Feature

Holistic development of employees

Mere domain expertise is not enough. The Indian IT industry has begun to look at the overall development of employees, reports Vinutha V

If you mull over what it takes to survive and profit in competitive and volatile market conditions, the common solution would be to offer improved products and services. This may be partly true. However, improvements are only the expected results, not the source of competitive advantage. Improved product development through innovation arises from the knowledge and experience of employees. Hence, employees are the core content of the IT industry, and their contribution is significant to the business.

Indian IT companies have started realising the importance of investing in overall people development more or less on par with the investments in service and product development. They have understood that their business survival is not solely based on products and services. Rather, it is dependent on the complete understanding that surrounds the job.

What is holistic development?

Harnessing of knowledge can lead to innovation. (Harnessing here can be termed as the overall well-being of an individual.) To achieve this, companies are taking scientific approaches, and considering the all-round development of their employees. Says Sabitha Prasad, consultant, people skills, Sabcons Project Management Consultants, “The holistic development of

an individual means touching all parameters such as his work, family, personal and spiritual zones.” She says that if employees’ interests and preferences in all these zones are nurtured further, they tend to give their best to their jobs. A focus on these factors will improve their attitudes, which is directly related to the progress of the company.

Domain skills not enough

The growing need to capture and distribute enterprise knowledge and improve the dissemination of processes can be addressed with the integration of technical and conceptual skills. According to Vijayalakshmi Rao, director, Scope e-Knowledge Centre, in India only well-established companies are focusing on empowering employees in each and every aspect of employee training. She says that “to gain benefits from employees, even small and growing enterprises need to look at investing in people via counselling, mentoring and coaching.”

A learning programme at an organisation should not be synonymous with attaining only technical skills or domain skills because a technically well-qualified employee may fail in communicating his achievements or putting across his ideas to his boss, subordinates or customers. This in turn will not only lead to employee frustration, but incur loss to the organisation as well. Companies that don’t attend to these issues get away by blaming the time factor—or maybe they just

don’t know the importance

of employee development. Comments Vishal Menon, HR manager, Ocwen Financial Services, “The RoI on people development is a long-term benefit to the company, hence there could be a bit of apprehension or negligence about training.”

Today, at every level of the organisation, employees recognise ongoing training as a tool that will help them not only to do their jobs better but also to improve their skill-sets and prepare them for increased job responsibilities in future. Neera Baburaj, HR manager, Take Solutions, believes that companies should have a good mix of both technical and soft skills: “An ideal overall development programme of an employee should comprise soft skills and technical skills in the ratio of 60:40.”

Holistic training

Growing organisations are driven by their strong vision and leadership qualities that should percolate down to all employees. An individual should be evaluated right from his joining time to see how he fits not only into the current job but also future jobs. Based on this, organisations should design training programmes that include soft and technical skills. Observes J S Shivkumar, HR manager, Ramco Systems, “Such initiatives allow an employee to know himself, to learn how to adapt himself to different situations, to tackle challenges.” Eventually, employees should feel that they are an asset to the company, something which can be achieved through various and regular training plans.

Analyse well

The holistic development of an individual means touching all parameters such as his work, family, personal and spiritual zones Sabitha Prasad Consultant, People Skills Sabcons Project Management Consultants	To gain benefits from employees, even small enterprises need to look at investing in people via counselling, mentoring and coaching Vijayalakshmi Rao Director Scope e-Knowledge Centre	Conceptual skills become more important as an individual moves up the organisational ladder M L Taneja Vice-president-HR HCL Infosystems

So what types of programmes do employees want most? The answer depends on the employee. In general, workers value training that will make a difference in their everyday professional lives. Any person will want to give up his inadequacies and limitations. If the training programmes are designed to help him shed his inhibitions, he will be a resource to the organisation.

Assessing employees using various psychometric tools would be the first step in holistic development. “This can be attained by using psychometric tools such as Predictive Index and Mayer’s Briggs to evaluate aptitude, domain skills, communication skills and conceptual skills,” adds Menon. Doing a gap analysis for these factors and creating synergy between them would help in working out a better training programme.

Designing multi-level training programmes

Dr Nandakishore Rathi, assistant placement officer of IIT-Mumbai, says that a training programme for all employees will not be worthwhile to achieve the required results. This is where organisations should be prudent enough to gauge who requires what. “Having training plans at three different levels—junior, mid and senior—would be more feasible,” he opines. Although the combination of personality development, awareness of technology, communication skills and transition of work are included at all levels, the emphasis on each aspect would vary at each level. Explains M L Taneja, vice-president-HR, HCL Infosystems, “Conceptual skills become more important as an individual moves up the organisational ladder.” At a junior level, more stress is given on the ability to adapt his academic knowledge to the working environment, besides some basic communication skills that include how to interact with people around and in the company. The project heads or team leaders at the mid-level should be equipped with better ways to train their juniors to get the best out of them. Once employees move up to the management-level or senior-level, the focus on technical skills will diminish, while management skills such as institution building, tapping others’ potential, and fine-tuning business strategies will grow in importance.

Certain practices such as involvement of an employee’s family, socialising, rewarding, showing the career path and bolstering employee interests should remain common to each and every employee of the organisation. To have a productive and healthy workforce, giving importance to factors other than training is very crucial, insists Taneja. Companies have started realising that orientation, spiritual and yoga sessions are successful stress-busters for their employees. “Allowing employees to teach computers at school, or work with non-profit organisations, will give them a sense of fulfilment,” says Shivkumar.

Employer check

The trend among people while opting for new jobs is that they put the work culture of the organisation at second place after the brand of the organisation. A person checks if a company will provide him the opportunity for overall development. Hence it will be sensible for companies to maintain best training practices on both the technical and conceptual skills front. Although such learning plans yield long-term benefits, the advantages one can get is enormous. Says Shivkumar, “Companies can see an increase in productivity and retention.” Besides, an employee develops a long-term relationship with the organisation.

Adds Rathi, “Every segment of IT needs conceptual training besides domain training.” Indian companies are waking up to how the overall development of employees is necessary, and are taking essential steps to become successful enterprises. Nevertheless, there are many companies which are not open to the concept of counselling from outside faculties.

A few have this facility, but most organisations still do not have this in place. Some put this onus onto the HR department. “However, employees are apprehensive about opening up to their own HR as they feel they are under constant scrutiny by them,” feels Prasad. Even with well-planned training planning, companies are failing to implement because of constraints of resources, time, priorities and training infrastructure. Yet to be a successful organisation it’s imperative to overcome such challenges.

vinutha@expresscomputeronline.com