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Employment Trends Human Resource Industry Evolution

New Skill training Post Covid

A new essential skill set requirement added to all job descriptions across the world –
Experience and management of work from home model.
“Do you know to handle your teams on WFH model. What have been the productivity levels and what has been the engagement hours? The emotional quotient required to manage people on the other side of the screen remotely will be a major HR skill .This will be the most essential question hereafter from any organization in an interview.

Whoever will develop this skill the best way will only be eligible for a job of leading and managing the team, else only fit for an Individual contributor. Learn the skill sooner than other to avoid getting redundant in the system. Else system will take the leap of introducing and adapting to automation preponing the plan of redundancy of people in the system.

A big wave of retrenchment and job loss among desk and process jobs to begin post- pandemic since all the processes will have got automated and human intervention and engagement will drastically reduce. Industry will have prepared for the next pandemic which will occur after 100 years assuming it will be similar to COVID. But in reality, Industry will have insulated itself from human dependency by the means of automation. The threat posed by robotics, AI and Machine learning has been executed by COVID beforehand.

It wouldnt be surprising if people will be managed by robots which was mentioned as an irony and laughed out earlier.

Industry digitization would have remained a temporary arrangement if Covid would have ended up in the first wave. But since covid has prolonged to second, third wave followed by black fungus or better mutated covid virus, the digitization will be further extended, improvised, sustained and habituated to.

Industry needs formalising the skill of WFH as a major training need and build training programs like how people management, motivation etc.., were identified as a skill earlier.

Categories
Current Affairs - Corporate Employment Trends Human Resource Industry Evolution

Industry trends during COVID and Post-COVID

According to Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy 27 million youth in the age group of 20-30 years lost their jobs in April 2020 following a nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
Further, 33 million men and women in their 30s lost jobs in April, out of which 86% of the job losses were among men, it said.

In addition to the job losses, pay-cuts, and furloughs, the other trends Industries are adapting are:

  • Deferring any incentives, appraisals to employees.
  • Laying off roles where there are repetitive jobs.
  • Performance-based layoffs due to skill or will issues.
  • Layoffs due to the non-adaptability of employees to post- COVID scenario.
  • Layoffs considering resources on the bench even for 15 days as a burden for the organization and shedding overheads.
  • Decrease of numbers in Support functions.
  • Laying Off Senior People in Senior positions in the age group of 50+ yrs addressing cost and as perceived by the Industry – limitation in the utilization of such resources due to mobility, multitasking, adaptability, rigidity, etc.,
  • Promoting Junior resources to Senior roles due to resource availability at a lesser cost, maximum utilization, flexibility, more accommodative, etc..,
  • Hiring resources across geographies due to Work from home model.
  • Doubling the expectations in terms of deliverable’s and accountability.
  • Transferring Permanent resources to contractual employment – this will reduce the overhead cost for the Companies and retrenchment cost based on future Industry uncertainties that can be well accommodated at lesser cost and no brand defamation.
  • Out-placement of retrenched employees.
  • Engaging skilled white – collared resources on assignment/ day/ month basis is the new trend.
  • Hiring experienced resources at the cost of an entry-level resource.
  • Deferring all Campus hiring offers to infinity.
  • Expanding the job description of new and existing employees.
  • Measuring performance only on results delivered and not on the engagement time.
  • Work from home, not limiting working hours to 9, 10, 11, or 12 hours.
  • Major Companies adopting to Work from home trend due to the cost saved on infrastructure.
  • Expecting Industry ready resources minimizing training time and training cost.
  • Human Resource engaging more in virtual employee engagement platforms.
  • Adopting Project-based engagement through contractual hiring.
  • Building effective virtual platforms of communication to make the Work from home model better.
  • Reducing trial time and adaptability time of any new resource joining the organization.
  • Transfer of employees to the most challenging locations or work area.
  • Bidding with extremely Competitive rates to gain business and sustain.
  • Keeping only the primary and lean benefits to the employees active.
  • Emphasizing on survival than growth.

Every aspect of the industry has undergone substantial modifications. Should it be called New -Normal or New World? But change always is initiated, implemented, adapted, and better successful in chaos.

Categories
Employment Trends Entrepreneurship Industry Evolution Sectors

Impact of COVID on Industries and Job Market. Equip yourself to survive, sustain, and progress.

Job Market and Employment trends have undergone multiple transformations with time due to Recession, Globalization, Automation, and Digitalization. Currently, Industry is going through a tough phase due to pandemic, which has appeared nearly after 100 years.
The whole of the Industry is making assumptions and anticipations based on ever data possible. But unfortunately, most of them are not in alignment with the facts to date.

The changing scenario of the COVID census in different states, mortality rate, key people in politics, Govt or Essential services – tested positive, their duration of recovery, disturbance in the functionality of essential services … all have added to more confusion.

There were predictions made that, the second quarter of 2020-21 will see a considerable recovery. Whereas the job loss has increased, and pay cuts have prolonged till next quarter. Few of the Companies have announced pay cuts till March 2021. Appraisals, Bonus, and Variable Pay, have deferred until infinity.

Sectors most affected like Hospitality, Airlines, Automotive, Aerospace, Retail are struggling for survival. The Recovery Rate of Industries impacted due to COVID is very slow. The cascading effect is creating an enormous blow to the other Industries in the supply chain. Employees with higher Salaries, Senior people with monitoring roles, Support departments, Jobs that can be replaced by digitalization, Business Development roles are on the Target for retrenchments. Campus recruitments stopped for a year.

The positive side of the situation is, Junior level, capable and efficient people are elevated with higher responsibilities and opportunities to perform and acquire more senior roles once the market stabilizes. Most of the jobs are using virtual platforms to interact, reducing cost and time for both organizations and employees. The Industry will further explore and innovate newer means to perform and sustain.

Work from home will, in the future, give opportunities to more people in 2- tier, 3- tier cities, villages to work for MNC’s from their homes. Geographies won’t limit people to smaller or lesser opportunities. Educated Men and Women in small towns or villages will not have restrictions in career growth or opportunities. Lifestyle and exposure will improve in small cities.

Sectors like Pharma, Retail like Grocers, Vegetable vendors, Automation, Digitalization, few Mfgg units, Telecom, Networking, Computer Hardware, Infrastructure have seen the demand. Today’s job market belongs to only those people who can commit and deliver results in the least turn around time with utmost quality, integrity, and accountability. The changing demands and the situation of the Industry will force Companies to expect more from the employees. And Darwin’s theory of ‘Survival of fittest’ and ‘Natural Selection’ will force employees to thrive on competition. New Normal will come with many demands from the employers, better gauging criteria for performances and deliverables

Change is inevitable. One who adapts sooner will succeed, be it an Organization or an Individual. Equip yourself to survive, sustain, and progress.

Categories
Current Affairs - Corporate Employment Trends Industry Evolution Outsourcing Model Sectors

How will Resource Outsourcing/Staffing help the Industry Post –COVID?

How will Resource Outsourcing/Staffing help the Industry Post –COVID?

India has generally seen a trend of engaging blue-collared, support staff resources on third-party/ off-roll/outsourcing/ staffing engagement. Post-2008 recession, the pattern of engaging white collared, skilled resources widespread by the IT Industry but still was limited to IT Industry alone. Post-COVID, the trend of engaging white collared, technical employees into Contractual engagement excluding few Senior Management and strategical roles is envisaged as a necessity and is in demand now irrespective of any sector.

IT Industry shifted to this trend after the 2008 recession based on the following observations.

  • Bench cost was consuming revenues of the Organization affecting the financial health of the Company,
  • Having resources on bench based on the projection of growth didn’t turn out to be a wise decision.
  • Expansion plans delayed due to many factors
  • Competition,
  • Pricing,
  • Clients’ Approvals,
  • Licensing,
  • Global Economic trends,
  • Currency conversion,
  • Downtime between projects,
  • Mapping of the maximum capacity of each resource
  • On the other hand, holding back employees with no complete engagement led to the attrition of resourceful employees, leaving behind only the average people in the stream.

Why is the Non-IT Industry ( Construction, Infra, Energy, etc..,) following this trend 13 years later?

Non-IT Industry, on the other hand, has been most apprehensive about this model. And there have been justifying reasons for the same.

The reasons for non-acceptance were many concerns.

  • Accountability and Integrity of skilled resources on contractual engagement.
  • Gauging of work in manual ways and not digital ways which make it challenging to monitor the process
  • Empathy towards fellowmen for the insecurities in contractual jobs
  • Comparatively smaller players in staffing with an unclear or obscurely defined scope
  • Payroll agencies with only documentation capabilities or partial responsibilities.

Development and transformation was slower owing to

  • Multi-level external challenges
  • Delay in deliverables where the line of activities got disrupted without a possibility of back up or control
  • Support from all departments on time
  • Inventory availability
  • Govt approvals
  • Fund shortage due to delayed receivables from the end client,
  • Change in instructions from management/client since this Industry has been extremely dynamic in nature.

All the above reasons led to resistance to change or non-prediction of uncertainties or inability to collectively assess the cost and business benefit.

In the current scenario, ambiguities are intensified to the extent of the uncertainty raising questions like “IS THERE A TOMORROW? IF YES, WHO ALL WILL JOIN US AND BE A PART OF TOMORROW?”

Limited visibility to the future by even big giants of the Industry, failure of long term plans, long term plans being replaced by short term plans have forced every Company to lie low and sustain. This, in turn, has led to Pay cuts, Lay-offs, Furloughs, increased pressure for people to perform. In such a scenario, the Human nature of sympathy, empathy towards fellowmen, bothering about developing people for long term returns, consideration towards others’ jobs, feeling stressed due to workload have taken backstage. What has been more critical is working towards sustaining the Organization (a foundation which houses employees) through the chaos irrespective of all reasons – genuine, significant, logical or fake, insignificant, illogical.

This situation has led Industry to adapt to staffing/ outsourcing as a stop-gap to cater to the active projects, or newly acquired projects for the next three years. Approximately three years expecting all the cascading effects, chain reactions, transitions, transformations, adaptations to be completed in three years, and implementation of new normal to start functioning successfully.

Hopefully, this opportunity should transform the staffing industry with a place in the Industry as an organized sector- breaking barriers, inventing, innovating, and leading to great opportunities and aspiration to the youngsters to step in this Industry by choice and not by chance. Because decisions are made out of interests, and interests lead to innovation.

Categories
Current Affairs - Corporate

‘A problem needs a solution; a solution doesn’t need a solution.

‘A problem needs a solution; a solution doesn’t need a solution.

Corporates are only expected to find solutions for any problem occurring on the horizon. The issues may be repetitive or new every time. But, the solution changes with time, phase, people, and culture.

Unpredictable situations have always circled the Industry. A robust problem-solving approach is still the underlying strength of any organization. Every situation has made the Industry more dynamic, building better processes, updating to newer technologies, eliminating or improving people to adapt to the situation.

COVID 19 also is a scenario that will force the Industry to evolve at its best. This can be the best opportunity or the worst punishment for any Individual or Organization. Options are always available, and making a choice is unavoidable.

Clarity through any challenge is always a tough task. But when choices are offered, it is smart to grab and make an opportunity.

COVID 19 can be the best opportunity to introspect and retrospect self and the Organization. Most of the time, we have been extinguishing the fire. Here is the time to have 7- Dimensional view and build a road map to avoid a fire in the forthcoming times.

Problems have been an indispensable part of life, be it an organization or individual. Glorifying the problems worsen the situation and block our minds from thinking.

Fear of the future creates confusion in the minds. Any Organization or Individual was not born to face only good throughout. The expectations were to meet more negatives than the positives when the journey began. Ambiguity was most common as we were born with it. The difference has been that there was a variation in the volume of people in the same situation. The problems were distributed and were of different in nature with each group of people or Organizations.

Fortunately enough today, most of the Organizations or Individuals are facing the same challenges world-wide. So solutions also will be found sooner with so many minds working on it simultaneously.

Hold on to your Place, your Company, your Clients, and Business… this has come to pass by and make you better.

Categories
Industry Evolution Uncategorized

Chain-Reaction across Industries, across the globe…


Work from home will hit the retail Industry, and the repercussions will affect the garment factories, and this, in turn, will influence the lives of lakhs of people associated with the Industry developing chaos further.


Generally, we groomed ourselves or embraced a lifestyle to influence and impress people around us. Now that the audience will decrease drastically, the things we’ve purchased till now will last all our lifetime, if the same lifestyle continues.


The economy will prosper because of our spending on luxuries and not necessaries. So what luxuries to be promoted by our marketing folks to support the economy.


People are losing jobs; schools aren’t entirely functional. Since there are online classes, the fee is reduced. But the staff and Infrastructure cost cannot be circumvented. Schools are forced to declare pay cuts for teachers. So, a series of outcomes on various Industry and professionals due to three reasons lockdown, job- loss, and social distancing.


Many such impacts are passing down from our post-COVID lifestyle, which will impact a series of industries passing down from one tier to another.


How do we safeguard these industries?


All our focus is on Industries, which are having an immediate effect- Airlines, Aerospace, Automotive, etc.. Our level of thought process hasn’t reached to the extent of different industries in a row which will be impacted due to the result on one Industry.


We generally have pursued an approach of post-mortem or analysis limited to a specific area, timeline, department, Industry, business, set of people, or society for most of the problems. COVID has forced us to collate all of the issues and find solutions at one go with zero downtime.


We need to analyze the Industry, which will initiate a chain reaction to many other industries involving most populations and affecting the economy the most. Prioritize them. Find addressal towards the same.


Let us see the unseen, envision beyond visibility, and initiate solutions for the forthcoming issues sooner with a seven-dimension perspective.

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A viewpoint which will include collective analysis of impacts on all the associated departments, industries, demographics, geographical areas, culture, Governing authority rules and regulations at all layers. A blue print for predictive progress every year and decade for next five decades has to be put forth by the Thinkers from all Industries, area and at all levels.

Categories
Employment Trends Human Resource Sectors Uncategorized

Evolution in Employment trends.

Evolution in Employment trends.

How to have a productive work from home model yielding to a win-win situation for both employees and employers?

The industry is figuring out every possible way to accommodate this model since we aren’t left with any option.
Employee’s safety, Client Service, Company’s Survival are all equally important.

But, for Work from home model to be successful, employees need to accept that this is going to be a permanent solution for many of their problems of past and present. Personal, professional problems like travel time to the workplace due to traffic, pollution, uncertain food schedule, family time compromise, work-life balance, COVID Infection, social distancing; and Organization’s problems of today which have enormously increased due to COVID – Economic crisis, Opex, Company’s sustenance, Competition, Cashflow, Governance problems, Communication problems, Adherence to Compliance and Rules of Govt.

How should this be structured?

Every employee has to work to overcome the problems of their Company. All these years, risks belonged to the Company alone. The volume of people facing the uncertainty and directly affected by the risks in an Organizations was majorly the Senior fraternity. They had to risk a significant share of their salaries as a performance incentive – a performance incentive based on the Company’s performance and not just individual performance. The performance, which was at risk with every right or wrong decision since the right decisions and erroneous implementations, also impacted the Organization negatively. The remuneration or incentives of these Senior leaders were dependant on the whole crowd of people working in the Organization. Additionally, their credibilities also were at stake.

One of the possible initiatives could be passing nominal risk downwards. The industry has anyways announced a pay cut as a precautionary measure as a preparation for the uncertain scenario Companies might face in the next two years. The revoking of this decision isn’t having a definite timeline either, as on date. Why not convert the same to incentivize the resource against their performance monthly. This eventually would shift some risks of the Organization to the employee and also focus on the theory’ Survival of the fittest.’ There are ‘n’ number of people who have lost jobs due to this pandemic. Why not allow them to be paid proportionately to their performance.
Making an opportunity of every disaster has been a boon to the thought process of humankind. Why not the employees and employers make an opportunity to survive and thrive towards success following this theory?

We have had consulting engagements for specific roles in most of the organizations. How about increasing the ratio of people in these roles, passing down more accountability for most of the functions?

Categories
Employment Trends Human Resource Outsourcing Model Sectors Uncategorized

Redefining Outsourcing

Redefining Outsourcing,

Bringing in a new trend in Employment and Resource Management, which the industry is in dire need today.

We all are cent-percent convinced with the understanding today that our well being is dependent on the Company we are working for. And every individual in the Organization is required to contribute 1000% to help the Company overcome this chaos. Employees are in the phase of giving more, and meeting the expectation of the Organization today.
The definition of working is redefined to what are the deliverables met? Yardstick and parameters to measure performance have entirely changed. It is no more the number of hours spent or efforts put in. Instead, it is only and only the output in the desired or lesser than the desired timeline by the Client that matters today.

It is and has always been of significance for Organizations to earn and save for tomorrow, not for today alone. So every Management decision is based upon securing the future of the Organization. The more sustainable the Organization, the lower are the risks of perishing, higher is the growth.

Outsourcing has been one of the options organizations have adopted for more than a decade to overcome future threats and current ambiguities. The outsourcing industry in terms of Job outsourcing, Subcontracting, or work contract has evolved in a significant way, since the phase of inception of the idea to today. But the outsourcing model concerning Resources has only extended to different sectors but not created depth. It has remained the same or altered very little in the last decade. Outsourcing resources are looked at as an alternative to recruiting or running a payroll of the employees. The resource engagement is considered as outsourcing HR process. Ideally, that shouldn’t be the case. But, the expectations and pricing aren’t clearly defined to plug-in with the organizational/ project requirements in most of the sectors. Resource outsourcing is compared with the resource cost and not the impact cost. This limitation has crippled the thought process of the sector, impacting the transformation of the Resource Industry faster. Or the Organization expects to replace the Work order assignments of PMC/ Contracting Companies. Of course, there are chances to achieve the same, because the deliverables are by the resources whether they are engaged with a PMC, Contracting Company, or a Resource Engagement Company.
Now is the time to expect solutions and not documentations from the Resource Outsourcing Sector.

Additionally, Organizations aren’t counting on them as a partner for their growth. They are just a borrowed identity for the employees engaged by the organizations to save the documentation and statutory disarray. There aren’t defined approaches, evaluated thought processes to draw a graph for the growth of this sector in a rational manner.
Resource outsourcing can be a powerful tool to revolutionize recruitment trends, employment trends, and performance trends. But with the right approach, expectation, and pricing by brainstorming sessions of the major players of the Outsourcing sector in synchronization with the other sectors.

COVID, revolutionizing employment trends, can expect the most efficient process and policy implementations through Resource engagement partners. Its right time now to lay right rules, timelines, and expectations with proper responsibilities, appropriate pricing – allowing the Resource outsourcing industry to mature and give 3-dimensional solutions to the organizations.

-Sucheta Gour