The Official Blog of Benifys HR Solutions

Background

The schools of today are very different from even 5-6 years back. Today, schools need to operate like full blown organisations and are faced with the same challenges as any other for-profit corporate organisation operating in a competitive environment. Schools have to begin to think of themselves as Organisations, competing with other schools, even other education imparting institutions, trying to sell their product (education) to a static-for-a-year buyer’s (students and parents) market. It is not by accident that the forward looking schools have begun to look upon their employees (teachers) as their differentiating factor in attracting the most number of buyers (applicants for enrolment). It is no longer the infrastructure or the historical glory that some schools used to enjoy that matters. Today’s parents and students are far more selective and discerning than earlier, when distance and ease of admission (and yes, absence of a ‘donation’) used to be the deciding factors. Today, what matters is the competence and attitude of teachers, and this is where most schools miss the bus.

With this in view, it is imperative that the Human Resources function begins to contribute in a game-defining manner to enable the schools to leverage the strength of their human resources (the teachers) to become institutions of repute and standing in the society.

Scope

All schools desirous of providing a conducive environment to the teachers, while developing or retaining the cutting edge in the education market.

Coverage

The typical activities in the Human Resources function that every school can benefit from can be summarised as follows:

• Attracting and recruiting appropriate teachers – appropriate in terms of qualification, experience and attitude
• Inducting the teachers in the processes/practices and ethos of the school
• Personnel records maintenance for teachers, complete with entire documentation pertaining to previous employment, experience, qualifications, etc.
• Continuous development of the teachers to remain above the bar
• Salary fixation and payroll processing, including implementation of government regulated scales and annual increments
• Performance Management of the teachers, setting goals and targets, and monitoring their performance with a view to bring about continuous improvement in the school teaching standards
• Query resolution for teachers, where face time is provided by the HR function for interaction pertaining to common or individual issues faced by teachers
• Separation process management – implementation of the separation process in a professional manner with templatised exit interviews and attrition factor trend analysis.

Value-add services

In addition to the above, there are many activities that do not classify under the core-competence bucket for a school, whose sole and undivided attention should be on making the students worthy human beings – knowledgeable, curious, capable, and contributors to society when they grow up. It is easy to let go of the activities mentioned below that require either a templatised, transactional approach, or special expertise or training. These activities can be as follows:

• Complete child dossiers
• Parent-teacher interaction co-ordination
• Communication charter development and implementation between school and parents
• Child and teacher counselling

Detailed offering

Benifys offers a bundled service offering that is easily deployable in a plug-and-play mode. Obviously, some aspects of this offering need to be suitably modified to reflect the culture and requirements of individual schools. The offerings mentioned above can be depicted in detail in the following manner:

Attracting and retaining teachers

The school has to have strong and robust processes around recruiting the right teachers. The right candidates have to be identified through a detailed market scanning exercise and a database that is unmatched in tapping into the right resources. The interviewing techniques not only need to measure the aptitude of the candidates, but equally importantly, measure the attitude. In the final reckoning, the differentiators will not solely be knowledge parameters, but the way that the teachers approach their roles. It is critical for any teacher to project the image that the school wants to project amongst the student and parent community.

Benifys provides robust behavioural skills based interviewing techniques that all our representatives have undertaken rigorous training on. The recruitment processes are managed through an integrated back-end support mechanism that will delight the candidates. Whether they succeed in getting employment at the school or not, they will go back thinking highly of your institution.

Induction of teachers

The first ‘moment of truth’ is the first few days after joining. Benifys recognises that the induction process has to be appropriate and should serve the needs of both the employer and the employee. Beginning from a formal reception to enabling the new hire find a place in the new environment, the induction process should facilitate a quick cultural shift to the new ways of working of the new workplace.

Benifys has a templatised approach to induction. We provide face time in the first few days to take the new hire through the new policies, processes and formalities, along with an induction schedule that covers the entire spectrum of activities befitting an organisation of repute.

Personnel records

One of the most important facet of organisation life, and one which is most often neglected, is maintenance of proper personnel records in safe custody. The criticality of this activity is often overlooked, to the detriment of the organisation.

Benifys has a robust mechanism of collecting the relevant documents, following up to complete the desired documentation, and then storing the collated documents in a safe and tamper-proof manner, with strict controls over accessibility.

Developmental activities

Constant development is the key to success – of individuals and organisations alike. It is imperative that constant endeavours are made to uplift the skill levels and behavioural aspects of all employees.

While Benifys provides a committed one day of behavioural training for teachers on a topic chosen by the partner school, we will be glad to assist with the co-ordination aspects towards organising skills based workshops.

Salary fixation and payroll processing

While there are Government regulated scales for teachers in most schools, there are nuances of the salary structure that have to be captured, leave and attendance data fed into the payroll system, and adjustments made for arrears and deductions. At the same time, the most appropriate salary structure has to be implemented so that the school is adhering to all compliance and statutory matters.

Benifys provides support in managing the payroll through its payroll processing team, professionally managed and with previous experience of managing large projects. We are committed to providing timely and accurate payroll support o every school that we partner.

Performance management

Performance management in schools is a vital component of the value proposition that it offers to the students and parents alike. Through a rigorous mechanism of performance evaluation, skill/attitude gap analysis, and chalking out a developmental plan for all teachers, schools need to pay special emphasis on the development of the teachers on their rolls.

Benifys offers a committed one day training workshop coverage of all teachers on the rolls of each partner school within this offering. This means that the school can choose the developmental workshop that it wants to create and run for its teachers. This workshop can be one of the staple products from the Benifys offerings, or customised according to the specific needs of the school. More than this, the school can choose to run different workshops for different sets of teachers.

Query resolution

However good an environment and however supportive the management, there will always be human issues that teachers are faced with. There needs to be a self-propelled mechanism that lends a ‘listening’ ear to the teachers and other employees, and this mechanism needs to be driven by an agency external to the management.

Benifys representatives provide the human touch to the running of a school. We know what it takes to present a humane approach to the employees of the school, and work extra hard to make sure that everyone feels wanted and cared for. The resolution might lie with the school, but the vehicle of carrying the concern to the management and the resolution to the employees is the Benifys ‘face-of-HR’.

Separation process

When employees leave, and they sometimes will, it is important for a free flow of communication to take place between the employer and the leaving employee. Separation is not about settling the financial dues at both ends, it is about parting in a manner that is becoming an institution of repute. We highly recommend a mutual parting of ways that allows both parties to get back together at some point in time, if it works for both. Finally, remember that the leaving employee is the best ambassador of your school.

Benifys not only takes care of the financial aspects of separation, but involves itself in understanding the real reasons behind people leaving. It could be as innocuous as marriage, or shift of towns; but it could be as critical as the working environment, or the employee relations practices that the school follows. Whatever it is, the school should know, and Benifys provides the ideal mechanism, through its templatised exit interviews, and exit analysis, for the school to understand trends behind attrition, and take corrective measures while there is time.

Value-add services

We recognise that there are a host of other transactional, or specialist, activities that are required by the schools. In our endeavour to provide a complete bouquet of services, enabling the partner school to avail of all such services through single window, we also offer the following services as our value-add proposition. These services are priced separately from the above suite of offerings, and can be implemented on a project mode.

• Complete child dossiers: all relevant and updated information about each student in your school is collated and maintained in a secure environment by Benifys
• Parent-teacher interaction co-ordination: setting up schedules, sending out messages, and physical co-ordination of the PTA/PT Meetings is done by Benifys
• Communication charter development and implementation between school and parents: any other communication channels that the school wants to open and maintain with the parents is handled end-to-end by Benifys
• Child and teacher counselling: specialist services by qualified counsellors provided through Benifys

Benefits

• Best practice implementation
• Templatised, yet customised approach
• Execution finesse of specialists
• Cost of uniform ‘best-in-class’ solution dependent on size – no investment ahead of time
• Variable capacity
• Value-add services from single window

Related posts:

1. High Level Performance Path
2. Formulating a Leadership Development Program