<div>Listening to <strong>Dixon Jose </strong>you know he is at heart an industrial relations (IR) man. Jose, <strong>Head, HR, Hyundai Construction Equipment India Pvt Ltd,</strong> a subsidiary of Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI), Korea, came up the ranks, having interacted with people at all levels. He believes HR should be given the final say on the recruitment of people, which currently is not the case and which very often results in bad hires. HR should be given its due place on the board, which automatically will result in integration of HR with the core of business. For a lean and mean organisation, outsource the routine work, is Jose's advice to HR practitioners.<br /><br /><strong>What made you choose HR as a profession?</strong><br />I have always had a sense of compassion for people, whether professionals or ordinary, with whom we interact in our day to day lives; This, coupled with a sense of empathy towards people, helped me choose HR as a career, to serve people at large and make a difference in their lives. I don’t regret my decision a bit!<br /><br /><strong>What has been the biggest achievement of your career?<br /></strong>Signing the first wage settlement with the union in one of my previous stint with a large organisation could be termed as my biggest achievement. The heat of the last lap of negotiations, sitting late night in a make-shift building, surrounded by unruly workers outside (some of them drunk and throwing stones at the building), gates blocked; we could not step outside the building even to attend to the call of nature; overall a nightmarish experience, but when we cracked the stalemate, it gave me a sense of achievement and satisfaction, which I had not experienced for a long time.<br /><br /><strong>What have been the primary traits/qualities that have helped you attain your present position?<br /></strong>I have come up the ranks and hence have seen and interacted with people at all levels. Seeing people at close quarters and understanding the demands and pressures at various levels helped me in my progress. A sense of time and deadlines, coupled with being a team player, helped me to stay on track. Of course, timely updates with the latest trends in HR also helped.<br /><br /><strong>What are the challenges you are facing in your organisation?<br /></strong>Currently, the biggest set of challenges we are facing are :</div><ul><li>To get the right people to man key positions;</li><li>Leadership development to take on higher and complex challenges</li><li>Meeting ever increasing employee expectations, particularly of Gen Y;</li></ul><div><br />The requirement of complex skill sets, ever widening demand for professionals in the market, changing tastes and expectations of people due to fast changing socio-economic landscape, also contributed in changing motivation and engagement factors of people, thus posing challenge to HR to meet such expectations; <br /><br /><strong>What are the steps a company should take to develop and motivate future leaders?</strong><br />I believe leadership development is one of the biggest challenges being faced by HR practitioners across industry verticals. Corporates may take some pro-active steps to nurture future leaders:</div><ul><li>Depute potential leaders to MDP’s or LDP’s to enhance their functional & leadership skills, from time to time;</li><li>Assign specific tasks / projects to them to complete in a given deadline, with clear deliverables. This will help them to stretch & groom themselves to their best.</li><li>Reward & recognise their achievements suitably, through’ career progression & market driven compensation.</li><li>Suitably reward them for innovation and risk taking abilities.</li></ul><div><br /><strong>What is your rate of attrition? How do you prevent it?<br /></strong>We would be one of select group of companies having achieved sub 10 per cent attrition rate, with 8.5 per cent attrition in 2012, while the industry average is anywhere between 13 and 18 per cent.<br /><br /><strong>How do you retain talent in your company?<br /></strong>We believe size of pay packet is not the sole motivator to retain people in an organisation and while we may not be the best paymasters in our industry, we try to keep people engaged through’ various other means. We have a structured engagement programme calendar running through’ the year, which takes care of people’s urged to be recognised for their non-corporate skills.<br /><br />Secondly, we have a well built rewards and recognition programme in place to appropriately recognise the efforts and delivery of people, through’ spot awards, half yearly and yearly awards.<br /><br />Further, being a growing organisation, we provide people with a challenging work environment, with job rotation, new projects, etc, to make people multi-skilled as well to provide them a new avenue to learn.<br /> <br />Overall, we strive to provide a positive work culture to people for their growth. <br /><br /><strong>What sets your company apart from other companies as far as work culture goes?<br /></strong>We have an open work culture, i.e. we do not follow a multi-layered hierarchy; in fact anyone can walk into the cabin of our MD anytime to have a chat with him. <br />We also have a relatively flat organisation structure, resulting in lot of synergy & faster decision making.<br />We are a Korean MNC and hence respect all cultures. We give equal importance to the cultural setup of Korea, keeping in view the Indian work culture as well. <br /><br /><br /><strong>What is the biggest challenge you face when selecting people?</strong><br />The challenge during selection is not as much as to assess functional knowledge, but to assess the softer skills of a person, which results in either good or bad hire. For instance, how do you find whether the person is honest or hard worker or his long term commitment levels, inter personal skills, risk taking ability, etc. Even the best of psychometric tests fails to pin point such softer issues.<br /><br /><strong>How do you track employees' satisfaction or dissatisfaction in your company?</strong></div><ul><li>Structured Satisfaction surveys are conducted through’ an external agency, once in two years, spanning issues like infrastructure, job roles and responsibility, leadership, career issues, etc., which gives us a third person perspective to gauge the satisfaction levels of our employees.</li><li>Yearly Town hall meets are held, which gives us a reasonable measure of satisfaction levels.</li><li>Stay interviews are conducted randomly across levels to assess satisfaction levels.</li></ul><div><br /><strong>How important is HR to the bottom line of a company?<br /></strong>At the end of the day, HR function is THE most important function for the bottom line, as we fully acknowledge the fact that we cannot survive in the market, unless we have the right kind of people on our side. We strongly believe, People are the ultimate differentiator whether a company sustains the vagaries of the market or falls flat on its belly. Hence, talent acquisition & development directly affects the bottom-line. Having said that, the Board monitors key HR indices, which affects bottom line like direct and indirect employee cost, productivity levels, etc.<br /><br /><strong>How has the downturn affected HR?<br /></strong>Generally during the downturn, HR roles changes slightly, due to manpower rationalisation or re-deployment, reduction of administrative costs, etc.; These measures are obviously not taken very kindly by employees; As such downturn results in more work for HR, as there are more emphasis on trainings and re-trainings during such periods. <br /><br /><strong>How should HR be integrated with the core line of business?<br /></strong>I firmly believe that for any organisation to be successful, apart from Finance, HR should be given its due place on the Board, which automatically will result in integration of HR with the core of business.<br /><br /><strong>A recent survey has questioned HR's actual contribution in an organization. Would you like to comment on it with particular reference to your organisation?</strong><br />There are some areas of HR function which are routine or technical in nature and hence can be outsourced easily, which we have also done. But I believe that the core HR roles cannot be outsourced and hence the relevance of HR will remain intact in time to come as well</div><div> </div><div><strong>If you could change three things about HR practices, what would they be? <br /></strong></div><ul><li>HR should be given the final say on the recruitment of people, which currently is not the case, resulting in bad hires at times;</li><li>HR should be looked at as a profit centre instead of as a cost centre by the management.</li><li>HR should shed its flab, by outsourcing routine work, make use of technology to connect to people and make them less dependent on HR, by becoming process oriented.</li></ul><div><br /><br /><br /> </div>
