HR Has To Challenge Itself More

Deepa Damodaran interviews Anand Shankar from Deloitte

“In the past, learning used to have a shelf life of 10-15 years. However, today it has reduced to three-five years. We call it as half-life. Thus, an employee’s core competency is the ability to learn quickly. One has to continuously learn and reinvent at an individual level,” says Anand Shankar, Partner, Leader - HR Transformation at Deloitte. He was speaking to Deepa Damodaran in the backdrop of the 5th APAC SHRM HR Tech Conference 2019 held recently in Hyderabad, India.

 

A couple of things are happening on the HR front today. Firstly, HR is adopting new technologies faster unlike 10-15 years back when it used to be the last to adopt new technologies. Secondly, the whole enterprise resource program system is getting challenged. Today, even a small company can afford a performance management system and recognize and embrace the need for speed and technology. 

However, HR is still in the old mindset. It is necessary for them to get out of the program-purposed mindset. They need to question everything that is happening around them. There is no need to automate everything. Except for safety and compliance purpose rest of all changes needs to be questioned. Ask if a policy is helping your company or your customer, and understand why does it exist in the first place. Progressive organizations have started doing this. They have completely redesigned their processes.

It took us three-four years to do away with the traditional performance management process. Today, we manage performances in snapshots. You seek live feedback after a task and such feedbacks are collated by the concerned manager from various sources and then used to assess an individual.

Unlike in other counties, HR is a chosen profession in India. Talent and technology are available in our country, however, we need to challenge ourselves a bit. 

In the past, learning used to have a shelf life of 10-15 years. However, today it has reduced to three-five years. We call it as half-life. Thus an employee’s core competency is the ability to learn quickly. One has to continuously learn and reinvent at an individual level.

When it comes to the adoption of new technologies, more than anything HR professionals are scared whether they have to stop doing what they have been doing on a daily basis.

We have this concept of creating an edge organization. Take an organization or HR department and select one part of it. Create a completely new organization out of it with new capabilities, new roles of engagement, and let them be independent. Let them be not concerned by whatever is bothering the organization as a whole. Protect the core of the organization at the same time. 

For example, when it comes to training, do not change your core training programs. Instead, create a new skill you want your employees to be trained on on and create a new way of learning. Indian Oil is building one of the world's largest eLearning systems for technical training. On the one hand, they continue to impart classroom training. On the other, they are training employees, such as panel operators, on the spot with mobile technology. They are building eLearning as an edge. Over a period of time, it will become a part of their overall learning system.  

Similarly, Reliance Jio was created as a completely new organization from scratch, as an edge. It looks and behaves very different from a normal telecom organization. Jio completely changed the game in the telecom sector. 

Examine why a job exists, write down what is the value of a job, look at how that value can be linked to other jobs in order to create more value, try to understand what are the technologies that are influencing that job, it, and then create a super job. You might have to junk your existing job description, but that is only to reinvent oneself. 

Some jobs will be definitely replaced. For example, some companies have replaced their HR processing with robotic process automations (RPAs) and have increased productivity by 70%. However, that doesn’t mean 70% reduction in manpower. That manpower needs to be reskilled to bring more value add. Improving performance, training and talent acquisition are not annual jobs. They are continuous jobs and you need manpower for that. 

HR has been traditionally weak in the areas of data analytics and understanding technology. Next is employee engagement. We have over-relied on data. Thirty-two years ago when I began my career, HR leaders could sense problems by just walking across a staff cafeteria or workspace. The ability to understand your people and have a dialogue with them, to ask how to make their jobs better are missing in today’s scenario. The human connect is fading in general. This is where HR comes in. The last would be the culture of an organization. Unlike in the past, people are expected to adapt to a company’s culture as soon as they join.

Currently, employees’ performances are managed with rewards and promotion, however, the gig generation is not bothered by all these. They are more concerned about their development rather than the organization's. So how do you lead them? Are leaders and managers ready for that? These would be the issues that HR will face in the future.