HR managers to face tough days

Venkatachari Jagannathan
04 December 2003

Chennai: If India is to succeed as the back-office of the global organisations, then human resource (HR) managers have to be proactive in meeting the HR challenges that might arise.

"Today unions have lost their teeth. But if things continue as it is now, then one may see the resurgence of a unionised white-collar workforce," says Totus Consulting founder Ganesh Chella. Totus Consulting is a specialist HR consulting company with expertise in conceptualising, designing, and implementing end-to-end HR solutions in a variety of business contexts.

Already the balance between work and personal life has gone for a six for many an employee, and this is going to be a serious issue in the future, he says. "The future HR challenges — both in normal and BPO [business process outsourcing] space — is going to be very difficult."

Increasingly service organisations will prefer women to men, he adds. "This is going to have cascading effects on the family life. How prepared are we as a society to tackle this trend?"

Continuing further on the challenges for the HR managers, he says for the past 10 years the HR function in Indian corporates is largely focused on getting the systems and processes right. "This was not balanced with employee-interface, thus losing touch with the employees."

The other issue is that companies are not investing in training and skill upgrading of their workforce. "All the organisations want to do 'workforce plug and play'; they want only experienced employees. This in turn results in high employee turnover and a continuous recruitment drive," he says. While that may be good for the recruiting agencies, the long-term impact is not being looked at.