The Official Blog of Benifys HR Solutions

In the toil of everyday working and just staying abreast with the needs of a business, it is easy to lose track of the constantly evolving organism that an organization is. If you don’t stop to check what state your organization is in and where it is headed, the shape it takes on it’s own might surprise you, to say the least. Here are some thoughts for you to chew on.

First, some clear signs that your organization has lost it.

1. Lunch breaks keep getting longer, 5 minutes at a day.
2. Your company is in a race to make YouTube the most popular website with employees viewing and sharing links everywhere.
3. Your organization drifts from one idea to another instead of finding it’s small niche.
4. Team meetings are infrequent and anything but invigorating. All conversations end in a either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.
5. Keeping up with current affairs has become an activity in reading Page 3 news.
6. Performance appraisal is an almost alien term, or worse, there is no performance to appraise.

Here’s a clear test – Mission Statement – Who knows it?

Ask your team in the next meeting whether they know what the mission of the organization is, they don’t have to spell it out verbatim; look for signs where people feel it is absurd and irrelevant for you to ask such a question. If everyone answers satisfactorily – congratulations, people are in sync what the organization wishes to achieve. If not, well, it’s time you either re-think your mission (Is it too abstract? Something straight out of a book?), or get down to finding out why your people are not motivated by it. What does an organization do when it doesn’t know what it does?

OK, it’s broken! What now? Take your client’s help.

Setup an online feedback form and request your clients to fill it out for you. Bad feedback never killed anyone, but it does give you the knowledge of what you are doing wrong. Form questions that help you understand the gap in promised service to actual delivery, like:

1. Is there a gap in the service we promised to the one that is now being delivered? If yes, please elaborate.
2. If you could change three things at <name of the organization>, what would they be?
3. Is the representative appointed by our organization knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the work they do at <name of client organization>?

Avoid questions that might induce bias or negative action – for example if you know that things have not been going too well off late, it would be stupid to ask a question like “Would you recommend us?” The purpose is to get feedback that you can use to improve the level of service and find out hidden gremlins in operations, a copy-paste job will only serve to make things worse.

Lastly, and most importantly, involve the people.

A majority of organizational problems both begin and end with people. If people do not volunteer information, have a round of team building activities in order to set the tone for it. The information gathered from client feedback can be discussed as a team and further used to make an action plan with timelines.

If people seem to be losing steam and you sense a growing disinterest amongst them, conduct an engagement survey with targeted questions to find out what precisely is not working for them.

By outsourcing HR functions, a company can unleash its energy for its core areas of function

GOOGLE as a search engine provides an excellent common platform for personalised consumer experience, as individual users decide how to use it to suit their particular needs. Giving other similar examples, the top ranked thought leader in the world, CK Prahalad explains in his book The New Age of Innovation that unique personal experiences are permeating industries as diverse as toys, financial services, travel, hospitality, retailing and entertainment. He further says that no company has all the resources to create unique personalised experiences and flexible systems are a prerequisite and must be developed to access talent, components, products and services from the best source. In this context, he mentions outsourcing as one way to access low cost, high quality talent and explains that it should not be seen only as a means to reduce cost but also give personalised service.


In the book, the head of ICICI human resources function describes his job thus, “ICICI now faces a challenge in our aggressive growth and HR emerges as a strategic function in this increasingly competitive battle for talent. We run HR operations and recruitment as a production factory. We scan more than 3,50,000 applicants annually. We hold monthly recruitment planning meetings that resemble demand forecasting meetings by a manufacturer.” Considering the complexities involved, one wonders whether it is possible for all companies to manage HR operations of this magnitude in house. In a world where business suddenly grows astoundingly, not only recruitment but training and development of the staff along with compensation and performance management also have to be handled aptly. As people are supposed to be the most important resource and management of people involves a lot of subjectivity, any inefficiency in this area can prove to be disastrous. Can it not be done by outsourcing HR services?


Normally when one thinks of outsourcing, the BPO industry comes to mind. Apart from call centers, there are many companies which outsource financial accounting and legal services as well. HR outsourcing is relatively rare but has been taking fervent steps in recent times. One of the best companies to emerge in recent times is Benifys, which claims its mission to be “to provide value-based outsourced HR solutions, enabling client organisations to optimally deploy their people and fiscal resources by leveraging simplified, quality HR practices cost effectively.” The basic idea is that organisations should be able to outsource their activities to HR companies to enable them to focus their attention on their core competency and develop variable capacity or increased flexibility to meet changing business demands.


Bill Gates had said in an interview to Time magazine, “As a business manager, you need to take a hard look at your core competencies. Revisit the areas of your company that aren’t directly involved in those competencies, and consider whether web technologies can enable you to spin off those tasks. Let another company take over the management responsibilities for that work, and use modern communication technology to work closely with the people — now partners instead of employees are doing the work. In the web work style, employees can push the freedom the web provides to its limits.” Though this was said in the context of IT, it can be true for HR as well if the work is outsourced.


According to Benifys, the existing team in the client company might be working out fine, but there are no comparators to their performance, they operate on benchmarks that have been internally set, based on the limited knowledge of the HR function that most line managers possess. To enable dramatic growth for any organisation, and to have access to specialised expertise in each of the HR domains, a much larger team is required, which can work on a need basis, rather than add to the salary bill that’s probably already a large part of the client’s total expenses. The most important thing is that with outsourcing HR becomes a variable and not a fixed cost, which can impact profitability considerably, especially in adverse situations. For any client, costs are linked to their capability to pay. If the client company is growing, the probability is they are now able to allocate a larger portion to support services like HR. If they are shrinking, they would like the support services costs to come down as well. For recruitment, HR companies can help negotiate better rates, and put in place a vendor management practice that one might otherwise not have access to. They also have a pool of recruitment partners, and will be able to obtain better terms for recruitment requirements.
Where training and development is concerned, the expert trainers and content developers in an HRO company will understand the particular need for the client organisation and design customised training programmes to address the training requirements. Benifys has different methodologies for all scales of operations — start-ups, middle and large. For better effectiveness and efficiency there are many benefits like leveraging shared services, access to innovation and thought leadership, tighter control of budget through predictable costs, accurate and secure data flow etc.


In the words of the Benifys CEO, Ajay Chowdhury, “HRO need not remain restricted to transactional activities, even though that is already an established market in India, but needs to move into an end-to-end solution space, where the executive management of an organisation, specially in the SME space, can sit back and concentrate on what they do best — develop strong go-to-market and strengthen business processes. For larger organisations, there is obviously a need to outsource the transactional HR activities, and bank upon people like us to implement specialised projects, or customised L&D initiatives. Having successfully gone through the proof-of-concept stage, we’re on the verge of a big leap forward.”


One of the most well known corporate figures in recent times, former CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch had adopted a philosophy of getting out of all the businesses except those areas where the company could be first and second. Outsourcing to my mind is extending the same philosophy internally — get out of all the areas except where you are best, your core competency. Welch had a 70:70:70 rule. He has decided that 70 per cent of GE’s work will be outsourced. Out of this, 70 per cent will be done from offshore development centers. And out of this, about 70 per cent will have to be done here in India. One of the reasons of his stupendous success could have been his efficient outsourcing. Peter Drucker’s book Innovation and Entrepreneurship describes how the great Henri Ford’s empire began to crumble after James J Couzens, the man who used to look after all other management functions to enable Ford to focus on his engineering core competence, left the company. In his book The High Performance Entrepreneur, Subroto Bagchi, vice-chairman, MindTree Ltd, says, “Many times a startup fails when it tries to be too big too soon and does things which are not its core competence.” Bagchi is right. Outsourcing is actually in-resourcing; whether it is a start-up or otherwise, the shift in focus to core competence can unleash forces that can be one of the factors which can actually make the entire company a high performance entrepreneur.

This article is written by Hiren Shah and was published in the October issue of Management Compass.