Just like investment capital the people who work in an organisation must be managed in a way that maximises their benefits to the organisation. The criterion, human resource focus, of the IMC Ramkrishna Bajaj National Quality Award asks how effective your company has been in developing the potential of its workforce, top-to-bottom, and across all categories of employees.
The first issue to address here is how your company’s various human resource goals and plans relate to overall quality initiatives outlined in the criterion on strategic planning (See Indian Management, August 2002). It is important that we keep in mind that the strategic quality plan should drive the human resource strategy, and not vice-versa.
As with most plans, human resource plans and priorities must retain some elasticity, as trends and conditions change. Worker expectations are not set in concrete - think of the changing demands of IT employees over the past 25 years. New technologies are ushered in without warning. Workforce demographics - age, education, geographical shifts - fluctuate considerably from one year to the next (consider the past 10 years). To cope with this endless swirl of change, a human resource plan must be flexible and fleet of foot.
The importance IMC-RBNQA winners place on human resources is evident in their quality values. Examples abound. The following are a sample:
- Respect for the individual
- “Our company always balances the needs of employees, our customers, and our shareholders, considering each in making plans or policies”.
- “We always consider first the effects on our people of making decisions, recognising that if we take care of our employees, they will deliver su-perior service which our customers will, in turn, utilise.”
Companies that score well in the human resource focus criterion, in essence treat their employees as “internal customers”, evaluating the needs of each segment, and translating those needs
into design features for various human resource programmes. The requirements of all categories of employees are addressed, including workers in sales, delivery processes, service, administration, maintenance, as well as back office operations. I specifically refer to the practices of HDFC, Infosys and Satyam Computer Services in this regard.
Historically, Indo-Gulf Fertilisers never felt particularly inclined to include any of its operators on project teams. Project teams were reserved for what the company called its “smart people” - engineers, accountants and MBAs. But there was a problem - no matter what solutions the “smart people” came up with, they ran into trouble at the plant. Operators resisted the ideas because they were not in on their formulation. Or they knew something critical to the plan’s success that the project team professionals were not aware of. “Nobody asked their opinion,” observes M N Dubey, deputy general manager (TQM&EC) of lndo-Gulf, “so they weren’t going to help. Today we involve them very much, right upfront”.
Companies that have difficulty with this criterion seldom have fully deployed human-resource systems, and what systems exist show little signs of cross-functional cooperation. Recognition and training are episodic. Employee morale is usually low, because the ideas of developing and involving employees are foreign concepts. On the whole, these companies do not get maximum benefits from their human resources, and it usually shows in the overall quality of their processes, products, and services.
Recognition and performance appraisal systems, handled badly, have the potential to do more harm than good - hurting morale rather than helping it, destroying teamwork rather than enhancing it. Recognition plays a key role in promoting employee involvement: it reinforces quality objectives, and encourages employees to cultivate initiative and creativity above and beyond the expectations of their formal job descriptions.
On the downside, it is difficult to develop fair systems that somehow balance individual and group recognition.
One of Prof Edwards Deming’s harshest criticisms was that traditional employee recognition is random; that recognition systems fail to account for naturally occurring variability in the broad spectrum of employee talents and aptitudes, and that the good effects of recognising one individual are nullified by overlooking the ill-effects of overlooking another. Dr J M Juran stoutly disagreed with Prof Deming on this issue during the latter’s lifetime.
Formal training of everyone in a company requires substantial investment. In fact, it is often the biggest upfront cost in a quality improvement effort. To ensure that education in concepts, tools, and techniques is cost-effective and of the highest caliber, companies must be extremely systematic in their approach.
Like all systems in IMC-RBNQA, education and training comprise a cyclical pattern of assessment, goal-setting, application, and evaluation. The criterion underlines Dr Juran’s belief that “education without action is easily forgotten; education with action is remembered”.
CREDITS: Suresh Lulla, Founder & Mentor, Qimpro Consultants Pvt. Ltd.