 "New talent challenges")
The Indian economy has shown varying growth rates over the last decade with rapid expansion at 8-10 per cent growth in the late nineties to a recession during 2008-09 to a period of consolidation over the last three-four years. The rise of social media and its rapidly increasing use has also changed consumer dynamics and makes it imperative for organisations to be agile to meet these new challenges.
Agility in an organisation's context means the ability to execute strategy quicker than competition. This translates into bringing out relevant products faster, servicing new customer segments effectively and quickly; innovating faster and in newer ways; changing the business models rapidly when the need arises and essentially being change-capable. This organisational agility demands a highly nimble and responsive talent pool - both in terms of the skills required and the manpower base. This could also necessitate a change in the workforce profile with new talent segments emerging and existing talent segments diminishing. All these pose new challenges for talent acquisition and management in the organisation. Human resource as the guardian of these processes has to fundamentally reshape itself so that the function becomes a driver of organisational agility.
First, from a talent definition and acquisition perspective, the traditional approach of highly defined and structured jobs is ceding way to a project-based work structure and broadly defined jobs. Organisations are now starting to believe that skills can be imparted and acquired within the organisation, but new hires need to fit in with similar behaviours and values. To nurture a culture supporting a nimble organisation, HR will have to enable employees to carve out their own roles which extend beyond their fixed job descriptions, based on an ever-changing structure. This means HR and line managers will need to actively support employees who seek out larger roles and new opportunities.
Alternatively, companies may define work in terms of small, discrete projects. It is essential that critical HR practices like career development, compensation, training, internal job mobility and performance appraisal are mature and linked to flexible role profiles.
Second, to align more closely with business needs, HR will have to start using data and fact-based analysis to help organisations recruit and manage talent. This analysis helps drive decisions on whether talent needs should be built (developed internally), bought (recruited externally) or borrowed (temporarily infused through contractors/consultants). A large Indian life insurance company regularly uses analytics to assist its recruitment team for mass hiring of sales managers. One such analytics insight revealed that a greater proportion of housewives were being converted in some states like Gujarat compared to other states like Karnataka. This led to a change in the sourcing strategy leading to a larger conversion rate on hiring. Another company uses supply chain principles in mass hiring at the entry level to ensure that each stage of the hiring process is managed using metrics like throughput, cost per stage and conversion rate. Stages that are performing poorly on these metrics are evaluated to understand root causes which can be addressed to improve hiring throughput. The onset of social media has led to some new age recruiters using parameters like Klout score (a measure of the influence a candidate has on social forums and networks) to evaluate a candidate's worth.
Another area where workforce analytics is increasingly becoming relevant is in understanding future demographic shifts in the workforce profile - such as multi-generational workforces and changes to the talent and leadership pipeline. Such shifts are more visible in public sector organisations or promoter-driven organisations where recent infusions of new generation and professionally skilled talent brings in its own challenges of mindset clashes and differing employee priorities. Organisations can address this by customising company policies, and practices on performance appraisal and career development to different talent segments.
Third, to support an agile work environment, HR will need to enable a 'learning organisation' - a concept which has been talked about in HR circles for long. HR can enable this with a culture of continuous learning blending informal learning such as peer knowledge exchange, social media learning and gamification with formal training programmes such as classroom/on the job training. An Indian arm of a global retail giant had planned an aggressive ramp up of its operations to meet business goals. Faced with challenges of lack of skilled talent and high attrition, the organisation reviewed its onboarding and training strategy. As a part of this, it shifted from a one-size-fits-all onboarding plan to a role-based onboarding training plan for its store personnel. These role-based onboarding plans were customised for the audience background, current and desired skill levels and the overall training and delivery plan. Post implementation, the company found new employees achieving time to competence much faster.
Last, there is an increasing focus on internal hiring and talent development to fill vacant roles. A global survey by LinkedIn showed that 94 per cent of Indian employers were looking at increasing or retaining past expenditure on improving their internal hiring and development practices. This calls for basic practices such as setting up a structured internal hiring process using job boards or transfers to more complex initiatives like leadership development to increase the pool of leaders as well as to enhance their competency levels. To hone the leadership and managerial skills of their function leads, a premier Indian EPC company recognised the need for a structured leadership development programme. The results were significant: more than 40 per cent of the programme participants moved on to new and larger roles within a year of programme completion.
For HR to effect the four shifts described above, it needs to change the way it operates and is structured from a provider of HR services to co-creator of business processes and organisational solutions. This requires that the HR move beyond its traditional 'support service provider' role to a more collaborative and networked business partner role. In summary, as businesses become more nimble, HR functions will have to reinvent themselves so that they can help business fluidly pull resources when and where they're needed to rapidly respond to changing business conditions.
Jayesh Pandey, partner & leader, talent & organisation practice, Accenture India and Shammak Banerjee principal, talent & organisation, Accenture India
