The human factor

Its India’s Turn to Lead the Way President & Chief ‘N’ Sights Officer, Nina E. Woodard & Associates, and past Executive Director of SHRM India, shares her enthusiasm about Indian ethos

India is at the core of the world of work for the next decade. Why would I have that opinion, you ask? Because, as I see it, in the next ten years as the western world continues to ‘age out’ of the workforce, and the economies struggle back to some level of what the future normal will be, the focus on the young educated Indian workforce and their growing entrepreneurial spirit will take centre stage globally. It will be the Indian middle income families with their disposable incomes who will be saving to buy new and updated TVs, cars, homes, etc. It will be India, with its average age of 29, that will lead the HR and business agendas of the world. I believe this downturn will resolve itself more quickly in India. The core of the American problem is the fact that in the US, we have been leveraging ourselves and our futures for years, while forgetting that we should only be buying when we have disposable income. In India, paying off in full, or not buying at all until it can be easily paid off, being sure that resources easily cover expenses, and living as part of an extended family is more the norm. As a standard, Indians live within their means. There is also the Indian ‘gold standard’. When I first arrived in India in 2000, I heard that if India was ever financially in trouble as a country, all they would have to do is ask the population to turn over some of their gold! I do not think that has changed too much over the years. These facts lead me to believe that India will not dip as low and will rebound more quickly than the US. While the US will have to modify the behaviour of its people by changing their spending and saving habits, India will move forward and continue its work at the usual rate. Before I moved back to the US towards the end of 2008, I had begun to see signs of HR in India starting to be looked at as an integral part of the business strategy. Today, managers in small and medium size businesses understand the principles of HR. They may not have an HR department, but they have long been working closely with their employees and fighting the battle to keep their ‘talent’ engaged even while the world around was offering new and exciting opportunities. It is true that they have been doing something right or they would not have survived the last ten years of high salaries and scarce resources. However, HR as it evolved also looked to the West for some best practices and absorbed or tried to absorb some of the practices without completely contextualising them. That was largely because of the many MNCs that put their best practices in the Indian operations without actually making them ‘Indian’. My experience of India and Indians is that they will make things work if they are seen to be important to the powers that be; regardless of the value they bring or do not bring to the workplace. It is therefore likely that many of these ‘best practices’ appear to be working. Therefore, as some approaches to talent management, leadership development, performance and rewards are taken on-board as is; they may not deliver the full breadth and depth of ‘value’ to the business or the employees.

Now while it is more difficult to keep employee morale high simply because of the slowdown, it becomes even more important for those responsible for HR within organisations to evaluate the essence of each ‘touch point’ they experience with their employees. There is a real need to evaluate characteristically HR programmes and practices to see if they are able to influence retention, productivity, employee job and personal satisfaction, and employee development thus creating value for the organisation. It is time for Indians dedicated to the HR profession as well as for business managers to be true to the natural Indian ethos that ‘work is worship’ and be sure that what is happening in the workplace creates the opportunity for employees to fully experience the ‘art of worship’ at work. Every employee touch point becomes an opportunity for creating and bringing home the employer brand. There should be no activity that draws time, effort and energy of the employees (both managers and the managed) that is not clearly a part of a strategic direction for the business and further, is not connected to the ‘HR’ initiative. This leads to being sure that the silos of staffing, compensation and benefits, employee relations and training and development rest solidly on the framework of a business strategy that is significantly influenced by the human resources practice. It is the perfecting of a methodology that honours the natural Indian, concerned for the ‘whole’ person employed, that will emerge as a central policy and direction of business. Against the backdrop of layoffs, change in strategy, and economic difficulty, India will chart a clear path for employee/employer relationships and best practices that the rest of the world will follow.