'HR heads need to develop biz mindset'

IN CONVERSATION

Deepak Malkani is a partner in Accenture India's management consulting practice and the lead executive responsible for its organisation and human performance practice in India. He has worked across a range of industries, leading large-scale transformation programmes focused on enhancing business performance. He has consulted and partnered with some of India' largest corporations in the pharmaceuticals, consumer and industrial products sectors, implementing change initiatives across business functions including supply chain, sales, marketing and service. He outlines his views on talent management strategies to Rajiv Shirali

How do you view India's demand-supply mismatch in talent as an opportunity to improve talent management practices?

This mismatch across sectors and skill segments is making the market more competitive "" and like all competitive markets, more efficient and effective. Companies across sectors are realising that talent management practices have to be world class, to succeed in any business.

Traditional sectors like engineering and manufacturing are realising that to attract the same top engineering graduates they used to a decade ago (and they are competing with global IT / technology companies) they need to match the best-in-class people practices these companies follow.

Indian owned and based companies are realising that their best talent is being wooed by global multi-nationals. To retain the best, traditional people practices have to be substituted with greater transparency, accountability, empowerment and an overall enriched career experience.

Our workforce is growing rapidly, and yet everyone speaks of a talent shortage. Shouldn't we be focusing instead on shortages of the right skill sets?

One of the chronic problems of our growing work-force is that "employability" in many sectors is not adequate to meet business needs. Rapidly growing sectors such as retail, healthcare, insurance and telecom are experiencing the biggest pains. These sectors also offer huge employment potential. There is a potential need for government-industry partnerships to address this challenge.

However, we must appreciate that the talent market does not have very clear and static segments. A critical shortage in one sector causes a domino effect in another. As the IT sector sucks up most of the domestic engineering talent and still falls short, the manufacturing and infrastructure sector feels the pinch even harder. Telecom and Insurance attracts sales managers from established FMCG companies in droves. How can a company elevate human capital management to the level of a strategic function and align it with its overall strategic direction?

We believe that the person in charge of people issues should have a seat on the top management team. A strong working Business-HR partnership can be built only when people issues are accorded the top most strategic priority.

HR functions and heads also need to fundamentally change their world-view and ensure that they understand the dynamics of the businesses they enable and take decisions with a "business manager mindset".

In many HR organisations, too much time and effort is expended on routine administrative tasks and too little on enabling the strategic agenda. One way to facilitate this shift is to dispense with managing administrative HR tasks inside the organisation and outsource it to service providers, at the same time freeing up critical bandwidth for key HR people to focus on strategic issues such as recruitment strategy, leadership development, succession planning and so on.

According to Accenture's research, two other factors which determine success in talent management are "ability to attract, develop and retain key talent" and "ability to minimise the loss of critical skills". Can you elaborate?

The essence of these factors is that organisations must be able to identify which are the most critical skills or talent areas and hence the individuals which it needs to attract, develop and retain. Experience suggests that an organisation will never be able to retain all its good performers. People's aspirations and the talent market will always attract good people away.

Many organisations shy away from really differentiating their best performers from the rest. What's critical is to identify the best from the good, understand their motivations and invest in their careers early on. Many organisations announce fast-track programmes, but often fail to have the requisite enabling systems and processes to make them meaningful. This requires strong and specific performance management systems, career development and succession planning systems.