People; People:Break all the New Rules !

TRIMILLENNIUM MANAGEMENT: PEOPLE
Break all the New Rules

By Anita Ramachandran

Events of the last 5 years of the previous century have focussed our attention on knowledge industries. In the first few decades of the New Millennium, India will witness a proliferation of brainpower- and manpower-intensive industries. The way we manage people in this millennium must take into account the contours of these industries and the expectations of a young, highly intelligent, and ambitious workforce that can choose to work anywhere in the world.

But it isn't just the hi-tech sector that will force us to change the way we manage people in this millennium. The 21st Century will witness a boom in retailing and the emergence of new industries focused on providing a service or an experience rather than a product. These industries will change the skills that we demand of our workforce and bring new types of people into the workforce.

The organisation of the future will have an increasing number of part-time employees as well as a number of employees doing multiple jobs. As we become sharper in our definition of the skills we seek, it becomes possible to outsource and seek more expertise. Besides, with technology helping accelerate processes, service businesses will be able to offer jobs for a few hours at a time. Thus, the organisation of the future could well have employees who are hired part-time to work on a specific activity, and are not overly concerned with the organisation's vision, mission, or belief in teams.

With the need to be globally competitive on costs, services and quality, both companies and employees will want more flexibility: for instance, the option of coming to work for a few hours 3 days a week. As entire activities get outsourced, companies could hire small teams of up to 10 people rather than individuals. The leader of the team will have to be an entrepreneur who takes on the responsibility of hiring employees, training them and delivering work of acceptable levels.

Even today, most companies think of employees as those with a total commitment to a single organisation. They think of work as all consuming for an employee and expect him to have the commitment to put in hours well in excess of his contracted terms. And they compensate him in various ways for this. Today, companies do this through different models of compensation that include a mix of cash, perquisites, and stock or variable pay, or by providing facilities such as childcare, fitness centres, or a mechanism to take care of chores like the payment of electricity and telephone bills. But will the employee of the future seek as much involvement on the part of the employer? And will companies want to be as benevolent?

Computers and technology have already changed the definition of the workplace. Employees no longer need to be physically present in the office. In fact, they don't even have to belong to the same organisation. The New Millennium will witness an increase in the number of these bit employees. It will also see the emergence of a few system integrators who coordinate the employees, align their efforts to the mission of the company and achieve whatever they set out to do. Companies will become smaller and essentially be a network of a number of small teams and individuals. Will vision, mission, company ties, and company bonding have any relevance in such a scenario? What will be the glue that will make these constituents interested in the whole picture? And do they need to be concerned at all?

I see a future where individuals may want to work on jobs requiring 2 different skills in 2 different places: for example, being a computer programmer and a music teacher. One may meet the employee's need for compensation; the other, her need for self-actualisation. Indian employees will, indeed, have the freedom to make these choices in the New Millennium because their compensation, adjusted for purchasing power parity, will, over a period of time, be comparable to global-benchmarks for most high- skill jobs.

The 21st Century could also see more employees being entrepreneurs and employees at the same time. As the number of double-income households keep increasing, the risk-taking ability of the average employee will increase. So will the ability of the employee to spend on their own training and learning. In a partnership structure, it will no longer be the company's responsibility to train the employee; the latter needs to come to work fully loaded.

Compensation will become more sharply aligned to the risk-reward potential of a job as it already is in other parts of the world. It will become more individual-oriented and will be a function of the time-commitment, results sought, and the risk involved. And the typical contract will not exceed 2 or 3 years. An employee's productive lifecycle in the 21st Century will become much shorter. Consequently, employees will have to focus on maximising earnings in a shorter timespan like our sportsmen and filmstars! The employee's compensation-cycle will be a series of 'S' curves, which will reach higher or lower peaks-higher or lower earnings than in the past-depending on her competency. The series of compensation-curves of employees who manage to keep ahead of the learning curve will have two or three high points. But in the case of those unable to do so, the compensation-curve will be a sharply inverted 'V.'

Will this century see us being different in our hr practices from the rest of the world? Clearly, we can't live in isolation as we did in the past. Answers to a few critical questions will guide our hr policies in this century: will India continue to have a large number of educated unemployed? Will the lifestyle and leisure expectations of employees change? And will barriers to mobility across countries continue to remain?

But for the large majority who do not have the opportunity to be mobile, there may still remain a culture that will be common to all low-cost nations: a culture with a focus on productivity and efficiency. The economic realities of being globally competitive will force attitudinal changes related to performance, quality orientation, and cost consciousness. In a market-driven economy there will be no scope for automatic wage-hikes linked to inflation; nor will jobs be protected. hr policies in the future are bound to reflect this reality. But some of our Indian ethos and emotional bonding with the workplace and relationships will endure all this. The intrinsic Indian need for an anchor, which comes both from families and the belief that work is worship will, hopefully remain.

Anita Ramachandran is the CEO of Cerebrus

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