The Official Blog of Benifys HR Solutions

Hectic month here at Benifys, like really hectic! Hence the late update, but then, work does come before anything else… not to say that we don’t like you, of course we do – that’s precisely why we spend so much time and effort making sure that if it is about HR, you hear it first from us!

Talking about things happening at work, our CEO, Mr. Ajay Chowdhury, recently conceptualized a new HR product made specifically for schools keeping in mind their peculiar needs and requirements, you can read more about the product here, and download the product brochure from here. The content for training and intervention for these programs is never a limiting factor for us because we apply a modular approach to content creation besides creating customized content on demand. Going with the theme of the name of our newsletter HR@Work, we have named this product HR@Schools, and are currently conducting market research in the NCR region on the Supply vs. Demand gap in the corporate services available to schools.

Since our organization’s formation in January 2009, we have been able to map the Human Resources Outsourcing market to a reasonable amount of success, we now know that the three most ‘in demand’ services in the National Capital Region are – recruitment outsourcing, payroll outsourcing and training and development. So we have been indeed lucky as far as start-up stories go, by no means have we reached where we want to be… but we have all the fun and learning typically associated with a start-up without actually having to go through the many toils and struggles. Silicon, Sushi King, RBS, iSango, Slideshare, Vinsol, Rabyte, and Vestige are some of the clients that we are currently catering to and there are many more in the pipleline.

There is a lot of activity happening in the online space too…

1. It is now possible for readers to subscribe to concise but powerful ‘mobile’ career tips by registering on our Blog (service powered by http://www.alertrix.com).
2. If you look closely on the left sidebar, you will find that there is now an option to subscribe to our articles and blog updates though e-mail now, and yes, we hate spam and unsolicited mail as much as you do!
3. The new Carnival of HR is up and running at the HR maven blog! Deirdre has an excellent post on her hands with some amazing submissions from thought leaders in the HR sphere. Our submission for the carnival was the article – If employees could fly; just some good humored stereotyping of people at work
4. Please do join our Facebook community of forward looking professionals at http://www.facebook.com/benifys, we pick the best of the web and post it there regularly, delivered in your Facebook Homepage.
5. 7600 followers at http://www.twitter.cm/benifys, we must be doing something right! From our twitter profile you will receive career and HR related updates on an hourly basis, did you know you could also subscribe to these updates in your reader via an RSS feed?
6. We have some amazing collection of articles, guest posts, links, resources and news coming up in this the October edition of HR@Work, to which you can subscribe here.

And besides work…

Sometime during the beginning of this month, we all went to Bar-be-que Nation for lunch to celebrate; it wasn’t quite clear to me what we were celebrating! Maybe it was a pre party for Rahul’s on coming birthday, maybe it was the fact that Ajay bought a beauty of a car, maybe it was the amazing feedback Ankita received from our clients, or maybe it was that the fact that I won an iPod nano from Channel [V] (no wait, we got the last news while we were having lunch!)

Anyway leaving you here with a collage of pictures from the lunch, find out more about all of us here. Till the next time this space is updated… keep doing what you love

The month is almost about to end, and we are just gearing up for the finalization and distribution of the Fourth Edition of our in-house Newsletter HR@Work for which we have been consistently getting great feedback; well, this issue is extra special then… why you ask? That’s because the newsletter now has a completely revamped look and let us tell you we just absolutely love it, and know that you will too! So here come the updates:


When we conceptualized HR@Work, we were not sure how it would be taken and whether we would be able to pull it off to any degree of success, now fourth month into it’s run, it now has a circulation of around 2000! The primary target audience and majority of the opt-ins that we get are from people working in the HR leadership domain in India with the occasional sign-up from professionals overseas who happened to stumble upon the Blog.


As I said earlier, the Newsletter has a complete new look and will have a guest column starting this month. We plan to use this space to not only get experts to talk on varied aspects of business like management, motivation, workforce management, people issues, organizational climate and the likes, but also as a space where our clients and partners can talk about the challenges they face in their day-to-day business affairs and what is it that keeps them going.


We love experimenting with Web 2.0 and believe there is a vast latent potential to it, once the targeted users reach a critical mass; taking action on that thought we are now on Facebook and Twitter (and are about to cross 4000 followers on the latter!). Eventually, we also plan to open a support group on LinkedIn where business professionals and budding entrepreneurs can discuss the problems they face while implementing their HR, or the lack of it.


This update is rather special, thanks to Shauna Moerke of the HR Maven Blog, we are now participating members of the “Carnival of HR” community and besides being featured in that space, we will be hosting it on our Blog on the 14th of April, 2010! Check out the latest carnival post hosted by Effortless HR Blog here.


A little late in the day to mention, but we signed a content partnership with HRguru (Part of the Monster.com Worldwide Company) for syndication of our articles on their website. HRGuru is an online community dedicated to advancement of current and future human resources professionals and of the improvement of HR as a whole. We plan to help each other in our online promotion efforts besides content sharing.


Lots of birthdays this month in our team, three to be precise and what fun it was! We wanted to share the photos but then someone suggested (smart thinking indeed) that posting our cake covered faces all over the internet might not be a very good idea and it for sure wouldn’t do any wonders for our branding effort! So I guess we wait until we can get some no ‘cake on the face’ photographs of us, fat chance of that I think! You can check more information about our team here, for once we have clean, bright faces .

The month of June was strange, just as life is.


Australia gets ready to honour Nelson Mandela, the icon of equality and anti-racism, and a few hooligans bring it contempt of the world by attacking harmless Indians on their shores. That their cricket team brings it further disgrace is another matter. And the fact that they are turning out to be sore losers as they walk out of the field that they dominated for so long – screaming, sulking, kicking-the-air, blaming everything and everyone but themselves – is a whole new story altogether. Quite unlike the ‘coloured’ grace that the West Indians displayed about a decade back.


Look at the contradictions closer home – Sania beats a much highly ranked player one day, and loses to an unheralded opponent the other; Saina brings glory by beating the third seed and winning her maiden Super Series title, and crashes out to an unknown the next; Indian cricket team can’t even reach the semi-finals of the tournament they won the last time around, blaming the IPL in the process, while the other teams think the IPL was the greatest thing to happen to help them peak at the right time; while criminals still run parts of the country, the Infosys honcho finds his way to the cabinet, signals that the Indian political system is attaining some degree of maturity in parts; the CPM wants to ban a right wing organisation, but not the apparently more dangerous left wing extremists.


There were knee jerk reactions too – while the move to do away with the Class X Board examinations is welcome, the 100 day deadline is not – such decisions with far reaching consequences need to be thought through in greater detail, and viable alternatives put in. Let’s not get rid of one monster and create another.
An interesting bit of data that catches the eye is that the tolerance level of Delhi and Mumbai to same sex relationships is much lower than the national average – so much for perceptions – one would have thought the opposite.


It’s time to break long held perceptions – Benifys added another client to its fold, adding strength to our belief that the HR Outsourcing model is here to stay, people just need to break away from mindsets that disallow a perfectly balanced approach to running their HR function. The day is not far away, we know it.
And finally, you can’t talk about the month of June 2009 without saying goodbye to the moonwalker. RIP, MJ – you made an impact. Planet Earth will remember you.


Have a great month ahead, and keep smiling…

May 2009 – quite an eventful month ­ at the national level, in the sporting world, and for Benifys.


The UPA emerged as a clear winner, pushing all its baiters to the background for good (at least for the time being), the last two teams in the 2008 version of the IPL vied for the top spot, and quite fittingly, the one that finished last in the previous edition came out the winner, and we at Benifys added another client to our portfolio for our flagship product ­ complete outsourcing of the HR function.


And while we have no political (or sporting) leanings, don´t get us wrong ­ here´s the common thread ­ you can´t keep a good team down for long. The UPA was made to run from pillar to post by all and sundry in the last run of the government, and in the pre­poll hustling, the third and fourth fronts and their ilk have nowhere to hide. The way that they shamefacedly offered ´unconditional´ support to the new boss was both hilarious pitiable, depending on how you view it. In the end, it was performance. Similarly, the team that looked best on paper last year in the IPL finished at the bottom of the heap. The team didn´t change this year, but their performance did, their determination did ­ and yes, some of their top performers didn´t have to go back to their national duties. Yes, okay ­ things have to turn in your favour too. At Benifys, it´s the same story ­ dogged determination coupled with execution finesse means that the tide had to turn our way. Well folks, it just did!


So, we have two parallels already ­ what´s the third? We´ll tell you ­ new kids on the block matter, and they can change the course of events on their own. Whether it was the youngest Gandhi or his brigade of young turks, or the Manish Pandeys and Rohit Sharmas in the IPL ­ there is a lot to be said about what vibrancy, transparency and the zeal to achieve can do. Magic, to say the least!


Here´s the second edition of our in-house Newsletter. We´re quite pleased with the reaction that our maiden edition invoked, and hope to better ourselves edition after edition ­ till our dream of making this the prime vehicle for the HR community (and its users) is realised.


Hope u had a great month of May and June is even better. Cheers.