Tag: human resources

Developing Human Resources for a Globalized Economy

Posted on April 5, 2012

Building differentiators that are difficult for competition to imitate gives firms a strong competitive advantage. In an increasingly globalized world, one of the key differentiators for firms will be their “people” practices. At a recent conference in Bangalore organized by the All India Management Association in collaboration with PricewaterhouseCoopers, industry heads and human resources leaders debated on how companies can best manage HR in a globalized economy.

In his keynote address, Ravi Venkatesan, director at Infosys and former chairman of Microsoft India, pointed out that as companies expand their footprints across the globe, three factors play a critical role in their success: the commitment of the global CEO, the capabilities of the local CEO and talent management.

Venkatesan noted that in most organizations, top leadership is accountable only for the quarterly numbers; they end up paying very little attention to talent management and leadership development. “If you want to have behavioral change in an organization, you must hold the CEO accountable for talent management,” he said.

According to Ventakesan, it is imperative for CEOs to take big bets on young people. “We no longer have the luxury of time to prepare people. We need to train them in an accelerated mode and be willing to give them [additional] responsibilities.” He added that people are drawn toward strong leaders and tend to stay on in organizations where they can learn and grow.

Another key takeaway was that the responsibility for an individual’s career growth must be shared between the individual and the organization. Speakers pointed out that if this process is left only to the individual, it can result in encouraging coteries, unhealthy internal competition and unplanned expectations.

R. R. Nair, non-executive director at BASF India and formerly director of HR in various Unilever subsidiary companies, emphasized the need to focus specifically on the top talent. He suggested that companies must have the flexibility to tweak their policies to align with the personal priorities of their top talent. “Employees don’t just want a direction, but a firm itinerary and the plans of the organization need to be integrated with the priorities of their top talent.”

Aquil Busrai, CEO of Aquil Busrai Consulting and formerly executive director, HR at IBM India, pointed out that it is easy for human resources managers to become mired in tactical issues like recruitment and compensation and, as a result, fail to gain a deep understanding of the challenges affecting the business. “We interact from the periphery and are therefore treated as such,” he noted. He went as far as to suggest that the time has come for making the HR function “obsolete.” Observing that the roles of business managers and HR professionals “will get converged out of sheer necessity,” Busrai said: “The business leaders and line managers must be made responsible for all people-related issues.”

R.U. Srinivas, CEO of business process outsourcing firm Caliber Point, suggested that HR professionals think of themselves as “asset managers,” view employees as “their portfolios” and devise ways of “measuring their portfolios.” Pointing out that HR professionals typically shy away from numbers, he added: “They must not only have a strong understanding of the business and technology, but also learn to like the metric culture.”

Investment in learning and skill development was reiterated as a main area that needs continuous focus. Padmaja Alaganandan, executive director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, noted that while India’s business community’s spending on learning and development at around 3% of payroll costs is in line with that of American companies, it is way behind what the country needs. Alaganandan cited two reasons for this: One, India is on a high growth trajectory and two; the education system in the country is not aligned with industry requirements. “We need to do a lot more,” she said.

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Creating a Pipeline of Female Business Leaders

Posted on August 18, 2011

Why aren’t more women reaching the corner office? In many industries, it’s a pipeline issue as much as a problem related to discrimination or the glass ceiling, according to panelists at a Wharton Global Alumni Forum that took place in June in San Francisco.

“It’s nice to have more diversity, but sometimes we don’t have girls entering the pipeline where they could [end up] in the jobs,” said Anne Hardy, vice president for technology and strategy at software company SAP. Hardy participated in the panel on creating more opportunities for women to enter and advance in the business world with Janet F. Clark, CFO of Marathon Oil; Connie K. Duckworth, a retired partner and managing director at Goldman Sachs who now runs ARZU, a non-profit organization creating economic development opportunities for women in Afghanistan; and Rosanna Ramos-Velita, chairman of the board of Caja Rural Los Andes, a microfinance institution in Peru.

Noting that she is usually the only woman present when she attends meetings at her organization, Hardy suggested that part of the challenge of recruiting women in industries like information technology or engineering is that comparatively fewer young women than men are choosing to pursue those fields in high school and college. “If you look at photography, videos or movies — typical things that girls of middle school or high school age are interested in — if they only understood that by studying computer science they could get into those jobs … maybe they would like technology more.”

Citing studies showing that the number of new IT jobs is growing faster than the number of new graduates in the field, Hardy said recruiting more women as well as men is the only way all the needed expertise will be available in the future. Studies have shown that women who do enter technical fields such as engineering ultimately leave because they feel isolated from their peers or passed over for promotions. According to Hardy, entire companies need to be involved in breaking down those barriers. “When there are activities to increase the number of women, we tend to only have women at the table,” she said. “We need to get men at the table and convince them that it’s not only a women’s issue.”

In addition to making young people more aware of the job opportunities available in certain fields, Duckworth suggested that enticing more young women to study business may also involve a mindset change. She pointed to a national study showing that teen boys cited money as their number-one criteria for choosing a job, while girls said their main consideration was finding a position that would help change the world.

Many young women see going into business as contradictory to that goal, Duckworth said. “I think back to when I was 13. What was I doing? I was running the ecology club at school, and what did I want to do? I wanted to save the world,” she noted. “There is this disconnect between perception and reality, and it’s partly about encouraging younger girls to go for the money because you can do a lot with it, and encouraging those boys to give a little back along the way, and save the world a little bit, too.”

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Why Are Indian Women So Stressed Out?

Posted on July 12, 2011

Women in urban India have easy access to domestic help: A full-time maid, cook or driver are not uncommon in their households. Of course, these are luxuries that most working women in the rest of the world can only dream about.

But a recent survey by global research firm Nielsen illuminates another picture. Covering 6,500 women across 21 developed and developing countries, the study’s results show that women in India are the most stressed out. Of the respondents in India, 87% said they felt stressed most of the time. They are followed by women in Mexico (74%), Russia (69%), Spain (66%), France (65%) and Italy (64%). In the U.S., the number is at 53%.     

What exactly is weighing on women in one of the fastest growing economies in the world? The Nielsen survey’s respondents point to the requirement of managing multiple roles.

One could well argue that this particular condition exists for women across the globe: Juggling roles at home and work are a given. There is a difference in India, however, says Nirmala Menon, founder and CEO of Interweave Consulting, a Bangalore-based firm that focuses on diversity management and inclusiveness in the workplace. Menon notes that even as career opportunities for women in India are on the upswing, the support structure and social mores have not kept pace. “Nor has the internal psyche of the Indian woman,” adds Menon. “Despite ‘modern’ times, traditional expectations of women are still conveyed in subtle but consistent ways. The Indian woman has far more familial interfaces to manage than her western counterpart.”

According to Hema Ravichandar, human resources advisor and formerly the global head of HR at IT firm Infosys: “Regressive mindsets in society and the workplace; a culture that rewards performance based on effort — with the number of hours spent [working] as proxy indicator — rather than result; rigid work policies which do not factor in the need to spend extra time at home during critical phases like childbirth, adoption, etc., are unique to India.”

There are other reasons, too. Technical infrastructure support and enablers are at a nascent stage in the country as compared to the developed economies. Options like working from home, flex-time, telecommuting and so on have arrived only in the recent past in new industries and are still evolving. “Even in companies which have these facilities, it is not construed as the right thing to do if you are serious about going up the corporate ladder,” says Ravichandar.

A lack of women in executive roles mirrors this. A report by Standard Chartered Bank points out that women constitute only 5.3% of the total number of board members in the top 100 Indian companies by market capitalization on the Bombay Stock Exchange. This is much lower than in other countries, including Australia (8.3%), Hong Kong (8.9%), the U.K. (12.2%), the U.S. (14.5%) and Canada (15.0%). The number of Indian women in middle and senior management roles is not much higher.

Meanwhile, the latest employment data show that worker participation (the ratio of workers to population) fell to 39.2% in 2009-2010 from 42% in 2004-2005. While the decline is marginal for men — from 55.9% to 55% — it is significant in the case of women — from 29.4% to 23.3%. Analysts say that one reason for this is that as men in the family start earning more, women, especially in the lower middle class, opt out of the work force for reasons of social status. In his column in the daily newspaper Times of India, Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyer noted: “Social mores, especially in the lower middle class, give superior social status to households where women don’t work. When a family with rising income decides to keep females at home, it literally buys social status with the income foregone.”

But the survey’s implications go beyond individuals or families. All of this has wide ramifications for India’s continued economic growth. If the support structure and attitudes towards women, both in the workplace and in society at large, don’t change, women will either simply opt out of the workforce or — faced with endless stress — be far less productive than their true potential. This will result in a sharp blow to the country’s demographic dividend, which though touted as a key factor in India’s growth, is under its own stress. The window for growth is small and, as Ravichandar points out: “Having women as part of your workforce is no longer a nice-to-do but a must-do.”

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