haris mohamed

Interviewer – Why us?

Hearing this question, I was confused whether I landed up in a wrong address or is he trying to give me an advanced warning – “why are you joining us, this is such a hopeless place?”. I looked around and made sure I am at the right address, so obviously he is giving a warning about his place!

I am sure in many interviews you might have faced this question. For me, whenever I hear this question I go through the above emotions, trying to find out what the interviewer is trying to get from me. From my perspective this question is asked from a totally wrong angle. I believe the world has changed a lot, organizations have changed a lot and people’s perspective have changed a lot. So instead of confusing and giving warning signals to your candidates, you should inspire them by telling how good your organization is, so that it gives a warmth feeling in the candidates’ mind joining you. Your approach should persuade him to join the organization.

Ah yes, coming back to our interview, you guessed it right, the next question is – “Why you?”

And now I leave the thought to you….

Now a days for many organizations cost cutting means just sending out people or reduce the head count. Sacking people has become one of the key functions or a major activity and many organizations are even scrapping the exit interview. Obviously, you can never ask HR to work overtime. After all they are not used to it   There are some organizations who has made this (sacking people) as a project and they have even a project name for it. There is no harm in being out of shape or out of size as an organization, but do you really need to say it to the outside world by giving a project name and sending out people based on that? The way they do it, I won’t be surprised if this project becomes a department in the future, since it is going to happen every year (read further to see why). And yes, there will be KPIs too, to monitor this department!

In the current hierarchy structure most of the organization is having Heads, VPs, COO, CEO etc. Now let’s put aside the CEO and COO, we still have VPs and the Heads who should be really doing the strategic thinking on the business since they have the Senior Managers, Managers and others who can handle the day to day work. So why these strategic thinkers always end up in reducing the head count rather than thinking on reducing the costs on other areas? Why are they not looking into the lead times or your production? Why are they not looking into the procurement process? Why are they not looking at your material returns? Why are they not looking at your process lags? Why are they not thinking that a small investment on your technology can increase your efficiency and profit?

Every time the organization has a cost cutting scenario, they immediately come up with the idea of sending out people. And most probably what happens is the people who goes out will be from the stores or the production area and they will be the least salaried people in the pay roll. So, are you really cutting the cost? NO. In the payroll, the number of people might have reduced but the impact on the financial books is still minimal. And the same cost cutting process will happen again and again. And many people have told me, instead of sending all these people out, they could have send a couple of Heads/VPs, which would have been an actual saving to the company. As a matter of fact, they are right, except they forget one major thing – the decision WHO has to go out are made by these Heads/VPs.

I am pretty sure that most of these Heads/VPs are paid in lump sum and after all these big remunerations, is this the only solution they can come up for the cost cutting. That’s really bad. Isn’t, it? Are their bosses also being lazy like them, are they not asking them to go the “extra mile” they normally say to the employees? Nowadays for every project we do a cost and benefit analysis, right? So why are we not doing a cost and benefit analysis on these remunerations. Now don’t say, this is not the only issue they have to tackle, they have many other serious problems which needs to look after. If they were looking after those issues efficiently, then the company would not have been in this situation. Of course, there is a market impact, but if you are not performing that bad, then you should be able to suck those impacts to a certain level.

Let’s break the two main factors here, cost and decision making. I had a friend who worked for a company which had only couple of managers who were reporting to a CEO. The company was doing pretty good and because of this an MNC came and purchase them. After the takeover things changed. Instead of couple of managers, now he has 4 or 5 C positions, nearly 8 to 10 VPs and many Heads, Senior Managers, Managers and so on. So, what is the outcome? He was getting a 2 months’ salary as bonus in the earlier structure, and in the new structure it has been reduced to 2 weeks or sometime may be a letter which inspires him for further hard work! Obviously, I understand where the cost is, and I believe you too. Let’s look at the second factor, decision making – A company hires a GM to make things better. Unfortunately, this GM lasted only for 6 months. Out of this 6 months 4 ½ months he was either in duty travel or personal leave. Now if you ask this person to come up with a strategy for cost cutting, do you believe he had enough time spend in the organization to understand the people and process, I don’t think so. And he will have only one solution and you know it. These are small examples or just a scratch on the surface, there will be many other deep routed problems.

Please don’t misunderstand that I am against all the Heads/VPs. In my career I have seen some outstanding personalities in these roles and they have inspired me a lot to pursue in my career. Some of them were real role models who motivates and mold you to become future leaders. They had the charisma and audacity which awed you and they were very transparent to gain your trust. But there was the other category who lied on your face for their benefit and for whom what matters was only a dollar a day. Whatever we have discussed above is about this category.

Tail Note – Next time you have a cost cutting situation call your Heads/VPs and tell them come up with ideas other than sending out people. Also advise them if any of them comes up with the idea of sacking people, he will be sacked. I am sure you will see some ground-breaking ideas coming up to save your cost. If not, sack them and you save the cost again, it’s a double whammy!

Why do we need HR?

If you are a freelancer then obviously I would say you don’t need HR, but the moment you start adding people to your company then the need of HR slowly arise. So what it actually shows is once you start growing, you need HR in your organization. This may be an answer to our question. And we can see multi million organizations with hundreds of people in HR department and this actually proves the above statement. But one thing that puzzles is, on the other side we have people like Ricardo Semler who doesn’t believe in HR and says he doesn’t need HR department. Semlers’ organizations have more than thousand employees and they are running successfully as well. He even questions the existence of Head Quarters, because he believes the moment you say HQ, it creates a bossy impression. This gives us an interesting outlook to see what HR should actually do.

Over a decade I have been a customer (or victim !!) to many HR organizations and if you ask me the customer satisfaction level, I would say it is very low. And I have seen many evolutions where Human Resources have changed to Talent Management and then to People Management and so on. Unfortunately I would say only the name have changed, but the attitude of most of the people remained the same. Once you are in HR department you will get a feeling that you are in a hard-core government organization where you don’t have any opportunity to speak, but just accept the service based on the officer’s mood. This is the same scenario almost everywhere as per my friends circle ! Obviously there are exceptional cases and I do respect those who provide an excellent service.

In many case what I have seen is that, HR is shrunk to just an administration department. I believe this is because of the short-term vision many companies have and due to this the functions of HR is limited to Sourcing, Performance, Retention and Exit. The whole outlook can be changed if we start thinking from a long-term perspective where HR can handle Succession Planning, Continuous Improvement, Leadership Development, Talent Scale-up and so on. One of the famous model in this line is Dave Ulrich Model where it explains HR should have mainly four quadrants – Administration, Business Partner, Change Agent and Employee Champion. And these four quadrants will relate to the people, process, strategic focus and operations of an organization. This is where HR can be pivotal and lead and organization to success.

I believe for many people it will be hard to digest Ricardo Semler’s concept of no HR, but please be aware that a bad HR is more dangerous that no HR.

Key Performance Indicator or Keeping People Intimidated !

Performance appraisal has become a nightmare these days, and it all starts with setting the KPIs. From my perspective many people miss the whole game in the start itself, i.e to identify what is the KPI they actually need. Many of the KPIs I have seen is just for the sake of giving a KPI and it doesn’t reflect where the company wants to go. For me the objective of any business is to make money NOW and in the FUTURE until unless you are running a charity organization. Does the KPI you set relate to this objective?. In most cases – NO. Even though it may start with this motive from the top, once it gets drill down to the bottom, it actually deviates from the real purpose and it becomes a namesake. I have come across a scenario where two people from the same department had conflicting KPIs and they were fighting each other across the table to meet their KPIs!

So what happens here? Many organizations make a mistake saying that minimum this much KPIs (in numbers) should be there. This actually force the people to invent KPIs which maybe irrelevant to business and this dilutes the whole purpose. And once these invented KPIs comes into picture then the poor employee has no choice other than start running to meet these. And every employee or manager is busy meeting their KPI (invented!!!) and forget the purpose of business. I have heard a saying that local optimization leads to global sub optimization and I always felt that this is very true when you look from a KPI point of view. Every one in every department is busy optimizing their area (or meeting the KPI) but this actually leads to sub optimization of the whole company. I have come across a scenario in an organization where I saw the buyers in purchasing department where chasing all the open orders and forcing the suppliers to bring the item asap irrespective of their lead time. I was curious to understand the motive behind this and came to know that the buyers had a KPI to close all open orders! (local optimization). But what actually happens on the other side is, the cash flow of the company is seriously affected (global sub optimization). And many of these may end up in your inventory without usage and that can be another KPI…..

Is the employee actually responsible for this? I would say NO, because as I mentioned earlier in many cases, they don’t have a choice but to just run around to meet the invented KPIs. So I think the organization should be more vigilant on providing the KPIs. It should be well studied before given to the employees and especially when you tag the performance to your pay. I have also seen the organizations which actually cant align the KPIs in the root stage are going for complex performance management method like Balance Score Card. This is actually suicidal.

The key here is as always go to the basics, understand what you actually want and set the KPIs which allows you to be successful and which helps your business to grow. And if you cant achieve this then better stay away from it rather than punishing your employees and wasting their precious time.