Job design and description and Competency Management

It is definitely a challenge to all the businesses today to design and define the job in right manner to attract right talent to it. This was the crux of the matter in today's presentation which I missed in the class. Nonethless, I discussed it with few members of the presenting team to get my understanding right.

Job design must be in allignment with the overall strategy of the organisation and lack of understanding of strategy while designing job(across the organisation) is definitely detrimental. It may be likened to a ship with multiple sails which are alligned differently, gets nowhere whereas a ship with each sail alligned in a proper manner definitely sails ahead.

There are a lot of constraints that one faces while doing this piece of job. There are sectoral, behavioural, environmental, ergonomical and various other considerations. Then the key is to reach an optimum solution and keeping it flexible with changing times.

There was this example or rather this comparison between Thermax and Zensar which was lucidly explained. Both the companies operate in defferent spaces and yet they focus very much on getting these things right.For both of them its a key challenge to get right people in right positions and to make sure they acquire right skills over the period of time to ensure growth of organisation and people. The relation is rather symbiotic. 

This sounds simple and pretty doable but with humans around complexity definitely arises in even most simple tasks. So it would be imperative for any organisation to address these challenges, especially in view of increasing diversity (refer to my first blog) in the organisations. 

Job Design seems like the ultimate HR challenge of businesses today.!!

Diversity And Inclusion

Diversity and Inclusion

It is imperative for an organisation to be diverse in terms of people constituting the organisation. The reason is definitely not socialistic. It rather lies in synergy that diversity creates by sheer different palates it brings to the organisation in terms of thought processes and creativity. An organisation will surely not sustain if it fails to incorporate diversity in its fabric. A company which fails to diversify will definitely lose out on a large customer base that will definitely not identify with it. A very good example is, HSBC which strongly focuses on diversity of all kinds in its talent pool, which allows it to operate successfully throughout the world. A company that sees itself thriving for a long time must therefore seriously recruit from different ages, genders, geographies for each brings a perspective which can give a new dimension to the business.

Diversity also brings with it a lot of conflict of ideas and inclusion is a way of managing all these differences in a healthy manner. Inclusion is providing a sense of belonging and respect to a person with an assurance that there would be fair and unbiased treatment irrespective of any clauses. Productivity depends a lot on the way diversity is managed and inclusion brought in. Although these are great values for an organisation to succeed but they need to be handled in a very sensitive way. This surely is a challenge to most organisations as many-a-times fair treatment of one group is seen as naturally unfair to the other. The organisations also need to be very open in their approach and unambiguous on such issues so that wrong perceptions do not float. For example in case of recruitment or appraisal both the criterion for performance and diversity should be clearly published so that no conflicts arise later.

A very important question which organisations face is – how much diversity is right? The answer lies in the strategy and the mission of the organisation. A strategically aligned diversity policy creates value for customers and itself.

Diversity paired with inclusion is what sets a truly global business apart from the rest.