Challenges for BPS industry in Entry Level Hiring of College Graduates

There is the positive side when it comes to talent in India... there is a huge supply, with over 28 million students enrolled at any point of time and about 9 million students graduating each year.  Of this 9 million+ graduating about 15% are from engineering streams and about 65 to 70% are from graduate streams like commerce, economics, arts, sciences, and so on.   

Business Process Services industry hires graduates, post graduates and PhD's from across streams such as Commerce, Accounting, Economics, Sciences, English, Art and so on.  This industry has one of the most diverse need when it comes to college graduates for entry level jobs.  Their skills are needed to cater to several hundreds of business process across over 20 industry verticals that the BPS industry caters to.  Year after year the competitiveness of the industry is being 

the last two days I  was surprised to read the buzz in social networking and messengers like Whats App around the fact that Ernst & Young decided to dump their degree classification criteria at college entry level hiring.  But the way it was interpreted based on news reports is very different...Looks as if you no longer need a degree to get into E&Y.  And already this decision  (interpretation of no need for degree) is getting huge thumbs up in Social Media forums.

This goes to show how naive people can be and how quickly they start jumping to conclusions and also how something like this becomes a thing everyone's thinking of copying without even understanding.

Life Without Bell Curve? What Should You Expect

In a previous post  I had written about factors to be considered before just doing away with the Bell Curve.  Organizations need to understand how it would impact them. In many organizations the data from Bell Curve is used to drive many key HR processes therein... from promotions,  to rewards and compensation, career movements,  attending key exciting training programs and also your next transfer....  all these possibly have been linked to outcomes of bell curve ratings.   In short some say.... "It's like a Visa to Many Exotic Destinations in the organizational journeys".   It is like the DNA that defines genetic instructions for functioning of living organisms. 

That's why many a organization men hated it.  It brought in a class system within the social strata of organizations.  One who was at the D end or left trailing end of the curve ended up feeling left out.   Also some managers took solace in the fact that they were basically good to their teams but the damn bell curve drove them to assess someone as "needing improvement" or "not meeting expectations".  

So what would life be after an organization gives up forced ranking based on a Bell Curve?

a) For sure you will find that unless you have factored downstream impact,  most of the other processes now see some challenge and their structure and form would be under pressure..... if you don't have other measures and decision factors... beyond those which depended on inputs from forced ranking ratings.   So you would now need different yard sticks for compensation, promotion, career movements and so on.. easier said than done.   If not taken care well at design you would end up by shifting the irritant from forced ranking outcomes to something else that becomes the dreaded word.

b) Distributing pay increases would become the next big challenge.  Today it was easy to promote a culture of performance (at least that's what most said)  driven pay saying that one section (lowest banding)  got zero increases or even saw a dip and to the other extreme you paid our above average increases with the spread in between.   Now with the forced ranking buckets gone, managers would need to play the role of  clearly distinguishing performance, breaking the pie to be distributed into seemingly appropriate bits that show a recognizable link with performance and not border on egalitarian approach to rewarding employees.

c) Large focus will have to be dealt on setting right goals, specific, measurable and verifiable (not necessarily quantified in numeric). Agreeing what would be right goal, achievable and doable would be the bone of contention.  The disagreements will shift from performance grade or class to goal appropriateness unless handled well by managers and leaders.   Goal setting and its evaluation will have to be absolute. 

d) There will be more openness (have to be...) on sharing goals, creating awareness of one and others goals,  achievements and successes.   This will be driven by the fact that performance will be absolute so there would be focus on whether people are low balling their goals (setting easy achievable one's designed to show your outcome well)

e) End of the day performance will have to determine salary increases if the designers don't come up with ways and means to design compensation frameworks based on skill / capability capacity and progression of the capabilities.  Mantra of pay for performance alone will not work.     In fact if performance alone determines pay in the new approach to performance management then it is going to be a failure since the whole grouse of current forced ranking was about distributing pay and reward with some people being at the receiving end vis a vis others. 

In short the blame could be passed by managers to the system of forced ranking in the current system but in the new context that will not happen.... Managers and leaders doing evaluation will have to take ownership and deliver lasting happiness among employees to feel they go a fair chance at appraisals.   HR and Organization designers would need to understand models that will help better and alternative linkages to promotions, career progressions as well

Some Key Take Aways from SHRM's India Conference and Exposition 2015 , New Delhi

Now Don't Junk That Degree Please.... !!!

In the last two days I  was surprised to read the buzz in social networking and messengers like Whats App around the fact that Ernst & Young decided to dump their degree classification criteria at college entry level hiring.  But the way it was interpreted based on news reports is very different...Looks as if you no longer need a degree to get into E&Y.  And already this decision  (interpretation of no need for degree) is getting huge thumbs up in Social Media forums.

This goes to show how naive people can be and how quickly they start jumping to conclusions and also how something like this becomes a thing everyone's thinking of copying without even understanding.

The biggest shocker came when I read and hear seasoned professionals  praising the decision and Yo !!! They are already advocating removing entry criteria of having a degree for entry level jobs.   Ranging from "I told you, there was no need for fancy degrees"... to "Yes there's not an iota of evidence that there is a correlation between college degree and success." and ....  You know "Bill Gates, didn't have one, See how successful he was".   Soon pundits will be competing with each other to see how they can do away with criteria of having a degree as an entry level job requirement.  

Don't jump to conclusions so soon.  Read between the lines.... For all you know...and read... E&Y is not doing away with criteria that college degree is needed to get an entry level position.  Probably  they are only doing away with the tougher filter criteria when applying for an entry level job.... for which  you need minimum number of A or B grades in the subjects learnt at college degree program to qualify to participate in their selection program.   It is like saying lower the eligibility from 60% (or 50%) cut off scores and just allow them to apply for your job even if they just cleared their degree program.  Although it looks misleading (even a tweet on the web page of the company says it scraps away requirements of degree for a job) I would guess they are not really doing away with need to have a degree.

There will be "experts" who will say "Why do you even need a degree?,  See Bill Gates didn't have one"  But the question is how many people like Bill Gates do you find every day in life.   These are exceptions.  If Bill Gates or Dhirubhai Ambani did not have degrees so what... they were surrounded by people who had degrees and college education.  You don't come across people with these stories every day in the bus or at the street corner.  Both Bill Gates and Dhirubhai Ambani had teams and teams of highly qualified degree holders who helped them run their organizations. They were visionaries and inspirational and that's what made them what they are, not the fact that they did not have a college degree.

Now the E&Y story and the buzz it created  raises the key question again... "Is A College Degree Really Needed as entry criteria for a job position at entry level".   In a manner of saying it means,  do you need a degree to take up a job in an organization.  I belong to the category of Aye Sayers.  College degrees are meant to provide holistic, all rounded personality development,  provide knowledge and understanding in a certain field of study and prepare the students to take up careers.   They are supposed to make a well developed person and not just an intelligent person with no understanding of  social realities,  appreciation of arts, society and philosophy and so on.  Probably the reason why E&Y Decided to delink the minimum performance criteria in the degree was due to the fact that they found little correlation between "performance" and "college grades".   Following can explain that...

a) Success in career =/=  Success in exams.   Life success is dependent on whole lot of factors beyond just grades (which are dependent on mental ability in most cases of curriculum design).  

b)Education has become very competitive and lucrative field.   Colleges want to avoid detaining students  hence majority pass out of college even though they don't really deserve to.  Holding back students for non performance is proving expensive for the colleges. They also face the risk of litigation by the affected students.  So there can be little evidence of those who succeed in school only succeeding in real life.   They start a new race altogether (see next point)

c) College curriculum is getting distant from reality of industrial and organizational practice and so people are finding it difficult to cope and the best students find themselves outwitted in the rat race in organizations. 

d) People see that whether you slog and perform at the really top end of the class or you just enjoy your way through college and clear the bar by cats whiskers distance from the cut off point for graduating you still end up going to work starting off at the same level as the direct fit with jobs is very low. So every one starts off on ground zero when it comes to work organizations.   Then starts the new race.

e)Also the main aim of a college degree is not to just prepare you for a job.  It aims to prepare you for a life, a good way of living, understanding, being and relating with people in our lives.  Hence maybe a poorly balanced output.

So lets not get carried away even if some organization may do away with the criteria of a degree.  Remember today's  solutions are tomorrows problems. Imagine if you employee people without a college degree what will your customer (who's paying for the work you are doing)  pay you for a job that is now done by non graduates , which was earlier done by graduates.   More OR Less... That's the Question?

The larger question is for educationists,  management thinkers from schools and colleges who need to wonder how they would address this issue of  lack of any seeming relation between what degree scores you have and how you do in your job at work.  Otherwise degrees will be just like the tickets that take you to the destination but you would need a visa stamp to enter it.

Enabling Change that Lasts, That Should be the Focus in Training

There is a saying .... "Put a Changed Man Into an Unchanged Context and he eventually goes back to the old ways of doing things".  

Very relevant for trainers and training fraternity.  General quest for trainers is to see change come about based on the inputs during a training intervention.  Thus they see their role as that of driving change.  However the lasting change does not come by because of the above.   Which means... The trainers should understand the context from which the trainee (who you expected to change) came from and eventually went back to.  

Understanding the context and seeing that in light of the training is very important.  Therefore the role of the trainer is also to collaborate with the owner of the context (here it is the line manager)  to understand stumbling blocks as well as enablers for the desired change.  

For e.g. you wanted to make people more proactive through a training program.  However the situation on the ground once the trainee went back (here it is say one of the operations floor for customer X) was one where any hint at addressing something which was not raised as an issue by the client or any other stakeholder is not welcome and looked at with suspicion is a sure shot recipe for the trainee going back to old ways.   Why rake up issues, why search for embers to burn your feet... these are the kind of manifestations of feedback.

So what do you do?  Trainers can pass the baton to designers and say the context should be taken care of during design.  Yes, but the product you create is what gets back to action in the context... (in example above it is the operations for Customer X) and it is in the trainers interest to work with the managers or leaders in the floor of operations for Customer X to see how people are encourage for being proactive.   The managers need to be sensitized that one has to encourage, reward, cajole people to be proactive just in case they have been so used to not being proactive and waiting for fires to be doused.

Operationally using Kurt Lewins - Force Field Analysis helps in identifying barriers to change and resisting forces and as a group the Trainers can work with leaders to eliminate the opposing forces.   Thereby it becomes a much easier task for trainers to achieve their goals of bringing about lasting change once the context issues have been addressed to facilitate changed behaviors. 

Training is not an event. It is a process. It does not end at the exit of the classroom session.  The designers, managers and trainers should work together to ensure that there is sufficient focus on right context for individual to perform in changed context.

Don't Miss the Woods for the Trees: Performance Management can drive right Behaviors

One objective of a good performance management framework is to drive the right kind of behaviors within various organizational entities.   How does this happen? By Setting Targets and Goals with qualifiers. Yes, the word qualifiers is to circumvent the proverbial  "fallen between the cracks"

It is important to emphasize both "how" and "why" aspects when setting goals and not just the focus on "what"

Take for example the highest achiever of sales in Pharma Co (name is irrelevant).  Here was Monty the highest grosser on sales.  For eight quarters he clocked over 40% growth each quarter and was the star salesman two years in a row.  About 9 months later when a new drug was launched by the competition the skeletons tumbled out of the cupboard.    Mohan used his smooth talking skills and network with stockists to off take and store more than they needed and the inventory went piling up finally leading to zero off take in two quarters when things got tough.

We don’t need to mention the fake invoice generation by “unscrupulous” employees to show higher sales.  This happens in various industries and google your way to “Billing Scams”

So if you are looking for good behaviors aligned to your organizations value system then you need to ensure the “desired behaviors” are brought into focus.  

This can be done through combination of the Performance Management and the Competency System.   The PMS should focus on the goals the “how” and “why” along with the “what”.   The managers should ensure that they anticipate how things can “Go Wrong” and discuss these with their teams in the process of setting goals.   

The competency framework should ensure that the behaviors of the competencies (managerial and leadership) do cover behavioral aspects of “how” apart from defining the core job related behaviors of the given role.

Focusing on just numbers,  targets and deliverables you might end up like the proverbial  missing the woods for the trees.

Need to Look Beyond Empowerment

Empowerment has been something close to the heart of HR professionals for several decades now ...probably since F.W.Taylor's times in these modern times.  However as change became more enveloping and dramatic and as the command and control structures in organizations gave way to more flexible structures and models, employees were... empowered and given more autonomy and freedom.  

But...it is not enough to empower individual employees.  You need two other conditions for the end results (organization effectiveness and innovation) that you would want to  pursue as a consequence of empowering people. First, you need creation of "practices that drive empowerment" and "an environment for empowerment".  Remember for example "Trust" creates and environment that motivates and drives engagement and resultant discretionary behaviors.

This is why great leaders who drove empowerment and created a wonderful organization at one organization end up failures in some other organization.  They could not drive the other two conditions to sufficiency although they would have driven the philosophy of empowering individuals.  

 As I have said in an earlier post "Context is key" and it is in this connection that "practices" and "environment" play a key role.  When practices are present that drive empowerment the relationship between them is positive however that positive relationship only gets strengthened when you have "the empowering environment".

Empowering environment is all about building trust by having the right kind of rewards that drive and encourage empowerment, giving the autonomy where people need,  giving them freedom to make decisions,  not making it look like a crime when someone commits a mistake  [Enabling Risk Taking Behaviors, See Earlier Post on this ] but rather encourage learning from the mistakes, and finally communicating these aspects of your culture.

Empowering practices include things like delegating authority (give them not just responsibility but also authority),  giving right feedback in performance processes and Employee Involvement in Decision making. (yes this last one is a practice which actually manifests in how you feel as an employee..)

Today empowerment is here to stay.  Whether it is giving employees a voice or a say in key policy decisions or allowing them flexibility in deciding some elements of their compensation structure or even deciding what time they come and what time they leave office.... as well as making substantive contribution in decisions of relevance to the businesses they operated in organizations have done a lot to provide the much needed empowerment.   

Focus is More Relevant than Effort !!!

A student went to a Zen master and said, “I am devoted and keen to study your martial art system. Tell me Sir, How long will it take me to master it?

The teacher looked at him casually and remarked “About Ten Years”

“But I want to master it faster than that, I will work very hard, practice twice the number of hours per day... and also slog at night" and "Sir, Then how long will it take me?”

The teacher thought for a moment and said “Twenty Years”

Simple lesson, it takes time to master something. It is not the quantum of time rather the focus and attention that we can pay that makes the difference in how much skill or knowledge gets accumulated.  

The more one focuses on the task the better is the learning.  If you tend to push through you are bound to undermine the learning. 

There is an optimal speed at which we can learn, understand and synthesize knowledge and we can get more adept at it but short circuiting it in something new we seek to learn will not help the learning any more than walking around with a dictionary makes you an expert in English language. 

Read more about the power of Focus and How It Makes a Difference in What we Do and What Gets Done.   Basically what gets focus gets attention and eventually gets done.  Read Here

When Opportunity Knocks !!

They say opportunities come knocking. Not once... but.. several times.  But we often ignore them or overlook them. As Winston Churchill said "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity while the optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."

This can happen only when we are aware of the opportunity. So, coming from a positivist school, I believe the world is not full of pessimists.  Then the question is why do people miss opportunities. 

First the problem of not being able to identify opportunities.  Reason can be explained as unawareness.  Did you remember someone you knew saying " I could have taken the Design Course.. but ....." or"I could easily have done engineering.....' but  or I was up for a top modeling assignment but chose medicine.... imagine what life could have been today OR the more common one among investors "I was about to invest in XYX stock.... only if I did I could have been millionaire like my friend."   One of the  most common mistakes made by students who get into the wrong course (they dislike after joining) or graduates getting into wrong jobs (hate the profession)  is they did not do enough homework preparing to understand what it meant. Most often doing some home work or some kind of scrutiny would have helped make better decisions. 

The other point about missing out opportunity is being overly cautious.    We fear taking risks, fear the unknown, fear not being able to make it, fear the hard work and thus ... miss out the opportunity.    Thus you end up giving a let go to something that you should have seized.  I remember one person telling me that he got into IIT Mumbai in the 1970's but did not go as it was too far and he preferred staying at his village and studying in a college nearby but.. the real reason when we explored more was about the fear of going to the city and competing with the boys there. 

Another reason especially among those who are talented, gifted or have some strength they never capitalized is their inherent lethargy.   Left to themselves they would prefer to chill, enjoy life as it comes and no one was there to push them to the wall and drive them.  So it is mostly talent wasted kind of situations that fall in this category. 

Next think of the dreams you had but never converted to reality.   To give wings to dreams you should have a plan.  Lack of Planning  is another way one has missed opportunities.  By the time the race had to be run you were still working on the equipment and missed the race.   

In human relationships we can often hear someone say "if only I could have made up with him / her.. Now he's no longer here..." .  This happens when we don't mend relationships or build broken bridges with someone while they are there with us but regret it later when they moved away to something new and no longer are with us or when they unfortunately pass away from this world.

In all probability you find that when people are old and enter the evening of their lives they often speak about what they did not do.... the missed opportunities. But I think being aware of how one can avoid the chance of categorizing the wrong one's and regretting them is something we should understand.   We will discuss a very simple framework in a later post.

Contextualization and Substantive Composition Key to Successful Practices

When it comes to organizational practices we seem to live in a copy cat world.  Human Resource is one such domain where similar sounding (Yes resoundingly the apt word can only be sounding...) practices abound across the organizations.  There is  strong tendency to look at what others are doing, emulate them, follow what they do and think that we would achieve success. So if you take a dozen processes in an organization you would find they resonate across different organizations in the industry.  However there are two things to keep in mind.   First is about “contextualization” and second is about “Substantive composition”

Contextualization is about understanding the scope and context in which the process, the tool or the framework you have adopted or implemented.   Take for example that most companies have a performance management system.   How much is it contextualized.  What does performance mean in the industry. Do you need a separate framework for sales versus the consultants, or will incentives work.  How much should you bank on deferred compensation.

Second one is about substantive composition. How you implement in your specific organization is more of a cultural thing.  They way your people do performance discussions, the reliance of managers in career development framework,  the coaching tendency of your managerial staff and other leaders,  the way rewards and recognition is valued when delivered all of these are cultural.

I can give my whole process manual for performance management in my organization to a competitor but sadly it can never be implemented the way it was done in my organization. It can be copied but it can't be implemented for the same outcomes.    Our HR practices and systems are not 'freely mobile' for implementation outcomes and if they were so then every industry entity say (in IT for example) would have implemented the same kind of  processes (yes they do have similar looking one's) and would have reaped similar benefits.  But this is far from true as seen over past 2 decades.

In conclusion remember....
"It is not the form that your HR systems and processes take that makes the difference and lets them stand apart --rather it is the substance behind the form that the systems and processes take makes them so". 

Without Bell, Will It Be Another Road Hell !!!

Today's Solution,  Tomorrow's Problem.  

Peculiar are the ways in which organization change things without understanding the real issues, the real problems they are trying to address and then live with a whole new set of problems down the line.  

The same is to come with Big Bell.   The Normal Curve or Bell Curve approach to manage organizations came about for two reasons...

a) Do away with a small fraction of non performers each year and replace them with stars

b) Next year you should have more stars and less non performers and in the long run you don't have any poor or non performers

Oh La, this never happens.  Why? 

The assumption is flawed.  Here is a way to look at it. Your individual performance (of employees) will be randomly distributed (like a bell curve) if you hired them at random from a crowd of talent.  However organizations work on deliberate attempts to source, select and bring on their talent to their turf.  So fundamentally performance cannot be randomly distributed when selection is deliberate attempt to hire people who are good in the population. .

Furthermore if your work was about doing some sorting exercise or widget breaking exercise where everyone is doing same kind of work and same standards apply then you can expect work outcomes to have a normal distribution.  When buckets of work effort are non comparable or when team effort is determining outcomes then what normal are we talking about. 

The problem was GE brought in Bell Curve for axing non performers, good for them. Everyone tried to copy but remember you can never develop sustained advantage from any system unless you understand the substance behind the form.   So many organizations tried to follow and voila....... everyone was using bell curve.

Then came more problems,  people who were paying out rewards found it a good way to easily segregate people and dish out salaries and increments.  But that was also a flawed assumption. They were creating tomorrows problems.  Real pay differentiation should be skill differences (capabilities) and resultant impact created for business.  When you cant' do this you find the easy way out.  Use something else which really does not do its job well   (the bell curve)

Now everyone's talking about Doing Away With the Bell Curve.   This is the seed for tomorrow's problem. The idea behind the bell curve was that you did a fair discussion elaborated to your team why A was different from B, and B was different from C in a convincing manner giving feedback twice in a six month period and finally when outcomes came no one felt he or she was a victim of the system that was unfair.

If companies were really sure their bell curve worked then the best thing to do was to put up on the notice board (intranet that so many have, or the notice board) highlight all the A banders with their achievements.   Who would deny such open culture and when people see what was delivered for an A there would never be a complaint.    Today all agenda's are hidden... Managers dont' want to give feedback.  They just pass it as another HR bungling by bringing in the normal curve and escape the questions they cannot answer.   Don't you remember the most quoted line after the Great Dictator ..... "You were great but ... we have a normal curve so you were pushed down"

Now doing away with Bell has become a fashion because Cisco's and Big Co's Did it but what is that you will do after Bell Curve is abandoned is not even simulated in the mind.  If you really need to give up the bell curve ask the following

a) How will you award increases.   If you think you will leave it to managers of teams to decide you are in for a great .... challenge.  Managers will come back saying give me a spread, or  they will end up playing GOD.   The problem will be attrition due to unfair managers.  If they become socialists distributing increases evenly you will end up losing your best talent to competition as your best performers will become average salaried people within 2 to 3  years.

b) How To Make them Give Better Feedback and Improve Appraisals:   This was always the case, but how will that change happen.  It needs deliberate attempts to understand what is meant by excellent versus what is mediocre in each and every work function.   Then be ready for your compensation teams to start groping in the dark how to distribute merit increase, how to compare jobs and how to make people happy with the rewards system.

c) How will you promote people.   Today it is generally based on High Performance as a lag indicator compared to similar groups.  The down side of doing away with Relative forced Ranking is having  a good way to identify potential that is scientific and predicts performance rather than scuttles performance in the long run.

d) Finally it is about asking What Next on Distributing Annual Increments:   With Bell curve managers were seen as forcing people into buckets without proper reason (Read it as poor feedback giving practice).  Without Bell curve managers will be seen as playing favorites or as being so non-discriminatory that their best performers will have no reason to stay back.

Just a couple of years down the pendulum will swing another way when maybe another CAPCO will start adopting the Bell and Everyone follows... without remembering that the last thing that can make your practice sustainable is the form, however the right substance behind the form is what needs to be understood. 

Performance Management: Don't Miss the Woods for the Trees !!!

Everyone seems to be jumping right onto the band wagon.  Bell curve has become "passe"... So what's the in thing....  That's a million dollar question.

A clear mandate now would be to go back to the basics.  Pressure would now mount on such systems which have done away with Brother Bell to actually motivate performance and no longer manage it.. This is going to mean

a)  Regular and precise goal setting
b) Clarifying understanding and expectations clearly
c) Reviewing periodically and being transparent on the achievement / non achievement
d) Understanding what went wrong and what could be done better.

Over and above is the substantive element that needs to be covered.

One objective of a good performance management framework is to drive the right kind of behaviors within your organization and its various entities.   How does this happen? By Setting Targets and Goals with qualifiers.  It is important to emphasize both "how" and "why" aspects when setting goals and not just the focus on "what".  It has to be a deliberate attempt and should not be left to chance.

Take for example the highest achiever of sales in Pharma Co (name is irrelevant).  Here was Madan the highest grosser on sales.  For eight quarters he clocked over 40% growth each quarter and was the star salesman two years in a row.  About 9 months later when a new drug was launched by the competition the skeletons tumbled out of the cupboard.    Madan used his smooth talking skills and network with stockists to off take and store more than they needed and the inventory went piling up finally leading to zero off take in two quarters when things got tough.
We don’t need to mention the fake invoice generation by “unscrupulous” employees to show higher sales.  This happens in various industries and google your way to “Billing Scams”

So if you are looking for good behaviors aligned to your organizations value system then you need to ensure the “desired behaviors” are brought into focus.

This can be done through combination of the Performance Management and the Competency System.   The PMS should focus on the goals the “how” and “why” along with the “what”.   The managers should ensure that they anticipate how things can “Go Wrong” and discuss these with their teams in the process of setting goals.   

The competency framework should ensure that the behaviors of the competencies (managerial and leadership) do cover behavioral aspects of “how” apart from defining the core job related behaviors of the given role.

Focusing on just numbers,  targets and deliverable s you might end up like the proverbial  missing the woods for the trees.

FIVE THINGS THAT WILL IMPACT HR OF THE FUTURE

We know well that the future cannot be predicted exactly as it would unfold. However a few trends can give you an indication of things to come.   When it comes to organizations the biggest question in the minds of leaders is "What will change and how will the changes affect the work organization". Below are a few changes and the impact it would have on the HR Function.  Organizations that anticipate these and make deliberate attempts to circumvent them will be in a position of strength vis a vis organizations that believe in crossing the bridge when they reach there.  You may not need a bridge for all you know...it may be something else.    

ANTICIPATED CHANGES	WHAT IT MEANS FOR HR
Heavy Automation of basic level HR processes Most employee data will be inputs by employees themselves	Almost all entry level HR jobs will disappear
Regulation and cross border movements will results in a maze of complex employment terms and conditions	Organization will need specialist advisors to help them navigate this complex web of employment benefits administration and cross border movements and virtual configurations
As organizations become more flexible yet complex leading to a duality it would need special skills and deep understanding of employment needs	Shift towards more specialist roles in the HR functions.  The era of generalists will be over
Data will be generated all round in organization both within and across interface of the organization.    Data generated will be more reliable, more robust.	Trajectory of HR professionals, their decisions and judgments will all be determined by insights and analytics from real time data More statistics and big data experts and statistical modelers would be part of the HR department
Too many people will be chasing too few in the talent pool. Curriculum getting specialized, niche skills will emerge.  Career orientation of students will no longer be linear	Having a right Employee Value Proposition and models to engage culturally diverse and remote sets of configurations will be key to surviving the talent war. Shift will be towards building relationships and transitioning talent across boundaries (from campus to coporate) rather than vanilla hiring process. longer term strategic partnerships and tie ups with colleges and universities will be key to talent war tactics

Urgent Versus Important: Towards Effectiveness in Our Goals

President Eisenhower once said "The Urgent Problems are Seldom the Important Ones".  This can't be more true even in today's context .  Incidentally life is much more complex, much more fast paced, urgent and demanding than during the days of President Eisenhower

You will agree, the internet boom has brought in so much information at our finger tips and at the click of the button that one cannot find time to focus on something without getting distracted. If you are working on a word document for an hour you must have felt the urging need to go online and inform your friends on Facebook or Twitter of how you are enjoying every minute of your writing or,  the tingling urge to browse the internet.   Coupled with those distractions is the temptation to respond to that beep on your hand phone or tablet alerting you of a message waiting or a update from one of your favorite apps. 

 Given this urgency and sense of distraction how do you remain on top of your dozens of conflicting priorities.   These priorities stare at an average person every hour of the living day.  Be it a professional working in office, a lawyer, or even a script writer.  How do you handle your day to day priorities becomes the top issue many times.   Missed deadlines,  abandoned personal goals,  a fuming boss,  a irate customer are all downsides of not being able to keep pace.   This leads to more and more accumulation and you end up with a Himalayan task of prioritizing and re-prioritizing.    What would help is to step back and think about that long to-do list you have.  Just having one does not guarantee you are moving well on the tasks to be completed.   Are you effective or trying to be efficient in the process. 

Here are few things you can do to make most of the avalanche of items on your  to-do list. These simple steps will soon make you more effective in your daily tasks and can lead you towards improved overall performance and reduced urgency and stressful moments.

a) Pareto to the Rescue:  Use the 80:20 principle to segregate the list of your pending items into vital few and trivial many.   Pick up the top 3 to 5 things you want to sort as key priorities among the several awaiting your action.  Call them your Top Priority one's.  Remember the key is that it is not enough to know what to do but also know what not to do. 

b) Use those Ever Increasing Constellation of Apps:  Be it android or iOS you will find several hundred planning tools, to do lists which can help you with alerts, alarms and reminders.  Put these Top Priorities into the calendar and keep coasting along as you finish them one by one.  For the technologically uninitiated there's always the daily diary or the planner book that can come in handy.

c) Distance Yourself  from Those Digital Distractions: You need to put away these distractions like the SMS to waiting to be read, the latest Tweet from your rock star hero or the latest update on weather, or the email from office  all arriving incessantly into the digital device.  Keep a time window for such activity and stick to it.  If you follow that routine then it starts getting ingrained in your mind, in a few days the sub conscious sub system of the mind learns to rewire our brain circuit

d) Make Time for Reflection:  In the hurry and pace of daily life we rarely stop to look back on the day gone by.  It would be a good idea to look at how you had done on the things you did each day.  You would need not more than 5 to 8 minutes and this exercise also helps you to identify any priority items that you may have to focus on the next day.   The human mind has a uncanny ability to tune out what is not in focus and one could easily avoid missing out something which might fall between the no light hours that separate the two days.

e) What Are the Other Distractions:  Do you have too many things going on at the same time.  It is said that human's multitasking are more likely to make mistakes.  This is due to context switching leading to reduced attention.  However it is not impossible and people can be trained and become better at multitasking but that is only after training.  Otherwise several studies do show the down side of effectiveness while multitasking. So try to focus on the tasks one at a time as the brain needs to refocus as you switch between tasks making use of mental energy.   So this goes back to making a priority lists as in point a and re-look at what's important, whats not before you race ahead.   Some of us think we are experts at multitasking then you need to have a shared understanding - it is about doing two unrelated tasks.  Second the brain has an ability to switch rapidly between one and the other task so we should not confuse that with multitasking.

So next time think when you are overwhelmed by a long list of to do items.  Remember that efficiency can be in contrast with effectiveness and the choice is in our hands. 

BPS Industry: Creating an Impact

Five Things You can Pursue....An Achievable Wishlist

In today’s world there is an unending quest for happiness.  But what makes you happy does not necessarily make me or another person happy.  In trying to pursue something which I don't want to go after, I am probably living a dream of someone else.

The question is....Is it something difficult to find out what you should pursue.  Is there something we can learn from others experiences.

One way to look at it is from the perspective of terminally ill people.  If you have lived with someone who was in the terminal phases of cancer you would find that they are in a hurry to achieve as many things as possible in the short span of time they have staring ahead at them. They want to do many things and the last days do see some good  progress being made.   They also regret they tried out this so late....Learning something new,  trying out what one never tried out,  meeting others, generally speaking.  All this in the midst of the suffering, the trauma that they go through.   

There was an interesting post that someone put up based on the discussion she had as a nurse with the terminally ill patients she spoke to.    Here's a link to the article.

The five things that most terminally ill people wished they did was

a) Had courage to live a life true to themselves and not living others dreams

b) Wish they did not work so hard... burning themselves and not having time to be happy and enjoy the small joys of life

c) Wish they had courage to express themselves

d) Wish they had stayed in touch with their friends

e) Wish they had let themselves be happier.

These are phenomenal ways in which we can look to in order to make things look and feel different for us.   Anything in hindsight might look simple but to have thought of it that way was the difficult part.  These five are good cues to pursue in our lives.  That would surely make it easier not to regret that we missed out doing these things in a life time.