The Beanpod Keep & Develop

It is a very different landscape in India today industrial production is growing @ 10.7% (will probably change next week) therefore, organizations are growing as well. Fresh talent is not coming in at the same rate. The need for qualified talent is growing and supply is shrinking, consequentially gives employable people a lot of choice; all this puts talent at a premium. It’s not surprising to see the huge transformation in creative recruitment advertising, in fact some agencies specialize in just doing that. Larger corporations have HR teams focused just on recruitment, continuously thinking and implementing many creative ways of attracting talent, looking for newer catchments for sourcing having recruitment drives and campaigns in city, uptown, national campaigns and so on. So what are all these folks doing? Really speaking sales & marketing, only this time they are not selling the company’s products or services they want their target audience to buy into the company itself; they are also seeking professional advertising help. They just donned the marketers’ hat, they are looking for customers, people who will buy their story and join them and we also expect the prospect to drop his loyalties with the current organization, we want him to churn out of there. While we are busy doing that somebody is encouraging churn in our camp. So the marketing warfare is in full heat.

If you remember the challenges for the marketer in the mid 1990s it was eroding brand loyalties, flirting customers and the struggle for marketers to keep their customers. From the mid 1990s marketers focused on Find, Get, Keep & Develop your customer that was the mantra. Late 1990s and early 2000 saw the evolution of what was called Customer Relationship Management CRM which was essentially database management software that helped do the same thing. From 2003 we started seeing articles and books and experiences on why did CRM fail? Why did it not deliver on promise? And so on. The reason it did not work is because organizations thought the mere implementation of the software that they spent billions on would give them windfall gains. They missed the human interface to technology that was required; they needed to understand that what they had really paid a fancy price for was a piece of database management software, which was very efficient in capturing customer information. This information needed to convert to knowledge and that knowledge needed to be translated into how the company managed their deliverables to the customer. It is the last link that most companies failed to implement scientifically, this was no software job. This is the human or professional layer over the software that will make all the difference.

The Human Resource Marketer if I may is today, a decade later battling the same issues. He is met with the same solutions hawked as Enterprise Relationship Management, Human Resource Management and Performance Management software and so on. All of them expensive database management toys that can make a big difference to the organizations success if used correctly. For instance I have come across organizations that have proudly told me, we implemented xxxxx (big brand software makes the organization sound committed), nothing wrong with that decision, nothing wrong with the software either. Here is a typical conversation that follows:

“Wow, you must have managed to control your attrition now?”
“Well yes it has come down considerably.” I do not hazard asking by how much; so I probe with a surrogate.

“ In your opinion what are the top five reasons, why people leave”
“There is so much opportunity today”;
“We need better managers but managers are leaving too”
“People want more out of their jobs, very difficult to motivate”

This is something one gets a feel of without a million dollar investment or by reading articles in HRM or PM magazines, I realize I am getting no where with someone who is currently overwhelmed or awed by having transferred all their manual and some not so manual processes into a good computer system, life and operations have become more simple, more integrated, there is enterprise wide access and so on. So what is the vision beyond that? I am still searching for the answers.

Unfortunately again the human or professional layer is missing, that which will make this investment come to Life. A number of questions need to be answered

1. Why did my company make that investment; is it simply because we use this globally and everybody is comfortable with the reports this software generates?
2. What are the strategies? What is the roll out plan?
3. What needs to be done to harness the right value of human capital; including how do I measure it?
4. How do I realize the true potential of every single internal customer?
5. When does an employee get productive?
6. What do I do to ensure my people stay for a long time? How long is long time?
7. Don my ‘Creative Hat’ what is the Extra Value Proposition (EVP) I am taking to my internal customer?
8. Why will he stay despite the attractive offers competition is making him?
9. What is my churn management strategy? Am I doing it scientifically? And many more …

We will help your organization answer these and many more questions and implement the ‘human layer’ with or without expensive software implementation. The Beanpod will help bring your investments to Life.