Talk to any player across sectors — IT, telecom, retail, education,
entertainment — and there’s one unifying lament, that India
is undergoing a talent crunch like never before. With experiment and research
key to a corporate’s success, organisations have often revamped to keep pace
with the competition. A lot has been done to enrich the workforce too. But have
we paid enough attention to human resources management? If we look at the rate
of attrition, it is as high as ever in a country like India where the rate of
unemployment is not less either. What it is it that is stopping HR managers from
recruiting the right kind of people for the organisation? Why is the employee
satisfaction level still low?
Finding answers to these questions will not be
easy unless we define the role an HR manager. The HR manager’s job is not
restricted to recruiting people for the organisation — it also means managing
the people. An HR manager should be someone who is friendly and approachable
and will bridge the gap between employee and employer. More importantly, the HR
manager should create a comfortable work atmosphere for the employee thereby
ensuring better time and energy management. With such crucial tasks to be performed,
it is essential to have enhanced systems that will permit the HR team to do the
job in the best way possible.
‘It’s important to nourish HR’
Today, when automation is the last word in every field, the HR department is
also looking at introducing systems that will strengthen the organisation. For
instance, there’s the Human Resource Management System (HRMS) developed by many
reputed software Companies like SAP, Oracle, eHorizon etc. These products are
easy to use and reduce a lot of manual work thereby leaving the HR managers free
to spend time on nurturing the talent pool. Where there is so much work to be done,
HR managers cannot be expected to flip through thousands of resumes to select the
right candidate. The HRMS products are continuously being updated and enhanced to help the HR
department choose the right one for the job.
“Today, HR managers are not just paid to work in corporates but they are an
asset to the company,” says Jyoti Mukherjee,
founder and group managing director, eHorizon India Private Ltd. Chaya Arora,
marketing manager, SAP India goes a step further and adds: “People are a
critical success factor in every business.” Thus, it is essential to nourish
the HR department in an organisation. May it be SAP, People Soft or eHorizon
HRMS, these, “solutions equip executives, HR professionals and line managers to
hire the best talent, and as well as cultivate the skills of their workforce,”
says Arora.
SAP HCM (Human Capital Management) allows the organisation to streamline
their goals and “organisations are more readily able to understand where their
workforce’s talents lie and align the goals of the employees with that of the
organisation’s overarching business strategy.” By using SAP, says Arora, “our
customers have been able to reap the benefits of reduced costs, better return
on investment, and they have been able to attract and retain talent, enabling
the division to become a strategic part of the organisation.” The latest
product of SAP has “end-to-end solutions” (from hire to pay, talent management
etc.), which are completely integrated, offers real-time data and are
enterprise service-oriented architecture (ESOA)-enabled.
Says Mukherjee: “HR is not all about hiring and firing. The trends are
changing dynamically. They are a growing power in the organisation and are
responsible for transferring information into knowledge. India
has a large workforce and it is a challenge to convert this into a resource.”
“Tapping the intelligence” may be the key word for developers
but then maintaining a large workforce is even more important.
eHorizon HRMS has thus developed an integrated system that will manage the
workforce right from hiring to inducting, training, performance rating, leave
management, payroll system and also retirement solutions. The eHorizon HRMS is
equipped with e-induction and self-training options. “It not only makes the
work of the HR easier, the employees working in the organisation can go for
‘self service’ on the desktop instead of running to the HR for each and every
query,” says Mukherjee. The new version of eHorizon HRMS will include an SOS IT
card that will contain all the medical details of the employee that can be
updated by the employee himself.
Clientspeak
Sudheesh Vankatesh, head HR, Tesco HSC, points out that the company has been
using People Soft HRMS 8.3 version for three years. “The software has reduced
the workload of the HR thereby giving them more time in involving themselves in
people engagement than administration. A good system will also keep the
overhead costs low.” This is true for every organisation — large or small. “But
SMEs sometimes find it too expensive to install HRMS. Moreover, it is difficult
to break the traditional idea about having a touch and feel HR manager,” says, Partha
Sarathi Bandyopadhyay, marketing manager, eHorizon India
Private Ltd.
A large organisation like DCM Shriram does use SAP HCM but admits Sushil
Baveja, head, corporate HR: “Organisations go a little overboard about HRMS.
Automation is desirable but one should not be a slave to automation. There
should be a perfect balance between automation and the personal touch.” Besides
such barriers, the “HR departments also often take international brands as the benchmark
and refuse to explore newer software with enhanced features,” rues
Bandyopadhyay.
Dominic Ooko, head, HR, Securicor says, “eHorizon Human Resources has
greatly reduced the manual records we hold. Prior to the introduction of the
system, information about the entire workforce (over 10,000 employees) was held
in giant files. A user-friendly system like this has made computerisation much
easier. And it goes without saying that data retrieval is much faster now.” In
short, “eHorizon HRMS system provides all the features needed to process the
personnel related information for our organisation,” says Maggi Kaddu, HR
Manager, East African Development Bank.
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