Apart from this group of employees, which faced the least turnover during the slowdown, 10% of the other employees are also likely to change jobs during the economic recovery. This, in turn, is likely to impact overall productivity in an organisation.

“An average organisation faces an imminent 7% productivity loss from the combination of departing top talent and undermanaged recruiting pipelines,” said the survey, titled Executive Guidance 2010.

Employees in India, especially is sectors such as IT and ITeS that are highly people-driven, have already started changing organisations, lured by better offers and higher salaries.

IT companies such as Infosys, MphasiS have already declared salary hikes and 100% bonuses for its employees in the coming months. Says Anirudh Desai (name changed), a Bangalore-based software engineer, “Many of us are looking our for better opportunities now that markets have opened up.”

The survey covered hundreds of executives globally and around 30 top executives in India. CEB is an advisory firm that helps companies find solutions to their business problems by sharing best organisational practices.

The survey also revealed that in order to avoid top talent disengagement, companies should ensure that employees are mobilised towards the right goals, and communication plays a key role in this.

It found just 21% of employees to be fully aligned with organisational goals, with the remaining 79% less productive on account of not being aligned with the right goals. This could be due to ineffective communication and the inability of managers to properly explain the job profile and objectives to employees. “If organisations enable peer-to-peer collaboration and manager-led dialogue rather than top-down communication efforts, it would help,” says CEB India managing director Shaurav Sen.

Beyond a manager-led approach, the Town Hall approach, wherein the senior management engages in a dialogue with employees openly, could also be used as an effective means to communicate, adds A Sudhakar, executive director - HR, Dabur India.

Further, organisations that engaged employees more in the process of job design are likely to have more satisfied employees, according to the survey. “This is important at the time of structural changes within organisations. If people are rightly communicated their new roles and responsibilities, the better equipped they become to handle any sort of challenge,” says Mr Sudhakar.

Another post-recession implication could be high levels of misconduct among employees, said the survey. “Restructuring and downsizing have created an increased state of distrust, anxiety, and cynicism among employees, which has translated into a rise in fraud and misconduct. Globally, unemployment and attendant employee mistrust may stay high until well into 2010,” said the survey.

Indian IT major Wipro recently admitted a case of embezzlement by an employee in its finance division. “If such cases are to be avoided, it is important to improve employee confidence in the organisation. Senior leaders must communicate openly, consistently model ethical behaviour, and deal decisively with misconduct. They should also recognise and respond to the emotional effects of the recession on employees and ensure that financial communications are frequent, frank and focused on employee concerns,” says Mr Sen.

Article courtesy of Economic Times.

Today, Ms Krishnan and her ilk give nightmares to their employers as the economy rebounds and companies dust up their expansion plans. Kept on a tight leash with hardly anyone recruiting, India’s notoriously attrition-prone code-jocks are now sizing up their options and moving in for the kill, threatening to kick back the attrition rates to the 25% levels of the boom years.

Ms Krishnan, who got married last year, chucked her employer in March to join the multinational Cognizant for a 15% salary hike. “My friends in Infosys got hikes even during the slowdown, but we kept thinking of saving our jobs,” says Ms Krishnan, who requested not to mention the name of her past employer.

In the $50-billion software industry, even 15% attrition was considered an achievement until 2008 while some companies struggled to keep it below 20-30%.

he scene nose-dived after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the onset of the financial slowdown, with attrition rates at India’s top tech firms dropping to single digits.

The status quo remained until a few months ago.

Today, with large customers such as JP Morgan, Citibank and GE sending more projects to the country, and multinationals like IBM and Accenture under pressure to hire more in India, the war for retaining and hiring talent is being waged once more.

“It’s coming back to haunt us. I just got back from a business trip, we have signed some new businesses and are now spending more time worrying about how to retain staff and hire new folks with relevant skills,” says the CEO of one of the top Indian tech firms, seeking anonymity.

According to Nasscom, the Indian IT industry will hire around 90,000 staff this year, taking the total IT workforce to around 2.3 million. Last year, the industry added only around 20,000 professionals as companies stalled their hiring plans.

Companies are now hoping that they will be able to retain employees with a 2-8% wage hike.

“Wage inflation is definitely back, but should be in single digit in the future,” says Phaneesh Murthy, chief executive of iGate, which counts General Electric among its top customers.

However, tech professionals who had to live with no salary increments last year are in no mood to remain loyal to the employers.

“I was planning to buy a car and go for loan last year, but did not have enough cash for making a down payment. Now, one of the companies interviewed me and offered some joining bonus too,” says Avishkar Sinha, a 28-year-old project analyst working with a Mumbai-headquartered tech firm.

TV Mohandas Pai, HR head of Infosys Technologies, says India’s second biggest software exporter has seen an increase in voluntary attrition from 7.5% to 8.3% in January.

“There has been a small uptick, and I think as time goes by, attrition will increase because there are many more opportunities. Not everybody gets promoted and people want to shift for various personal reasons,” he says.

Mr Pai says that companies should make sure they pay people better, offer more career opportunities and training opportunities. “We have to live with it,” he says.

The new uptick that he talks about was triggered by the increased hiring by MNC rivals IBM and Accenture in India. While IBM is letting staff go in countries such as Australia and the US for increasing the proportion of Indian workforce, Accenture is under pressure to improve its profitability by doing more work from cheaper offshore locations such as India. Both the companies are expected to hire over 50,000 people in next few years.

Experts such as Praveen Bhadada, engagement manager at Bangalore-based Zinnov Management Consulting, says companies will seek to address high attrition rates by offering retention and one-time bonuses apart from on-site overseas travel opportunities to their staff.

Growth is coming in from two engines: expanding domestic market revenues and backfilling for servicing newer geographies, he says.

Attrition is no more an HR challenge. For business leaders and CEOs at top tech firms, it’s one of the top priorities to ensure that there are enough professionals available to serve the customers.

Article courtesy of Economic Times.

“Yes”, agrees Shalini, the HR head at an MNC. “Very often, individuals tend to perceive work as a necessary burden and become lethargic and overtly dismissive of the positive energy. Nagging, constant reminders of tasks, stress at workplace, the butt of co-worker’s comments and jokes, lack of relaxation and recreation and the like can simply suck up all the creativity from even a competent individual and make him negative.” However, Shalini has a word of caution, “the dangers become far more pronounced if the individual is very explicit about the mounting negativity. It does catch up on the others around him. Quite rightly said, it grows on like a virus and engulfs the entire workplace. “Negative individuals thrive on an intrinsic ability to tap into the potential for despair which is present in all of us. They peddle their special brand of pessimism, including discouragement and defeatism, and can easily infect the people around them.” Says Fiona, who desists Supratik’s approach but feels helpless about it.

How then do you deal with negative people at work? Diwakar Pande, who runs his PR firm, has his own way of tackling negativity in his company. “I never try to persuade the negative person that he is wrong. Instead of confronting him, I try to show him some alternatives that are worth trying. I don’t rush in to propose a solution. Instead, I help him analyse the problem. If I don’t propose a solution, there will be no opportunity for the negative person to respond. I would rather that he proposes the way out. That’s a sure shot way of succeeding with a negative person.”

There are some who would dismiss that as a puritan approach and do not believe in dealing with negativity, the Diwakar way. And I am one of them. To my mind, negative people rarely contribute much to workplace morale as they wallow in their pessimism. Nobody has the time nor the energy in these testing times to make them come around. In choosing between whether to let someone go, or find them a place where they won’t interfere with the rest of your team, I urge you to “sooner rather than later” remove negative individuals from your workplace. Move them away. Put them into roles where they don’t have to interact with others, where they cannot influence the behaviour of others negatively. Cut them away from the remaining people. Prevent the virus from spreading. That is the only way in which you can prevent the spread of negativity in your organisation. I firmly believe that in case of dealing with negativity, quarantine works better than medication.

Planning is an investment. To plan wisely and well takes time, effort, patience‚ good research, and counsel. But a well-formed plan will pay for itself many times over.

There are many ways to create a strategy, but here are a few tried-and-proven principles that you might want to try:

1. Define your long-term objectives.

What exactly do you hope to achieve? Spell each one out on paper in concrete, concise terms. For the greatest chance of success, narrow your focus to one or two primary objectives. You can take on more or diversify later, as resources permit.

2. Set short-term goals to reach your long-term objectives.

In order to reach your long-term objectives, you will need steppingstones along the way. These should be smaller goals that together will get you to the final destination of your long-term objectives. They should be detailed and specific, concrete and measurable. If a goal isn’t something that you’ll be able to tick off as done, if it can’t be quantified, then it’s not specific enough.

3. Breaking down your goals into bite-sized pieces is crucial.

The simpler and easier your goals are to reach, the better, because you’ll see more immediate progress. It’s easy to overestimate and shoot too high when setting your goals. It’s also wise to realize that reaching big objectives takes time. Having a number of smaller goals will help keep the motivation level high, because you’ll see more tangible progress. And every time you tick off one of your smaller goals, you’re that much closer to your long-term objective.

4. Identify any obstacles.

Once you have determined your long-term objectives and your short-term goals, you should take a look at any obstacles, or cons‚ or things that might stand in the way of achieving the results you’re after.

5. Formulate a strategy.

Once you have determined your long-term objectives and the short-term goals, you need a plan that includes specific tasks that will help you reach each of your short-term goals. Your plan must be realistic. A lofty plan may look impressive, but if it’s too complicated or difficult to implement, it will never get off the ground and therefore be ineffective.

6. Assign the specific tasks that will be involved.

Determine who will be responsible for each step, when they should have it done by, and if it’s possible to know at this stage, how it should be done. Accountability is vital to success, as otherwise there will be no follow-through and no progress.

7. Document the plan.

Unless you document the plan clearly, things will be forgotten and left undone, and you might as well not have gone to all the trouble of having created the plan in the first place. Good documentation is vital for follow-through, accountability, and gauging progress.

8. Execute!

The most common pitfall of planning is failing to implement the plan. People invest in creating a great plan, and they have the best intentions in the world for carrying it out. But things come up, life is busy, and they don’t follow through.

9. Monitor your progress.

Set in place a means to monitor progress at regular intervals. Make sure that tasks are getting done when they’re supposed to and that progress is being made toward reaching your short-term goals. If you don’t stop regularly to check your “map” and see where you are, you’re less likely to stay on the road to success.

10. Expect the unexpected. Be flexible.

Things rarely happen exactly as we imagine they will. As you monitor your progress, be prepared for new factors and adapt accordingly. If something comes up that makes it impossible to carry out a task as you had hoped‚ look around for alternatives. If something isn’t working, change it. Generally follow your plan, but don’t set it in stone.

11. Keep it simple.

Guard against additions or complications that would overload the time and resources you’ve allocated to reaching a particular goal. When you first plan something, it often looks simple enough. But as you go along, the project grows—either because you keep adding new ideas, or because things are just more complicated than you thought—and usually some of both. Recognize when your plan is becoming overloaded‚ and determine what is necessary and what is not. Be willing to cut the frills and scale back on aspects that are just too costly in terms of resources.

12. Celebrate your successes, the milestones along the way.

Don’t wait till you reach your long-term objectives. Celebrating the completion of short-term goals generates satisfaction and excitement.

Article courtesy of: activated.org

The High Tea chat session was a smashing success with nearly 7,500 attendees. Some of the highlights in the chat conversation, and the noteworthy quotes were:

“HRMS technology is definitely in a very good shape is in the path of innovation. You will see more convergence & innovation happening in the coming years.”

“HR IT is a need of the hour and organization be it big or SME’s are increasingly investing in this area. I would tend to agree that it has to and can innovate further.”

“Integration of HR IT systems is an effort to be taken by individual organizations through interfaces and adding codes/ interfaces isn’t tough and can be done easily and flawlessly!”

“Whether we like it or not – we in HR deal with multiple systems in across various steps in the organization. As long as one has the willingness to learn and put that effort forward – it should be easy. What level depends on what system you want/ prefer!”

To read the complete transcripts from the High Tea session with Mr. Mahesh Ramalingam, click here.

He will be live on chat to answer your questions on February 3rd, 2010, between 3:00 PM & 4: 00 PM.

The high tea sessions have been met with smashing success on the TimesJobs site. Both recruiters and candidates alike have been flocking to hear the news and views of guest speakers on the site.

You can also click here to see the transcripts of our previous High Tea sessions.

All this and more will be answered in TimesJobs High Tea Session. If you want to know more about whether or not the hiring boom has arrived again in India, catch a High Tea Session with Mr. Elston Pimenta, Head – HR, Cybage Software Pvt. Ltd.

He will be live on chat to answer your questions on 20th January, 2010, between 3:00 PM & 4: 00 PM.

The high tea sessions have been met with smashing success on the TimesJobs site. Both recruiters and candidates alike have been flocking to hear the news and views of guest speakers on the site.

You can also click here to see the transcripts of our previous High Tea sessions.

While answering a question on how the recruitment scenario will be in 2010, he said, “2010 there is a positive outlook of recruitment and some sectors are opening up very well and I can see that we shall again see major recruitment taking place.”

On Jobseeker’s expected behavior in 2010, he said, “Potential job seekers will be holding multiple offers and last minute companies will experience candidate not turning up to the client. Besides this again the time pressure on closing the requirement will be another challenge I could foresee.”

While talking on the Retention issues, Mr Patel said, “Retention has been challenge across the industry and level. I have been consulting various organization to identify the missing link where employees are feeling that change is the only alternate for their career. If organization is able to identify this and address it well, retention can be managed well.”

To read the complete chat transcripts, click here.

Are you faced with challenges of recruitment? Looking forward to know what would be the Recruitment Challenges and its trends in year 2010? Are you out of ideas or unsure of what to do as problems keep weighing down on you in this area of your professional life?

All this and more will be answered in TimesJobs High Tea Session. If you want to know more about Expected Recruitment Challenges in 2010, catch a High Tea Session with Mr. Ashish Patel, Vice President – Human Resources, Asset Reconstruction Company (India) Limited.

He will be live on chat to answer your questions on 6^th January 2010, between 3:00 PM & 4: 00 PM.

The high tea sessions have been met with smashing success on the TimesJobs site. Both recruiters and candidates alike have been flocking to hear the news and views of guest speakers on the site.

You can also click here to see the transcripts of our previous High Tea sessions.

P.S.: You will be required to register as a Jobseeker to participate in the chat session.

Let’s start with the first month and newest feature of the year. Bringing you a richer experience with TimesJobs, we launched some powerful productivity tools to fasten your hiring process:

1. One Click Download - You can download resumes in just few seconds, all you need to do is select the time period.

2. Enhanced Usage Report Experience, Unlimited Saved Searches and New Search Settings – You can download a login usage report for a duration of 30 days, have no limit on saving your searches, and preset certain search parameters that are common across all search forms to save the same.

3. High Tea - Jobseekers can ask you job-related questions that they’ve always wanted to know the answers to, gain tips, and benefit from your experienced professional knowledge and more!

4. Resume Popularity - Sorting the search results by Resume Popularity will display the most popular resumes amongst recruiters, on top of search results.

5. Unlimited mail templates - The limit on the number of email templates has been removed. Simply put, this means you can now create and save Unlimited Email Templates.

6. TimesJobs on Social Media - Users can get updates through various social channels such as Facebook, Orkut and Twitter.

7. Search History - You can view the searches run at your account in the last month with details such as the time, parameters, resumes viewed from the search, new resumes added in the search made earlier, and you have the option of saving these searches too.

8. Smart Match/ Sort - You can view more matching resumes like the one you’re searching for and have all the most relevant applications appear on top.

9. Managing Job Applications - You can now reduce the time taken to go through a particular application.

10. Global Connect - You can be fully informed of a candidate’s strengths and achievements through viewing their social media resume before you contact them for future interviews, thus reducing your time spent on interview time by half.

Another major achievement is that TimesJobs reached a whopping One Crore Resumes! And last but not least, this blog kept rolling on throughout the year.

So as 2009 rolls on to its close and 2010 is just around the corner, here’s three cheers and a celebration for all that TimesJobs and you have achieved side-by-side in your career and on the job portal. Hip, hip, hooray!

Do let us know your feedback on our new features. We’d love to hear how they work for you!