Articles
Organisational effectiveness, often referred to as OE, is a specialised area within the human resource function that focuses on answering some of the most critical structural questions an organisation faces. These questions relate to roles, skills, levels, and the optimal number of people required to deliver business objectives.
Hiring talent is often discussed as a problem of availability, but in reality, it is more a problem of how organisations look for and identify talent. The market has enough capable people; the challenge lies in recognising them without falling prey to bias or short‑cut thinking.
Building succession and preparing the next line of leadership is one of the most critical responsibilities of senior leadership. It ensures business continuity and reduces the risk associated with sudden leadership exits. Succession planning is complex and requires a structured, specialist‑driven approach.
Hiring at leadership levels is one of the most complex and high‑impact decisions an organisation makes. Leadership hiring errors are expensive, disruptive, and often take years to correct, which is why organisations need a far more deliberate and structured approach when selecting leaders.
One of the most common questions organisations ask is what the appropriate HR to employee ratio should be. While there are many opinions and numbers available publicly, the right answer depends heavily on how an organisation defines the role of its HR practitioners and what it expects them to deliver.
One of the questions organisations frequently ask is what kind of salary or cost they should be paying their HR staff. Since HR plays a critical role in shaping culture and supporting business outcomes, this decision needs to be approached with clarity and consistency.
Every organisation incurs a cost to manage its people, but many leaders are not fully clear about what constitutes an HR budget and what an optimum HR budget should look like. Having clarity on this helps organisations plan better and understand the real cost of managing their workforce.
Reducing employee attrition is one of the most frequently asked questions by organisations, yet it is often approached in an overly simplistic manner. Employees leave organisations for a wide range of reasons, many of which are unique to the organisation’s context, culture, and operating environment.
In the business world, the terms line and non‑line functions are used very frequently, especially when discussing organisation structure and human resource practices. Understanding what these terms mean and why organisations divide functions in this manner helps explain how resources and benefits are allocated.
When organisations talk about having a fully operational or evolved human resource function, the question that naturally arises is what such a function should actually be delivering. Understanding this helps organisations assess the maturity of their HR capability and identify gaps that need to be addressed.
An assessment centre is a structured program that uses multiple methods and multiple tools to arrive at a well‑rounded view of an individual. It is commonly used to support decisions related to promotions, leadership development, training identification, and in certain cases, specialised role selection.
45, When hiring an employee what kind of information is required to be collected (joining documents)
When a new employee joins an organisation, one of the first responsibilities of the HR function is to ensure that the right information and documents are collected. Some of these requirements are governed by law, while others are considered good governance and best practice.
When organisations think about building a training function or strengthening capability development, one of the first questions that arises is how training should be structured. Understanding the different kinds of training helps organisations design programs that are relevant, effective, and aligned to actual work requirements.
One of the most common areas of confusion in human resources relates to the terms compensation, salary, and benefits. These terms are often used interchangeably, even though they mean very different things and serve different purposes in an organisation’s reward framework.
Finding the right talent has become one of the most prominent challenges for organisations as the Indian economy continues to evolve. A significant portion of HR budgets today is focused on talent management, which includes both acquiring new talent and retaining existing employees.
One of the questions business leaders often ask is how to measure the performance of a human resource practitioner. Unlike sales or production roles, HR work is not always directly visible, which makes appraisal and increment decisions more difficult if there is no structured measurement system.
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.
