Challenge for HR - National HRD Network

Thinking 'Integrated Space'
-TQM and HRM
– P. Vijayan
Most often, TQM is rarely seen as an
important and integral element of an
organisation's Human Resource Strategy,
policies, thought processes. Most often,
TQM is on the agenda of Manufacturing,
Operations, and Supply Chain and at times,
finds its rightful place, along side Business
Excellence. HR professionals tend to
possess very little appreciation of this
important body of knowledge and, hence,
are not at the table, regarding their
organisation's Quality Strategy and
integrating with the People strategies and
approaches.
My experiences, over time, has confirmedtime
and again- that breakthroughs in
thinking, frameworks and in the end superior
performance of a process, system,
company, industry, country happens when
two disciplines meet each other creating
new and unique ' space". As an eg,
Employer Branding is an important example
of the coalescing of Brand Management,
Communications and HR. Another example
is the inter disciplinary breakthrough of IT
and Medicine, where many many years
back, Medical transcription became an India
advantage- much before the 'formal
outsourcing wave' became aware to most
of us.
I intend exploring the space where TQM
interacts with HR process/system/practice
and would like to share what new
possibilities could emerge. I would be
exploring a couple of linkages of a TQM
process/principle/philosophy with a HR
process/system/practice. This by no means
is exhaustive but should inspire you, the
readers, to deep dive and explore more
insights for common good of TQM and HR
professionals.
Let us kick off the exploration with Talent
Attraction, a major challenge for India Inc
and even the world.
What does TQM postulate on a parallel
process like Customer acquisition? Isn't
customer acquisition and potential
employee acquisition fundamentally
representing the same'process' and could
learn from each other? Do we, HR
professionals in the recruitment and
selection vertical, understand potential
employee characteristics, availability pools,
substitutable skills etc, as well as the
organization and the Marketing/Sales
professionals understand the end customer/
intermediate customers? How much
research do we do to test the effectiveness
of our talent acquisition strategies- in terms
of efficiency, effectiveness and reinforcing
the employer brand? Is our potential
employee search focused on the right
segments of availability? Do we know,
globally, the demand supply flows of skillscurrent
and likely into near future? While
Product Development and Marketing
professionals use advanced TQM based like
Quality Focus Deployment, Taguchi
experiments etc, why are HR professionals
not giving more care to understanding the
potential employer better- in terms of
psychographic profiles, motivation to work
and rewards etc? Are we in sync with
changing demographics and the values of
the emerging work force?
Let us look at the selection process a bit
more closely. Most of us, HR professionals,
tend to give search assignments and we are
psychologically happier when the search
firm generates quantity- a number of CV's.
We believe that gives us the widest choice
and hence would lead to a better shortlist
for initiating the testing processes. This most
often is not true at all. When you study the
TQM principles, it is clear that more is not
necessarily good. That is why TQM treats
inventory, excess production, warehouses
as waste. Inventory hides inefficiencies in
the supply chain in terms of demand
forecasting, placing timely, the right orders
with vendors and the latter's capability to
deliver right numbers of first time right
quality. Infact, Vendor Performance
Improvement programmes almost always
are accompanied with dramatic reduction
in inventories, warehouses and even the
ratio of vendors to components. Then, why
are HR professionals, and even Line
Managers, insisting on number of cv's? Why
do we not transfer accountability to the
search partner to do the funneling in from
many to a few and we spend more time on
the few candidates??? Seems elementary,
however not experienced in practice.
TQM has at its corner stone, the satisfaction
of the customer. Whatever is done in an
organization- big or small- has to result in
customer satisfaction/delight, leading to
loyalty which in turn leads to the
organization succeeding more, vis a vis
other stakeholders. In the same vein, very
few organizations have the courage to
measure employee satisfaction and even
fewer who are ready to see employee
satisfaction as one of the most important
indicators of organisational success,
alongside customer and financial success.
Many companies conduct employee
satisfaction studies but the action planning
of the outcomes are weak and sporadic.
There is a tendency of many organization's
to believe that employee satisfaction
improvement is the baby of the HRD
department while on the other hand, the
entire organization -rightfully so- is involved
in enhancing satisfaction of the external
customer. How can not so satisfied
employees continue to add value towards
enhancing customer satisfaction?
Staying with employee satisfaction, I have
observed that there is a gap between what
the senior leaders of a company wants/feels
is necessary to improve employee
satisfaction and the 'real' need of the
employee. There is still the tendency for
thinking on ' we exactly know what the
employees want and what we should give/
not give." For egg, if the employee
satisfaction scores around reward and
recognition are low, the typical responses
would be from the following set of
diagnostics- market benchmarking tells us
that we are paying one of the highest and/
or employees will never be happy with
whatever salary and benefits that we offer
etc. The 'real' voice may not be around
quantum of reward but around the process,
criteria, 'employee experiencies' in terms of
his/her voices are being factored into Policy
and programmes. The point I am trying to
make is that we, HR professionals tend to
over simplify when not appropriate and
complicate when not needed. The one size
Contd.. On page 20
P. Vijayan, he can be reached at E-mail: latika_vijayan@yahoo.com and vijayan.p@mahindra.com
| HRD News Letter | December 2007, Vol.23, Issue:9 21 |