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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
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.

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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?