Last month, I met an old friend. He had done himself well, and is now the HR Head – or Chief People Officer as he would insist - in a blue-chip company.
"How have you been?" I asked him.
"Oh, I am doing well," he replied.
"...and how has the current recession affected you?" This was a curiosity for me: what would the HR professionals be doing with people when there is not enough market demand to keep the employees productively employed.
"Not much, really!! We have managed it well," he said. "In fact, we just concluded an Employee Alignment and Optimization initiative last week."
"Employee Alignment and Optimization" seemed such a sexy term. It conjoured up images of a happy bunch of people being helped by my friend and his HR team to bring their interest and capabilities in-synch with their work and performance.
"That’s really nice! You mean, you assessed and re-allocated them so that they get to do what they are really capable of doing, and enjoy doing?”
He looked aghast and uncomfortable. “No! no!,” he said. “This was actually an initiative to disengage about 200 of them from the organization.”
“You mean, you fired them?!!” I was startled, not being sure how can one “optimize” and “align” people by firing them.
“No, actually, we didn’t have to fire them, at all,” he beamed, happily. “ In fact, as we had planned, it was a voluntary separation. It was really a very smooth process.”
I was thoroughly impressed. “That’s really remarkable!,” I said with awe. “ It says so much about the level of commitment you must have fostered among the people, that they could make such a sacrifice for the larger good of the organization. Imagine!... you send out a mail saying that we need 200 volunteers to leave the organization – and people actually volunteer.”
My friend looked at me as if I had lost my beans. “Of course, Not! It was not like that at all!!” he almost choked. “This was a very systematic and thorough exercise; we planned it with precision, and with full confidentiality; and we trained our HR and line executives to communicate the choice to the 200 of our employees who had be separated.”
I was befuddled, “….and what was the choice?”
“Oh!,” he said with the pride of a general who has cleverly ambushed the enemy. “We told them that they can volunteer to resign; they will have to sign a document to that effect. It was our legal department which suggested this. In return, we will give them 2 months of “sabbatical leave” – “
“Sabbatical leave! You mean, the company will finance 2 months for their re-education?” I was amazed at this generous gesture, though by now, I had nagging doubt that there must be a catch somewhere.
“No, no!, we can’t do that. Think of the costs!” he corrected me. “You know, what with this sensitivity of media about the pink-slips, we had to really think about what to call this interim period. What we actually offered them was 2 months of further employment at half salary, and they don’t have to come to office – actually, they can’t enter office, at all! We also promised to help their outplacement, and they get a decent separation package after 3 months. Depending upon their length of service, they would get 2-months to 10-months of their pay as the severance pay.”
“…and what if they didn’t accept this offer?”, I was curious – or as Alice would have said, it was getting curiouser and curiouser.
He laughed, waving his hands in the air. “Actually, there was not much of a choice for them.” he said with some satisfaction. “We had their performance ratings, and other inputs from the line managers, which we could use to retrench them. We told them that, upfront.... our Legal Dept had already put together a strong case for termination for each of them, really!.”
A stray thought suddenly occurred to me.
“But tell me,” I asked. ”why did you want to fire – er, sorry, disengage - them in the first place!?”
He looked at me incredulously, as if I was from some other planet. “Don’t you read the newspapers?” he asked. “I don’t know if this is a cyclical recession or a meltdown, but the point is that we need to cut down costs – and maintain our margins.”
“But aren’t employees the “resources” – I mean, Human Resources? I know organizations which even call them “the most precious assets” or “human capital”? How did they suddenly become “cost” to the company?”
“Ugh! You don’t seem to understand…,” he lapsed into silence for some time. “After all, “resources”, “assets” etc., are just words. The key issue is: whether, as HR professionals, we are contributing to business or not.”
“But what happens if the business picks up in a year or so, and you need more people?”
“If that happens, we will have to hire new ones”, he said in a matter-of-fact manner. “The point is that have to maintain our profit margins of 35%...”
Needless to say, we left each other, puzzled – and the rest of the conversation, somewhat, went on the same tenor…
And I recalled Jerry Harvey’s classical article: “Eichmann in the Organisation”…
“… it was not the Nazis only who were to be blamed for what happened to Jews – but also the Jewish Council in Germany. To quote:
“…the collusive role played by the Jewish councils – the most powerful, respected, and trusted members of the Jewish community – in the liquidation of their own people, including, in the end, themselves…. they compiled lists for the Nazis of persons to be deported… served as police during actual seizure of people and property… “ etc.
In the contemporary scenario, Eichmann was the quintessential Human Resources professional, and would have approved of the new HR Mantra:
Align!... Optimize!!... Fire!!!
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Align!.. Optimize!!... Fire!!! - The New HR Mantra
Friday, September 05, 2008
...thanks to my teachers
Today is the "Teacher's Day... and an occasion to remember and thank those who continue to teach me...
Sometime back, somewhere else, I had written about On Being a Teacher...
...which were essentialy my musings on the dilemma about what "teaching/learning" is all about (still trying to figure that out!)
A few days later, an old student sent an invite on Orkut:
"...have attended some of ur utterly confusing n thot provokin lect."
Curious about what this meant, I wrote back:
"How can something be simultaneously utterly confusing and thought-provoking?"
...and got the response:
"there were times... when we were faced with ideas/beliefs completely opposite to what we had carried all along... so confusing because we kinda never expected that the opposite side ever existed or was appreciated.... Thought provoking because then later we end up appreciating (or at least start looking at the logic) for all sides of the argument."
That made sense to me - and I learned something about teaching/learning from her mail...
Today, among the many heart-warming mails/messages which one gets on the Teacher's Day, one which captured this teching/learning matrix, had this quote about learning/teaching in these verses from Rainer Maria Rilke:
Live the questions now
Perhaps you will then, gradually,
Without noticing it,
Live along some distant day
Into the answer.
Like him, I also "gradually, without noticing it, live... into the answer" through these myriad messages and interactions.
So this post is just to say thanks to my many teachers - many of who sat through my classes...
Saturday, July 26, 2008
On Facing Death...
Randy Pausch, the IT Prof in Carnegie Mellon (with specialisation in Virtual Reality), died today... He succombed to pancreatic cancer, which he had harboured, looked in the eyes since long....
Since the time, when in September last year, he had given his "Last Lecture", he had become a phenomeon ("The Last Lecture" is a series at CMU, where Profs are invited to give the lecture/talk, which they would, if it was there last one... IN case of Randy Pausch, it was a real talk, since his doctors had given him just a few months to live)...
Since then, he had appeared on Oprah Winfrey show, had written a book "The Last Lecture"...etc., etc.
[To access any of those just Google "Randy Pausch"]
What struck me about his "Last Lecture" was:
1. his humaneness in the face of death, and
2. that he had prepared his lecture, not for the audience, but for his 3 kids - he was making a point about a life - lived and understood in its own context...
...which reminded me about someone, I used to know intimately - in similar circumstances, who had written:
- "...It is like this - it has to be different for everyone. If twenty years back someone had told me all that I would feel, or that there was a point - I would have thrown it all out without a second thought - because nothing mattered when I was 18... Life for me began when... Then other things happened, and from time to time I lost track of the meaning behind it... I still have to put it all together. And no one else can make this story work out for me. This is a crisis even now, in fact, now larger than life.
And still, when I am not there any, I want you to tell X__, it mattered...
... I think the image I have resisted putting on paper is the Confluence. Two rivers coming closer and joining for a while - but each has to take a different direction. Each absorbs the other for a while, and nothing remains the same. Yet, the point of the river is to flow. The point of the human being is to remain humane and vulnerable...
And still I want you to tell X__, that it mattered. There was a point to the music, the chocolates, the fancy dresses, the loneliness and the hopelessness, the talks, the walks, the dreams and the mourning, the helplessness in the face of hurt...
...That is the point for me... don’t call it a quest for immortality or any such thing. It is not for my sake that I wrote this down. It is for her and you - but because of all that, it is for me also."
Randy Pausch's Last Lecture was his way of saying: "It mattered."!!
In any case, the Life goes on!...
[Cross-posted @ Madhukar's Musings]
Monday, March 31, 2008
Are You a "Bystander"?
While cleaning my mailbox today, I came across this year-old mail from a "friend" - well, we had communicated on mails, talked a couple of times on phone, and had even met once accidentally. This young MBA from IIM/A was working with Ashoka:Innovators for the Public, and we had got in touch because of my interest in Social Entrepreneurship.
His announcement came out-of-the-blue...
"...I am leaving Ashoka to work in the grassroots in Assam. The situation in my home state is terrible, and I do not wish to remain a mute spectator to this devastation. I am not yet sure what I'll exactly do, but I plan to travel extensively to figure out how best I could contribute to making some positive difference."
Reading his mail again, reminded me of the reverse stance many/most of us get quagmired into.
I had once written about this Logic of Inaction, and his mail stimulated me to make this quiz for myself (you may also like to take it):
Realising that such a candid and conscious admission to an otherwise unconscious stance of negation is difficult - actually impossible - to make to oneself, I also created a checklist of typical statements that one makes (to oneself and to others) to justify one's Bystander Stance.
etc. etc....
So...? Are you a Bystander?
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
The Man Who Moved the Mountain
I had once written about him...
A tribute to this man...he died last week.
Outlook Magazine wrote wrote about him:
- "Every morning, for 22 long years, a frail, diminutive man, barefoot and clad in a loin cloth, would trudge two kilometres to a hillock of solid rock and chip away at it with a hammer and chisel. Bemused onlookers thought he had lost his mind, and he was an object of great fun for village urchins. But the women of the village, young and old, admired him, for his was a labour of love."
This was his memorial to his wife, who had died on her way to the Wazirganj hospital, because the road around the rock was 19km long, and took long time to traverse... a memorial
- "...that won't ever find a place in hallowed global must-visit lists, but can well be passed down from this generation to the next as a monument of love. A poor man's Taj, literally. Not for its aesthetics, but for the way it symbolises the human spirit's capacity to endure, its indomitability..."
Saturday, January 20, 2007
On Merit & Discrimination: Pygmalion in the Classroom
In 1960s, Robert Rosenthal, currently a Professor of Psychology at Univ of California, along with and Lenore Jacobson had conducted a series interesting experiments about what a teacher - and his/her beliefs, hopes, biases and prejudices - can do to a student.
The findings of their unsettling study finally got published as a book: The Pygmalion in the Classroom
...and have been replicated more than 350 times since then....
The experimental design was simple:
Randomly select a groups of students, and group of teachers. Tell the teachers that they are going to teach some of the brightest of the brains in the school.
The Result: The students out-performed their batch, even though they had no "real" differentiating "merit".
Rosenthal's studies were about the schools, so one issue that begged the questions:
does this apply to higher education?
Apparently, it does, as he shared the example of the juniors he teaches:
- "I ask them to define a research problem, search the literature, design an experiment and come in with results all in one semester. Now nobody can do all that in one semester. I can't do that in one semester, but these are juniors: they don't know it can't be done; so they all do it. They do amazing things."
Some other later studies also identified the reasons for such perceptions (which are quite relevant to contemporary Indian acadmic environment) for such perceptions - and therefore, lower performance among students:
Rosenthal's book ends with a quote from GB Shaw's play "Pygmalion":
- ..."You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will."
It all depends on....
How do you treat Eliza Doolittle?
... As a "lady" or as a "flower girl"?!!!
Sources:
Rosenthal Lecture
Expectations & Student Outcomes
Pygmalion In The Classroom
"Proper" English & Reservations-of-a-Different-Kind
Quota/Reservations: More ""Reserved" than Others
Saturday, August 20, 2005
SEP Field, etc: The Logic of Inaction
It is an intriguing thought: The more we know, the less we act.
With the information explosion - countless TV channels, newspapers, internet, travel, etc. - we are, undoubtedly, more aware of the world and people around us (and beyond our immediate circumstances) than the previous generations. A hundred years back, our great-grandparents lived in a world, in which they knew maybe 100-500 people in their lifetime, and barring a few exceptions (and exceptional circumstances) only got a few rare glimpses of the world beyond their limited life-space. Today, as an article in The Economist noted, we can "know" at least 20,000 other people in our lifetime - through media and over phone, internet, or videoconferencing.
Compared to earlier generations, we (i.e., the social strata which would be reading this post) are also far more aware - on a daily basis - of the great happy happenings in the world...
...and about the dreary footnotes of contemporary history...
...mutilated bodies, bombs exploding, emaciated infants dying of hunger, immobile bodies lying on footpath as we walk to work, whole communities forced to migrate and become homeless (due to politics, war or large infrastructure projects), global warming, human trade (a polite name for modern day slavery), polluted rivers, sweatshops, AIDS, honour-killing, lives getting downsized/rightsized out of their job, identity and self-esteem...
Perhaps, once in a while, we think about these, or maybe, even discuss them with some others. But our personal life goes on in its comfortable schedules and routines - and none of these moves most of us to act.
I guess, to understand this curiously contemporary phenomenon in the lives of urban educated global citizens, we need new concepts.
I could find three:
1. SEP Field:
Douglas Adams (of The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy) was smart, when he created the fictional technology called SEP (Somebody Else's Problem) Field:
An SEP field can be erected on, or projected around a bizarre and unbelievable scene so that the unconscious minds of the observers instantly abdicate responsibility for its existence, assert that it's "somebody else's problem", and therefore don't perceive it at all.
2. Pluralistic Ignorance:
A curious group/social phenomenon in which people act contrary to their beliefs, because they misperceive beliefs of others - because others are behaving contrary to their beliefs.
Or in other words, as an individual, I think that my perceptions, beliefs and attitudes are different than others in the group/organisation/society. However, I behave like the others (and contrary to by beliefs), because their behaviour shows that they all are unanimous in their perceptions, beliefs and attitudes...
The irony being that each person individually thinks the same way... because everyone who disagrees behaves as if he or she agrees, all dissenting members think that the norm is endorsed by every group member but themselves. This, in turn, reinforces their willingness to conform to the group norm, and not express any disagreement.
And so, we conform to a perceived consensus, instead of acting on their own perception and thinking.
3. Bystander Effect:
Another curious phenomenon, observed by social psychologists, that people are less likely to intervene in an emergency situation, and help others, if there are more people around.
This is a corollary of the Pluralistic Ignorance - that each person monitors the reactions of others in such a situation, and concludes from the lack of initiative of others that other people think that it is not necessary to intervene. Since everyone behaves in this way, no one may take any action, even though some people privately think that they should do something.
The hopeful factor, however, is that if only one person manages to break out of SEP field - and starts throwing starfish back into the sea - others are more likely to follow, actively get involved and make a difference.
Sources:
SEP Field
Pluralistic Ignorance
Bystander Effect
Perspective on "Making a Difference"
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Primitive Processes on the Internet
In continuation to the previous posting, an article by Prof Robert M Young, Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Sheffield, makes two insightful points:
1. "One of the most striking features of email forums... is that people can experience almost no impediment to expressing themselves — for good or ill. They can say something which they would be very unlikely to say on the phone or write in a letter, largely, I think, because it all feels as if it its happening in the head. You do not even have the other person’s voice cues; no piece of paper, envelope, stamp or trip to the post is required. Cyberspace has a fantasy quality. As a result, people say the most intimate thing and the most horrid things with considerable ease....
...It is also the case that one is in a private space and alone while writing, inside the head. No other face or voice is in the room. It can seem like reflecting, with no external consequences. People are usually unaware as they compose email postings that messages are archived by the recipient or automatically by the forum. There is no sense of a permanent record. It can all seem like passing thoughts, of no long-term consequence. A computer file does not feel like a permanent record. Even though it can be printed out its reality is experienced as virtual."
&
2. "...where people can be whomsoever they like. They change their genders, their degree of assertiveness, their sexual predilections at will. Anything goes... On the net it is easy to split into idealised and denigrated part-object relations... People are also much more generous and helpful on the net in scholarly matters than I have found them to be in the rest of life. On the other hand, people can project violently and utterly denigrate another or a whole forum and have tantrums...
...I think cues are important here. The coinage of email communications is the written word, usually composed quickly, often in haste. The keyboard is one’s palate. There is no eye contact; there are no nuances of intonation, no instantaneous chance to measure and correct misunderstandings, as there are in the feedback loops of face-to-face conversation or even a phonecall. There is no necessary space for reflection."
In context of the forum I was refering to, this makes a lot of sense.
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Group-Think in Online Chat Groups
Internet is a great democratic medium. But I stumbled on an interesting "real"(/virtual)-life event - a particular online discussion forum - during last few days. Searching for an explanantion about what was happening in this forum (what would look to be a case of collective pathology), led to some interesting resources about what can happen in an Online Community.
Gordon Graham in his book, The Internet: A Philosophical Inquiry [see summary], makes an interesting observation about the online groups, and their "pure confluences of interest".
Graham says that the internet is a medium which enables people to seek out exclusively kindred spirits and to avoid ever being exposed to views which are contrary to their own. He claims that... "the self-made philosopher with a grand but completely vacuous 'theory of everything' will sooner or later find a coterie of people whose knowledge and critical acumen is even less, but who are willing to be impressed."
The Symptoms of Group Think are:
1) Illusion of Invulnerability
2) Belief in Inherent Morality of Group
3) Collective Rationalization
4) Stereotypes of Out-Groups
5) Self-Censorship
6) Illusion of Unanimity
7) Direct Pressure on Dissenters
8) Self-Appointed Mind-Guards
Give the nature of the self-selection in most online chat groups, these symptoms are quite likely to emerge.
