Author: Lipi Agrawal | HRKatha

It is not always wise to offer salary increments or promotions to get employees to stay on; sometimes this can be counterproductive.

According to CareerBuilder’s Annual Valentine’s Day Survey, love is not as much in the air at work, as it used to be earlier. Looks like cupid has gone on leave!

Conventional reward mechanisms following the ‘one size fits all’ approach do not allow organisations to provide unique experiences to employees

The employee net promoter score helps measure employee loyalty and engagement within an organisation

Line managers are in key positions with a hold on both business and people. That said, how managers behave, particularly with their teams, can have a huge impact on team morale and overall performance. At times, managers may impose their own insecurities, incompetencies or for that matter, their obsession with how work should be done, on others. In doing so, they may behave in ways that could hurt others and consequently affect organisational effectiveness. Is there a way organisations can keep a check on such subjective yet day-to-day issues?

A social office allows different people to interact and collaborate bringing them out of their silos and work boxes, thus enhancing team productivity.

Jonathan Vehar, global VP-products, Dale Carnegie & Associates was in town. Vehar has worked with organisations to develop leadership and innovation solutions necessary for growth. He is considered to be an innovation thought leader. In an exclusive interview with Lipi Agrawal of HRKatha, he, along with his colleague Pallavi Jha, chairperson & managing director – ?Dale Carnegie Training India, share the future of training and the role technology will play in making training a measurable exercise. Excerpts…

Rattan Chugh, an engineer by design and a true HR professional by default, has close to three decades of experience with global organisations, ranging from startups to leading multinationals. He started his career as a hands-on engineer in the IT industry and grew through the ranks to serve in several key positions in the financial services industry.

Currently, the chief people officer at Times Internet, Chugh is focussed on building and sustaining a culture of excellence at the Company, that entrepreneurs and leaders could leverage for success. He talks to HRKatha about his experiences across industries, talent management and what it truly means to be an HR professional.

While it may facilitate an open culture, it may not guarantee one.

With businesses increasingly seeking employees open to change and multitasking, alterations in job roles should not rattle anyone.

A pending or skip level early promotion, an exorbitant salary raise or a new profile — counter-offers may appear in many forms. However, there are hidden disadvantages.

The two-pizza team rule states that a team should only include as many people as two pizzas can feed.

Be it negotiating salaries during hiring, to bring down employee cost for the organisation, or disclosing the management’s decision to let go of people, HR always ends up having to do the dirty job. On the one hand there is the management that requires HR to execute a certain task beneficial to the organisation, and on the other, there are those people whose careers are at stake—a catch 22 situation for HR. It is left to HR to decide whether they should balance out the situation or get their hands dirty, by blindly following the management’s orders.

The journey started almost four decades back when Dilpreet Singh or DP Singh, as he is known to all, was graduating and preparing for the central services examination. It was then that he came across an article in a US publication, about how CHROs grow up to become CEOs in the future. Inspired, he decided to make a career in HR.

Industry leaders share their perspectives on a case that involves glitches in the employee referral process.

Born and brought up in Czech Republic, the travel enthusiast in Jindra Hachova took her places in Europe and around her homeland, but she yearned to visit India for ten years, until she got to know that Home Credit was looking for a CHRO for their India business.

The decision to hire or not hire someone is a crucial one as it directly or indirectly impacts not only business performance but also the workplace dynamics. While the hiring process is now backed by a lot of reliable data and analysis, human judgement and intuition still play a significant role in making the final decision.

Have the interviewers or recruiters ever had to wonder whether their intuitions or judgements  with regard to the candidates  will really stand true in the real scenario? What is the real moment of truth in the hiring process? How does it impact the hirer’s decision or how does one deal with it?

IR experts from across industries discuss how safety at work deeply impacts employees’ motivation and productivity.

A panel of senior members from the industry – Rajesh Padmanabhan, Rani Desai, ES Srinivas, Sandip Ghose, Mahalakshmi R and Kamal Karanth – with diverse experience and expertise opine on what happiness means in the current times and how organisations can facilitate the same.  

Chandrasekhar Sripada’s wide experience of over three decades across economies – old and new –and across companies in the private, public and multinational sectors spans such as IBM, Capgemini, Reliance Infocomm, NIIT and Bhilai Steel Plant.

Sripada, president & global head, HR, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, talks to HRKatha about leadership styles and influence of environment; technology and its impact on the workplace; and about people practices in the pharma industry.

Happy customers are made by happy employees. Hence, process experience for employees has to be that simple too. Sanchayan Paul, head of rewards–effectiveness and change, Vodafone, shares the secret recipe behind ensuring employee happiness at the workplace.

Recruitment and talent acquisition are the two most commonly used terms in HR departments across the globe. However similar they may sound or be perceived as being, there is an underlying difference between the two that many professionals tend to ignore. There exists a thin line between the two that creates a big difference in the way organisations manage talent.

Guillermo Miranda, chief learning officer, IBM is a seasoned executive with 19 years of extensive experience working in multinational environments across Europe, South America, Africa, West Asia and North America. A lawyer and business management graduate, Miranda is on his second stint with IBM with a mandate to reinvent learning and employee enablement for the digital and cognitive economy.

He speaks to HRKatha on how the landscape of learning is changing with the rapid digital disruptions.

Meet Rajendra Mehta, chief people officer, DHFL, who is passionate about impacting people’s professional lives for good, leading them to success, fulfilling their aspirations and turning smaller impacts into bigger successes for the organisation and its people.

A senior executive of Accor Hotels in India and an international leader, Jean-Michel Cassé came to India with an open mind and heaps of excitement around building an empire from scratch. He shares his India-work experience with HRKatha.

In June, the government raised the retirement age of doctors to 65 years. Doctors anyway continue to practice till the last leg of their life but from government’s perspective, it wanted to retain the talent pool in Central Health Service. It’s a growing concern for the government as more than 28 per cent of the central government employees are above 50 years of age. This implies that not only the government will lose experienced high- level personnel but it will even entail unquantifiable costs as new recruits will require training and on-the-job skills.

If professionals such as doctors, lawyers and CAs, can continue to work for post 60, then why can’t other professionals be it an engineer, bureaucrat or a clerk do so. The official retirement age was fixed at a certain 58 years or 60 years because then the life expectancy was low. Now with better medical facilities, people above 60 are quite active and healthy. HRKatha tries to find a rationale.