Amidst the entire hullabaloo about the SIP, the junior SAPPHIRE team came with the much awaited event CHAOS.  The entire event was spread across 3 rounds, first one being a quiz on leadership, which had various questions on the veteran leaders, the world has seen so far.  The second was a recruitment based strategy game, where in a team of 4, two participants were the college placement cell and the other two were the company recruiting for their vacant posts.  The game had put them through a whole lot of negotiations where the placement cell of each college had the onus of securing a placement for all the students in their college with the best possible remuneration and role whereas the company recruiting for their organization had to ensure that the package they offer is within the bounds of the budget of 1 crore and all the vacant posts are filled.  The overall score of a team was calculated based on the difference of overall salary package bagged by the placement cell for the students and the amount spent by the company for recruitment.  The team with the maximum score for both the rounds emerged as the winner.

Winners : Change Agents (Honeydeep Singh, Pratik Tripathi, Amrit Datta, Anurag Gupta)

Runners-Up : Jaisi Aapki Shraddha (Anindya Upadhyay, Sargam Toor, Harsh Seth, Hemant Bhardwaj)

Second Runners-Up: Chaos Grenades (Saurya Chakraborty, Sumant, Neelshekhar, Vivek)

Prizes:

1^st – 5000

2^nd – 3000

3^rd – 2000

To add to the fun, there was a 3^rd round about the comic employer branding where the teams had to choose from a list of comic characters.  Winners of this round – Victorious Secrets (Rajiv, Sameer, Sanuj, Saurabh)

All in all, the event lived up to its name ‘CHAOS’ and was a truly exciting and thrilling experience for the participants as well as the moderators.

Kudos to the junior team for pulling it off successfully!!!

We appreciate your patient wait for the results!

A CEO’s Dilemma is under evaluation. Follow the blog to know the results !!!

Dr. Sibbernsen started his lecture by telling the students about his career transition from being a lawyer to the Vice President of Human Resources at Bellsouth Corporation. He then explained what the study of social science actually is and related it to the field of psychology and diagnostic tools. He talked about the complexities faced by business firms globally and quoted some personal experiences from Tenneco Inc. where he was the Senior Vice President of Corporate Relations. He talked at length about how to handle surprises effectively and execute HR processes flawlessly. He also stressed on the importance of sharing good practices of different cultures and effective communication within an organization.

Dr. Sibbernsen said that we, the students at XLRI, being the future HR managers should create a sense of urgency to develop HR practices. He supported his statement with the varied experiences he had at Bellsouth Corporation and quoted an example of global surveys as well as local inputs taken by the organization which encouraged open comments and feedback about leadership and its success in changing the attitude of top leaders. He listed out the top five qualities which are critical to a good human resource manager:

a)      Integrity and related it to being a good team player

b)      Technical capability

c)      Effective execution of organizational policies and result orientation

d)      Dealing with ambiguity – He said that in an organization one cannot get 100% information about everything hence it is important to take a sensible decision with limited information at hand

e)      Change management

He then talked about how line managers are talent managers whereas HR managers are talent developers and ended the lecture by emphasizing the importance of ruthless prioritization and factual analysis of situations for a Human Resource Manager.

Long time ago, Arjuna was fighting the demons inside himself. In stepped Lord Krishna to clear his apprehensions, and the rest as they say, is history… As the junior batch set foot into the unknown world of HR, SAPPHIRE senior members shared the wealth of experience (!) they gained in the field of HR over their prolific year at XLRI as well as summer internships, in a session taken at Father Prabhu Hall on 19^th of July 2011. The session aimed at assisting the junior HRM batch to get the better of their doubts.

The session was attended by approximately 50 students, which began with addressing few of the biggest concerns the students had for example:  “Why HR?”, “What roles can I get being in HR?” “How will I be able to fare well?. SAPPHIRE members introduced the courses to be covered over the first year, along with the importance of each course in an HR manager’s role. Not only did they speak about the relevance of each course being covered, they also quoted examples from their summer internship experience elucidating interdependence and relevance of the courses, and how sincere study of these courses would help us as HR managers.

There was also a sub-session on the various courses that students would be taking over their first year at XL and tips and tricks about how best to deal with the course (and the Professors teaching!).

The session proved to be of great importance in clearing the air of apprehension that the first year students had regarding different roles being offered to an HR professional. Questions were taken up wherein students asked about the prospects an HR professional has, also about various roles available to an HR. The summer internship experience shared by the seniors provided much clarity on the issue. A detailed break up of sector wise HR roles was presented, wherein analysis of HR roles in different sectors including FMCG, IT, Banking, Consulting, Manufacturing, General Management, and Real Estate was given. This session also acquainted students with numerous roles of an HR ranging from corporate HR, HR sales profile, IR roles, PMS, BP HR, contract labor management to various client dependent business roles.

Next on agenda was the much spoken about but mysterious SIP which was discussed. The session provided an insight to the students regarding which courses they should focus more on, topics that are frequently asked during SIPs also few tips to fare well during the SIP. Students showed a great deal of interest in understanding the process of summer internship, and got their doubts cleared related to the whole process.

The session effectively cleared the air of apprehension that the students had and also helped them fathom the roles of an HR manager while providing them with a peek into what could be expected in the coming year at XL. 

Welcome Juniors

As the academic session for the year 2011-12 began and life became more taxing at XL, Team SAPPHIRE was back with a bang with the Ice Breaker event for the Junior batch. Held on the 25^th July at 2200 hrs at our very own Father Prabhu Hall, it was open to both the HRM and BM batches and saw a huge turnout being attended by over 100 participants.

The event was designed to capture the essence of HR and its related fields. Conceptualized and compiled by the senior SAPPHIRE team, it had tempting cash prizes to be won:,

1^st prize: Rs. 3000

2^nd prize: Rs. 2000

3^rd prize: Rs. 1500

The event began with a mind-boggler of a quiz containing questions on all aspects of the Human Resource Management. And if the teams thought that was kind of tough (as could be gauged from quite a few agonized expressions!), it was followed by a group task where the teams were provided with the profiles of 13 candidates for the post of a manager and then had to choose the best amongst the potential candidates after identifying the required KSA’s for the job based upon job analysis. Each team thus picked one candidate. After that they were thrown into new groups comprising of 1 member from each team and the participants were required to brainstorm and come to a consensus about the order of the candidates suitable to the post of the manager.  This led to some extremely heated discussions and some serious out of the box thinking as all the participants tried to vouch for their chosen candidate as the best suitable candidate for the job! Budding recruitment guru’s are a plenty at XL for sure!  And finally, the teams were given a brain-tickling crossword to solve.

All in all, it turned out to be a fun-filled affair where the participants were enthusiastically engaged in discussions and proved to be quite a learning experience for the ‘potential managers’.  

The results were declared the next day and the following teams emerged as winners !!!!

Winners :                           Kar Lo Employees Mutthi Mein

                                              (Anusheel, Abhay & Rahul Kalra)

Runners-Up :                  McGregor’s X-Men

                                             (Abin Sarkar, Radhika Gupta & Pranav Kedia) 

Second Runners-Up:   HR Devils

                                            (Rahul Krishnan, Vikrant Chaplot & Srikanth SV)        

Sapphire congratulates Anupam Agarwal and Varun Boob for their Nestle PPIs!

WAR OF WITS

War of Wits, the flagship HR event of Ensemble ’10 organized by SAPPHIRE(Students’ Association for Promotion of Personnel Management and Human Resources), saw enthusiastic participation from over 45 teams across various B-schools. An elimination round comprising a case study was conducted to shortlist the finalists. The six teams which qualified were from renowned institutes such as IIM Shillong, TISS, XLRI and XIMB. They were invited to campus to compete for cash prizes worth Rs. 75000 sponsored by Murugappa Group.

The event comprised three rounds, each designed to test a different aspects of HRM. The cumulative scores of these rounds decided the ultimate winner. The three members of each team had to put themselves in the shoes of consultants at ‘WoW Consulting’ and provide solutions to the issues at hand.

In the first round, the teams were engaged in an Employer Branding case, which required them to strategize and present ways of retaining existing employees and attracting new talent. The presentations were judged by our esteemed faculty, Prof GlorysonChalil.

The second round tested the teams’ ability to fit the right people in the right jobs. Evaluation was done on the basis of accuracy shown by the teams in identifying the correct functional area and hierarchy for every job description provided to them.

In the last round, the teams got a chance to interact directly with the client, a PSU in the telecom sector, to redesign their Performance Management system. They were expected to extract relevant information in a given time frame and incorporate the findings in their suggestions to the client.The presentations offered various opinions on how to transform a bureaucratic PSU into a modern competitive firm with regard to its Performance Management system. Prof R.K. Premarajan assessed the teams on the comprehensiveness of their presentations and gave valuable feedback.

The lead was exchanged several times before ‘Team JEDI’ from TISS emerged as the winners followed by team ‘Evangelists’ from IIM Shillongin second place. All teams enjoyed the diverse challengespresented to them during the event and appreciated the learning value of the experience.

Our association with Murugappa Groupwas instrumental in pulling off War of Wits successfully. XLRI looks forward to continuing this association with Murugappa Group in the years to come.

TEAM SAPPHIRE

As I set out to write an inspiring blog on this topic, or atleast that was my aim or motivation I first wondered what creativity was. I researched some articles involving complex definitions until I discovered a simple yet very relevant insight on creativity.  Robert I. Sutton, the author of “Two Weird ideas that work” defines creativity as

“Using old things in new places, ways and combinations”

All major examples of creativity have not arisen from thin air, but have been a product of work that had already been done. If we take the example of IPod, the most innovative product of this decade, apart from the interface design and the user controls the remaining features already existed in the market and had been developed by others.

The implication this has for HR managers is that they essentially do not have to come up with entirely path breaking organizational processes or systems. Even small innovative practices which make the existing processes more efficient, simple career development and retention practices in the organization context which engage the employees can be deemed to be extremely creative. Through innovative engagement practices if HR managers can increase the engagement levels of workers even by 20 percent, the increase in productivity levels and consequently the revenue increase that can be attained are enormous.

Every creative idea needs resources to be tested and refined before it can be implemented and can add value. HR managers essentially face problems when it comes to having to test the ideas or in other words when they have to experiment their ideas. This stage requires elaborate experimentation and this is where HR managers are somewhat inhibited. The element of creativity disability comes from the fact that HR managers deal with people and experimenting our ideas on people, especially employees of an organization becomes difficult. Employees are the resources of the line managers and sparing them for HR initiatives or experiments is generally not taken kindly by most Line managers. While I was interning with GSK Pharma my mandate was to come up with feasible retention strategies that would considerably reduce the employee turnover. After collecting information about attrition data and conducting numerous staff attitude surveys and benchmarking studies I could come up with some rational recommendations. The question now I was left wondering was how I could test whether my recommendations would be successful and were feasible. One way was to take a test group of employees and implement these initiatives on them, similar to test groups from whom you take feedback on a product before launching the product in the market. However, this idea with respect to employees was met with staunch resistance from the Line functions. The idea of experimenting with employees and changing their benefit structure or reporting structure even for small periods and using them as guinea pigs for testing people interventions evokes strong emotional reactions from line managers.

I think the second biggest challenge that HR managers face when it comes to experimenting people interventions in organizations is emphasizing their relevance to other functions due to absence of concrete metrics in many cases that they can flash to show their business contribution. A sales manager or a marketing manager can always show the amount of sales he has done for the organization and consequently the revenues reflecting in the balance sheet because of his effort. Similar, is the case with functions like Finance, Operations etc. Because of this labeling of HR being Cost Centre, HR managers are discouraged from experimenting and testing their initiatives lest it could harm the business in any way, or may cause flight of talented employees.

I got an opportunity to listen to Leena Nair , Executive Director and HR Head of HUL India who had come down to XLRI for a leadership talk. She, while answering to a question stated emphatically that there is nothing in HR that cannot be measured. Every task that HR performs or every initiative that HR takes can be measured with respect to its contribution in business and every effort has to be made to measure its impact. I think this is one avenue in which the HR managers have been found lacking and consequently gives tremendous opportunity for HR managers in future to be creative and devise mechanisms to justify their presence by quantizing the impact of their people initiatives. By emphasizing their relevance to business as a profit center, HR managers could justify performing experiments and introducing people initiatives which could provide significant competitive advantage to the organization.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi , one of the leading authorities on the subject of creativity wrote that the creative process normally takes five steps

• Preparation – becoming immersed in problematic issues that are interesting and arouses curiosity.
• Incubation – ideas churn around below the threshold of consciousness.
• Insight – the “Aha!” moment when the puzzle starts to fall together.
• Evaluation – deciding if the insight is valuable and worth pursuing.
• Elaboration – translating the insight into its final work.

To cite one example of measuring impact of HR initiative creatively using the above illustrated process I would like to describe the case of a Pharma Company. The attrition rate in the company was very high and around 5 percentage points higher than the industry rate. The HR function wanted to reduce the attrition rate. But they also wanted to measure the impact of this attrition reduction in monetary terms. Therefore, before introducing any innovative people interventions they first took out an elaborate exercise of costing turnover. This was one of the creative exercises I have seen, because in practice there are very few companies which measure the cost of turnover and are able to concretely estimate the cost of employee turnover. The HR managers applied complex economic models to measure the cost of attrition. Once the cost was determined, they estimated how much money would be saved if they reduced attrition by 5 percent. They first showed these calculations to the CEO. Then they embarked on exercise to achieve the goal.

Problem Preparation: They set out on diagnosing the problem of attrition, they collected data from different sources, became immersed in understanding the causes of attrition. They analyzed data using various stastical tools to derive meaningful interpretations.

Incubation: After 3 months of tireless efforts they took a break and went to a resort for relaxing for 3 days. In the morning they would play and in the evening for three hours they brainstormed their ideas.

Insight: After 3 days they had a bunch of people initiatives that they were confident would reduce attrition in the company.

Evaluation: They presented these initiatives to the Top management, and tested in on a selected small department before launching it in the entire organization.

Elaboration: After achieving satisfactory results from the test group, they launched the initiatives in the entire organization. They collected data in terms of attrition in each department, attitude survey to gauge the moral after the initiatives and measured the improvements periodically. They tweaked the systems when they thought something could be done in a better manner.

After a year the attrition rate had reduced by more than 5 percentages. They calculated the cost saved because of this initiative. They presented this cost saved as the profit generated by the HR department. This profit was very high even though very conservative estimates had been taken

I would also like to cite the importance of environmental scanning to be creative. This is required to be a forward thinking HR manager. I was listening to a lecture by Prof. R.N Misra, IR head at Tata Steel. He says “HR can no longer be reactive”. He describes that his job is not to jump into action when a strike happens, negotiate with the union and try to pacify the workers. His job involves constant scanning of the environment, the country’s political environment, the economic condition of workers, and the changing union dynamics. By monitoring these he aims to stop any strike or problem in the plant from arising in the first place. The HR has to prepare for all contingencies, and this takes creativity and planning. You have to be able to recognize what is happening that may affect your employee population and your company’s ability to attract and retain those employees. And this skill takes creativity! It calls for you to get out of the general HR routines and think about the world, the problems in a different perspective. One needs to become more elastic to be on the road to become a better and creative Human resource Professional.

Ashwin Shetty

PMIR 2009-11