Dr. Arvind Agrawal, President - Corp Development & HR, RPG Enterprises shares with Basuri Dutta, Great Place to Work® Institute India, the increasing challenge of skill shortage and loss of demographic dividend as a result of rising cost of labor

What are the top three people related challenges facing the industry today?

The three challenges are availability of people, rising cost of labor, and productivity. Skilled manpower is in short supply. While we do have the demography to our advantage, there is a need to convert that into skilled manpower. So, availability of manpower is the biggest challenge at every level and we are experiencing that, whether it is plantation labor in Cochin, or our factories in Mumbai.

The second issue is the rising cost of people. Increment rate in India is at 10-12 percent, unlike in the west, where we hear of maximum 4% increment. While rise in cost of people means increase in per capita income of the Indian population, I also believe that it will pose a challenge for India’s competitiveness of low wage cost. Therefore, rise in increments will mean that India will have to compete on other parameters and build excellence in terms of product quality, product excellence, design, service levels, etc.

Thirdly, when I compare productivity levels of our workforce with elsewhere in the world, I find that we tend to waste a lot of time, partly, because of our work habits and partly, because of poor infrastructure, the kind of equipment/machinery one deploys, and work processes that one has, which pulls down one’s productivity.

What is the one characteristic that a people manager should possess and why?

The biggest thing I would say is honesty of purpose. I am dismayed when I meet very smart people, who are very capable, but they may not be honest in terms of why they are doing what they are doing. For example, as a business partner, the primary motivation for an HR manager must be to add value to the business and not to one’s own biodata. For example, we often meet people, who say, they must do a specific thing, say assessment centers, because it will add to their credentials and strive to get the organization to sponsor the initiative, whether or not it is required in the organizational context.

Secondly, as a people manager, one is privy to a lot of information; one has the confidence of the CEO and access to his/her time on priority basis. If one misuses that information for personal positioning and one-upmanship, then one is not being honest to one’s profession. So, what distinguishes a good HR professional from another is whether or not he/she is committed to the cause or is he/she just doing a job for personal gratification.

What makes it so difficult for most organizations to become great workplaces?

Organizations today have a large number of people belonging to different walks of life, having different priorities and mindsets. If one is not able to engage with all of them and wheel them together with what they are doing, it would not become a great workplace. If employees feel that they are just a cog in the wheel and distrust the management, then it can never be a great workplace. This particularly happens at the blue collar workmen’s level as most HR professionals are not connected with the blue color workforce. For example, if you have 10,000 people, about 70 to 90 percent will be in that category. One may do very high-end HR work for the first 1000 people, but what about the rest 9000? To what extent one engages with the maximum number of people in the organization defines whether an organization is a great place to work for or not. A couple of years back, we were going through an organization excellence evaluation, which is like ‘Malcolm Baldrige’ or ‘European Federation of Quality’, and we shared our engagement levels, which were very good, with our auditor. We thought we would come through with flying colors, until the time the auditor asked us the next question as to how many people did it pertain to. That was a telling story, because, out of the overall employee base, we have an IT business too which has 5000 white collar people, and this referred to a relatively small percentage of our people. We were asked what measures we used for the rest and we did not have a convincing answer. Since then, we have embarked upon ensuring that we have measures and initiatives that address our blue collar workforce as well. So, how inclusive and egalitarian you are as an organization will define how great a workplace you can become.

If you want to hire the entire workforce with just one interview question, what would that be?

Well, the question that I will ask is - ‘what are you excited about in terms of the work that you do?’ So, if you get to know what that person is excited about, then you just need to see if the job has those elements to offer and factors like competence, etc. will be figured out by the person himself/herself. One needs to align that person’s excitement with one’s job requirements.

What are the top three matrices that you track measure your business health and the top three people-related metrics?

I look at engagement levels, and we have a score line on that. I look at attrition levels, which is almost a lead indicator of engagement in some ways. And I look at succession bench strength. For example, if we have a 100 critical positions and the succession bench strength is only 40 percent, then one would attempt to push it to 50 or 60 percent and ideally to more than 100 percent.

One thing you have learnt as a people manager that you wish you had always known?

Knowing more about the business itself is something that I learnt as I grew in my career. Around 1986-87, I got exposure to Total Quality Management (TQM), which I wish I had known earlier, because it had a huge impact on my thinking, my orientation, and took me closer to the business. It has a framework to make sure that one looks at the root cause, and generates options before one arrives at actions.

What, in your opinion, are the three biggest and common mistakes that CEOs make when it comes to people management?

It is not as though one CEO would make all the three mistakes, but some of the typical mistakes that CEOs make are; having the mistaken belief that he or she has all the knowledge and skills, and he or she is responsible for providing solutions to all the problems rather than harnessing the skills available in the organization; not running meetings skillfully, in terms of their ability to ensure that everyone has airtime; their ability to stay focused to the agenda, to be committed to the timelines, to be able to follow-up on the decisions; confronting people without being disrespectful and the efficiency of the entire process; and the lack of basic sensitivity by being overly task-oriented and numbers-driven.