E-commerce, a big buzz word these
days! Aspirational place for all premier school pass-outs! A revolution which
is changing the way India shopped for generations!! A buzz, which is giving
dizziness to all the brick and mortar as well as mom and pop stores in terms of
their business and also the HR function for reasons more than one to be worried
about.
Human Resource in e-commerce
industry is very different as well as difficult. There are many reasons which
makes an HR person’s life difficult in such organizations. The major few are detailed as below.
1. Youngistan: Typically most of the
e-commerce companies in India are started by premium engineering college pass-outs.
Some of them may have begun their career with an e-commerce company abroad and hence
picked up certain tricks there. This entrepreneur group is young, dynamic and
passionate and often is carried away by their objective and goals. The lack of
industry experience and their extreme passion to create something different,
sometimes are marked by less experience towards people and people management
skills.
2. Subordinate is senior to Boss: Founded
by a young person or a group of friends in their twenties, most of the
e-commerce companies were joined by a group of friends who divided certain
portfolios between them and started heading it. As the time progressed, with
increased internet penetration and changing consumer behavior, the
organizations grew and then they started to engage the industry veterans.
People experienced in supply chain, garments, vendor management etc. were
needed to improve the financial and operation efficiencies. The experts often
come up with more than a decade of experience. Hence these experts are much
senior to the founders and initial joiners of the organization. As a result, we
get a situation where bosses are at least 7-8 years younger in terms of age and
experience. Sometimes this gap is as wide as almost a decade and a half
especially in field of finance, supply chain and human resource.
3. E-commerce- not a defined industry:
E-commerce as an industry is not well defined under India legal system. Some of
the clauses of classical industrial acts are redundant for e-commerce companies
while some clauses are adapted as per convenience to show some level of
compliances. . Compounded by FDI regulations, the companies try to adopt to
convenient rules and closest possible fit. Hence, different organizations may
have different understanding of the ‘borrowed’ rules which makes it difficult
for inspecting bodies and internal inspectors like HR to say what is right and
cent per cent compliant.
4. Sudden mushrooming with limited resource
pool: Most of the e-commerce companies started almost at similar time
between 2007 and 2009 and grew almost simultaneously. This resulted in all
companies vying for same talent pool- be it for marketing, merchandizing or
even delivery people. This led to either overpricing of resource or accepting a
70% fitment. Either ways, it is a challenging situation for the HR function.
Both the situation has to be mitigated over a period and it is not so easy to neutralize
the effect of mistake committed at the beginning of the journey. After few
years of experience in the sector, most of the trained resource of e-commerce
are now hot resources in the job market where e-commerce is the preferred
employment sector; making retention a tough job.
5. Many industries come together as one:
E-commerce industry is an unusual set up as it is not one but many industries
coming together. The technology provides the interface, the supply chain and
operations provide the agility, retail aids selling, customer support which is built on a BPO model
provides require help to the customers while logistics and warehousing form the
neural network. Since the organization is young and is breathing on investors’
money, the finance controllers are equally important. In short, there are
people from varied background, with preference towards different environment
and set up need to be brought under one ecosystem. Hence, hiring strategy,
competitor analysis, retention programs and any other people approach needs to
be very diverse despite being one organization.
6. Confused identity: The e-commerce
companies in India are often confused whether they are a technology company or an
online retail company. We have seen lot of companies going through a
metamorphosis over last couple of years which means internal employer branding,
people approach, hiring strategy and projections, everything to be overhauled
by the human resource function. The lack of identity also leads to blind aping
of certain best practices followed at certain global giants. However, this
leads to certain problem due to diverse population, different business and the
stage of organization life cycle.
7. Everything is trial and error: The
e-commerce industry is new to India. Internet penetration in India is in lower
single digit percent. Thus, data to predict things accurately about consumer
and their online buying pattern may be not be sufficient or conclusive. In such
situation, an extrapolation with certain assumptions is maximum accuracy one
can achieve. Lot of decisions in e-commerce industry is pure gut feeling and
can always backfire in terms of area targeted, timing or logistical and vendor
support. Human resource need to support all such brave hearts appropriately
differentiating between courageous and over ambitious people.
8. KRA is dynamic: As mentioned in earlier
points, e-commerce is an unchartered territory in India. Thus one really needs
to find his way out from the maze which has probably only one way out. The course of KRA changes very frequently
during initial times as one realizes that the way ahead will hit the dead end.
This makes job difficult for people and hence the motivation level fluctuates.
HR who is battling the change in strategy themselves, also need to hold all the
employees together during the initial roller coaster ride. The performance management
during such time takes a subjective route as not many results are there to
showcase. Bringing in fairness in a subjective environment is tough job for
Human resource function.
What is the solution?
There is no prescribed solution
for HR function of e-commerce company. An HR needs to be agile, experimental,
adaptive and receptive to environment around. Though these requirements are
applicable for any HR but in commerce industry, these things are much more
important sue to lack of previous instances to refer. Till we reach a point
where e-commerce sector becomes established in India, the HR function needs to
work with more trial and error and some borrowed solutions-tweaked to match the
requirement and still have the approach which is not disturbing the harmony
between diverse groups within the company.
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