According to a recent Gallup poll, the most critical job of a CEO is to ‘attract, motivate and retain talents’. Thus unfortunately, you cannot retain people by money alone, you have to engage them physically, mentally and even spiritually all the time taking care that HR interventions are culture sensitive as well. As the world moves from ‘Classical Economy' to ‘Knowledge Economy', HR perforce has to take the centre-stage. While Machine, Money and Material provided the competitive advantage earlier, suddenly it is the collective wisdom of knowledge of employees which is giving the sustainable edge in the market place.

Companies not only survive, but grow on this base. The first major problem with the earlier model was that all the above mentioned physical assets were ‘inert’ in nature. The only live asset is ‘man’ and you require their intervention to make inert assets useful for the organization. The old dictum that `it is not the machine, but the man behind the machine who makes the real difference’ is really true after all. The second problem was that all these assets could easily be duplicated or even bettered by any competitor within a short span of time. Organizations have now realized, after much suffering unfortunately, that their HR assets or systems are the only resource difficult to imitate and hence provide sustainable competitive advantage. Thus, increasingly HR has to take the lead in making an internal work environment where employees could grow professionally as well as personally. We at Varroc therefore are leapfrogging from Personnel and Administration (PA) & Industrial Relations (IR) to Strategic HRM (SHRM). A well planned strategy to introduce a High Performance Work System (HPWS) is currently being implemented at Varroc (see figure-1).

HPWS is no nuclear science, but, a specific combination of HR practices, work structures, and processes that maximize employee knowledge, skill, commitment and flexibility. It has 4 critical strategies (see figure-2):

Thus, behind the implementation of HPWS is the idea of empowering the employees so that they can work on their own to contribute to the corporate goal. The role of HR in this entire exercise is to facilitate the nurturance of talent. To attain this, we have looked at each and every subcomponent of HR Architecture, right from Manpower Planning to Separation and re-engineered it with the sole aim of helping our employees to excel. Take one of our major thrust areas e.g. Recruitment & Selection (R&S). We have designed a unique Curriculum Vitae Assessment System (CVAS) which looks at a prospective employee from `person job-fit’ as well as `person-organization fit’ perspectives so as to identify the best talents on whom we can bet long term. CVAS assesses a candidate on 5 major factors (Work Experience, Education, Communication, Stability, and Person-Organization Fit) which are further sub divided into 12 different sub factors in a structured and scientific way so as to shortlist the best. Our experience shows this to be almost 90% accurate thus far. We also understand that there are no universal qualities for a prospective employee as no two jobs are exactly identical. However, we expect a candidate to not only have the technical skills vis-à-vis the job in question, but also to have the 8 managerial competencies which we have identified. Over and above that, the candidate should have the necessary attitude to incorporate and practice the Varroc core value system namely `Passion, Humility, Integrity, Self Discipline and Sincerity’. These candidates then undergo an Assessment Center (AC) which typically looks at the candidates through a variety of selection methods by multiple assessors to avoid the usual subjective content of selection process. During AC itself, we also start identifying the skills and competency gap which are later addressed through Training and Development (T&D). Once the candidate is selected, HR helps the candidates to be placed in the most optimal way through a well designed induction process. Idea is that each individual should know his Key Stakeholders, KRAs as well as Key Deliverables even before he starts working. He then goes through at-least two PMS process during his probation period so that shortcomings, if any, can be quickly ironed out. Thus, HR concentrates on making a success story each time a person joins.

Since HR has to make the difficult shift from a `cost center’ to an `investment center’, it is imperative to make HR people the true leaders to face the new paradigms of business and management. Accordingly, `HR Leadership Conclaves’, are held every quarter where HR people are taught to become change leaders. Both theoretical and practical inputs are provided at such conclaves so that HR employees have the cutting edge knowledge and technology at their disposal.