Managing: Snapshots From HR-Hell

MANAGING
Snapshots From HR-Hell

Sure, everyone pictured in this article looks happy, but managing people and people policies in dot.coms isn't what you can call a fairy tale.

Paroma Roy Chowdhury

Sack him. It's not working out.'' The words, spoken loud enough for the subject to hear, are from a 22-year-old techie who looks a little bit like Keanu Reeves' Neo in The Matrix. They're addressed to a harried-looking HR-type, one of the two people, in the room, wearing a tie. The room itself is the two-cubicles-make-a-conference-room working space one can expect to find in a typical inner-city Mumbai office-block.

It's weekly-review-meeting day at one of India's lesser-known dot.coms, and the techie, the HR-man, and a few others have just been listening to the head of marketing, a name with a decade-and-half of experience in a top-notch consumer goods company (also the man the techie has suggested sacking, and the other man in the room in a tie) stumble through a largely technical presentation. The marketing head pretends he hasn't heard the remark; a young web-designer giggles, and masks it with a cough when someone shoots her a disapproving glare; and the HR manager sighs. This would have never happened in his old firm.

Today, if some between-jobs scribe were to collate incidents such as this, there'll be enough to publish at least three volumes of The HR Manager's Guide to Hell. Like the experience of an urbane HR head at a Chennai-based ISP (come now, do you really want that expanded?) who thought the six-monthly appraisal-and-reward scheme he'd woven into the company's compensation system was innovative. That is, until a scruffy content-editor with the kind of hair that could put Rapunzel to shame, confronted him near the water-cooler one day. ''Why can't my salary be revised every month if I exceed my monthly targets?", queried the Marley-clone.

This isn't purgatory; it is hell. As if suddenly-coy venture capitalists, customers reluctant to break their e-Com cherries, and the pressing need for a revenue stream weren't enough, dot.coms now have to deal with the terror within: their people, and their people policies. The people in question are the usual bunch of émigrés, who abandoned secure real-world jobs for the excitement and quick-bucks that dot.coms promised. They came in droves: star managers from Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Citibank, Standard Chartered, SmithKline Beecham, and Hindustan Lever, who believed they had what it took to work the alchemy of converting an URL into a fortune.

Whether it was the inability to make split-second decisions, that of functioning in an unstructured environment, or that of living under the constant threat of technological obsolescence, something went wrong. Today (if you'll forgive the poetic turn of phrase), dreams have turned to dust: attrition rates are high (25 per cent), and employee-morale is low. Piyush Gupta, who left a promising career at Citibank-he was head of the bank's Indonesian operations-to take charge at The Hindustan Times-promoted portal go4i.com, confesses that things are very different in virtual-space: ''Working in a dot.com is far from easy, especially if you come from a traditional business. Cyberspace has no time for comfort-seekers, slow learners, and egotists.'' Across the divide, Nalin Miglani, Coca-Cola India's HR veep, can't control the jubilation in his voice: ''Most people who left us now want to come back. Things aren't going right in dot.coms.'' If you were any more right Mr. Miglani, you'd be J. Edgar Hoover.

Resolving hr.com woe #1: Skills

It's a truth everyone chooses to ignore: the skills-set people require to meet dot.com challenges are very different from those that made them fat cats in the real world. A report by global search firm Korn-Ferry and the Sun-Netscape Alliance (an AOL, Sun Microsystems venture) shows how different: (an e-employee) has a low tolerance for politics, under-performance, and the status quo, and is not afraid of breaking some glass along the way. The other qualities the report labels 'preferred' include flexibility, the willingness to risk it all, the total lack of an ego, and the ability to live with ambiguity (plus some domain knowledge and the capacity to work in teams in a largely unstructured environment for higher-level positions). Ajith Abraham, who looks after the HR function at Satyam Infoway says these are just the qualities he looks for when he's hiring: ''We look for domain experience where it is critical, a belief in the potential of the Net to revolutionise things, and the ability to learn and change continuously.'' Looking for the desired dot.com attributes while recruiting, thus, could help companies avoid the minefield of competency-mismatches.

Resolving hr.com woe #2: Age

Dot.coms cannot be blamed for picking brick-CEOs. A dash of old-e genes, after all, is just what every corporate doctor in town has been recommending to ailing dot.coms. Only, in the light of what's happened, these doctors look like quacks: the Korn-Ferry-Sun study puts the age of the dot.com CEO at 39, and suggests that the person possess the relevant skills to operate in a tech-driven business environment, the ability to envision the future and play the role of an evangelist within the company and without . Read that sentence again; how many real-world CEOs you know of fit the bill? Predictably, it is at the senior level that the people-problem in dot.coms is the most critical. With age comes the unwillingness to listen to the young. Says Atul Kunwar (old at 37 in the dot.com world), the chief executive of ISP-and-portal Mantra Online: ''A dot.com CEO must have the humility to learn from his youngest colleague. He needs to lead through empowerment rather than command.'' That empowerment-bit is critical: decision-making in dot.coms happens at the speed of thought; that means the CEO can't make all the decisions.

Resolving hr.com woe #3: Culture

Heard of the man who tried to endow everyone in Mumbai's Churchgate station with a 'shared vision'? The HR function at dot.coms must do something similar. Consider the typical dot.com: its employees come from diverse backgrounds, possess different skill and age profiles, and have little in common save a passion for the Net; and it operates in industry-and market-landscapes constantly being reshaped by factors ranging from regulation to technology.

Ask Purva Mishra, an organisational effectiveness consultant at consulting firm Hewitt India, about things like vision and culture in a dot.com, and she scoffs: ''More often than not, the people who start dot.coms are looking for quick returns. Culture and vision are secondary; and people are just warm bodies.'' The better dot.coms have realised the necessity of creating an organisational culture (and that doesn't mean wearing shorts to work or dancing to Santana while sipping peach-schnapps at 4.00 p.m). At the Bangalore-based horizontal portal Indya.com, HR head Anuradha Sharma believes the impromptu unwinding sessions, regular dos, and high teas the company organises are part of a culture-building effort: ''Our culture gives individuals space to merge their creativity with entrepreneurial skills, grow within the company, and have fun while doing that.'' Others have recipes of their own: it's open-communication channels between the entire team at one end and the senior managers and investors at the other, at job-site Jobsahead.com; and a mantra of empowerment and accountability at Mantra Online.

Resolving hr.com woe #4: Systems

Systems rule. And most dot.coms do not have any. True, instituting systems takes time (time that a dot.com can ill afford to spare) but, over time, a dot.com without systems is certain to falter and fall. The solution to this seemingly impossible problem is balance: dot.com biggies like Rediff, Mantra, and Satyam have adopted this middle path which requires building an organisation around employees arrayed in three-to-four levels-with standard designations like associates, managers, and editors-and working in cross-functional teams with aligned development, appraisal, and reward systems. The presence of an established way of doing things-which is what a system is-weeds out ad-hocism. It can also make life a whole lot easier: questions like who do I report to? or how do I go about this? don't usually get asked in an organisation with systems.

Resolving hr.com woe #5: Careers

Anita Ramachandran, the CEO of HR consulting firm Cerebrus, puts it best: ''Dot.coms offer jobs, not careers.'' If you work for a dot.com and don't quite agree with her, stand up and take a look around the cube farm you are in. That 26-year-old content editor in the next cubicle-what is he going to be doing next year if he stays with the company? At one level, the ease with which entrepreneurs sell out and bail out lends an air of perennial-temporariness to everything.

At another level, flat organisational structures limit vertical growth. The solution is horizontal growth: Jobsahead allows for lateral moves; Mantra places an emphasis on multi-skilling; and go4i redefines roles regularly. It may be easy for someone like Gokul Kaushik (he's all of 28 and the HR head of Jobsahead) to say, ''Designations are illusory in our firm,'' but, it won't be that easy for real-world executives to stomach that.

Resolving hr.com woe #6: Pay

The pay itself isn't the real issue: contrary to popular opinion about dot.coms being profligate when it comes to pay, most pay salaries are comparable to those offered by software and FMCG companies. The real issue is the immediacy of appraisals and rewards. Given the unique characteristics of the business, it isn't altogether surprising that some dot.coms have moved to bi-annual or quarterly appraisals. Neeraj Roy, who runs brand consulting site Hungama.com believes this is only fair: ''If you are working on Internet time, you need to incentivise people accordingly.'' Nothing wrong with that; only, most dot.coms follow appraisal processes that are far from structured. And with no benchmarks available, pay is often a function of the employee's negotiating skills, instead of being an accurate indicator of the market value of the skills presented by the individual.

In dot.com yesterday, firms thought ideas were all they needed to make it. Now, they've realised that it is the execution of the idea that is critical, and that they need people who can take the idea to its logical denouement. Where there are people, there need to be people-policies. Only, most real-world HR tricks don't work in virtual space. Which is why you need hr.com.

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