The Hindu Business Line : The direction of HR

You are the harried HR head of a mid-size company. There are multiple fronts that you need to activate to communicate with the company’s employees: there’s the weekend beer and biryani bash at the beach; you’ve got to rope in interested members for next week’s training programme; then you’ve also got to keep worrying about bringing in new talent to take care of high rates of attrition.

With so much on the agenda, how do you communicate with the different groups that you need to reach; bland e-mails may not work as effectively.

HRDirectiononline.com, a portal offering ready-to-use HR communication from advertising agency R.K. Swamy BBDO, has been developed to help human resource professionals who are short on time and high on targets. The portal offers over 1,000 ready-to-use creative posters and e-mailers for effective communication on over 150 topics that one can customise in any language in the quickest possible time.

So, for the weekend bash you would just need to go to the fest and festivities category and pull out the most relevant poster, use the editing tools to customise design and copy, slap your logo on and presto, your poster is ready. Or, there’s a category for employee training and development and even one for an employee referral programme – the posters can be printed out and pasted on notice boards or mass-mailed to the staff.

Ask Srinivasan K. Swamy, Chairman & Managing Director, R.K. Swamy BBDO, whether a service such as this won’t impinge on advertising services and impact the mainline business and he says, “If we don’t do it, IT companies will do it anyway.”

HR Direction has been in the business for six years and has brought to bear its experience and insight on the needs of HR professionals while developing the portal.

As Arun Kumar, Senior Partner, HR Direction, points out, “We’ve gained valuable insights on the attitudes and behaviour of employees by working with dozens of organisations across industry segments. Their collective knowledge has gone into this portal. The editing tools are so simple that an HR executive with basic computer skills can choose and make the desired changes.”

As Swamy explains, the online service has been offered at a time when companies globally are looking to cut costs in internal communication. Says he: “The portal uses high-quality photographs and graphics licensed from Getty Images and, therefore, users can be happy that they are not violating any copyright law. It offers a cost-effective option for HR professionals to be in control of their employee communication.”

The portal has access to 18,000 images from Getty. HR Direction is already marketing the portal in the US through group company Hansa. The group has invested Rs 3 crore in developing the portal and expects a revenue of Rs 10 crore in the first year of operation. Depending on needs, the user would have to pay Rs 10,000 for one “creative unit” or Rs 3 lakh for 75 units.

How do potential users of this portal view the service. Says Shashi Ravichandran, Head, Corporate Affairs, Scope International Pvt Ltd, “Most companies demand agencies give them communications aids instantly — the timeline is always ‘yesterday’. R.K. Swamy has not only made this available at the touch of a button, they have developed the material based on years of experience working with HR professionals. This will cater perfectly to medium-sized and other companies who may not want to retain the services of a full-fledged agency.”

However, the biggest negative for her would be the brand compliance and restriction. “But having said that, the service allows companies the flexibility to customise the collaterals to their own individual needs. I predict that companies that do not have their own in-house corporate communication specialists will benefit hugely from it.”

V. Ramachandran, Senior Director, HR, Motorola India Pvt Ltd, says an organisation such as Motorola places a premium on employee communications. “In these days of constant change, ruthless competition, dynamic markets and choosy customers, the fortunes of a company fluctuate and, therefore, to engage the employees we have to communicate, communicate and communicate! A service like what R.K. Swamy has launched will be useful.”

While emphasising that the agency has to weigh the pricing model at the introductory stage, Ramachandran says that the HR professional can get on with the job of customising his communication without going into a “vivid explanatory exercise with his ad agency. However, ad agencies will still be useful for specific communication exercises.”

Explains K.S. Narahari, Director, Communications & Internet Marketing, Texas Instruments India, “For campaigns that are long-term and involve strategic thinking, this service will not be of much help. This service will be useful for quick one-off campaigns that have to be delivered at low cost and in quick time.” The available selection of creatives is sufficiently large though the cost is on the higher side and could be a deterrent for companies. “While an attempt has been made to make it versatile, there could be limitations in the layout and format of the final creative,” says Narahari.

Arun Kumar explains that the cost of the posters have been benchmarked against what a top-notch agency will charge for a good quality poster. The enquiries he is getting from several companies is for large volumes which will leave room for negotiations. The next stage is to offer high-resolution images which would allow users to print on vinyl for outdoor hoardings. But given that the file sizes for that will be huge, this would be a long way off, says Arun Kumar.