What are the various avenues to providing employee delight...

Tips from: Dr. Pallab Bandyopadhyay - VP - HR Asia Pacific at Perot Systems, has more than 23 years of professional experience in the areas of Institution, Organisation and Human resources development.

Excerpts from Mr. Pallab's talk:

A year back Professor Madhukar Shukla, who teaches in XLRI, Jumshedpur, gave a presentation to a group of senior HRD people. Today I'm using his very thought provoking and groundbreaking ideas.

The Educational profile of the Indian workforce is 44% illiterate, 33.2 % middle or above, 22.8 % up to primary level. The data is from the Planning commission document and Center for monitoring Indian economics.

As far as qualified manpower goes, out of the total 26 million, Engineering degree holders are 1 million, Engineering diploma holders constitute 1.5 million, Medical and Veterinary graduates form 0.6 million 

If we look at the availability of marketable skills, which is bifurcated into absolutely no skills and some skills for the urban and rural, male and female ratios, the skilled workforce available is abysmally low. The Government of India listed skills are not high end skills like understanding financials of a company or coding of software programs, but skills such as Typist, Fisher man, carpenter, Welder, Minor, Tractor Driver, Mason, Bricklayer, Midwife, and Barber etc.

On the other hand we keep hearing that there is a tremendous opportunity in terms of Job generation. When it comes to Opportunities, the NASSCOM report of 2006 speaks of 415,000 jobs in ITES-BPO, the same report talks about 1.3 million jobs in IT; 3 million indirect or induced jobs, along with IT and ITES companies there is growth in the services supporting this segment, like catering companies, transport companies and Recruitment companies etc.

Both are facts, what is the situation in our country? Are these opportunities enough for a country of our size? Today the skill sets of the available manpower are far below the required skill set level.

Non availability of qualified manpower in large cities is creating "war for talent" in the corporate sector, while there is a large pool of untapped Human resource outside the organized sector. Now under cost pressure, we are wondering why we need a Computer science graduate for maintenance job, why can't we recruit a B.Sc. for this job?

What is the meaning of delight, can we define it as "What you get far exceeds what you expected." Having said that, whose delight are we talking about. What you have today can become an expectation tomorrow. When I was in Sasken, a register was maintained for employees to write their grievances in, everybody used to write that Chapati was not good, after 28 days of seeing the same remark, we threw away the register.

I heard K V Kamath, Managing Director and CEO, ICICI Bank Limited, talking in an interview with CNBC, and I expected him to speak about world economy and the reason for the weakening Dollar etc. but when asked what caused him worry, he said, "A major problem I fear is the growing in-equality".

On one hand in our country there is a huge opportunity and on the other hand some people have nothing. We have concentrated on "What you get" as a bench mark for employee delight. We as HR people should contemplate working on the expectation of people, why not look beyond when we talk about employee delight. Let's not say X company gives this benefit hence we will also do the same and more.

I visited a company in Chennai, which contributes 25% of their profits to charity. It is a 350 people company and the attrition is very low, the owner created the company to satisfy his urge to give back to society.

There are some concepts I want to draw your attention to. The first one is Management of attention, Great organizations are created by like minded people working together to achieve something higher. What is management of attention, do you want to hire very highly qualified people to do mundane jobs. HR needs to focus on attracting the right kind of people and attend to them, once they join.

Second one is management of meaning, we must at some stage of our life, explore the meaning of our life, and what is the legacy that we leave behind.

How do you create management of meaning in an organization? Emotion, Energy and Edge, it is also called the WOW factor. Warren Buffet once said "People are voting for the artist, not for the painting", so it is essential to create the meaning.

Third one is Management of trust. Trust can be created by three things, Competence, Congruity and Constancy. Competency is very important to reach aspirations. Trust is very important in enabling everyone. Everybody has an aspiration, how does the organisation help me realize my aspiration.

And the last is management of self, Time magazine published an article saying that the biggest money spinner is God, and it's an estimated 200 million dollar industry world over. People in their effort for self growth are leaning towards spirituality. First it is self introspection. Every human being has something good in him or her. If the organization becomes the instrument for Self development on personal front and professional front, then the delight is available. Noel Tichy in his study said that if you are a leader, you should have teachable point of view. He said the leaders are going to be teachers. If you think hard, you can connect to someone who contributed to become what you are today. Leadership is a process of influence, and you can see it clearly in the field of spirituality.

Zig Ziggler once said, if you don't stand for something, you will fall for everything, the organization should people stand for something they believe in. Organizations being socially committed the employees feel far more connected, it brings out their productivity, and they see a larger purpose.

Congruity - Tofel 2007 study on employee engagement, in sample size was 88,612 in 18 countries of the world, they used 3 points, thinking rationally, feel emotionally and act motivationally. They found 21% of the employees to be engaged, in all 3 aspects and these are the delighted employees, 41% partly engaged, they know what to do and tend to get the work done, high score on rationality and motivational aspects, but they are not connected emotionally, that is why they are not going the extra mile, 30% are disenchanted, their scores were significantly lower in all 3 components of engagement, but were dramatically lower on the emotional component. 8% completely disengaged, disconnected rationally, motivationally and emotionally. This is the state of the global workforce.

Let me end with a quote from John Gartner who said "Therefore the leaders who wants to be teacher, teaches the leaders caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers"

Therefore we need to have teachers possibly in organisational context, who work with employees to help in realising their potential and therefore delight, and therefore engagement and therefore the organisational success.

Dr Pallab Bandyopadhyay is a doctoral fellow in HRD from XLRI, Jamshedpur, he is also trained at various human process and organization development interventions at NTL, USA as well as adult learning theories at Interactive consultants, Canada.

Before joining Parot Systems he headed HR function in Cambridge Solutions, Sasken Communication Technologies and Ashok Leyland Information Technology He and his team has been instrumental in making Sasken winner of the prestigious National HRD Excellence Award for 2002 conferred by National HRD network for outstanding contributions and achievements in the field of HRD in India. He was also conferred the Super Achievers Award in 2003 and 2006 by Centre of Change Management/Institute of Fun and Joy at Work and Indira Group for outstanding achievement in the field of HR.

He was speaking at a Panel Discussion organized by Businessgyan and TASMAC in association with Cynergyis, on the topic ‘Creating Employee Delight'. 

Compiled by Ms. Mangal D Karnad for Businessgyan

Issue BG84 Mar 08

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