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.

EDT
April 29, 2009

With recession hitting the market, companies need to be more practical and strategic in their business process. Of late, companies have started realizing that HR recruitment, selection, retention etc., is quite a cumbersome process calling for high amount of time and resources and inflicting cost. Thus, they are warming up to the idea of outsourcing HR function to offshore firms. Multinational companies are saving millions of dollars by outsourcing HR. All cultural differences are addressed while streamlining the work.
Advantages associated with outsourcing the HR departments include:

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Great Reduction in Costs

HR outsourcing (HRO) converts fixed cost to variable cost and can produce quality performance in low cost. Companies have started realizing that offshoring HR department to low-cost areas will help in reducing cost while maintaining the quality of performance. Gradually, offshore outsourcing firm becomes an inbuilt function of the organization and the combined effect of their partnership further strengthens the process of the company.

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Simple Global Models

Outsourcing takes HR functions to a global scale. With entrance of global service providers in the market competition has become tough; however the service delivery model has become mature and highly satisfactory for global clients. Outsourcing helps in moving HR executives from local role to global. Few advantages of global engagements for HR are:

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• Expertise: HR Managers of varied expertise from all over the globe improves the recruitment process.
• Cost Effective: As stated earlier, hiring HR personnel from low-cost countries helps in providing same or better service at lower price.
• Workplace diversity: Globally functioning HR brings employees from across the globe and makes the work environment culturally more diverse.

In a tough competitive global market, the benefits of global HR model are too valuable for a company to miss.

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Best of Breed Solutions

With outsourcing talent hunt has become broad spectrum. Now finding the desired candidate satisfying all selection criteria is not the main area of focus, instead, best-of-bread approach is taken to find the leaders in the field.

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Risk Mitigation

Many a times companies faces crisis due to sudden loss of the key HR person. A tight labor market delays finding a suitable replacement. Hiring and training a new person for knowledge transfer becomes difficult and costly in recession. An outsourced HR engagement helps to almost terminate these problems. In HRO, hiring new replacements and training them are the responsibilities of the service provider, thus, ensuring a continued hassle-free service.

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Value Addition

Generally, in-house HR functions are primarily visualized as cost-centre; whereas, HRO models chiefly focus on strategies which would improve business and reduce cost. Unlike in-house HR personnel, outsourced HR team does not get caught up in internal issues and thus can concentrate on cost-reduction, talent acquisition, training and retention. This results in the following benefits:

• Increases process efficiency by concentrating on important issues.
• Increases flexibility of business and makes it more dynamic.
• Increases employee satisfaction and productivity.
• Increases the business network and help gain market access.
• Increases sales and business during recession.

In the current volatile market the need to focus on core business activities has become an absolute necessity. To cater to core activities, companies are opting to outsource non-core process like Human Resource management.
Like every process, outsourcing too has its own pros and cons. Few disadvantages of HR outsourcing are:

• It requires lots of coordination with the service provider.
• It reduces the scope of learning for an organization.
• It reduces the control over the support function thus affecting the integrity of the company.

To minimize these disadvantages organizations has to understand their ultimate motive of outsourcing. A clear vision of goal and transferring only the functions and not responsibilities will certainly prove to be fruitful in smooth outsourcing of HR functions. This is no cakewalk and requires a great deal of knowledge, planning, skill and commitment.