SYNAPSE - 2014
SYNAPSE - 2014
The Organization: What is and What Must Be
- Dr. Jitendra Singh, An Interview
Dr. Jitendra Singh is a B.A Economic
Hons. from St. Xaviers College,
Calcutta. He did his MBA from XLRI,
Jamshedpur and his Ph.D.
from Wharton School, University of
Pennsylvania, USA. He has
the corporate experience of working in
the HR department with Tata Steel. He
has been awarded Doctoral Fellowships
by the English Speaking Union of
Philadelphia, and the Indian Council of
Social Science Research. He is listed
among the Greatest HR Professionals of
India by ITM Business School (2006),
and recognized as the Best Teacher
(Human Resources) by Dewang Mehta
Foundation (2008). Apart from being a
revered faculty in the HR & OB domain,
he is also the author of numerous
papers and articles of repute in some of
the biggest national and international
publications.
Professor Singh was kind enough to take out
some time from his schedule and grant us an
interview.
What is your view on the changes taking place today in HR?
Everybody today is
crying about talent
management, good
people are limited
There are lots of things that will force HR to
change. One is that in many parts of the world
the nature of business is changing. More and
more now, the emphasis is on the service side
rather than on the manufacturing side. So the
kind of people companies are looking for are
changing. Secondly, if you look at the people
who want to work, even their profile is changing, their aspiration levels are changing. There
was a time when people tried to find a good
niche for themselves and make a long term
career in one place, that has changed, people are
in a hurry, they want to move up as soon as they
can, people want to experience as many organizations as possible, so there is tremendous
amount of mobility as far as people is concerned.
Third, with this globalization trend, work forces
are becoming more and more global in composition. You are not dealing with only the domestic
kind of working force and this will become bigger and bigger as the time passes on, so how to
deal with a multinational work force will be an
HR challenge.
Everybody today is crying about talent management, good people are limited. There are lots of
people looking for a job that is another matter,
but the ones that the companies are interested in
are a small number, so there is a tremendous
amount of poaching that goes on, and that adds to
the mobility of people. To replace a good person
is difficult, very expensive, time consuming. So
how to get a good guy, how to hang on to him for
as long as possible is something that all organizations are trying to figure out. HR itself is more
and more being questioned in all the organizations, “what value is this function adding, yes it
does a lot of work, hard physical work, but that
work can be done by anybody by outsourcing, so
do we really need an elaborate HR organization.”
If it comes to recruiting there are plenty of people
around, if it’s managing simple compensation we
can have anybody to do it. So HR is under threat
because of that, and it is not the destination of
choice within the company for star performers.
The star performers in a company want a variety
of experiences and they want to go to the critical
functions and HR is looked at as a support function or secondary function so it does not attract
people internally, so there is a problem of attracting from outside and a problem of attracting from
inside.
Q. What are your views on Empowerment?