Grasp Emarketing Blog

My self being an HR professional and a strong advocate of the importance of HR in all walks of business; I am pissed off hearing that “Human Resources Executives are neither strategic nor leaders”. This accusation is not from some sales or marketing honcho, but this blow to HR comes from Hewitt Associates!

I love you mom!

Nishchae Suri, Business Head, Consulting Analytics, Asia-Pacific, Hewitt Associates says “Despite this, HR departments are on the whole still not considered a valuable strategic asset. After nearly 20 years of hopeful rhetoric about becoming “strategic partners” with a “seat at the table” where the business decisions that matter are made, the truth of the matter is most HR professionals aren’t even close. The majority of HR executives remain, to all extent and purposes, neither strategic nor leaders.”

Sorry! I retaliate! Mr. Suri, I strongly disagree with you!

The importance of HR in organization has always been on the top of my mind. In one of my researches at Talent Junction, where I invited CEOs to wear HR’s Shoes; I found that companies that respect HR grow as large as Microsoft or Google! And those who don’t; please note thousands of the businesses wipe off the scene every day.

HR is the mother of all business!

Mother is the originator, facilitator and half of the world! Same is HR. Similarly, in any organization, Human Resources Department also plays the role of mother.

Back here in India, we respect mother a lot – just like a goddess; we respect her because where we are today is because of her. So I want the same respect HR at work.

Here are my one dozen arguments that advocate to my new found title “HR is the mother of all business”.

All of us hear employees complaint about the companies who would treat employees badly, have poor HR policies, don’t pay dues to employees, have poor engagement levels, and have no focus on work life balance. Up to 2005 it worked well! All a disgruntled employee could do was to speak about them with his friends and family or a few colleagues, which didn’t matter a lot to the organizations.

Frustrated Employee

The revival of Internet after a Dot Com Burst has however, changed everything! Internet’s new avatar in form of Social Media emerged as a powerful mass-communication tool enabling everybody who has an access to computers and some writing skills.

Yesterday, I read an employees’ vented frustration about one of my favorite companies on complaints board. BLR Events (a HR consultancy) recently hosted an event, saying “How to save yourself from a disgruntled employee with a PDA and access to free blogs?.”

Listen to what the guys from BLR Events says “Technology is changing the face of the American workplace in a variety of ways. Many of those changes are spurred by the challenges and opportunities presented by the Internet.
The Internet can be a great resource for employees and employers alike, but it can also lead to a whole new world of negative exposure and risk. This is especially true when you have an employee (or former employee) who has a grudge along with a platform-like a blog or a Facebook page-that allows it to be broadcast to the world.”

Social Media is Both Positive and Negative:

Recruiters felt very happy when they found a new friend in social media – aggregation of the information about employee that they plan to hire – Linkedin Profile, Twitter account, and so on and so forth. They started recruiting better candidates by gathering more and more information about from Social Media. But they forget there is NO FREE LUNCH.

The Tale of a Shoe hurler…

Long time back I wrote an article “Who is responsible for attrition?”. My research at CiteHR said that the biggest reason for attrition (read non-performance) are supervisors. But a commenter named MP3 rightly said “The poll results are simply inadequate.”

It made me to re-think . But non-performers do exist. Then who is to blame.

Consider an employee be a non-performer.  His Supervisor is to blame, as he is responsible for non-performance of employee. Right!

In organizations…usually…

All fingers point to grass root level supervisors. But one of my fellow HR bloggers with his experience says that apart from Supervisors (i.e. Reporting Manager of the employee), there are 4 more reasons for poor performance of employees, making the equation 20/80:

1. Lack of transparent and employee friendly HR policies,
2. Absence of processes to implement and audit these policies,
3. Absence of an holistic approach to label employees as ‘non-performers’
4. Focus on recognition & development of high potential employees only.

This means that supervisor is only 20% liable for the employee non-performance, 80% it is “something else”.

After mid-night there is a sunshine. After every depth of despair, there is a height of Hope. And so did I have one.

After a frustrated experience with Linkedin Groups,  I thought to start my own Linkedin Group.  So here is mine:

HR Carnival on Linkedin

HR Carnival is a group on linkedin for all HR bloggers who participate in HR Carnival. Link: http://bit.ly/hrcarnival (A complete good looking link coming soon…)

The purpose of HR Carnival Linkedin Group is to bring all the bloggers from HR at one platform for discussions related to HR. No nonsense, no SpLinkedinG, No Spamming. Period.  I am inspired by Google. Do no Evil!

What is HR Carnival

The Carnival of HR, started by the Evil HR Lady, features recent posts from the best of the HR and management blogging community.  Visit: http://carnivalofhr.blogspot.com/

My relation with HR Blogging

I started my blogging life with Talent Junction, an HR blog ( no more regularly blogging there).  Have a solid work experience working among HR folks for 3 years in India, USA, Middle East, Africa – that makes me eligible for HR Blogging.

Now I am blogging at Grasp e-Marketing Blog = my experiences in marketing technology, software, HR stuff and a byte here and a pinch there.