ITs essential for HR to have a USP

ITs essential for HR to have a USP

With manpower retention being a key issue, HR heads of different companies are gearing up to focus on 'Stay interviews' so that there will be lesser exit ones

What is your USP as an employer? With manpower retention being a key issue, this was among the key issues deliberated at the NASSCOM HR Summit 2010 held recently at Chennai. The HR heads provided some interesting perspectives and if the industry as a whole can make an effort to follow these concepts, existing and potential employees can look forward to a much better working atmosphere.

Yahoo! Vice President HR Aparna Ballakur, pointed out that "What you sell to bring in an employee is only the first and the easiest part of the whole game. The challenge begins when you have to retain the ones who buy this first move."
There are three scenarios that can evolve in any HR operation. One where there is a dissonance between what you are and what your employees think you are.

The somewhat happier situation is a resonance on what you are and what your employees think you are. But the ideal state to be in is when there is complete resonance between what you are and what your employees want you to be," she said. So focus on stay interviews and there will be lesser exit interviews, keep an eye on the factors that could push employees out of your company, was her advice.

For Sreekanth Krishnan Arimanithaya, SVP, Global HR for CA Technologies, there are tools to arrive at right values to offer for an organization. "Talent matters to business - and this talent is also in a way shifting to cloud with global workforces. Managing and securing this talent will be the next challenge for organizations and selling values to this workforce will be no cakewalk," he opined.

In an ecosystem where attrition and churn is re-surfacing, pay cannot be the only factor to either recruit or retain people. There has to be a value preposition on offer," said session chairperson, Gaurav Ahluwalia, SVP, HSBC Electronic Data Processing India.

John Sullivan, Professor of Management, San Francisco State University provided a 'HR's Crisis survival Tool-kit' where he pointed out that downturn is nothing new. Crisis has a way of reccurring. Benchmark best practices, focus on productivity improvement and innovation even when you are cutting costs, he advised.

Dr Sullivan spoke about 12 factors that company could pin up their HR plan to tide over the next downturn.

 

• ·         Get into the reactive mode. "How many of you have a workforce plan - a written one? We polled companies and realized that only 17 per cent of them had such a plan," he said.
• ·         Next comes, an ability to forecast. "If you are surprised, shame on you."
• ·         Quantify crisis - how often do layoffs reduce cost - almost never. So know the bets.
• ·         If you are not realizing the new economic reality of continuous ups and downs, you are bound to be caught off guard.
• ·         And as part of the HR fraternity, stop being overly optimistic.
• ·         Crisis always has precursors...rain has precursors like weather, cloud, thunder...identify warning signs before a rain.
• ·         Always alert your managers on immediate problems.
• ·         HR sometimes works without prioritization.... they try to treat everyone the same. However, alworkers cannot be treated equally.
• ·         Connect the dollar spent on labour to the dollar earned as output.
• ·         Many a times, solutions are adopted without data on tooeffectiveness. Stop that with immediate effect.
• ·         There has to be an "If-then" scenario practiced so that there is better visibility on topics.
• ·         There is usually no mid-course feedback loop metrics so that the solutions can be tweaked mid-term.
• ·         And companies need to know when to resume talent growth.