HR must be connected to business results… - Suhanya Aravamudhan

Have you worked in an organisation where the HR person tells you, “ I’ll call you back in five minutes,” and never calls you for the entire week? And the next time you call, you hear, “I am in a meeting. Can I call you later?” And a few us get disheartened with the entire organisation because HR has let us down. The HR department gives you your first impression of the company’s values. Its role is gaining in dimension and getting to be more demanding in a scenario where the employee is expected to work more like a business partner.   Suhanya Aravamudhan is currently doing a Ph.D. in HR and Performance Management from IIT DOMS (Chennai) under the guidance of Prof. T.J.Kamalanabhan. With a B.Sc in Statistics, (where she earned a University VI Rank), and an MBA in Human Resources and Marketing, both from Chennai, she holds an impeccable academic record. Her thesis is a study on the Usage of Balanced Scorecard in Indian companies. We spoke to her about her research, about the role of HR and about the need for research in our country.

What made you choose HR as a specialisation and why research?
According to me the major challenge to any organisation is to manage their human capital (not because it is huge) but because they bring sustained competitive advantage to the organisation.

It is worthwhile to do a research in HR because any change in a firm’s structure, policies or any change in strategy, always has a first and immediate impact on the employees.

And what made you choose IIT DOMS?
IIT DOMS has a good academic research record. The department and the faculty show great interest in undertaking multi-disciplinary research to widen the scope of the work and enable us to identify our core competencies. IIT DOMS has a feasible Research environment, resources in terms of technological sophistication, books and journals availability and exemplary guidance.

How did you identify your area of research? What do you find most fascinating about your research topic?
Generally research scholars select a broad research topic and then they try to identify specific issues from the literature pertaining to the topic and also get insights from industry experts. Some research has direct implications on individual organisations and, to be more specific, to industry sectors.

It is good to select the area of research that is closer to our personal interest.

For example, I have a great interest on Metrics as such and I planned to do research on issues related to HR Metrics and that’s how I’ve landed up in the area of strategic performance management.

What are Metrics?
Numbers, trends, ratios and benchmarks that help in demonstrating the contribution of HR activities to immediate ROI.

Metrics fall into three principal categories: historical, real-time and forward-looking, and we need to consider the forward-looking metrics that enable strategic planning and facilitate strategy implementation.

Return on training, ROI in human capital, Turnover costs, Cost per hire, Cost-benefit analysis of HR interventions etc., are examples of metrics.

How do research papers impact policy changes in the industry? How immediate or urgent is the impact on industry?
Many research issues have been noticed by organisations when they happen to see such issues being addressed by researchers in international conferences in India and also abroad. Journal publications make research issues and solutions visible to the academia and to the industry. Most of the research problems pertain to a particular industry or more, hence we expect positive changes in the policy decisions.

My research is an example of it. In The Hindu of Jan 26, 2006, there was an article that said that a  “Balanced Scorecard Adoption Can Benefit The Indian Industry” and my research also addresses the usage of BSC in India and the feasibility assessment of BSC in Indian organisations.

Research papers can bring changes in the policies. We collect material from the industry, we are in constant touch with the industry and they, too, are therefore aware of our projects and look forward to knowing the outcome of our projects. The changes based on the research findings are more of an important and beneficial nature rather than of an urgent nature.

How important is it for research to be encouraged in our country?
It is the need of the hour not only to encourage research but also to facilitate researchers to undertake challenging and worthwhile research projects that can facilitate learning at the individual level, organisational level and also at the broader (national) level.

“Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the greater the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest.To be productive, to enhance the knowledge pool, research seems to be the best way and needs to be encouraged by all possible means.

As the business markets are volatile in nature, there needs to be an ongoing research on business activities. Researchers contribute to the theoretical body of knowledge and organisations can utilise the research results by studying such issues in their own organisations. Most of the issues pertain to the industry either in a direct or an indirect way.

Are there problems that you face as a research student?
According to me, here at IIT DOMS, the only problem that stays in the mind of the research scholar is their “research problem/topic/issue”.

What are the critical skills required to choose HR as a specialisation? A lot of students choose HR because then they do not have to travel or because they like to interact with people. Are these misconceptions? And, in any case, are these the right reasons to choose HR?
To choose HR as a profession, there might be many reasons from many perspectives because HR as a function itself is not perceived in the same way by everyone. So, obviously, there is a great scope of misconceptions prevailing around about the usefulness of the HR function. Organisations have started to develop innovative assessment systems that demonstrate the HR’s influence on business outcomes like firm profitability, shareholder value etc.

Students particular in choosing HR as a profession, have a responsibility to prove the worth of “their department and activities” by emphasising their strategic contribution.

If HR professionals want to reach top positions in their career/ organisation they need to act as a strategic partner, employee advocate and a change mentor.

It is now incumbent to decide where to place the HR function in the minds of others as HR traditional or as HR strategic.

Does HR need to be understood differently in our country - are we too dependent on western policies?
I read in a magazine recently that ‘The training in any foreign culture is not to make Indian professionals less Indian, it is to make them more globally competent.’ Our HR policies are very independent in nature. Certain HR policies need to be tuned to the environment to facilitate the virtual working groups.
It will look as if we follow Global western policies but the primary purpose is to make the employee culturally accustomed and globally competent.

Sorry about making this generalised observation – but in most organisations the HR department uses pat phrases like ‘we have a highly motivated team’ and seem rather unable to explain the high attrition rates.
People feel that HR has a negligible role to play in the organisation and consider it to be as just a supporting function. There is again a strong opinion that HR, as a functional area, does not seem more strategic in an organisation because it does not deliver results that are visible enough.

 Efforts are taken by researchers to make the efforts visible to all by building effective measurement systems. Nowadays, HR managers justify the programmes they develop in terms of return on investment or ROI. HR managers also quantify their activities (e.g., a proposed training programme) in financial terms.

For example, if turnover is 15 percent, the organisation should be alarmed and must engage in activities and interventions to decrease the number. This information must be taken as an input to business strategy.

I believe that HR professionals should start developing and implementing measurement systems (HR Scorecards) that facilitate assessing the contribution of HR to business success.

There is no doubt that most of the HR activities have an impact on the individual skill, knowledge level and also on the overall bottom line. The contribution of the HR must be made more visible.