Point Of View

More than half of the 2,000 companies surveyed in the US by the consulting firm, Willis Towers Watson, plan to increase transparency around pay decisions in the next year. Verve, a marketing company, has already listed employees’ salary on an internal document for everyone to see. By 2019, all 1,100 employees at CareHere, a Nashville-based healthcare company, will know the pay ranges for all positions in the company. Another New York-based software company, Fog Creek, ensured the same last year. Employers have long avoided discussing money at work, partly because concealing salary information keeps compensation costs down. But the examples above clearly show that the attitude is starting to change. Can India be transparent when it comes to disclosure of salaries?

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?

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.

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 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?

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.

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.

With the advent of digital platforms and various other disruptive technologies, the focus of organisations seems to be shifting from quantity to quality, which is why some believe the smart workers are expected to be more successful as compared to the hard workers. However, this is a long debatable topic with two ends weighing equal depending on the context.

Millennials are frequently blamed for their lack of duty and discipline at the workplace, and often called the entitled generation. Senior HR professionals share their opinion on this.

We often hear stories about how star developers in the Silicon Valley hire agents to sell their skills. It is said that the world bends over backwards to hire star developers from the Silicon Valley, and that they are a special lot. Has the industry transformed into one where talent calls the shots or  are organisations just playing a smart game of making them believe so?

We have seen brands and companies perish or become history on failing to predict the future. Does this also hold true for talent hunt?

CHROs becoming CEOs is not a traditional choice but evidences point out several advantages.

Companies are increasingly allowing the ‘work from home’ facility, but does this benefit them? HR Katha finds out…