Career Advisory

In senior leadership roles, be it in India or elsewhere, trust plays an important role. As you move up the hierarchy, trust becomes a crucial component. At the top, leaders support each other and many times, a manager is likely to support his colleague than his subordinate(s).

At its core, Lean is about the identification and elimination of waste through a structured approach to problem-solving. It focuses on reducing the complexity of each process and identifying areas for improvement.

Let me just take you through the memory lanes of my life and introduce you to a friend of mine, Mr. Gaurav Sharma. We were neighbors for two years in Delhi. Mr. Gaurav is a Marketing professional & I am into HR.

Notice periods are meant for handover of tasks and activities. An employee is also supposed to complete tasks in hand. During the notice period, an employee shall not be assigned new tasks or activities...

We believe companies should arrange for a regular awareness campaign for their employees to educate them about early symptoms of heart-attack, managing stress, diabetes control, early symptoms of cancer, managing in case of epilepsy attacks, burns, and accidents.

Hiring an employee is a positive experience for any HR personnel, but terminating any employee is almost a nightmare for most. Whether an employee is fired due to economic reasons, or low productivity or misconduct, a proper termination protocol needs to be followed to prevent additional hassles.

Induction, or new hire orientation, is defined as the process when a new employee is being introduced to his/her new company's vision, mission, policies, environment, and culture. The orientation process lays the groundwork to seep into their new role and ensures effective integration of an employee into his/her new firm.

While sitting on that wooden chair in the hallway, along with other extremely nervous candidates, I could hear my heart pounding in my chest and my brain going numb with anxiety.

Human Resources are a complex world within the corporate structure with many positive and negative experiences of employees in rife who deal with the HR department on a regular basis. But, the HR department has always played a key role in retaining a company's employees, be it private or government.

I was born in an affluent family and my father was a merchant at Assam and we had all the joys and luxury that we wanted. But life had other plans! The person who was holding the strings of fate gave a nice twist to our life. We were cheated by our own family, astonishingly by my own uncle.

Interviews are conducted to hire the best fit from the talent pool. The sole purpose of interviews is to ensure that the deserving candidate is hired.

Shalini was waiting eagerly for her Chartered Accountancy Final Results. She was about to reap the benefits of 5 years of intense struggle and hard work.

I had just finished college and was in dire need of a job. I wanted a writing job as it was a preconceived notion that it would be quite easy for me so I put the filter “Writing Jobs” and anything that came up, I applied. 

HR (Human Resource) is an important wing of all Organizations and Companies. Many aspire to be a part of this profession; however, we all agree that effectively managing a human resource isn’t an easy task. Like any other role, HR has its own set of challenges.

HR has evolved remarkably over the years. With constantly changing dynamics and technologies, it became imperative for HR to upgrade and embrace a wide range of roles and responsibilities.

The fundamental truth is - process, people and culture keep changing, no matter how much you try to remain oblivious to it. So, to stay in forefront your approach must also follow the change. In past few years, numerous HR practices have undergone a makeover.

Some of the things I enjoy being a Management Consultant are wide ranges of networking prospects, traveling across globe and opportunities to work across industries on a broad range of HR projects.

Management defines the talent as per the requirement of business needs and its diversified expansion plans. However, the way it gets translated and interpreted by HR, Hiring Manager’s and Recruitment Agencies is very different from the vision of management team and requirement of business.

The theory of constraints (TOC) is an overall management philosophy introduced by Eliyahu M. Goldratt in his book, The Goal, published in 1984. According to him, , constraints are usually external in nature;   Physical [Equipment, Material Shortage, Lack of People, Lack of Space], Policy [Government Regulations, Company Procedures, Union Contracts], Paradigm [Organizational beliefs and culture], and Market [when production capacity increases sales, etc.],  that can be fixed  using FIVE focusing steps  –

When the case of Madhumita Sharma came to me in the last quarter of 2015, both she and her boss were frustrated with each other and the scenario was not only affecting the performance of Madhumita but that of the entire team. Madhumita was working with an automobile company as a Director – Client Management for just over a year.

It’s appraisal time. It is that time of the year when employees in Corporate India get evaluated and rewarded for their performance of previous year. This phase of performance evaluation usually expose many internal processes of companies, such as, 

It was the evening of Friday, 21st October and most of employees in our organization were busy planning their weekend. Ours was a young company, less than 9 years old; ours was young crowd with an average age of 28 years.

Meera belongs to a middle-class family. Her father died when she was 16 years old. She has two younger siblings. She needs to work to support her family. Her mother is working as a clerk in a government organization but her salary is not enough to take care of the family.

It was like any other day in office and as usual, I was glued to my laptop until my phone buzzed at 10 A.M.

Professionals working in Human Resource Function Often solicit in a belief that their role is very descriptive in nature with intangible output; hence their performance cannot be measured accurately.

I was in a meeting when my mobile buzzed. A closer look flashed the name of Kabir. I excused myself from the meeting and answered the call, “Hey, Kabir. How are you? Tell me, what can I do for you? How come you thought of me at this moment”?

A couple of weeks ago I went to attend an event organized by one of the HR Forums - " HR Enlight". Dr. Pawan Agrawal, a speaker, author, and educationist, who has done extensive research work on Dabbawala’s, titled as “A Study of Logistics and Supply Chain Management of Dabbawala in Mumbai"

Before I proceed with People Management Lessons that we can learn from them, let me explain the complexity of the system that these Dabbawala’s work in and which makes their work so special. Suppose there are FIVE pick-up and delivery railway stations – A, B, C, D and E.

Of late there has been so much emphasis on leadership qualities and leadership development programs that we have begun to underplay the role of Managers and stealing away its importance in the process.

Let's identify bad apples from the basket of good apples. A lot has been written about bad managers. Many authors seem to have taken out their frustration through their stories and prepared an extensive list of 25-40 traits they seem to have noticed in managers.

Good managers are those who planned their career. They invested time and money to groom self, identified their mentor, and took the help of professional career coaches to develop competencies required to be successful as a manager.

Let’s define a checklist of questions to be answered before promoting the best employee to the role of a manager. The onus is on HR Function to execute it thoroughly.

In last few years, I have developed my own unique process of networking with leaders and professionals across industries and it has worked efficiently for our mutual growth.

It took me 30 meetings, involving over 50 stakeholders, in a span of FOUR months to understand existing processes and gather information about challenges faced by HR team and leadership team and create a document and process flow diagrams.

With automation of major HR Processes, the role of HR Professionals in an organization has changed dramatically. It is no longer transactional, administration or activity based.

Last week, an email from Ganesh surprised me. It was almost after a decade, he tried to contact me. After an exchange of 7-8 emails within 12 hours, we finalized a day, time and place for our meeting in Mumbai during his visit to India.

For me, weekends are a time to reflect upon my thoughts and be creative. Last weekend wasn't any different. A bizarre thought crossed my mind that there was a connection between “Employee Retention” and “Successful Marriage.

Now, at last, you got married and have decided to stay together for the rest of your life. Getting married doesn't assure you that you will have a successful marriage.

Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao, along with his finance minister, Manmohan Singh, initiated the economic liberalization in 1991. The reforms did away with the Licence Raj, reduced tariffs and interest rates and ended many public monopolies, allowing automatic approval of foreign direct investment in many sectors, such as telecommunication, computer software and hardware, BFSI, IT enabled services, Construction, to name a few.

While we were students in school, all of us had those classmates who would often whine, "I will tell the teacher" or “I will tell my mother.” On some days they did bring their parents to school to speak to the teacher and complain.

I am sure we all have come across people who bully their juniors, kids and weak people to show their might. Such people also exist in the corporate world.

It happened few years ago when I was working with a start-up organization housing 210 employees. I was on leave for TEN days when I received a call from a team-leader in my team, Priyanka to inform me that Sarah, another team member, had resigned.

My presentation about the best definition of Accountability included what has been explained in Oz Principle:

In an organizational setup, one gets an opportunity to see and interact with all kinds of people.

Airports may hold great surprises of bumping into some wonderful people. During such few occasions, I could meet celebrities, politicians, my former colleagues, and bosses and sometimes I chanced upon people who are connected with me on Social Media, such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

I was assisting one of my clients with content for their website. We prepared an outline and decided to hire the services of a professional “Ghost Writer” on a few articles for the company BLOG.

When I hired this young 23-year-old lady, there was a spark in her, a fire to prove something to the world.

While hiring through references, we get TWO kinds of people -

Once there was a concept of life-time job. People used to join one organization and would work there for rest of their life. They would grow with company. Loyalty and relation were given more preference than anything else.

It Destroys Careers, It Destroys Lives; It has to Stop!

Hi! I am Anil Saxena, working as a "People Manager" in an organization. The next few pages that you scroll down will take you through an experience of mine I had in dealing with an ‘Employee’s Non-performance’. Come let’s begin the journey…

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Employee Separation - Notice periods are meant for handover of tasks and activities. An employee is also supposed to complete tasks in hand...