Resign today for that long awaited raise!

So here is a common script that I've seen played over and over again.
An organization 'values' a potential hire based on the 'standardised' parameters of (a) number of years of experience (b) current compensation (c) current position (d) existing pay scale in the organization etc. The candidate is made an offer (position and salary) in the 'best interests' of the organization which turns out to 'under-value' the 'potential' of the candidate. The person joins the organization and turns out to be an extra-ordinary performer and adds value to the organization way beyond his brief. When the first performance cycle comes, unfortunately the company is not able to promote him because the minimum period an employee has to spend in the company before a promotion is 12 months. He is rated at the highest performance level and gets the 'best' raise possible in percentage terms. But because he was under-valued at the time of hire, a high percentage raise does not correspond to a high raise in absolute salary and he continues to be under-valued. At the same appraisal cycle, he sees his lesser performing colleagues who had spent more time in the organization getting promoted by virtue of being ahead of him in the 'waiting line' for promotion. Our protagonist feels dejected and de-motivated, but having the DNA of a high performer, he is again motivated by the challenges at work and continues adding value to the organization. The great appraisal fair comes calling again and our under-valued poster boy gets that long awaited promotion with a considerable raise in percentage terms. But, the fact that he was initially under-valued continues to offset the promotion and raise that has been doled out. Interestingly, the organization remains ignorant to the fact that a high performing employee has been under-valued and does nothing to correct this imbalance.
One fine day, revelation finally dawns on our hero that he is grossly under-valued by the organization and decides to quit his current job. When our hero breaks the news, it's received with extreme surprise and disappointment by the organization. Management goes over-board to pacify our protagonist and let him know how much he is valued by the organization. They also ask him what they can do to change his decision and some people even promise that anything can be done to keep him in the company (which will be carefully worded like, 'We can 'work' it out!). After couple of rounds of negotiation, both parties reach an agreement and our hero continues to be with the company. The employee is either promised an astronomical hike, or a long term foreign assignment or a certain role he had his eyes on.
What surprises me most is this reactive response from organizations - they seem to wake up only when they realise that an exceptional employee is resigning! HR and management talks about salary ranges, salary parity within the team, restrictions on promotion etc. to justify their weird decisions during an appraisal cycle, but when crisis hits (like when a high performer resigns) all these 'standards' seem irrelevant and insignificant. If this is not opportunism and hypocrisy, what is?!!

Here are my take-aways from this post:

(a) A high potential employee who is under-valued at the time of hire, will continue to be under-valued in the organization, unless the employee deliberately tries to change this condition.
(b) Standards defined for employee appraisals including salary ranges, parity within team etc. are not golden standards and can be altered as and when required by the management.
(c) There is no mechanism or process to measure the value of an employee, other than archaic employee appraisal mechanism that rates an employee based on colours, numbers or alphabets!
(d) As they say, 'A great employee is 'x' times more valuable than a good employee' (I've put a value of 'x' as I've seen different values quoted for this parameter by different researchers). If that is true, what are you as an organization doing to recognize the 'value' of these great performers and retain them in the company?

The Mars-Venus story??

I remember a conversation from a meeting with my HR spoke couple of years back. She asked what my interests were and I said that I blog a bit on PeopleSoft. Her reaction was, 'You write about work even after work? That sounds boring'.
May be this explains why there is a distinct disconnect between the employee population and the HR fraternity in IT/Software organizations.
When do I get to meet an HR person who understands and appreciates my intrinsic interests and motivations?

Reflections on the Commonwealth Games mess

'All that's necessary for forces of evil to win in this world is for enough good men to do nothing'

-Edmund Burke.

Random Thought

"The human mind is not adapted to interpreting how social systems behave"
-Jay Forrester

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:

"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.