‘The Axiom Revolution’: Power to People – Part II

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

The second half of the ‘The Axiom Revolution,’ the annual learning conference organised by the Association of Human Resource Professionals of Sri Lanka as a prelude to the HRM Awards 2012, commenced following a recess for lunch, with a presentation by GAC Corporate Academy General Manager Damien O’Donoghue who spoke on borderless learning - innovating the ROI.

Corporate learning organisations

Do HR professionals really understand the matrix of their respective organisation, questioned O’Donoghue, pointing out that it is in this that lies the real challenge of those involved in HR.

“What happens if we spend money on training our people and they leave? What happens if they go to our competition? The answer to that is what if we don’t and they stay? In the olden days, aggressive corporations would have a training department but smart companies across the globe are now coming up with their own model of corporate learning organisations. Those organisations have quite specific differences in comparison to traditional training institutions,” he explained.

As large organisations and MNCs become bigger and conquer the world so to speak, they have to have mechanisms to transmit the learning and culture in a systematic way across boundaries. E-learning has come up as a powerful capability builder to enable that one but the question arises as to how ROI can be calculated and how specifically organisations can demonstrate that everything they are doing affects the bottom line.

O’Donoghue noted that corporate learning organisations have come about as learning is seen as a strategic enabler to growth. Competition is based on being able to learn and adapt quicker than rivals. People are therefore challenged to continuously expand, innovate and create. Collaboration and innovation are nurturers for competitive advantage.

“It starts with learning and growth as the most important enabler of a company. When you think of training as opposed to learning, training consists of skills development applied externally, short term skills uplift, equips for known challenges and is primarily structured. Learning on the other hand takes into consideration behaviour change and skill development, is internally accepted, brings about long term change, equips for the ambiguous future and is primarily organic,” he listed out.

Stepping into the evolution of corporate learning, it commenced in the 1980s-90s and with the advent of internet and broadband, a lot of companies saw the advantage in blending training materials online. As it evolved, companies looked at concepts like blended and informal learning. The emergence of corporate learning organisations over the last decade in turn saw the blending of learning with the HR function.

Earliest adopters included McDonalds with the setting up of Hamburger University and Motorola with Motorola University and these institutions are now going beyond just serving in-house clients, offering their services to outside people as well.

“Why advocate corporate learning organisations? They should strategically align the corporate strategy of the business with learning however the biggest failure in strategy is execution. Furthermore such organisations act as a central transmission station for corporate culture, drive a culture of measurement in all learning and development activities, increases and fosters employee involvement and collaboration, develops appropriate pedagogy and promotes employer branding with HR,” he further explained.

Today, the growth of corporate learning organisations is estimated to be 200 per cent faster than the vocational and academic sectors.

Emergence of e-learning

O’Donoghue then focused on the emergence of e-learning and learning without boundaries. It is a form of learning that eliminates travel costs, eliminates the need for facilities and equipment, does not take participants out of work environment, enables out of hours learning, reduced instructor salaries, and eliminates printing costs.

Social constructivism is a very big part of learning and education and putting together people from all over the world together in a virtual classroom will allow them to connect with each other and acquire different things in different contexts.

“What outcomes do we expect from people as a result of going through this learning? We want you to go out into a working environment, speak to managers and come back to your virtual classroom and share what you have learned. We are also respectful of people’s time and believe that learning should be a part of their daytime job rather than something that should be done in addition to it,” he stated. O’Donoghue added that they have found out that Generation Y generally loves e-learning.

However he pointed out the emergence of a big industry that peddles a large amount of e-learning content which can be pretty bad. Off-the-shelf e-learning has poor user engagement, competes with abundant internet information, is unduly prescriptive, expensive and lacks context and has no social engagement.

Innovating return on investment

“Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts. The possible benefits of corporate learning and development include the improvement of employee performance, the enhancement of company profits and the saving of money, amongst other benefits.  How a company measures the ROI depends on how the company values the training programme. In general there are three values on the value continuum: corporate learning as a publicity exercise, corporate learning brokering training and as a strategic enabler.

There are several potential cost models that can be deployed for such training programmes, such as cost distribution, as a corporate overhead, 100 per cent cost recovery and corporate universities that run as profit centre but there are only a very few examples of them around. “Our clients are businesses and need to run like a business,” O’Donoghue commented.

Employee engagement – an archaic expression?

Up next was Tata Motors India Senior Vice President and Head of Human Resources Prabir Jha who spoke on covering emerging challenges and key HR risks related to employee engagement in organisations and how to tackle them through an animated presentation titled ‘New Vistas in Employee Engagement.’

“What is an organisation without its people? We cannot reproduce people. In the brave new world that we live in today, everyone has a choice and it is people who decide what to do. It is not easy for businesses and organisations to come to terms with this reality but it is the reality. Ephemeral organisations need to adapt themselves far faster and quicker than they’ve had to in the past because even the most engaging cultures can get repetitive and boring,” Jha asserted.

How happy is the employee, he asked, adding that happiness is the eventual currency. It’s not about the currency or perks that an employee gets, it finally just comes down to whether the employee is happy or not. In this case, how does the HR function and organisation work towards making people intrinsically happy? If they are happy, employees will want to come to work. Employment engagement – is it now an archaic expression?

“We outline our corporate policy and culture but does that really work? Employee engagement is not as easy as most people seem to think. It is doable but it needs commitment and intent and with it raises the question if employee engagement is really important. If a manager thinks so, it will be done. It’s a very important paradigm. How important is the career space in the life space of a person? You could promote a person and the person may still not be happy because it could have not been what he or she wanted,” he said.

At the end of the day engaging an employee is simple and yet difficult – that is the paradox of leadership, Jha noted. When it comes to employee engagement, it consists of things that are more subtle and should be perceived and felt. Engagement is not just science, it’s an art. However, engagement generally fails because what procedurally and logically look sensible lacks heart behind the whole thing,

“The biggest stakeholder who gains or loses from employee management is the manager. The real job of a good manager is to go from being a boss to being a coach. Communicate with your people and not to them. Most people at senior levels sermonise and talk down to their employees,” Jha advised.

The strategic role of HR managers

Batting last as he put it, was Postgraduate Institute of Management Director Professor Uditha Liyanage. Having addressed the gathering at previous conferences organised by HRP, he first drew upon a simple model of people roles of a typical HR manager which he had presented at the annual conference two years ago.

“At the bottom basically was the HR manager as a provider, as the principle responsibility of the HR manager is to hire and recruit people. Ideally, of all the decisions senior management takes, there is one central key decision which supersedes others – the hiring decision and this is made by HR people,” he stated.

You feel as you see and you think as you see, Liyanage added, noting that the key point there is that there is a fundamental distinction between seeing and thinking. If an organisation hires people who don’t have the right perceptions, who don’t see the light, who don’t have the right world view, in Liyanage’s words, that organisation is doomed.

However, choosing the right employee is something that is very difficult to figure out, he admitted. “There are tests and so forth that can be employed but I would argue that most of our measurements and tricks at the point of recruitment are based on thinking.”

He then drew upon a study conducted about two years ago which asked 8,000 managers three very simple questions and Liyanage posed one of these questions to the audience.

The managers were asked to assume that they were the sales manager of their respective organisation with the responsibility of hiring one person from two candidates. The profile of the first candidate: smart, congenial, personable, integrity beyond question, a team player and capable of making the business a profit of $100,000.

The profile of the second candidate: a mind of his own, might question the status quo, may not fit into the team from day on but is likely to produce a profit of $140,000, and the question posed was which one would you hire.

A statistically significant number of managers said that they would go for guy number one and a statistically significant number of managers said they would go for guy number two, said Liyanage.

“Now the point is this. This is not about the action on the part of the managers. This is simply how they see one guy versus the other guy. And this seeing, this perception, is conditioned from childhood – school, university. HR managers mistakenly try to get the guy to fit into the corporate culture which they conceive as being fantastic but which is absolute nonsense. You can’t change people. They are conditioned over a period of time and you can’t expect them to become a process of the way we think,” he expressed strongly.

He then moved on to what exactly is meant by an HR manager’s strategic role – a topic on which much had been said.

“I believe that the strategic role of HR managers has two aspects. The first aspect is that of a strategic planner. He is involved in the strategic planning and process of the organisation. He has a role to play and that is the first strategic role,” Liyanage explained.

Taking the example of Sri Lanka Tourism to drive his point home, he said that the organisation sometime back worked on a plan which essentially consisted of two questions – where do you want to go in terms of the number of tourists and what is the path, the way to achieve this.

There was a strategic plan and the HR manager said that they want to have 2.5 million tourists and broke down an approximate value of tourists for different categories and detailed an exact point at which they could start to generate these numbers – they were involved in a long term planning process.

“Now I would argue that there is a second role that an HR manager has to play – as a true strategic partner and that is not to just be a part of the strategic planning process but be a part of the strategic positioning process,” he went on to say.

“We thought about it long and hard and decided on a strategic position for Sri Lanka Tourism. What does Sri Lanka Tourism stand for was the question posed and after much deliberation, we came up with five words that captured the effects of the positioning of Sri Lanka Tourism. Asia’s authentic, diverse and compact island. Three words which separate us from the other destinations in Asia.

Liyanage pointed out that while certain numbers needed to be estimated, it was not only a numbers game. “We needed so many chefs, so many tourists for each category but it was also a question of getting people who had values and this is why I believe that seeing and values go hand-in-hand.”“When I say 3M, what is their strategic positioning? What is the word that comes to your mind naturally? Innovation. Now if you don’t have people who value this, then you can have the numbers but won’t have people who see it right because I think that is a very powerful impression – seeing, feeling, thinking, doing. If you don’t see it right, you don’t feel it right. If you don’t feel it right, you don’t do it right and if you don’t do it right, the results will not be satisfactory. So when recruiting people, it is actually important to get people who see it right and think about it right.”

 Pix by Upul Abayasekara