‘Customise HR for young India or lose talent'

With an increasingly young work force driving corporate India, especially people-centric service industries which account for half of the country's GDP, HR practices will have to be re-engineered to meet the aspirations of individual employees, noted speakers at ‘Metamorphosis', an HR Summit hosted at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS).

Speaking on people challenges in start ups and scaling enterprises, Mr Pankaj Bhargav, CEO, HRMantra Software, underlined the need to keep every employee aligned to the vision. “The younger lot is not ready to accept existing HR systems to evaluate and reward performance. The days of grades and salaries are gone. Whether it is salary expectations or perks, they have their own set of expectations. We need to personalise the HR policy to address individual aspirations,” he said.

Mr Wahid Ansari, President - Operations at security services company TOPSGRUP, said, “The communication aspect internally has to be looked at not just by HR, but by every manager in the system. Organisations need to communicate to the last person in the line, and appeal to individual talents in each employee. Established organisations tend to be rigid with silos and systems. That doesn't work with the younger work force which demands instant gratification.”

Lending perspective to the discussion was Prof. Satyajit Majumdar, Ph.D., from TISS. He noted, “Smaller organisations and start ups are better at adapting. When you have no rigid rules, you can create your own rules.” He added, “This is probably the time to think of competency building at the organisational level. Such competency is lesser mobile than people. The ill effects of people movement can be countered by systems.”

On the need to recognise individual talent, Ms Kalpana Bansal, President, TalentPro, explained the need to explore what is equitable, not ‘total equality'. Mr Ansari said: “Putting a value on the individual employee has become important. It's very difficult to do using existing performance metrics.”