What is a bigger problem: Managing employee appraisals or writing accurate appraisals?

December 24th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

While, I was organizing a software training workshop for a major Electric Power Distribution Corporation in New Delhi, I asked Vikram Singh, one of the participating Senior Managers, who has a team size of 150 employees for performance review, “What is the bigger problem when conducting employee appraisals: managing appraisals or writing accurate appraisals?“.

[Background: This 2,500 employee big company opted for EmpXtrack Performance Management System. Prior to using a web-based performance management system, they used paper based appraisal forms.]

“I have a team of 150 people to review, for me managing employee appraisals is a bigger problem. With an experience of 10 years, writing accurate appraisal is not so difficult. It may be difficult for younger managers but not for an experienced one.“, said Vikram. He continued, “For senior managers like me who also have to review appraisal of my juniors’ teams (I have 8 juniors managing teams of 15-20 each), managing appraisals is a far bigger problem. There is already a long list of urgent tasks with me and then managing 150 employee appraisals, usually in a span of 1 month. It makes me sweat.”

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Posted in Employee Appraisals, HR Technology, HRMS (HRIS), Human Resources, Performance Management | No Comments »

Ten Tips For Downsizing with Grace in Difficult Economic Times

November 26th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

Difficult economic times call for tough calls, and, downsizing is one of the toughest calls that leadership and HR have to take. Though downsizing is the most hated task and nobody wants to do it; it is a necessary evil for saving a company from an economic collapse.

With little efforts organizations can minimize the effect of downsizing on economy and employees to a some extent.  Here are 10 tips that one can consider while downsizing:

1. Do a manpower analysis before you Downsize!

Think twice, do you really need to vacate those seats and happy faces. Do not make subjective decisions!

Work and re-work on your manpower requirements - for today and for tomorrow. A good manpower planning software can assist you and your mangers to accurately assess your manpower requirements. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in HR Best Practices, HR Technology, Performance Management | 2 Comments »

Leadership insights on “Budgeting for Growth”

September 26th, 2008 Maj. Gen. B.K. Bhatia

I was invited to a attend a seminar conducted by a local chapter of a management group. The conference was titled “Budgeting for Growth” where experts and industry leaders were invited to share their views on optimizing budgets for Marketing, Infrastructure, Information Technology and HR.  Since my interest is in the area of HR, the viewpoints of a cross-section of the audience on budgeting for HR are shared below:

CEO of a Logistics Company: “Our IT budgets are managed by the IT department. They spend it mostly on hardware & support besides investing marginally on software purchases. Our VP - HR is exploring on-line systems through which he would be able to explore employee profiles quickly. I have no budgets allocated for this.”

MD of a Publishing firm: “My CFO feels that we have limited budgets for HR automation, but we may hire two additional executives in the HR department to manage the increase in workload as we expand. Additionally, our CFO is worried about hiring an expensive IT resource to manage any new HR system. We are in a dilemma!” Read the rest of this entry »

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You Can Only Improve What You Can Measure

September 11th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

Going through a book on Six Sigma, I came across this very popular statement “You Can Only Improve What You Can Measure“. Does it hold true for HR also? Why not?

If the answer to above is ‘Yes’, then for HR to improve its processes it is important to measure the current effectiveness. Here is a tool at EmpXtrack’s website which can help you to measure the effectiveness of your HR.

‘CEO’s checklist for HR Effectiveness‘, a tool designed by Maj. Gen. B. K. Bhatia, helps the CEO or Head HR of an organization to measure the effectiveness of their Human Resources Management functions. It is based on 20 most important criteria which constitute the framework of modern HR. Each criteria has a unique weight determined by the size of an organization.

Click here to use this tool to measure the effectiveness of your HR.

Posted in HR Best Practices, HR Technology, Human Resources | 2 Comments »

10 things about Technology every HR Manager should know

September 11th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

After spending a lot of time working on HR technology, I have just tried to collaborate some of the technology knowledge that any HR Manager should know.

1. The Era of Excel is over, its no more the most Powerful tool.
There was a time when Excel Geeks were highly in demand. Everybody will approach them for a solution. However, with the arrival of softwares like SAP, where HR can ask the software team to create personalized reports, Excel has been moved to the corner. With the amount of analysis and metrics that appear today, Excel is just insufficient. Added to it is the cost of acquiring MS Office. Open Office and Google Docs have appeared as the free alternatives to Excel. Sharing Excels sheets is fun with Google Docs. Though none of these serves as an alternate to customized HR software.

2. Locally developed softwares are out of fashion.
The technology is growing at such a pace that the small and one-room-run software vendors are unable to infuse the technology and dynamics that world of HR needs. Don’t you remember the important updates that you required but your software vendor was unable to do. People are changing, become more tech savvy, blogs are swarming all over - so how can you expect your employees to appreciate your locally developed software. And then there is no need to worry, the latest SaaS technology offers high degree of customization to develop a system meeting your specific needs.

3. Web based Software is the new affordable tool
The huge success of Monster.com, Salesforce, EmpXtrack, SuccessFactors, et ecetra is enough to prove that the era of web 2.0 has begun. Most of these, especially, EmpXtrack provides updates to the software at the fly, the price of these softwares is unmatched and no need to keep in-house support staff. So why would anybody keep the old, poorly interfaced software in HR. Would you? Click her if you want to see how a web-based HR software works.

This was HR in 1960s

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Evolution of the HR Function

August 18th, 2008 Tushar Bhatia

Introduction

A few years back during a client interaction, while being quizzed on our capabilities, I was surprised by a question on security practices in our company. The reason cited was that the customer measured the maturity of their vendor on the basis of the security practices prevalent in the vendors premises. After all they wanted to entrust their data with us!

Around 5 years later, we were asked a similar question where another customer evaluated our HR practices at a significant level of detail to gauge our competence.

In subsequent discussions, I have found that the question on HR maturity is being asked frequently by potential customers, investors and even prospective employees. The answers indicate maturity, stability, long term sustainability and delivery capabilities of your organization and hence are very important.

So what is HR function growth? Read the rest of this entry »

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