NHRD Journal - National HRD Network

Socio - Economic
Highly mobile and churning workforce
resetting the norms of "what is acceptable
attrition". The scarcity of industry-ready talent
has resulted in too many employers targeting
the same limited talent pool. This has created
high churn and wage inflation, with attrition
in high growth sectors at 20-35%. This
combined with exploding employee numbers,
means that at any point in time as much as
50% employees could be less than an year old
in the organization. This creates an adverse
"new" to the "accultured" ratio, challenging the
DNA of organizations. The challenge is who
holds and inculcates the organizational DNA
and the institutional ethos to the thousands
who join the organization every year.
Confusion among the employees who want the
benefits of the capitalistic system but the
security and comfort of the socialistic system.
While individual choice and potential supernormal
rewards for extraordinary contribution
are desired, the flip side of undesired
consequences for less than expected delivery is
deemed unacceptable. This creates an
unrealistic expectation that one should get the
super-normal rewards and at the same time
there should be no down-side risk. This in turn
will result in a young and anchor less
leadership in organization wanting
meritocracy without appreciation of the risks
and the inequity & differentiation which
characterizes it.
Rapidly globalizing organizations faced with
the challenge of balancing exporting talent to
other parts of the world and coming to terms
with differing work cultures of host countries.
E.g. notions of required work hours, work-life
balance, private space vary significantly across
geographies. In such situations, what kind of
trade-offs does a globalizing organization
make? Ensure a homogeneous work culture by
continuing to export talent? If overdone, this
may compromise brand proposition to local
customers. Adapt work culture of the host
country? This may compromise the work ethos
that makes the organization competitive.
Demographic
Plummeting average work age leading to
middle management talent crisis and the
challenge of young leading the young. Low
median age of the population translates into
an advantage at the entry level pool, yet poses
a serious challenge at middle and senior level
managers. At these levels, experience and
maturity built over time are critical; yet current
phase of outstripping growth has meant that
talented yet inexperienced managers have been
fast-tracked into middle management roles.
Relatively few middle level managers have
significant age, experience and maturity gap
when compared to their subordinates.
The Change Challenge with ICICI
Drawing from the overall challenges that are
explored, in the context of financial services
industry and specifically of ICICI we can link
it up as below. The financial service Industry
has been growing at 30% over the last 5 to 6
years. ICICI Bank has been growing at 35 to
40% year on year during the same period.
Given the challenges listed in the context, the
following mind set changes were required at
the leadership level with respect to talent
acquisition and deployment:
From outsourcing investment on training to line
managers taking ownership for training raw
talent.
Seeing the role of manager not simply as delivering
on tasks through one's team but also as builder of
organization's talent pool. Not simply a net
consumer of talent but a net creator of talent. From
insistence on readymade talent to raw talent that
is trainable. From seeing compensation as the
sole lever for attracting and retaining talent to
investing in learning for accelerating time to
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November 2007 NHRD Journal