted.
Why does this happen?
The primary reason for this has to be the organisational design - with different departments handling a 'resource' at different points of time and working in silos. Almost every company that I know has a dedicated training department which takes care of the entire training initiatives, then there is the HR department which liasons between the employees and the training department and finally there are the operational departments where the employees actually work. Now what happens when an entry level employee joins the organisation? The HR folks handle all the onboarding formalities and pass the new employees on to the training department. The training department 'owns' the freshers for the stipulated training time which could range from one month to a maximum of three months. In the mean time, the HR department will liason with the various operations departments to understand the openings available for freshers in various projects and will decide on a resourcing plan. Once the training period is over, the fresh recruits will be 'released' to their allocated operations departments. That's the end of the story - the training department will flaunt their 'metrics' on the number of recruits they trained each period, the number of recruits who obtained excellent rating in the evaluation exams, number of hours training was conducted and a host of other 'performance indicators' that will help the training manager draw up colourful charts, the HR department on the other hand will also draw up their metrics on the number of positions filled with freshers, number of offers vs. number of actual joiners etc. Are these metrics and measures important and of any value? Is the measure of the number of people trained or number of hours training was imparted of any true value to the organisation? My answer is no - these are all dead statistics, numbers which might look good on a presentation, but giving no real insight into the actual impact on organisational performance. If the actual effectiveness of trainings are to be meausured, the training and HR teams should move beyond their current boundaries and look into the operations departments for data on the impact of the trained employees on project delivery. Post-training, if majority of the employees have not been able to contribute positively to a project or if their skills are being eroded, then that does not speak volumes about the effectiveness of the training. I am also convinced that if organisations start measuring the actual impact of training and more importantly learning on organisational performance, they will even rethink some of the training strategies they have in place. Thus my argument is that organisations need to meausre the returns they have on trainings and need a complete rethink about the KPIs that are set for the training department, the measure of a good training department is not in the number of people they were able to train, but in the contribution of the training to organisation's financial performance. But that cannot happen as long as the various departments work in isolation of each other and lack systems thinking. Well there is only one important measure of success for any department in an organisation, the direct or indirect impact that the department's activities have on the financial performance of an organisation.
Even though I do not have empirical data to prove my case, I would safely bet that most organisations do not measure their returns on trainings and more importantly do not even have a methodology to do so. I perceive this as a serious faultine in an organisation's HR and learning processes, because the organisation is fundamentally not measuring whether the huge amount of money, time and resources spent on training are contributing to organisational effectiveness and growth. What is the point of training if the employee is not able to contribute to the bottom line of an organisation? I am convinced that there are serious faults with the way training is being imparted currently, especially to entry level employees (I had touched upon this point in a previous post), because there is a glaring disconnect between actual project contribution of an employee and the training that is imparted.
Why does this happen?
The primary reason for this has to be the organisational design - with different departments handling a 'resource' at different points of time and working in silos. Almost every company that I know has a dedicated training department which takes care of the entire training initiatives, then there is the HR department which liasons between the employees and the training department and finally there are the operational departments where the employees actually work. Now what happens when an entry level employee joins the organisation? The HR folks handle all the onboarding formalities and pass the new employees on to the training department. The training department 'owns' the freshers for the stipulated training time which could range from one month to a maximum of three months. In the mean time, the HR department will liason with the various operations departments to understand the openings available for freshers in various projects and will decide on a resourcing plan. Once the training period is over, the fresh recruits will be 'released' to their allocated operations departments. That's the end of the story - the training department will flaunt their 'metrics' on the number of recruits they trained each period, the number of recruits who obtained excellent rating in the evaluation exams, number of hours training was conducted and a host of other 'performance indicators' that will help the training manager draw up colourful charts, the HR department on the other hand will also draw up their metrics on the number of positions filled with freshers, number of offers vs. number of actual joiners etc. Are these metrics and measures important and of any value? Is the measure of the number of people trained or number of hours training was imparted of any true value to the organisation? My answer is no - these are all dead statistics, numbers which might look good on a presentation, but giving no real insight into the actual impact on organisational performance. If the actual effectiveness of trainings are to be meausured, the training and HR teams should move beyond their current boundaries and look into the operations departments for data on the impact of the trained employees on project delivery. Post-training, if majority of the employees have not been able to contribute positively to a project or if their skills are being eroded, then that does not speak volumes about the effectiveness of the training. I am also convinced that if organisations start measuring the actual impact of training and more importantly learning on organisational performance, they will even rethink some of the training strategies they have in place. Thus my argument is that organisations need to meausre the returns they have on trainings and need a complete rethink about the KPIs that are set for the training department, the measure of a good training department is not in the number of people they were able to train, but in the contribution of the training to organisation's financial performance. But that cannot happen as long as the various departments work in isolation of each other and lack systems thinking. Well there is only one important measure of success for any department in an organisation, the direct or indirect impact that the department's activities have on the financial performance of an organisation.
Just Believe!
The greatest mistake a manager can make is to not see the potential and aspiration of his team members and provide the right opportunities. Why is it that most people I know reluctant to give inexperienced yet high potential employees the big opportunity citing their relative lack of exposure to an area as a constraint? Experience is a devious word and over the years as I have come to understand, one that can breed mediocrity. Trust and believe in the 'potential' of an employee rather than his/her specific experience, for only the that can assure you continuous growth and excellence.
Just believe....the results will follow and there is no better investment you can make towards the future of the team and the organisation!
Just believe....the results will follow and there is no better investment you can make towards the future of the team and the organisation!
Friday, October 2, 2009
Watch without numbers....
Overheard at office, a conversation between two cubicle mates, working on different projects:
A: 'When did you come to office today?'
B: 'Hmm, around 8 in the morning?'
A: 'My goodness, that's almost 12 hours of work, too much of work load these days is it?'
B: 'I enjoy what I do, I am getting to work on end to end systems here and not just at a small piece of code. I don't think that's any load'
It goes back to the old quote 'If you find a work you enjoy doing, you will not be working for a single day of your life'. Well, I find that the workplace is a victim of an overdose of this propaganda cocktail of 'a balanced life', 'work-life balance', 'fun at work' and the rest that tend to treat work as a means of earning livelihood and separated from the definition of the self.
Well, does it really matter from the point of view of an organisation what attitude an individual has towards work, as long as deadlines are met and great products are delivered? Well I think yes, it does indeed matter....that might just be one piece to the jigsaw called 'true work satisfaction'
I want to sign off this post with a short scene from Good Will Hunting where Matt Demon tries to explain why he's able to do Organic Chemistry problems with ease (when Minnie Driver says that 'nobody does Organic Chemistry for fun'. How many times have I heard one variant or other of that phrase - 'nobody works for fun!').
A: 'When did you come to office today?'
B: 'Hmm, around 8 in the morning?'
A: 'My goodness, that's almost 12 hours of work, too much of work load these days is it?'
B: 'I enjoy what I do, I am getting to work on end to end systems here and not just at a small piece of code. I don't think that's any load'
It goes back to the old quote 'If you find a work you enjoy doing, you will not be working for a single day of your life'. Well, I find that the workplace is a victim of an overdose of this propaganda cocktail of 'a balanced life', 'work-life balance', 'fun at work' and the rest that tend to treat work as a means of earning livelihood and separated from the definition of the self.
Well, does it really matter from the point of view of an organisation what attitude an individual has towards work, as long as deadlines are met and great products are delivered? Well I think yes, it does indeed matter....that might just be one piece to the jigsaw called 'true work satisfaction'
I want to sign off this post with a short scene from Good Will Hunting where Matt Demon tries to explain why he's able to do Organic Chemistry problems with ease (when Minnie Driver says that 'nobody does Organic Chemistry for fun'. How many times have I heard one variant or other of that phrase - 'nobody works for fun!').
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