HR Thoughts – People First

Another Anniversary in HR: Looking back at things our team is proud of

Today, Jul 27, marks my another work anniversary in the HR function, and the anniversary of my first day at Profoundis—later acquired by FullContact, Inc. I am trying to reflect on some great people matters our leadership and HR teams are proud to have envisaged and implemented over the last few years, besides the usual HR business stuff. Not in order of occurrence, though. The credit goes to our awesome leadership and HR teams across offices of FullContact 🙂

What led us to these decisions/benefits

FullContact takes decisions based on the Core Values it is built on. Our people decisions are mostly based on treating people as independent adults and believing in an accountability-driven organisation than a task-driven organisation. Leaders of our organisation have shown immaculate allegiance to these two principles while making people decisions. What if it goes wrong has always been part of the decision-making process, but has not been the deciding factor that prevented us from doing something right.

FullContact India got GPTW Certified within 2.5 years of its operation

FullContact India got recognised as a Great Place to Work®

Within 2.5 years of beginning its operations, in 2019, the FullContact India office was recognised as Great Place to Work Certified®. This reflected how our members felt about the organisation as a great place to be at, how our processes aligned to benchmarks that the GPTW team set. We were one of the very few SME IT organisations, back then, to achieve GPTW certification back then in Kerala.

Ask No Payslip Policy

In 2021, FullContact India decided that we would NO LONGER ask for the CURRENT SALARY information, or PAYSLIPS of any candidates. We would just ask them their expected salary, and no documents violating the candidate’s financial privacy would be collected.

FullContact does not ask for payslips from previous organisations

Travel Benefits

FullContact used to offer travel benefits (then called PAID Paid Vacation) that offers both two weeks of paid leave just for travel and a sum of Rs. 1,50,000/- per year to take an actual vacation. Later this was revamped to be called FULLBalance Vacation Benefit with UNLIMITED paid vacation time and a sum up to Rs. 2,15,000/- per year to take the vacation. At the latest, I recently took a trip to Turkey and Azerbaijan, thanks to this policy.

Holidays

FullContact has an unparalleled holiday and leave policy in India among the IT SME organisations of our nature. As I write this, FullContact India employees enjoy double the national average per year as holidays—27 in total in a year. This includes 13 scheduled holidays as per norms in the Holidays Act, ½ Day Fridays during Jul-Sep, and year-end holidays from Dec 26-31. As part of our ½ Day Fridays policy, all the Fridays from Jul 1—Sep 2 are half-day Fridays, meaning we close our work by noon on Fridays and take an early weekend to spend more time with ourselves and our beloved ones.

FullContact offers unparalleled vacation benefits and holiday plans

An extended Leave Policy

FullContact has always tried to maintain a top-notch leave policy. Apart from the typical Sick/Casual/Earned/Maternity/Miscarriage/Abortion/Adoption/Sterilisation leaves, FullContact India also offers:

Unlimited Hospitalisation paid leave, for as long as the employees remain in a hospital; this is not to be availed from sick leave or any other bucket
Paternity paid leave for 21 days
Bereavement paid leave for 14 days
Family First paid leave for 3 days to spend time with family for any reason (e.g: celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, just spending time, etc.)

No-leave-approval process

Effective Jan 1, 2022, FullContact India moved from Leave Approvals to Leave Acknowledgements. This means, our paid leave requests are auto-approved and only an acknowledgement will be sent to the reporting managers as FYI. There’s no approval process if Earned Leaves and Casual Leaves are applied for at least 5 calendar days in advance. All Sick, Covid, Hospitalisation leaves, and Bereavement and other sickness/illness-related leaves are auto-approved without any notice requirement.

Unlimited VTO

FullContact, besides our leave policy and holidays, offers UNLIMITED Paid vacation time off for all our members. Our members are able to take any number of days as vacation, besides all the short-term statutory leaves and holidays! We have a formal policy to encourage members to take a MINIMUM of three weeks of vacation per year. The new Unlimited Vacation policy takes care of the other end of the benefit, making it practically and technically unlimited.

FullContact offers unlimited paid vacation time off for all members

Our Benefits

Our awesome list of benefits includes but is not limited to:

Health Insurance for family and parents fully paid for by FullContact
Accidental Insurance fully paid for by FullContact
Life Insurance fully paid for by FullContact
Employee Access Program fully paid for by FullContact
Equipment reimbursement for people of determination
ESOPs
FULLBalance Vacation Bonus
Monthly work-from-home reimbursement
Home office setup cost reimbursement
ThankFULL Rewards and Recognition Program
SkillFULL Employee Training Program
SuccessFULL Career Pathing Program
And we are default work remote 🙂

First among the few to close down physical offices when the pandemic hit

I included this in the list since I am proud of the leadership team that unanimously decided to shut down our physical office space until things get back to normal (phew, it took two years for it to be normal) when Covid 19 hit. We were one of the first few offices to go remote—and we went fully remote, permanently so later—when the pandemic hit. Our flexible work policy dueing pre-Covid era that empowered our members to work from home did help us in making this transition with ease.

The guiding light for decision-making was of course the safety and wellbeing of our members. We were also one among the first very few SME IT orgs in the state who incorporated a home office setup cost reimbursement upto Rs. 7500/- which was later increased to Rs. 10,000/-. We also offered (and continue to offer an increased amount of) Rs. 1000/- per month toward home expenses such as the internet charges.

Unparalleled Covid 19 Benefits

Our organisation, like many others, took the decision to stand by our members during the tough times of Covid 19. We released a stream of Covid Benefits for our members and their families. It included sponsoring covid vaccinations for members, spouse, kids, parents and parents-in-law and our members appreciated this benefit.

We also declared 4-day work week in the month of May 2021 for our members to get more time with family and friends during those tough times.

Other Covid 19 benefits included 14 days of paid time off if a member is Covid positive, Covid insurance for all employees if not already covered by the organisation’s group health insurance, employee access program to provide mental support and counselling sessions free of cost—for members and their families, 7 days of paid time off as Caregiver PTO to take care of a family member in case of being Covid positive, two days of additional paid leave for vaccination, salary advance for members affected by Covid, reimbursement of Covid tests, and continuation of salary for six more months in case of an unfortunate Covid death. We also ran the #HealthyFullContact initiative and also put together some Mental Health and Wellness Ideas that our members found useful.

FullContact offered unparalleled Covid 19 benefits to our members

An Inclusive workplace

Developing an inclusive, equitable and diverse workplace has always been one of our prime agendas—though this is a work-in-progress. Our DEI teams across both offices set SMART Goals and work toward making them a reality. This is a picture that our team treasures and gender inclusivity of this magnitude is something that we enjoy having at FullContact. We also offer reimbursement of the cost of equipment used by our members who are people of determination, up to 7500/- in a year.

Compensation Structure with Flexi Benefit Plans

FullContact introduced Flexi Benefit plans to make sure that our employees get to decide, to an extent, how their compensation should be structured. We made sure that we do not inflate CTC for the sake of making it bigger by including components like medical insurance premiums, gratuity, variable bonus, ESOPs, etc. in the CTC—the philosophy was to keep it simple for the employees and prospective employees to give an idea about a fixed compensation.

Also published on LinkedIn and Medium.

A definitive guide on not assessing in just 10 seconds if a candidate is hireable

“It comes with experience. I can tell if a candidate is hireable within the first ten seconds of my interaction”, I heard a senior HR professional say this three years ago when I was eavesdropping at the break time of an HR conference in Hyderabad. I was still fresh on the job, with hardly one year of experience, and I wished if I could be like him one day.

Fast forward to 2021. I couldn’t still be like him. I read a few human behaviour books in the interim, read about body languages, did a formal course on BEI and watched some TED/TEDx videos on the subject since interviewing is one of my favourite things to do. As yet, that’s a dream not come true, and I wish it stays that way.

Back in college days

I come from the middle part of Kerala state and went to undergrad college in a nearby district. I was a hosteler where we had inmates from all across the state. Those who know Malayalam would know that the way Malayalam is spoken differs almost every 100km within the state. I had a friend from Malabar region whom I heard, on the first day on phone, speaking to his mom, “Ningal evide poyathanu?” (verbatim: Where did you go?). The word ‘ningal‘ (=you) is treated as a word without respect, except probably in a formal setting, in my area of living. One would easily get offended if I would use that word.

I was assuming that my friend was angry with his mom and I did ask him if everything was alright. To my surprise, he was all cool. When probed, he told me that it is common to use that word, without any lack of respect, in the Malabar region. That was sort of a cultural shock for me. The life thereafter was full of such cultural shocks, different ideas, fighting over ideologies, settling for compromise, understanding that people would have different opinions and that the world is no binary. That understanding, maybe, comes with age and experience.

Each candidate is a story book that’s not to be *read* in 10 seconds.

Then why?

Every person’s story is different. Very unique in every aspect. We know our story. We may know a few others’ stories as well. That does not mean that we know every story. Humans have a tendency to look for patterns in everything they pursue. We are like a machine learning algorithm where there are preset stories (knowledge so far) which we try to match with the new entrant. Unless and until we have sufficient data to classify the new entrant, the algorithm will fail. That classification is the learning process, which needs sufficient data to process.

Hence it is very important that we provide sufficient time hearing people out. This is the only basic step to remove our own biases in the evaluation processes. We need to hear people out. We should look for what they have done in the past, and most importantly why they have done those, and try to extrapolate it to what can be done. This process takes time and this is why I don’t digest when one says they can assess if a candidate is worth hiring in the first 10 seconds itself!

Interviewer is not a machine, nor is the candidate

Both are humans. Even the most learned machines need at least a dozen inputs to identify patterns for an evaluation. Then how can a human being, with their very limited knowledge—howsoever big one would assume it to be—understand a candidate in a few seconds? That would mostly be a biased opinion, I may think.

As both the candidate and the interviewer are not machines, we need to listen. A candidate may be late to the interview, they may have dirt on their dress, their language may not be perfect, their hair may not be combed, they may have had a gap in their career—how would one know what’s the story behind it without them telling us? What if they have a story that will justify these? If an interviewer is suddenly decides on the hirability of a candidate, that’s way too unjustifiable for the very same reason.

Way forward

Tech interviewers may have a different reason to identify if a candidate is suitable for a role faster, but HR interviewers should spend sufficient time to listen to stories of the people. Candidates are adults with a totally different life story than ours. This is exactly why some great companies have thorough and sufficiently long interview practices, even if the candidate may possibly seem a bit off in the first few minutes. HR interviewer’s responsibility lies in traversing through the story to see if there is a new story the candidate can build at your company. Past predicts the future and history is not a subject learnt in 10 seconds.

Also published on LinkedIn and Medium

Work From Home Musings

Here’s the snapshot of my WFH experience (though I’ve done it in the past, not as many continuous days as this time).

Work From Home, Working From Home — Image Courtesy: www.entrepreneur.com

Gained weight. I was on a consultant diet for the last three weeks and had lost 3 kgs. Looks like I eat at leisure while at home and gained 2 kgs over the last one week.
I eat my meals on time, but while at the office I am known to procrastinate meals and eat them all together later. However, I drink less water while at home. And I miss pantry talks.
Missing the office AC. The room where I’ve set up my work from home corner is damn hot. Internet at the office was heavenly, too.
Missing my people around, especially the G&A team of FullContact. Meetings having been moved online, I’ve started missing meeting people in real. Added to it, I am in HR.
I fail to switch to work attire though many on the web suggest doing so.
Productivity swings. At times, I am underproductive while productivity soars up sometimes.
Feeling unnaturally sleepy after lunches (while at the office, it doesn’t happen quite often).
Kid at home & Working at home together is a bad idea.
Last but not the least, I am living two more days in a month. I have a two-hour transit daily, multiply that by 24 and you get 48 hours = 2 days!

Musings of an Engineer-turned-HR: Here’s what the budding HRs should know

It was on a not-so-fine day that Arjun, CEO of Profoundis and my collegemate met me at Lulu Mall in Kochi. I was going back to Bangalore, where I worked at Oracle as a Software Engineer for around 3 years then, and I had no clue what Arjun had to offer. He asked me if I would like to join as the Head of HR of Profoundis, which was about to be acquired by FullContact, Inc.

I personally believed that I had the traits of an HR (though when I look back now, most of those thoughts were out of place ;-)). I had a dilemma during the final year of study of my graduation whether I should pursue MBA or MTech. After a lot of articulation and inner discourse I decided to pursue MTech, which I do NOT regret now. I ended up in IT, as I assumed, but I never felt Software Engineering was my realm. Having these excruciating thoughts to jump out of my engineer role coupled with Arjun’s offer, I didn’t have a second thought. I had my personal reasons to move to Kochi, too.

If I do not say that I was apprehensive, rather confused, about my capacity to be a Head of HR at the very beginning of my HR career itself, I wouldn’t be doing justice to me. I did a lot of reading afterwards, which in fact Arjun asked me not to. He said they wanted an unconventional HR, who doesn’t go by the books, and recommended that I be not distracted and misinformed by the literature. However, I did my fair share of reading before I joined Profoundis.

What followed was a roller-coaster ride. As I write this, I can feel the cold feet I’d when I first entered the Profoundis office. But I’d something in store – an amazing team who believed that people operations is fundamental and pivotal to any business. There started this small journey of my HR career, which is now at the fourth year! The three years have been of immense learning, understanding, mistakes, corrections, unlearning and what not! I would like to scribble down for the budding HR fellows, who might have as bad a cold feet as I’d on my first day, as to what to expect, what to ignore, what to render on an HR job. Here we go:

Prepare to Unlearn and Re-learn

One might have learnt many things about HR and processes in their text book; or they might have been told that this is how the ideal HR function looks like. Be ready to face the fact that HR is different across organisations depending on the nature of business, nature of the workforce, locale and the priorities of the leadership. What you learnt in books could be obsolete by when you join the HR job – so be ready to remember/forget what you learnt and start afresh on many things—let’s preserve and remember what’s still required. Be ready to read and re-read the latest books, trends, researches, blogs, etc. so that you stay up-to-date.

HR is not just about compliance

The general notion that many have is that HR is all about recruitment and compliance – this is a myth. HR has over the last two decades evolved as a business function. While compliance plays an important role in the success of an HR team, treating them as the core function of HR is erroneous. Compliance is an assumed-to-be-required function of HR. It’s very basic. HR’s more to it. But remember—compliance is a culture. Nurture it, but that’s not only what you’re defined by.

Culture is your dad, business is your mom

It’s the business leadership and the HR leadership together that decide the fate of an organisation. If one of this duo fails, either you will end up with a zero or negative business growth or a bunch of unsatisfactory people. The two are complementary to each other—or, rather, co-existent. HRs (should get a chance to) decide the culture of an organisation, while they participate in deciding the business destiny. Gone are those days when HRs come into play when someone needs to be hired, reprimanded or fired. Starting from talent acquisition to talent development to talent retention to talent nurturing to making the workplace a great experience for your members depend on how the HR team is envisaged and functions. Your job exists because the business exists

Find your path to heaven

One may define the success of their career by multi-factors. For some, it could be the happiness of their members, achieving KRIs, promotions and merit increases, and what not! But ultimately, if you ask me, the end result of one’s actions should be such that it makes him/her happy.

Learning is the Key

You need to invest some time to learn. To learn from others, your peers, leaders, fellow HRs, blogs, and what not! Make sure you are part of the communities of your liking. I have learnt a lot from the fellow HRs through NIPM, WhatsApp groups, meetups at Infopark, conferences, etc. Whenever you’re part of such a gathering, make sure you find (rather than it giving you; thanks to Anish for the usage) some takeaway as learning. You may also follow some really good HR blogs like PeopleMatters, RBL, etc.

Learn from marketers

It’s high time HR team learnt from the Marketing teams on various fronts. Starting from employer branding, HR should look at how the marketing team hustles in getting the product into the market and reach the right targets. In my opinion, Marketing teams are the ones who first use all the theories and tools of human interactions, technology, and result-oriented-action-plans in any organisation. They are leaders in many respect – for example, take the case of Conjoint analysis which helps the product organisations decide how their product should be. HRs can very well adopt this (and many organisations have already done so) technique to define the happiness factors of their members—the benefits, the facilities, the factors by which they will leave the organisation, etc. One must look at how the marketing team performs in their organisation and imbibe what can be imbibed into their HR team—be it theories of human interaction or defining success of one’s function.

Not every grey hair deserves your ears

Keep the thought that every grey-haired man is a mentor out of your minds; it’s the grey matter that matters. You might need a mentor who can lead you through your HR career—since you’re just taking your baby steps—but that doesn’t mean that you should lend ears and years to those who pretend to be mentors. Try a few, leave them it doesn’t work. But trust me, having a good mentor is always worth the effort—but the call is yours.

Do not forget to live

When you strive to have a great work-life balance for your members, do not forget to have a life for yourself. Chill, keep calm and just be yourself. Have an introspection of whether you hate Mondays, or super happy on Fridays—if the answer is a yes, you should consider switching the job. At the end of your life, what matters is whether you have been happy throughout and that happiness is defined by you and you alone.

Also published at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/musings-engineer-turned-hr-heres-what-budding-hrs-t-a-shrm-cp/?published=t

Training Your Employees to Take up Jobs at Other Companies? Yes, Amazon does it!

The Last Mile has always been a concern for all the realms of ideas. Today, let’s have a look at one of the Last Mile (at least, I would prefer calling it so) stretch of an HR concept.

Many organisations see training as an investment with a target ROI to the business. While this is an agreeable concept, IMHO, training is an ‘engagement’ (may not be in its traditional meaning) activity. When an organisation trains an individual, s/he is seen as an asset and thus feels more valued in the organisation. Plus, training offers avenues for self-exploration and self-improvement. Training, if done at the right metrics, certainly can improve the engagement dynamics.

Amazon went to that extra mile when it comes to learning. They are now offering company-sponsored learning budget to employees to TAKE UP JOBS IN OTHER COMPANIES. Yes, you heard that right!

Amazon found that there is a chunk of their employees who are earning less than the average of salaries. Those employees may leave the organisation owing to this concern. Most organisations would let it go—which is the start of that ‘extra mile’—as such. Amazon decided to let the employees take up a course of their choice that would equip themselves with skills that will land them in a better job—at the cost of Amazon!

The idea behind this is pure love; to let the employees empower themselves who will later be implicit ambassadors of Amazon. Or at the least, that’s the ‘human’ part of HR 🙂

#humanresources #LnD #training #employeeengagement

The Agony and Ecstasy of Working as HR Professionals in Organisations Today

‘You should not stop being people’s advocate! The day you end being one is the day the HR dies’.

These words which I happened to randomly listen to while working at Oracle as an Engineer, later became the cornerstone of my HR career. While I believe that any job has its own merits and fashions, there are certain jobs that have the capability to make impacts of higher gravities. HR is one, nevertheless, it goes a thankless job in some organisations.

HR, like any other job, is like a two-sided coin. You will have happy days; and then there will be days that give you a headache. Interestingly, the primitives on which the functions of an HR are based invariably embrace the ‘headaches’. What’s fun if things go as in the books; HRs come into play when things are not in line or if there’s no line at all. Thus, the headaches become opportunities. We cannot really see these as binaries—either yes or no—but grey. Let’s have a closer look:

Leaders with People Mindset

HR team’s vision will only be successful when your company has a management that believes in people. Forget your company’s revenue, business strategy and everything else; it’s the faith of the management in the people business and their mindset of treating people as the largest investment that drives the success of any HR team.

Starting from the CEO, every C-level and VPs should have a clear understanding and buy-in to the policies that the HR team parks on. This is the biggest factor of all which decide if an HR’s life is hell or heaven. This article on HBR says that during 2008 recession, only a third of HR departments were consulted when layoffs happened, pointing to lesser influence HRs had in strategic business/people decisions—this is fast changing now.

It’s imperative for the modern day HR to work closely with the line managers as well, to make sure that the ‘people mindset’ envisaged at the top level trickled down appropriately at the length and breadth of the organisation. The organisation’s profitability comes only through the growth; and growth comes only through its employees and culture—not the C-officers alone! HR is certainly a partner in strategy execution, and hence they should have business acumen and understanding as well as the people mindset. 33% of execs believe that there’s ineffective HR leadership that drives their organisation to the unsolicited directions as per this HBR report. This can be tricky and painful for some of us, but definitely the need of the hour; it has always been, but clearer in the recent years.

Data and Opportunities for Analytics

With the advance of technology, data has come to play a major role for the HR as well. This has helped establish data-driven strategies. Since most HR operations have gone digital, HR gets instant access to the data and can run an analysis on it to reach faster and effective conclusions. Analytics has resulted in the greater impact of HR activities starting with talent acquisition through engagement to exit.

Changing Workforce

Gen X is fast coming to the top of the ladders, and most ‘workforce’ now comprises of Gen Y and Z. The millennials tend to pose and trigger a change in the way most HR teams function. The factors that excited Gen X may no longer be valid/needed for the Gen Y/Z. This needs a larger discussion in all organisations, where HR takes the lead role.

Starting from how your recruit talent to keeping them engaged should change due to this workforce change. Your ‘food coupons’ or ‘telephone reimbursement’ may not be an attractive benefit as it used to be. Your vacation plans, office timings, attire requirements and health initiatives may need a thorough change keeping in mind the interest of the new workforce. This is one place where HR gets into agonies or ecstasies. This also points to changing your HR practices and policies to accommodate the new-styled workforce who love things to happen faster and easier.

Pay Gaps and Diversity

Gone are those days HR recruited the ‘protagonists’ alone. Ideologies and societal factors keep changing, and Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) has become another opportunity for HR. While this is seen as an ecstasy from a philosophical standpoint, various reports suggest that the pay gaps and men:women employee ratios are still really bad in numbers. The report from WeForum suggests that in 82 out of 142 countries, pay gaps based on gender is still increasing. This is alarming, and agonising for the HRs, for they have been trying to establish a reverse scenario through D&I and localisation initiatives.

KPMG reports that HRs around the world struggle to keep in line with the global workforce, which turns out to be an agony for the HR fraternity, yet. With globalisation, teams become more and more integrated and agile, which HRs must run fast to cope with. Increasing number of remote, and arguably virtual, employees demand that the HRs tighten their belts.

Attraction, Training and Retention

Organisations today want not job-seekers, but talents. For example, in IT, with the massive ‘attack’ of automation over the services sector has diminished the glitter of the old glossy, silky texture of the industry to a great extent. Companies today want to find talents (“attraction”) rather than applicants finding them for jobs (“acquisition”). The onus is on the HR team.

The new organisation have a diverse workforce that constantly looks for enhancing their skill set. The old school training curriculum is undergoing a thorough revamp, which is, yet again, equally agonizing and ecstatic for HRs. Starting from the training modes—virtual to gamification to anytime anywhere learning platforms—to the training content, organisations are thoroughly revamping their L&D strategies with the Gen Z in mind.

Another area of concern for the HR is retention. It’s way beyond creating a good brand; stories float about youngsters rejecting offers from big brands to choose what they want to do in small companies. Retention plans of the new age is another agony for HRs, planning of which needs a thorough analysis of their workforce as well as the industry trends. People don’t just stay back for money.

HR Tech: the future

As it goes without saying, HR Tech is already here. Yesteryears’ Personnel Manager changed to HR, and then got transformed into People Enablers over a period of time. The new role of HRs will be that of technology and business leaders enabling people functions with the help of cutting edge tech. Coming of tech into HR will certainly reduce the job opportunities of the existing HR workforce, but wait! It’s a two-sided coin again. While this is seen as an ‘oh-my-god-am-I-gonna-lose-it’ scenario, why don’t we look at the brighter side of it? It gives us room for learning technology and pouring it into what we have been doing, thereby making a yet greater, happier, better workplace! Ain’t it ecstatic?!

Disclaimer: Any of the discussions above does not reflect the views of my present or previous employers. Views are all personal.

Employee Engagement and College of Engineering Chengannur: An HR Case Study

There’s something between College of Engineering Chengannur and CECians—the students and alumni of the college that binds the duo together. That’s never-ending loyalty and affection of the students and alumni of the college for their alma-mater.

College of Engineering Chengannur is my undergraduate college where I did my Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering, and graduated in 2010. During our time, there were less than 220 students in an entire batch all the streams put together. The college was the first Govt. self-financing engineering college in the State of Kerala. When it started in 1993, it was a much sought-after college in the state.

The unique feature of most of the CECians that I have noticed is their affection for the college. The moment when an alumnus in a random crowd happens to say he’s a CECian, the other one in the crowd picks it up promptly and they instantly become family. This feature has helped the students (and alumni of the college) immensely, especially in networking and career prospects. CECians have a thing.

The sole intention of this article is not to ‘market’ my alma mater, but to use it as a case study as to how organisations can learn from it to build a highly-engaged crowd in their teams. There are no numbers since I have not conducted a formal study.

While I think of the reasons why there’s a high grade of the sense of belongingness to the college, it takes me to the fact that there have been a variety of events that happen at the college every year. Thanks to being a government college, most of the events are envisaged, planned and executed by the students alone. This gives them a sense of responsibility, pride and achievement.

Now what an HR should learn from this scenario: there are technical groups, arts club, sports club, National Service Scheme, Nature Club, multiple sports events, stages of art expressions, union senate, etc. In fact, there’s a surplus of forums and activities for a comparatively smaller college like ours.

The above fact has resulted in a very desirable scenario—that each of the students will be part of at least one of the activities/groups. There are exceptions, but on a negligible quantity. At the end of the four-year course, there would be at least an event/activity that every student has volunteered in/participated in.

Employee Engagement Credits: https://unsplash.com — Credits: https://unsplash.com

Students and the college recognise each such successful programs. This adds to the sense of achievement of the students. This ‘boost of pride’ is the sole reasoning for the immaculate belongingness of its students and alumni. That stays for good.

I was coming to it—the lesson an HR can take from this is how s/he should plan the engagement activities in the organisation. It’s imperative that the engagement initiates that the HR department drives at their organisation touch the sentiments of the employees. A wise selection of engagement events will strive to touch the likeness or interests of all employees.

It goes without saying that a single initiative alone cannot attract the interest of all employees. Hence, it is important to know what your employees are interested in. Some of the employees may have a personal interest in painting, some in music and some other in badminton. To the best extent possible, a good HR engagement practice and design will always have events planned to touch these interests of the employees, at least once in a year. It’s simpler in SMEs, but in larger companies with HRBP concepts implemented, the same ideology can be extrapolated on smaller teams.

Let me close by saying this—the intention is not to create a heat map of the hobbies of your employees and then take the mode of it as the next engagement activity. But the intention is to identify those employees whose sentiments are barely touched and to address them.

How about a deeper analytics on the engagement score vs hobbies of the employees for better insights on what next you should take up as an engagement activity in the company? Will write about it in a few days, but would like to know your thoughts first on what’s written above. Let me know in comments.

Happy HRing 🙂