The Hindu Business Line : Right way to nurture the NextGen employee

Organisations would need to look beyond compensation and perks and create an environment which will transform for the NextGen employee’s ideas into profitable ventures.

Piyush Dutt

The current focus is so much on inventing or exploring NextGen technology, NextGen services and NextGen solutions that the key element of this conundrum has been forgotten. The one that is right at the centre of organisations — the employee. It is he who will invent the NextGen technology, he who will put together the NextGen services and he who will design the NextGen solutions.

Therefore, the focus of anything NextGen should be identifying and readying to nurture the NextGen employee and give him all the space to do all that he has to. To achieve this, organisations need to put in place a transformation process that will lead the change and create value for themselves.

Step 1: Getting right the people vision

Organisations must place employees right at the top of the business cycle, including customers. As the world gets flatter and opportunities multiply faster than ever before, the basic approach and mindset towards the employee will have to undergo a paradigm shift. From a resource that could be hired by the hour/month, today ‘professionals’ are ‘individuals’ with unique needs. They need all the space to grow, time to think and tools to use. Also to ensure that the employee delights the customer, the employee needs to be delighted.

Step 2: Hiring will be a game of value creation, not people trade

Once the basic philosophies and beliefs are in place and fully understood, the organisation needs to think through their hiring strategies. It might at times require the organisation to rewrite its recruitment philosophies and processes. The two key concepts to keep in mind while doing this are — ‘the world is flat’ and the employees ‘have as much of on interest on the selfish side as they have on the professional side’.

A flat world full of opportunities — according to Thomas Friedman, “flattening of the world means ... that we are now connecting all the knowledge centres of the planet together into a single global network. ... It is now possible for more people to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people, on more kinds of work, from more different corners of the planet ….To an employee seeking work this description translates itself into a world full of opportunities.” Individuals are no longer restricted by geography and will be part of a global skillpool with employment sourcing options available from all over the planet.

Job descriptions will undergo a paradigm shift — today companies seek technology/business skill as the first level of eligibility and define the ‘soft skills’ as secondary. In future, enterprises will look for soft skills, such as excellent communication, programme management, analytical skills and attitudinal behaviours as the primary requisite and treat the tech/business skill as trainable.

Step 3: High-genes of engagement will change dramatically

Faster expectation cycles — if you think it’s tough to manage your employee’s expectations today, then you may want to take an early voluntary retirement as things will only get tougher. With skillpool crunch and employee-opportunity ratio rising each passing day, what is good enough today will become a ‘hygiene factor’ tomorrow. This would require organisations to continuously think ahead. Business, on the other hand, is going to demand a higher level of specialisation and thus the strain on the existing pool is going to be more. Therefore, shorter cycles would be the norm for any programme to give results.

Policies have to be diverse, not unified. Today companies can afford to have a unified charter for all their processes and follow an industrial approach to management. But with a more globally diversified workforce, governing policies will have to be flexible and diverse enough to accommodate all demographic and social demands.

Cultural amalgamation. Many companies face this challenge when they acquire new clients and along with them, usually, a new set of people. Sometimes such clients wants a single point of responsibility for the job and therefore make it mandatory for their staff involved in that particular area to be acquired by the service company. Called “re-badging”, this exercise can be a mind-boggler for companies not prepared or have robust people management and transition metrics in place.

To meet this challenge, a transition module for these ‘re-badged’ employees needs to be created; one of the parameters of success, including organisational cultural amalgamation of the new employees and hybrid policies. This will be a key determinant for the success in the NextGen customer acquisition cycle.

Peer into their lives. Today an employee is basically influenced by two main groups — his colleagues and his family. But the coming times with deep Internet proliferation will result in creation of virtual peer groups. We are alr eady seeing that take shape in some form with online CUGs (closed user groups) on technology thriving; in the next future, this phenomena will only inflate and hence will become a key piece in the employee influencer jigsaw.

Creating global offices. What will compound matters are the two ends of a people scale in most organisations. On one side will be the employees in geographies other than in the headquarters. On the other will be employees in the R 16;home country’ but working to global time-zones. Each group can get isolated, if not backed by a well-oiled HR management system.

To effectively address these challenges, the key will be to create diverse, yet individualised, policies with an organisational vision. Organisations would need to look beyond compensation and perks and create an environment which will transform for the NextGen employee’s ideas into profitable ventures. Indeed, the key to hold tomorrow’s employee lies in creating a culture of “ownership” for him. This will make the NextGen employee stay engaged, unleash his potential, achieve self-satisfaction and create value for the organisation.

(The author is Head, Human Resource, HCL Comnet.)