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R. Shekar

Kavita Jamtani was appreciated for assembling a youthfully mature workforce. But Ruth Walter, her mentor cautioned her about mistaking it for competitive advantage.

What else could explain the dramatic difference in annual per capita profitability (PAT/Employee strength) variation from Rs 5 lakh for Infosys to under Rs 1 lakh for the rest of the players, all of whom are stated to be in the top league of IT!

Based on data that appeared in a recent business magazine on the ‘Best companies to work for in India,’ Ruth pointed to an almost identical factory-like homogenous demographic workforce profile across all the companies. See the plot of the mean residence time of employees (X-axis) against the mean age of the employees (Y axis).

A ‘frank debate’ on the quality of workforce engagement revealed some surprisingly obvious bottlenecks:

Leading engagements involved working to tight delivery deadlines with several specialists drawn from various domains. Being mission critical project, the customers held them on their ‘radar’ obviating lack of directions. Why then was our top management needlessly micro-managing our teams additionally?

Growing segment represented work that was heavy on research, analysis and development involving a significant amount of trial and error. There were several open-ended issues demanding fresh insights but our specialists were operating in silos and customers were running out of patience. There was diffused leadership with no accountability!

Peaking: Expertise of mature employees was directed at maintaining systems built on obsolete technology or broken work processes at abysmally low rates of remuneration linked to stringent Service Level Agreements (SLA).

While the sales were pressurising delivery units to cut down rework, they were shy of precipitating discussion with customers to move to ‘sunrise’ technology platforms.

Lagging were the premature start-ups that were perpetually on a start-stop mode waiting for customer specifications, interim stage approvals or the workforce, dedicated to it originally but frequently pulled out to address amore pressing ‘crisis’ elsewhere.

The centralised system of manpower allocation is a ‘holy cow’ that no one was willing to question.

If ‘improved returns on human capital’ meant addressing these and could land that coveted ‘Head – Asia-Pacific’ position for Kavita next year, why not?

More Stories on : Management | Human Resources | The Fourth Quadrant

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