Guest Series-9

What’s common between journalists and HR professionals? Generally, they both hate math! One becomes a journalist being good with words while being an HR professional requires not arithmetic but good people management skills. There’s always been a certain element of number crunching to everything the HR department does, but the recent focus on HR metrics has increased it by the power of 10.

Waves of HR (R) evolution

The growing intricacies of the global economy and the workforce call for a new kind of HR – one where HR professionals ask informed questions about business issues, design clear choices and alternate solutions for business leaders and eventually run more business-focused HR operations, which are measurable.

The past decade evidences that HR has made noticeable strides in employing process improvements and technology to minimize costs and drive higher operational efficiencies. However, as a profession, HR continues to battle issues of credibility and verifiable strategic impact on business. Even so human capital function today is ideally positioned to render long-term competitive advantage to the business through people assets.

Various forms of intangible human capital likeexpertise, employer brand, customer relationships, business processes and intellectual property are highly complex investments. Companies that understand what is affecting their workforce, how investments impact it and how various changes can be communicated effectively get the most out of their human capital.

Starting with the end result in mind, the intent of HR Analytics is to facilitate smarter, better decisions for business while on the people-side of business, analytics indicates moving from guesswork to actionable business intelligence. It signifies moving from assumptions and conventional paths of wisdom to true analysis that leads to actionable insights, clarity, and smarter business outcomes.In most organizations, the people side of business suffers from a chronic lack of focus and underinvestment, which leads to a lack of urgency to get this fundamental issue right.The essential problem lies in measuring people as costs and not actually measuring them as assets and true analysis really helps address this problem.

There is a growing need for HR professionals to understand how people management initiatives lend value to business to be able to augment ones that generate utmost value. This necessitates HR Analytics – a completely new class of systems that gathers not just HR-specific but organization-wide data, including client, supplier and financial for consideration, analysis and presentation. In the words of Dave Ulrich, HR is effortlessly ‘becoming more outside in by focusing more and adapting to contexts, stakeholders, and strategies.’

Road to Big Five Metrics

A number of organizations in recent years have resorted to much downsizing and restructuring without giving much as a passing thought to the ideal size of a workforce. Either they don’t have the right set of metrics to assess the workforce or go about measuring everything not knowing which numbers actually make a difference. A good workforce strategy subsists on certain vital metrics to interpret challenges and changes stemming from economic growth cycles and crises.

Stephen Moore, M.D. of HR consultancy firm Optimum Performance, at the HR Measurement and KPIs forum held in Sydney in February 2012 outlined that human capital metrics should focus on the four areas of workforce management, workforce planning, workforce benchmarking, and HR function effectiveness.

Ranging from engagement, retention, payroll, compensation, benefits, performance, training, and more, there is a wide range of human capital metrics available to a company. However, some metrics are more important than others depending on a company’s objectives and strategy. It helps to consider the following four questions before implementing workforce analytics:

• What metrics are most significant to a company?
• What data needs to be collected and tracked to analyze chosen metrics?
• How will the data be examined and benchmarked?
• How will the final outcome be used for planning, developing, and improving HR interventions?

In an article titled Maximizing the Impact and Effectiveness of HR Analytics to Drive Business Outcomes, authors Scott Mondore, Shane Douthitt and Marisa Carson have provided a practical roadmap for conducting HR Analytics:

According to a study by Human Capital Institute, the crucial five metrics should include total cost of workforce, management span of control, high-performer turnover rate, career path ratio and talent management index. Visier, a top workforce analytics solutions company, in its September 2012 study emphasizes measuring a different set of five indicators namely, critical talent retention, recruiting effectiveness, productivity, compensation and pay equity, and performance management. KPMG, however, recommends a more holistic profiling manifest in its five people agenda dimensions of cost, capacity, capability, compliance, and connections.

Each organization would need a different set of HR metrics, yet the emphasis should always be on developing an instrument to enable well-timed and high quality decision-making. The metrics must be wisely chosen and prioritized in keeping with the strategy, stakeholders, products/services and marketplace of an organization to create useful insight from information.

Correlating Metrics to Human Capital Issues

The task of identifying appropriate set of metrics inevitably leads to organized data collection and focused analysis to uncover a range of workforce issues like:

• Need of succession pool for senior leadership cadres
• Rise of workforce absenteeism
• Rise of voluntary turnover of in-house resources
• Attrition of Hi-performers
• Penetration rate of development programs
• Rate of Internal hires
• Ramp-up of contingent human capital
• Rise of aging workforce
• Absence of staffing cost control due to pay creep

Carefully chosen organizational metrics can help divulge root cause of underlying manpower issues. For instance, is growing employee turnover rate a sign of an organization-wide issue? Or, is it possible to further drill down into that metric to reveal that this trend is characteristic of just one particular geographic locale or a business unit? Culling out relevant information, HR experts can then examine whether it is an emerging problem affective the entire organization or only one particular region or whether this new trend is an expected change arising out of a certain event or policy.

Using Analytics to Glory

The strength and effectiveness of a good human capital analytics system depends not so much on technology but on its being flexible, user-friendly, practical and ability to generate timely and accurate information. Talent Analytics at Google is a niche function consisting of a director and a team of 30 researchers, analysts and consultants to determine capabilities and behaviors linked to high performance and create a model for boosting retention rate.

Webdunia, first Indian language online content company introduced a sophisticated, enterprise-wide integrated HR Management system for automating administrative and employee functions like recruitment, leave and attendance tracking, user management and performance appraisal. This has greatly enhanced the ability of decision-makers to access and use timely and accurate data to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the workforce. 

Over the years, Tata Consultancy Services BPO has designed a predictive approach to define the eligibility score and recruitment mix to be hired for various types of processes, which has led to overall increase in process productivity scores and customer satisfaction scores. In addition, its proprietary tool iNTRASCOPE facilitates matching up the demand and supply of talent internally has resulted in decreased attrition rate, increased percentage of internal career progression, and upped revenue to employee-cost ratio.

Beyond the obvious significance of ‘centralized data as a critical enabler,’ some of the key organizational challenges in using analytics for value creation include:

• Data credibility issues, imaginably caused by insufficient trained manpower, privacy and security and privacy concerns, employee-given details for some of the data,old  data, financial and legal constraints,  etc.
• Absence of incentives for other stakeholders to share data across functions
• Managing data from multiple geographies
• Restricted access to data for slicing and analysis
• Customizing and communicating outcomes to different levels of the organization

Organizations that successfully employ HR analytics focus on people factor of change and view their workforce as a rich mine of collective data for making sound decisions about talent. The use ofrelevant human capital metrics and predictive analytics for planning, managing, motivating and retaining employees doubtless renders hard-to-replicate business advantage. HR can finally earn a seat at the table by making data driven workforce decisions through improving talent retention, finding opportunities for cost savings and upping human capital efficiencies and productivity.

Sanjay Joshi is an Editor at SHRM. Republished with permission. Copyright ©2012 SHRM India All rights reserved.

                                                                                                                                                                                                             Guest Series-4
Piyush Mehta is Senior Vice President-Human Resources at Genpact, where he heads the Global Human Resources Function. Genpact is a leader in the globalization of services and technology and a pioneer in managing business processes for companies around the world. It combines process expertise, information technology and analytical capabilities with operational insight and experience in diverse industries to provide a wide range of services using its global delivery platform. It has delivery centers in 17+ countries including India, China, Hungary, Mexico, Morocco, the Philippines, Poland, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Guatemala and the United States. As a member of the Genpact Leadership Team, Piyush has played an active role in the organization's journey to becoming an Employer of Choice by contributing to various aspects of people management in both business and corporate roles, including Employee Relations, Organization Capability Building, Mergers & Acquisitions Integration and managing the function for P&Ls and geographies.

Piyush joined Genpact in 2001, leading HR engagements across businesses and assumed his current position of Senior Vice President - HR, in 2005. He has over 22 years of experience in Human Resources. He began his career with Hindustan Lever and has held the position of HR Director for AT&T - India, and was the Organization Capability Director for Frito-Lay - Asia Pacific.

He is an alumnus of XLRI, Jamshedpur, where he studied Personnel Management and is an Economics Honors graduate from Delhi University.

In an interview with SHRM India’s Sanjay Joshi, Piyush talks about the challenges in his current global role, the measures used for grooming talent, gender diversity initiatives, the discussion agenda for the 2012 SHRM Annual Conference in Atlanta and the benefits of such professional development conferences.

Excerpts:

SHRM India: What are the key challenges in your current global role? In what ways do you seek to overcome these challenges?

Piyush Mehta: Globalization of the world’s economy is a dominant trend today. A highly skilled and experienced global workforce translates into a strong competitive business advantage. Historically, our company has been global in its work. We have always served global customers across global locations through our global leadership teams. Some of the broader challenges, however, include:

Hiring top notch leadership talent globally:  In today’s competitive market, sourcing talent with a strong mix of domain expertise, leadership skills, cultural fitment and integrating them quickly within the organization is of paramount importance. This is critical to us as we expand in newer markets like China and Latin America. We have designed a robust recruitment process that leverages psychometric profiling, multiple face-to-face interactions with diverse senior leaders, culture “reality check” discussions and extensive reference checks to corner the best talent pool. A senior leader dedicatedly handles the function of integrating new hires at a leadership level. There are well-structured programs tailor-made for 30-60-90 days post-joining with a focus on deep immersion in our operating centers and business processes. 

Sustaining employee engagement and retention: This is vital in a service industry like ours for creating a sustainable workforce. For enhanced employee engagement across different businesses and geographies, open and frequent communication of concerns and feedback is encouraged through intranet, town halls, web chats, and employee surveys. Our digital platform iThink makes it easier for employees to regularly submit new ideas for increasing business efficiencies and driving cost productivity.

Attrition rates are typically very high in our industry and this is something that affects clients directly. Our current attrition levels, however, are around 21 percent, which is less than half the industry average. We have recently done a Six Sigma project to identify specific root causes of attrition and put in place some cutting edge practices to mitigate the risks. 

Our unique Education@Work program in partnership with leading B-schools like XLRI, IIMs and others helps employees develop career skills while working with us and diminishes attrition risks. Various innovative people practices targeted to help supervisors right from the pre-hire levels to integrating and growing their teams ensure talent retention in the current turbulent economic scenario. 

Staying cost competitive: As part of our smart location strategy, we have a first-mover advantage in adopting Tier-II and III cities for expanding our talent pool and maintaining price advantages for our diverse clients.  Our strong philosophy of “making” talent rather than “buying” it is actually a deep commitment. So we have structured “build” programs, which help employees develop skills in-house and remove the need to hire from outside.  This has proved particularly helpful in grooming employees involved in basic transaction processing jobs to move into higher end jobs in analytics, IT or finance and accounting.

SHRM India: What are some of the critical steps you have taken for grooming talent at various levels within Genpact?

Piyush Mehta: We put great emphasis on promoting people from within the organization into higher management roles. We have laid down the guidepost that 70 percent of all roles above entry level should be filled through promotions only. 

We have a very intensive, year-long integration program for people we hire at the senior levels, where we work with them and let them travel to different centers across the world to gain exposure to other cultures and organizations. It gives them an opportunity to learn about our operations, delivery, sales, and marketing in centers across the world. 

We even have an online tool called GlobeSmart on the intranet to assist employees learn about the countries in which we do business and our overseas colleagues from those regions. It is a fantastic tool in today’s global business environment for employees looking to develop a global mindset and cross-cultural competence. A large number of our frontline employees also travel to overseas locations in order to transition jobs from those locations. The whole concept of global exposure is an integral part of our business model and not something that we got into right now.

Various leadership development programs figure high on our people agenda for growing top talent into leaders of tomorrow. We have collaborated with a few leading universities worldwide, including Duke University, to build our leadership curriculum for us. Our GOLD Program is essentially an operating leadership program where we take around 100 middle managers off the floor for a period of 18 months and take them through structured and intensive leadership development training to become future operating leaders. It is very useful in terms of developing technical and operational depth in our potential leaders and involves job rotations across regions, functions and businesses coupled with classroom training and interactions with senior leadership for better immersion in organizational culture.

We also have executive education programs in place for our senior leaders with a strong focus on leadership, execution, strategy, talent management, execution, finance and commercial skills. 

Each of these programs is a critical part of our investment in our people to bring out their best. These programs provide the foundation for building our leadership gene pool. It is our belief that with the right platform and encouragement, high-potential employees can be groomed into influential leaders, who will lead us to success in the future.

SHRM India: Genpact has a diverse workforce. Women constitute 35 percent of the Indian and 40 percent of the global headcount. Can you tell us a little bit about Genpact’s diversity initiatives and how they have added value to the Genpact culture?

Piyush Mehta: Genpact was quick to realize and value that gender diversity, particularly in senior cadres, would be critical to its performance and growth. The commitment to diversity initiatives is a business imperative given the fact that gender diversity is almost 50 percent of our global talent pool and even 50 percent of our customer base. Hence, having women in top leadership profiles makes good business sense and is not just something that is “nice to do.” 

We strongly feel that diversity as a business agenda needs to be driven top-down and interestingly our CEO is hugely passionate about it. At VP-plus levels in the top 400, there is an 18 percent diversity rate, which is quite good when compared to a number of other organizations. Our President and CEO, Tiger Tyagarajan has two direct reports who are women.

Our GENWIN or Genpact Women’s International Network is basically a worldwide affinity group for women employees aimed to address their individual needs and enhance their exposure by providing numerous networking opportunities. It offers a fantastic opportunity through sharing best practices amongst the female workforce to cultivate a global perspective. It effectively fulfills a business need by promoting a culture of diversity and boosting talent retention by offering various top level career opportunities and stretch assignments.  

We have also recently launched the WeMentor program to spot and pair 150 high-potential mid-management women with senior business and functional leaders in the company to guide and assist them on professional fronts.  It becomes the personal accountability of the senior leaders to oversee the development, retention and career advancement of the shortlisted female employees. In addition, a number of leadership development programs exist that allow women to acquire the necessary skills to grow within the organization.

Various targeted initiatives like work-from-home, part-time work, extended maternity leaves, crèche facility, education and training, onsite medical check-ups, security guards in transport, an Ombudsperson process  and concierge  have also been implemented to create a favorable work-life environment for women. 

SHRM India: What are some of the topics that you would like to discuss at the 2012 SHRM Annual Conference in Atlanta?

Piyush Mehta: We would like to take this opportunity to share the people @ Genpact story. We have been fortunate to have pioneered a new industry and during the course of that journey created some really interesting HR interventions and initiatives.

Some of the salient points we propose to discuss would include:

• Top five things we do as a company to help our clients achieve business outcomes giving relevant examples
• Pioneering an industry in various cities and countries around the world
• HR Tools that we developed to stay ahead of the curve
• Focus on leadership development and “building” our own talent
• Our identity as a “talent” and not an outsourcing company
   

As leaders in the business process technology space, we assist multiple businesses with smarter insights and outcomes through a range of data analytics, process and technology solutions.

SHRM India: What are your expectations from the forthcoming SHRM Annual Conference in terms of professional growth and benefits?

Piyush Mehta: Professional development events like the SHRM Annual Conference present a tremendous opportunity to connect with the peers as they attract thousands of delegates from several countries. 

Besides networking as a way of gaining insights into other organizations and getting global professional contacts, this mega event will offer an exciting time to share HR challenges, ideas, best practices, and approaches on a host of burning HR issues. 

This conference will be packed with structured talks, workshops, lectures and panel discussions leading to newer ideas and insightful conversations. It will be a time to for us to benchmark our challenges and attainments in the areas of talent management, employee retention and collaborative people performance with peers from around the world.

Sanjay Joshi is an Editor at SHRM. Republished with permission. Copyright ©2012 SHRM India All rights reserved