l&D: Your Guide-on-The-Side

J.K. Galbraith, the well-known economist said, “There are those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know,” commenting on people who try to predict the future. I would not like to fall into the second category by trying to predict the future of learning and development, but it will possibly be worth exploring the macro-factors that will significantly impact learning and development in the times to come.

That technological advancement is and will be a change enabler is a fact of life today; the other factors that I believe would change the landscape of L&D are the changing demographic profile of our working population and the shift of economic power from the west to the east. Global connectivity and a diverse multi-location workforce have already moved a large percentage of L&D activities from the physical to the virtual space. Technology has enabled on-demand learning; social networks and learning environments have enhanced the informal learning phenomenon in workplaces; and these have augmented formal learning and development initiatives. L&D professionals believe that in the near future 80 per cent of learning will be on-demand and informal while 20 per cent would be formal. With telecommuting catching up, we might soon see a day where teams will come together only on days of team-building and learning initiatives.

The change in the demographic profile and the abundance of accessible information have also changed the equation between the trainer and those being trained. Access to information which was earlier available only to experts, has empowered individuals to challenge experts and authority, and the role of the trainer has changed from that of a “sage-on-the-stage” to a “guide-on-the-side”. L&D professionals are chagning and will have to change the way they deliver training and create new interactive content which will better suit this new reality. With growth in the number of employees who come from rural and semi-urban areas, it has also become imperative that vernacular e-learning content be developed, and indeed we have seen a number of content developers explore this space.

With the growing might of the Asian economies, specifically that of China and India, L&D will need to rethink and redesign programmes, that today are fundamentally western in context, to programmes that take into consideration the cultural as well as the ground realities of the eastern economies. Working with people from diverse cultural backgrounds, as well as working in geographies with a culture that is different, require certain skills as well as some specific knowledge, and L&D will play a vital role in this area.

With the growing importance of L&D in the business context, forward-looking organisations have started leveraging the function as a vehicle for change, innovation, and strategic growth. In this issue you will find perspectives from practitioners and businesses that are trying to build resources and stay ahead of the curve through innovative L&D practices. The challenges that lie ahead for the L&D community are complex, but the opportunities are enormous. It is time for the community to grab this opportunity and shape its own destiny, because the only way to predict the future is to invent it.

The Future of The Workplace

One significant effect of India’s demographic dividend has been that the composition of our workforce has changed more rapidly than that of most other countries. While in the United States or Japan the workforce has aged significantly, in our part of the world it has become much younger. Technology, and the affinity and ease with which the younger generation of workers use technology, has changed the workplace, as they have changed the fabric of our society. The workforce that we see today is diverse in gender, colour, race, origin, orientation and their likes and dislikes, what is interesting though is that this workforce doesn’t allow these differences to affect their work or personal relationships.

While most organizations conduct orientation and induction programs to allow new workers to assimilate into the organization and its culture, forward looking companies have been long aware that the workplace of today, in terms of both amenities and culture, may not be able to attract and retain the talent of the future. Technology has changed the way that we do business, and continues to change the way we lead our lives. A couple of decades back when a large proportion of today’s workforce was entering their profession or were settling down in their careers, mobile telephony was the stuff of luxury and to some extent fiction. Today a business, or for that matter an individual, cannot dream of functioning without the same. Social networking has made connecting and communicating with friends and affinity groups easier, and the prospective employee today seeks more information about the future workplace from informal channels than from official channels. Across the globe more women have entered and re-entered the workforce, and structures and policies have changed and need to change to accommodate the aspirations and needs of this demographic, and to leverage the unique qualities of this ever growing workforce. The differently-abled today have access to knowledge and resources and are completely capable of significantly contributing to the economy, and organizations are creating spaces that take into consideration their special needs. The workplace is also becoming truly cosmopolitan and global. This new workforce takes flexibility for granted, is at ease with the concept of taking charge of their own careers, and unlike the workers of yesteryears do not expect job security. They are aware of the fast changing dynamics of the workplace and know the need of upgrading their skills on a regular basis. While they do not expect employment for life, they do expect that their organisations will help them to remain employable. These changes also mean that organizations require tweaking their work culture, their compensation and benefits, as well as their motivational tools to tune in with the requirements of this diverse and technology savvy workforce. In this issue we try to envisage from employees as well as employers the changes that they are incorporating in their workplace and the changes that they foresee in the future.

We have also incorporated a couple of new sections in this issue, and have tried to get news and a view from the middle-east, a market that is grows in importance with time. As always we hope that you find the magazine engaging and useful. Do write to us with your feedback, we depend on your views to improve The Human Factor with every issue.

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.