View: Indian HR are true Hindus

Disclaimer: 

The article is my personal view and is not with an intent to hurt any religious sentiments. My apologies if I have hurt someone.

----

Hindu religion is full of gestures based on scientific principles. Be it saying namaste by pressing your palm against each other or having your food while sitting on ground. In traditional south Indian Brahmin community, one has to perform alternate nostril breathing before doing sandhya aarati. They all have scientific bases like pressing the pressure point, most conducive position for digestion and calming down all day stress in the evening. However, all these scientific practices have been reduced to rituals of just raising the hand or just just touching your nostrils due to "lack of time" as people moved to modernism. As the short hand religious practices got transferred to newer generations, it became 'lack of time' as well as lack of knowledge for them as they aped the ritual and further condensed it to its nano-ism. 

In India, Human Resource function I will say, is closest to modern day practice of Hndu religion. We started few years ago from all scientific approach but we ended up doing ritualistic practice. We could also recollect that when Indian IT was growing, how a group of dynamic HR people laid down the foundation for some best HR policies and practices for their respective companies. But with time, all were diluted and lost. 

Almost in every field of HR, we can see a dilution of the original principle but to begin with, it is performance management. Performance management has the objective of developing people and having a periodic career counselling. However, what happens is KRA setting in retrospect. Most companies have their employees setting up their goal in retrospect at the end of the appraisal period when the time of evaluation is near. I need not discuss the effectiveness of such appraisal. 

Recruitment has a vital component of HR interview which is suppose to be a stress interview assessing the personality and job fit of the person. However, once business team has evaluated the required skills, most of the HR interviews become ritualistic just discussing salary expectations. 

One of the buzz word in HR is employee engagement but if you survey thirty HR professional (minimum number to have a statistically valid sample) who have spent 3-6 years in the corporate, and ask them to mention top two employee engagement activity they need to perform. At least 50 percent will mention at least one employee entertainment activity as the top two employee engagement activity they will perform. Among the daily rituals, when did they get mixed up, no body knows.  A team outing or a 'fun friday' event will be surely mentioned while voting for top two employee engagement practice. Career discussion with manager or skip level manager will always be secondary. 

Compensation is derived more out of peer pressure than actually trying to fit in Maslow's theory of needs. There is a rush to out number the other. Lot of times I have seen organizations driving 'Fish Philosophy', Kanban, Kaisen, Performance culture etc. without even understanding what it is and whether it will suit the organization needs. The number of examples for the baseless activities can be infinite. However, the crux remains the same that somewhere, the scientific principles behind HR initiatives are getting lost in recent HR practices. The deeper impact is that despite companies spending so much on employee;s compensation and engagement amenities like food, juices and pool tables, they still have discontented employees. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why HR are unable to have a strong say in business meetings as they have not given the required ROI to the business. I personally know lot of mid-sized organizations who have minimum HR interventions at a strategic level. This situation has come up because we have blindly aped the HR practices from our HR ancestors of western countries and Japan without understanding their social system and philosophy. More over we tried to derive a quick fix approach out of the practice and hence missed out entirely on the ground work.  Where will HR go from here, no body knows but some of the HR folks surely need to take the responsibility of bringing the ritualistic HR back to being a scientific one. 

Reference

http://www.think69.com/20-amazing-scientific-reasons-behind-hindu-traditions

Paradoxical behavour by HR Managers

The must have paradoxical image for a Human Resource Manager is very interesting and hazy thing to discuss. I can think of top three traits where the nebulous aura of HR is more evident but I am sure that there will at least half a dozen more. Anyways, here are my top three. 

As head of HR for a small to mid size firm, I was busy drafting the code of conduct for the company. A person from marketing team who sits next to me and works closely with me on internal branding, came and tapped my shoulder. I looked up. She was almost in tears and I knew that she has come out from a KRA discussion meeting with her new boss. She looked at me. Tears rolled down as she picked up a post-it from my desk and wrote “I am resigning”. I read and said without any emotion,”kal aana. Kal baat karenge. Ghar jao”(Come tomorrow. We will speak tomorrow. Go home). She was not expecting this from me. A HR person is supposed to be an agony aunt (In my case -agony uncle)!! I managed to infuriate her to an extent as I continued with my work. Ten minutes later she tapped me again but this time for a cup of çhai. I said “Chai ke liye ok, but if you want to discuss, kal aana” (I will come for a cup of tea but if you want to discuss, come tomorrow). Anyways, we had tea without any discussion. Next day she came and said, “I was anxious and irritated when I went back yesterday. But now I am feeling fine. Let me see how much growth the new KRAs give me over next six months. I will take a call accordingly.” Voila! My job was done. Previous day no matter how hard I would have tried, she would not have absorbed any of my HR gyan. Today it is automatically resolved. As per my guess and some rational estimate, two-three out of five problems HR has to hear, need not be responded. I am not saying that HR need not be responsive but these situations need to be assessed before jumping into solution mode. The moment you try to give immediate solution, people stop exercising their brain and rationale and expect you to fix the problem for you. The worst is, most of the solution they seek is escalation against manager since they are source of most problems (actual or perceived). Hence, somewhere HR needs to have show some indifference with proper judgement. Ek nanhi si jaan kya kya solve karega??

HR also needs to mingle around with people and create guptchars around in different teams. Yet another contradiction from what and how HR shall be. HR shall not promote any gossip flowing in. But to know the real pulse, you need to have your khabris working. Sometimes, some really deep buried skeletons can be unearthed as gossips flow to the HR.  That is why often HR people are noticed teasing or joking with other people from different teams and going out for a smoke or drink with them. Needless to add, the balance is important as reputation is at stake. If the mingling doesnt yield any information, HR has a dagger of being tagged 'gossip monger'or 'time waste conversationist' hanging on his head. 

Last but surely not the least, I will refer to legendary poet T.S Eliot’s great poem ‘Macavity the mystery cat’ here. HR needs to be something like the poet description of the legendary villain.

His brow is deeply lined with thought,

his head is highly domed;

His coat is dusty from neglect,

his whiskers are uncombed.

He sways his head from side to side,

with movements like a snake;

And when you think he's half asleep, he's always wide awake.

In short, have a disguise-look absent but be present. Ah! The fine balance part again. You shall not pretend to be so absent that you actually become absent. Tough call but yes that is the fact. You need to be a silent observer. Looking at all possible small and big happening around, giving no reaction till time is right and ripe. Hey, I sound like I am teaching HR to behave like king cobra! HR and Cobra !! Gosh ! But yes, with the fine balance during execution, wait and watch is must for the HR person. Sometimes haste can only give you a fraction of the truth and we all know that most part of bergs are underwater and are capable of sinking the unsinkable leviathan like Titanic. 

So guys- behave the way you should not !