Articles
Overtime refers to any work performed beyond the standard working hours prescribed under applicable labour laws. In India, this is typically more than eight hours of actual work in a day, excluding lunch and tea breaks, which is why many organisations require employees to be present for nine hours including breaks.
Employee engagement is a term that is often loosely used to describe fun activities, celebrations, or events organised by the HR team. While these activities are visible aspects of engagement, employee engagement as a concept goes much deeper and plays a critical role in shaping organisational culture.
Executive compensation is a topic that does not get discussed as openly as other compensation topics, primarily because it applies to a very specific set of roles within an organisation. Before understanding executive compensation, it is important to first understand who qualifies as an executive.
Employee resignation is a regular activity in any organisation. Just as organisations experience excitement when a new employee joins, they also experience disruption when an employee resigns. A common question that arises in such situations is whether it makes sense to give a retention or counter offer to an employee who has already resigned.
The salary increment process is not an arbitrary activity. It is a structured decision that begins with understanding how much an organisation can afford to spend on its overall payroll. Payroll here does not only mean fixed salary but also includes bonuses and incentives that the organisation plans to pay.
Hiring for performance is the most commonly used approach. It focuses on evaluating what a person is currently delivering or has delivered in the recent past. Organisations rely on historical and present performance data to predict that the same level of performance will continue if the person joins their organisation.
The terms appraisal, increment, and evaluation are often used interchangeably in organisations, even though they mean very different things. This confusion leads to poor conversations, unrealistic expectations, and sometimes unnecessary dissatisfaction among employees and managers alike.
From an organisational point of view, the expectation is to deliver outcomes for clients and customers within defined timelines and using a fixed set of resources. Just like machines require maintenance to perform optimally, human resources also need rest and recovery to sustain productivity over time.
A lot of times, the decision to hire a HR professional is taken by people who are not personally HR practitioners. This makes the hiring decision slightly complex because the interviewer may not always know what questions to ask or how to evaluate whether the candidate will genuinely add value to the human resource function.
What is a specialist, and what is a generalist, or what is a person who is "management", is an important aspect to understand? We are in a knowledge economy, and as we work in a knowledge economy, we should be very clear that there are going to be people who are very strong in terms of the subject that they bring, or the subject that they have competency on. So they are called specialists. So before we get a little more into detail, let's first talk about the method of working and what we are trying to talk about from a management perspective.
Complying to laws in an organisation is a very interesting aspect because that is one of the key expectations from a leader, that you, as an organisation should be compliant. We don't want to be a legally non-compliant organization. So let's spend a little time trying to understand what kind of a compliance system do we have. It's somewhat standard globally.
So we have something called as an Act.
When we talk about labor laws, one of the important things that gets asked is, which are the laws that we need to follow as an organisation to be compliant. Finding out the list of laws is not something which is easy. So, today we are going to talk about the laws that you should be aware of, which normally get clubbed under the heading of labor laws.
One of the important aspects of managing the workforce is managing relationships between employees. And a very sensitive or a very troublesome relationship that we need to manage with the employees working, is what we title as the office romance. Today we are going to spend a little time discussing office romance. At the base, we need to understand that human beings are social in nature. Human beings are obviously supposed to interact with each other. And I'm sure that as an organisation, you would be trying to build in a lot of systems, processes, In fact, even the term employee engagement was coined to start building interactions within the organisation's employees.
It's very important to understand that getting employees out of the organisation is not a standard activity. Yes, I mean, we do have systems and processes in place, which say that I will give you one month notice as an organisation if I want to exit you. And you as an employee, if you want to exit the organisation, you need to give me a one month notice, or of whatever time period we have decided.
Work From Home has taken a lot of management time over the years, right from the middle of 2010s, when it was discussed, to COVID and now post-COVID when it has seen various kind of dimensions. In fact, it has now reached alarming proportions, and many influencers and people who can influence decisions are now taking sides. Whether it is A side, B side, whatever, now people have views on Work From Home, strong views. So let us try and give a fair discussion to this topic, to try and see whether it's relevant, it's not relevant, or will it stay, or will it not stay?
Mentoring and coaching are certain topics that are used quite interchangeably, and they are also an important buzzword that are necessary. From an organisation standpoint, they are necessary. Why? Because in the organisation journey of building future people to take care of the organisation, or in the organisation journey of succession, or the CEOs or MD's personal journey to succeed and take the organisation from one level to the other, the roles that the mentoring and the coaching programs, or the role that a mentor and a coach plays, is one of the most fundamental and paramount essential topics that needs to be looked at.
Bell Curve and Forced Ratings have been discussed for a very long time, and at least for the foreseeable five to ten years, we see that the discussion will continue. So we are going to talk a little bit about whether a Bell Curve and Force Rating is really adding value to the organization, or they have outlived their utility. Let's start by talking about the necessity of performance differentiation. We are of the view that differentiating rewards, differentiating punishments, differentiating treatment to employees on the basis of performance is a relatively acceptable aspect, both to the employer and the employee. This is something that everybody expects. Not only people who are high-performing, but people who are average and underperforming.
Like most countries, India too has a lot of shortage of talent, what we call, a lot of shortage of trained talent. And like most of the countries globally, India too is putting in a lot of effort to see how people from the armed forces can be assimilated into the corporate life. So, today we are going to spend a little time trying to understand, do people from the armed forces really add value to the corporate entities, specifically because the goals that the corporate entities are trying to achieve and what the armed forces are trying to achieve are not in similar lines.
Providing medical insurance, life insurance, or accident insurance is a decision that an organisation needs to take, whether to give it to the employees or not. One of the rationales this would be based on is whether you want to use this as a benefit to attract or retain talent. That's a decision that you could take. But today, we are going to not talk about that. We are going to more talk about the risk factor. So what is the risk factor?
Worker unions or employee unions is something which we assume to be a very dangerous topic to talk about, a very stressful thing to have in an organisation, and a very troublesome thing to know that a union has been established in an organisation. But the fact of the matter is, a union, whether you have it for employees or workers, is a group of individuals, is a group of people coming together and saying that we are going to work in a certain fashion, or we want certain negotiations, certain benefits, certain way of treating us to be done.
The labor codes have been in the domain for some time now, and it is expected that whenever the government does notify that the labor courts are effective, organisations should have already done their homework or their preparatory work, and should be able to implement them within a reasonable time. So what is it that we should have done as an organisation? What is it that is required to be done if we are still not prepared for making sure that we are ready for the labor codes implementation.
Maternity benefit is a very sensitive topic. I could also go to the level of saying that it's a very touchy topic, because there are two strong views on maternity benefit. Right or wrong is not a choice we have, but the point is, there are two strong views on maternity benefit. First, let us talk about what is maternity benefit governed by? Maternity benefit would normally be governed by three broad laws in India.
Labour laws in India are a group of laws which govern the employer-employee relationship or the employment conditions. There is no specific law with the name Labour Law (Act) or the Labour Law, but it's a group of laws, multiple laws, which we club and only refer as labour laws. Sometimes certain laws are included in that group, sometimes they are not. Therefore, to explain in a better fashion, we would say when we are talking about labour laws, any law which you feel is governing the employer-employee relationship or the terms and conditions of work, that we should consider is what we will use for this article.
<p style="font-weight: 400;">Frauds are a very interesting aspect of any organisational set up, and one in every three organizations faces some kind of employee fraud.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">Predominant frauds that happen in India, our study shows are around,</p>
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<li>Travel, A travel fraud is one of the most common frauds that happen</li>
<li>The other fraud that happens is in terms of your educational qualification or the qualifications to get into a role. That is the second highest fraud that happens in terms of fabricating experiences or education or exposure to get into a job.</li>
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Finding good talent has always been a problem, and in the foreseeable future also it will continue to be a problem, irrespective of whatever we believe that AI will help us do in finding talent.
The recruiters will continue to flourish, because they are the ones who help find great talent. AI can only assist in the screening side of the process, but we will still need great talent.
So, as a manager, what can be done to get great talent?
Salary increment is nothing but a result of a negotiation.
And negotiation is predominantly, not based on the grounds of what the market is paying, or what is the worth of the skill that an individual is bringing on the table.
Neither is the salary increment a result of what kind of budget the organisation has.
The need for an HR function arises primarily as a result of two important factors.
One, when the leaders are not able to devote time in managing people issues or people systems or people processes. And second, when the leader feels that they have reached a stage that an expert is needed to manage complex kind of issues people issues.
HR policies, also referred to as human resource policies, are a set of rules and guidelines along with a set of processes that are required to run the management of people in the organisation.
If we try to answer a question, are HR policies really necessary for an organization? or at what stage should we, as an organisation be introducing HR policies?
AI is a very important tool, and ignoring AI is going to be not the right thing to do for a human resource professional.
Needless to say, that the introduction of AI is not going to change the human resource profession is going to be wrong. AI is already changing a lot of human resources functions roles and responsibilities.
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<p class="ember-view">There are a lot of HR tech, or what we call as the HRMS solution providers available in the market in India today. Quite a lot of them are overseas based, and you can subscribe to them sitting in India.</p>
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