Enabling Innovation

The last decade has marked the coming of age of the Human Resources function as a strategic partner to business. This evolution can be largely attributed to the innovations that the Human Resources function had incorporated in its systems and processes over the last decade. Through outsourcing and enabling technologies, HR was able to hive off and automate a significant amount of the low value and repetitive work that would take away most of its productive time a few years back. With more time and resources, HR was now able to focus on strategy and planning, and the fact that the time was well spent is borne by the fact that today most Fortune 500 organisations have an HR seat on the Board. There have been significant advances in aligning compensation and benefits with business results and direction, bringing together a diverse workforce to adapt to the global village phenomenon, and in recruitment and skills development processes. While all these efforts have given forward-looking organisations a competitive edge over their peers, HR’s most significant contribution towards the creation of winning organisations has been and would be in creating a culture of innovation. With the commoditisation of even high-value, complex-technology products, the organisation of the future which wants to stay ahead of the pack would have to be necessarily innovating continuously in systems, processes, products and services. These organisations will need to continuously recruit people who are innovation champions, and having recruited them, provide them an atmosphere which encourages innovation while helping them upgrade their skills.

As far as innovation is concerned, the head of the Human Resources function could well be the most important person of your organisation. The most powerful force and differentiator in business is culture. While it might be a stretch to say that corporate culture is the sole responsibility of HR, the people who are hired and the training and cultural imperatives placed on the business are done so through HR, and this is where HR can have a big impact on whether or not the firm is culturally attuned to innovation. There is a perception in the business community that innovation is the responsibility of a product team or a business head. We must understand that not all employees are innovative, nor would everyone be able to internalise or institutionalise innovation. Innovation springs from the minds of creative individuals working in an environment that spawns and encourages innovation. Attracting and keeping the most innovative people, constantly improving their skills, and creating a culture that supports innovation will enable the organisation to create a sustainable advantage.

In this issue, we have deliberated on the innovations that HR has internalised over the last decade. Across the board, practitioners and business leaders agree that HR has evolved to create strategic business value. It is now time to step up the tempo and proactively start creating value for the future through championing the innovation culture. Institutionalised innovation will be the gamechanger of the future, and businesses will look up to HR to be the innovation enabler.

Welcome 2011

The New Year, as always, arrives with a lot of cheer and positivity. The economic indices are looking up, and we hear that most organisations are looking at hiring people and retaining employees through better compensation packages. The last certainly is news that makes Human Resource managers happy, because content employees allow us to implement better and innovative practices. 2010 has been a decent year from the perspective of the industry. We have seen significant growth, and have been able to leave behind the paranoia of recession that had consumed us the year before. 2010, however, when we look at it from the perspective of an Indian citizen, will perhaps be best remembered as the year when corruption of mind-boggling proportions kept creating news every few days; be it IPL, CWG, or the 2G and mining licence scandals. We can only hope that we have seen the worst, and 2011 will be the year where ethics in business, and not corruption, take centre stage.

In this issue, we have profiled a hundred organisations that we believe are companies that the next generation of professionals and consumers will look up to. While this is no exercise in ranking organisations for their superiority in a product, function or category, this list has organisations that have made excellence their mantra in everything that they do. Amongst a host of organisations that have shown stellar performance, either in creating shareholder value or capturing the mind-space of consumers and employees, these are organisations that stand out for multifaceted performance. To capture the imagination of a generation that takes geographical mobility for granted and consumes information at the speed of light, organisations can no longer be complacent by producing superior performance in a particular area of operations. The convergence that we keep talking about is true and happening, and it is happening at a scale that is unprecedented. The Next Gen professionals and consumers, while hungry, are also discerning to the extreme, and organisations that are unable to capture their imagination at multiple touch points will find the going tough. Forward-looking organisations like the ones that have been featured in this issue are aware and willing; they are initiating activities at multiple levels and are not afraid to experiment with a variety of forms and factors. We have tried to analyse what makes these organisations successful in what they do, and we hope you will enjoy the read.

THF: The Coming Of Age

The Human Factor completes two years in it’s avatar as a magazine with this issue. It has been an amazing journey, in which the magazine has evolved from a toddler, trying to find its feet in the world of print journalism, to a youthful entity which takes confident strides while knowing that there is a lot left to learn and achieve. The HR fraternity has given us many reasons to celebrate our second anniversary; our readership base has grown multi-fold, HR practitioners in India and abroad has recognised The Human Factor as a key publication in the genre, and we have been awarded the “HR magazine of the year” at the Global HR excellence awards. As we have grown over the last few months, we have infused new blood into the editorial team, and our commitment and passion is stronger than ever. Our commitment is to be true to the soul of ‘The Human Factor’ and yet keep expanding our perspective of the HR landscape. We had started our journey as a human resource journal, at a time when the HR function was just about coming onto its own. The last few years have been exciting for HR practitioners as it has grown in stature and been universally recognised as a strategic business function. With recognition comes responsibility, and the future of both the HR practitioner and The Human Factor while challenging, promises to be rewarding.

Our first anniversary issue - “Hall of Fame 2009” was a great success, and so I believe will be this “Hall of Fame 2010 - The Premier League”, the second anniversary issue. You will see that we have added a few categories to last year’s list. This is in keeping with the fact that organisations across the world have come to value the importance of the Human Resource function, and most forward looking leaders recognise that every manager is, at some level, a manager of human resources. In our quest for nominees for the “Hall of Fame - The Premier League”, we realised that there are exemplary examples of HR leadership in all business functions, be it sales, marketing or finance. Dave Ulrich had said that “HR should not be defined by what it does, but by what it delivers -- results that enrich the organisation’s value to customers, investors, and employees”, and as traditionally non-HR functions embrace HR values to deliver organisational results, we also see HR managers soaking in skills of other business functions to be able to become a true business partner in the organisation’s efforts in delivering value to all stakeholders. In this issue we have profiled managers and leaders across industries, sectors and business functions, an eclectic mix, which we believe will give readers a broad perspective of success factors and people leadership.

As businesses grow, diverse, global and complex people managers will come across a steep learning curve which will require them to not only prepare themselves for the present but also prepare for a dynamic and uncertain future, while keeping in mind the important lessons learnt in the past. We hope to remain an able and supportive friend in your journey into the exciting times that lay ahead of us.

What Ails Learning & Development?

The economic turmoil of the last couple of years has had a significant effect on the executive learning and development landscape. A recent Duke Corporate Education study suggests three primary forces that have changed the shape of L&D: budget cuts that meant significantly fewer available resources, travel restrictions that led to a search for new ways to learn, and improvements in technology that offered new methods for achieving learning. While the findings may not come as a surprise to professionals, it has taken the industry time, in both the supply and the demand end, to adapt to the new reality. While the tools and technology for hybrid learning models have been available, learning and development professionals had walked away because of their apparent inefficiencies. The last few years have seen dramatic improvements in technology but the fraternity still shows a certain inertia and skepticism in embracing them. In the post recession world it will be difficult for providers to survive if they fail to adapt new technologies into their design and delivery methodologies. The other area in which we have seen a lot of planning and little execution is in the aligning of business to learning objectives. Almost everyone that we spoke to regarding executive training at both the consumer end and the provider end acknowledges the importance of corporate training activities to be aligned to business needs, but a framework which would help organisations design interventions to achieve objectives seems elusive to most. In some organisations we see that there is participation from the drivers of business at the intervention design stage, but the engagement dilutes at the delivery stage.

The onus for creating a learning environment and culture that is both development and objective oriented is with the executive leadership of every organisation. That people are an organisation’s most important resource is today beyond debate, and yet when it comes to people development, more often than not we see the responsibility being abdicated to the HR or training functions. HR and training are possibly the best suited to facilitate and execute the intervention, but only business leaders can extract the best ROI on training. In this issue we have engaged with the entire spectrum of stakeholders in the learning and development space; business leaders, management consultants, service providers, trainers, and training managers, from across the globe. I believe you will find the articles and interviews to be insightful and interesting.

We have an array of exciting issues coming up to mark the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011. We will end the year with “The Hall of Fame 2010” where we honour leaders who have most impacted businesses and people in their area of work. This year we have expanded the scope of our Hall of Fame categories to include business driving functions like sales and finance, in recognition of the fact that in a diverse, decentralised and yet global economy, all organisational functions have significant impact on both business and human capital. As always, I look forward to receiving suggestions from you that would make your magazine more impactful and insightful. Happy Reading.

Leadership @ HR

In today’s business environment, when most organisations realise that their people create the difference between success and failure, strong and strategic leadership from within the Human Resource function is an imperative. In this issue, we have tried to scope the evolution of HR and then define leadership in the context of the HR function as it stands today. While the buzz about HR has been growing across industry sectors, it is only recently that we have seen strong and charismatic leadership come from within the community. We spoke to a host of extraordinary HR leaders across industry sectors to understand what it takes to be a true HR leader in this ever-changing business climate.

Today’s dynamic marketplace requires human resource professionals to have an expanded role in the organisation due to increasing importance of social and relationship capital. The challenge today is to gain and use influence to become a better business partner, to determine the strategic direction and the short- and long-term objectives of the organisation, and to take initiative and lead from the front to use the human resources function to help achieve corporate goals. While aspiring leaders in HR need to be technically proficient in the tools of their trade, they also need to acquire management and leadership capabilities to leverage these tools to produce sustainable and measurable results on the ground. Communicating and constantly upholding the corporate culture to build a cohesive team is an important enabler for driving growth. HR leaders who have made the transition from good to great are more than messengers of corporate culture; they have transformed themselves into evangelists who promote the ethos of the organisation with a religious zeal. An interesting finding for this issue was that most organisations that had great HR leaders had taken proactive measures to deal with the downturn and, but naturally, in these organisations there were fewer drastic measures like downsizing or salary adjustments. The adverse business sentiment also separated the men from the boys, and the better leaders found innovative ways to increase productivity while keeping the workplace energised. Today, at all levels we need committed leaders and managers like them to translate strategies and frameworks into solutions on the ground.

As you may be aware, your magazine The Human Factor has been awarded “The Best HR Magazine of the Year” at the Global HR Excellence Awards. This is a proud moment for us, and I feel honoured to lead a team which transformed the fledgling magazine to a force to reckon with in a matter of two years. I would also here like to express my gratitude to the stalwarts in the HR community who gave us their unflinching support and held our hand when we needed it most. My heartfelt thanks also to you our readers, without who the entire exercise of publishing this magazine would accomplish absolutely nothing. As we move closer to our second anniversary, this award gives us even more impetus to strive harder and add more value to the community.

Managing Uncertain Futures

At The Human Factor over the last few issues we have been trying to bring to you people perspectives from a variety of spaces beyond the regular workplace, from the world of media, sports and advertising. This time the magazine turns a new page, and we bring to you perspectives from the Chief Minister of Delhi, Dr. Sheila Dikshit and from Mr. Kamal Nath, the Union Cabinet Minister for Road Transport and Highways. While discussing organisations and workplace policies we mostly restrict ourselves to the corporate sector, or at the most, the public sector; but leave aside one of the largest workforce that has an effect on our daily life; the government and the bureaucracy.

With the Commonwealth Games around the corner, the scale of operations that Dr. Dikshit is driving in addition to managing the daily turbulence of public office is incredible. Mr. Kamal Nath, on the other hand, is committed to improve the surface transport network, and targets to add 20 kilometres of roads every day, while at the same time negotiating public-private partnership deals to create world class connectivity. What makes their job even more difficult is that while they manage a structured bureaucracy at the ministerial level, they also have to, on an everyday basis, manage the political cadre which is largely unstructured, and whose goals and ambitions are not always aligned to that of the government. It was educational for us to learn how public leaders successfully manage these multiple threads, and we hope you will find their interviews of interest.

In the campus-recruitment space, the industry and professional schools have just concluded a full cycle of pre-placement talks, assessments and interviews, offers, acceptance, and onboarding. Before the next cycle started, we wanted to have a 360° view of what students, industry and institutions, that is, the most important stakeholders, perceived to be important success factors for institutions to able to churn the right kind of talent. We reached out to students, faculty members and administrators in professional institutes, specifically business schools, engineering schools and schools of medicine, and to recruiters who are veterans in campus recruitment. While most stakeholders stressed on quality of curriculum, and industry readiness as important factors, the industry particularly stressed upon the placement process at the institution to be streamlined better. With the number of institutions mushrooming across India, the recruiters have a difficult time identifying the better schools from the masses. The tier two institutions at this point would do well to concentrate on building a brand that would differentiate them from the rest, if they want to come out as winners in the placements sweepstakes. While branding activities would help build perception, it is also important to build the brand around the core factors like curriculum, faculty, teaching methodology and industry exposure. It would probably also make sense, if instead of trying to copy the top schools and become another me too, these institutions try and create their own niche in terms of curriculum and industry specialisation. India certainly needs many more professional institutes, but it is not enough to just churn out graduates by the hundreds, what we need is employable talent in large numbers.

Engagement Is Strategy

In recent years many senior executives have iterated that more than strategy or vision, managing or engaging employees is their foremost priority and is probably a much tougher job than charting out a strategy for the business. There is also a school of thought which claims that if an organisation can get its ‘people’ act together, the business would take care of itself. Vineet Nayar’s new book Employees First, Customers Second has once more brought employee engagement issues to the fore. There is a certain romance in putting employees above all else in our scheme of things and we HR professionals feel vindicated when the industry acknowledges the truth that we had always believed in. We however need to ask the tough questions – is it possible to put employees first at all times? At what cost? Will we be able to convince non-employee stakeholders about the sound business logic of our employee engagement initiatives? We have seen some research lately suggesting direct linkages between employee engagement and company profits, but the industry and financial markets need more empirical evidence and standardised measurement tools before we can go full-steam ahead with an ‘employee first’ strategy.

In today’s fast changing business climate where employee loyalty can no longer be taken for granted, the new school of thought says that leaders and managers should focus on managing the relationships among people rather than managing individuals. This philosophy does bear reason; there is hardly a single piece of organisational work that an individual employee can today perform without the help of a team. In Robert Putnam’s seminal work Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital, Putnam defined social capital as “the connection between individuals-social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trust worthiness that arises from them,” and claimed that social capital was so important to an organisation that it defined the difference between stagnancy and dynamism. Creation of this social capital or interpersonal relationship between employees and the organisation as well as between individual employees and employee networks is the goal of employee engagement initiatives. In essence a good leader is one who is to able to create and leverage these emotional bonds to produce business results whose sum is greater than the value of the parts put together. When the direction, objective, and values of individual employees, their networks, and that of the organisation are synchronised, leaders can expect a resonance effect in terms of productivity and profitability from the social equity that is created.

In this edition, you will be surprised to see that we have interacted with and interviewed stalwarts of marketing. We have always been intrigued by these individuals who have stood apart through their knowledge, deep consumer insights, and creativity; individuals who have created a niche for themselves beyond their organisations. While we wanted to know about their success stories and creative triggers, we also wanted to understand their views on success factors in the workplace. What was interesting is that they all stressed on the basics and fundamentals of management like meticulous planning, teamwork, communication, and ethics. As Jack Trout said, the best advice that he has received is “Solutions are Easy”. As we start our various initiatives it would be wise to keep this thought in the background.