Initially, HR management was seen largely as a support function, with major focus on hiring and managing the exit of an employee. As businesses evolved, so did the role of HR.

Today, HR is a business partner and a key function in building an organisation. In addition to taking care of on-boarding and exit formalities, HR is also tasked with the responsibilities of attracting and retaining talent, as well as nurturing employee growth within the organization. There is a paradigm shift from the old practices that are fast becoming redundant. Particularly in the QSR space, newer and more convenient procedures that aid an organization’s goals are displacing some old HR concepts. Here’s a list of HR practices that are fast becoming extinct or are in the process of being so:

1. Recruitment on the basis of quantity

The QSR space is burgeoning and as more players enter this space, the demand for competent and quality professionals keeps growing. Companies begin to struggle with a high attrition rate, even after bulk recruitments. Hence, a lot of focus is being given to employee training and development, counsel and guidance facilities as well as other HR initiatives aimed at keeping employees satisfied and committed to the organization.

In the present scenario, it is considered ideal that an organization create an internal talent pool to tap for ideas, new initiatives or responsibilities through training. This empowers employees to participate in growth opportunities within the organization. At McDonald’s, we prioritise existing employees for non-specialised openings across operations. Our current Vice President of Business Operations across McDonald’s restaurants in West & South India, Ranjit Paliath, is a fine example. He had joined the McDonald’s family in March 1995 as Trainee Manager at its first restaurant in Bandra.

2. Centralization of leadership

The Retail and QSR segment is a major employer of youth, including first time job seekers. It is important for HR professionals to groom talent – taking on young people and developing them into leaders through training programmes and relevant work experience. The rising employee turnover rate is making it essential to develop programs that allow for employee growth within the organization and train them to assume senior leadership positions in order to create smooth transitioning of functions.

3. One-way Communication Channel

Today, it is critical for organizations to have a two-way communication channel with its employees. This exercise not only provides a transparent platform for both the parties but also educates employees on the organisational goals while keeping the organization informed about an employee’s strengths and weaknesses. An HR professional must understand an employee’s perspective and customize talent management exercise on the basis of organization objectives as well as employee needs and expectation.

There is a paradigm shift from the old practices that are fast becoming redundant. Newer and more convenient procedures that aid an organization’s goals are displacing some old HR concepts

4. Excessive dependence on Face-to-Face meetings & Briefings

The trend of daily meetings has reduced as employees tend to be stuck in longer meetings leading to non-productivity. New concepts like e-learning and online communication facilitates flexibility and is a refreshing approach to exchange ideas and even training, compared to face-to-face modules. McDonald’s was the first QSR in the industry to take e-learning to the work floor.

Archaic practices have given way to new techniques that have helped organizations align their business goals with HR practices. HR professionals must never allow processes to become the culture of an organization. They must always strive to create an environment that is accepting and open to employee advice and opinion.

5. Intense focus on operations & processes

An HR professional must understand that processes are supposed to help organizations grow and improve efficacy for new hires and existing employees among other things. These processes must not be a hurdle to an employee’s growth but must be an enabler.

Today, employees think beyond monetary compensation and the HR needs to be mindful of the fact that an employee performs better if the work environment encourages a healthy work-life balance. It is important to have an understanding of work pressures and requirements in the organization and design competent training programs to optimise talent and make work enjoyable. Technology goes a long way in ensuring that processes are smooth and hassle free.
At McDonald’s, we have introduced GATE, a software that standardizes the talent life-cycle management, assessment, performance reviews, succession plans and mobility management. Recently, we also introduced ADEPT-15, a personality assessment tool that helps us analyse an employee’s strengths and weaknesses. To make it more employee friendly, the system is available in local languages so that no information is lost in translation.

The way forward

Archaic practices have given way to new techniques that have helped organizations align their business goals with HR practices. HR professionals must never allow processes to become the culture of an organization. They must always strive to create an environment that is accepting and open to employee advice and opinion. It is critical for talent leaders in organisations to keep pace with employee expectations and needs, creating a workforce that exudes productivity and performance. And an environment that not only facilitates learning but also makes work fun, flexible and creates sustainable futures for both the employees and the organisation.

Over the past years, HR had a mandate of maintaining firm control over the workforce; provide low-cost, convenient administrative HR services; and promote fairness through equal treatment of employees. In the future, the mandate will be to understand and serve employees with highly appropriate offerings that improve their commitment, enthusiasm, preservation and performance.

In a milieu, where our lives are ruled by myriad digital screens — mobile, tablet, laptop, TV, cinema — each telling us how to communicate, shop and behave; and where our business processes are getting more automated, we might just be forgiven to think if we even need people in our organisations any more. At the same time, the need for human ingenuity and intelligence to design the final outcomes on these interaction mechanisms as well as the need for emotional connect in an increasingly impersonal environment around us cannot be more emphasised.

Get ready for a quantum shift

Retail as an industry is at a crossroads today. Existing business models are being challenged as businesses evolve at a much rapid rate than ever before. The new wave of creating business models around shopping on the internet is creating a demand for skills, not known earlier.

As it is, retail demands a baffling variety of skills — ranging from business managers to fashion designers to project managers to customer service associates (It’s enough to befuddle the ordinary HR manager). Add to it, the demands placed by technology experts and analytics champions, which have just gone to further confound an HR professional’s problem. Customers, whether online or in brick-and-mortar stores, are evolving and are demanding more not only in terms of better products and services but also in terms of their shopping experiences. The demands on HR, therefore, are not only in terms of harnessing the right functional skills but also in terms of creating right attitudes and building a customer-centric, performance-focussed, empathetic organisation culture.

However, the truism that ‘the more things change, the more they remain the same’ still holds. In these times, HR professionals have a greater need to go back to the basics. There is an increasing need for HR to connect better with business. A CHRO, who is not in sync with his CEO in crystal gazing on what is going to happen to the business in the next few years, simply belongs to the dinosaur age. Sound knowledge of business levers, and the key triggers which could impact the way business is done, is now more essential than earlier. Understanding this would lead to forecasts on the skills and competencies required in the future. An understanding of, and a call on, how technological advances would impact business processes would determine the need and quantum for human interventions. A good HR manager, should therefore, be ready for a substantive shift in the quantum and nature of people in the organisation.

6 must-have HR skills

1. A sound knowledge of business levers, and the key triggers that could impact business
2. An understanding of how technological advances would impact business processes
3. An ability to deal with people from varied and disparate backgrounds
4. Knowledge of the science of sociology and neuroscience in addition to human resources
5. A knack for maintaining an emotional connect with people
6. Awareness of newer and efficient solutions available for handling HR processes

Update your skill sets

It is expected of HR to keep the workforce engaged and aligned with the organisation’s business goals. With people from increasingly varied and disparate backgrounds present in the organisation, and each employee community demanding different ways of motivation, an intelligent HR professional should be well-versed of such a requirement, and means to deliver on them. A cookie-cutter approach having standard operating processes on ‘engagement activities’ will not work now. Like a good marketer, a sound HR professional needs to now segment the workforce.

Increasingly, new performance management and appraisal processes and workplace practices will need to be adopted. Performance appraisal processes and workplace practices that evolved during the manufacturing era are still prevalent today. Instead of vociferously and erroneously backing them, it will serve HR professionals well to appreciate the great way in which the society around has transformed with newer mechanisms of ensuring adherence to business goals. Peer evaluations, social media and community recognitions perhaps are now more potent than plain monetary incentives. They need to reflect on whether some of the rules governing time and attendance need to be questioned in an environment that provides flexibility of working anytime from anywhere.

With rapidly changing technology and an increasingly young workforce, the HR manager is going to be subjected to managing the aspirations of the youth on the one hand, and handling the challenge of reskilling the older generation on the other. That is because even as younger people join an organisation, longer life-span and rising costs are forcing people to continue working for longer than earlier. Increasingly, the HR professional needs to identify the source of these social tensions and be adept at resolving them. Right skilling of the younger people joining the workforce to enhance productivity is also key.

Use technology

We, in HR, will be doing our businesses a great disservice if we do not adopt technology in our processes. Identifying the right talent for the right roles, making the talent productive, and keeping them motivated remain age old problems for HR. However, newer tools are available to us to deliver better on these tasks. From talent sourcing, acquisition and life cycle management to exit management, newer and efficient solutions are available today, and are emerging by the day.

HR managers need new skills to help organisations achieve its business goals

Ignoring the potential of new tools is dangerous because it will lead to a rapid obsolescence of what we, as professionals, bring to the table. Increasing use of analytics and big data, even in HR, is of paramount importance. The behaviour of people in our organisations, if it can be measured and analysed, can throw up key messages on how to keep them happy.
A good HR manager now needs to be more aware of the science of sociology, neuroscience and perhaps anthropology too, and not only be limited to the science of Human Resource Management. The challenge for maintaining an emotional connect with people is greater than ever before. Unless HR professionals raise their empathy quotient manifold, organisations are at a risk of creating an army of mercenary automatons.
Newer challenges bring newer opportunities and a chance to learn things afresh and explore the limits of our own abilities. Today, we are afforded this chance, to renew ourselves and to be better human managers.  Let’s grab this opportunity with both hands.

The John Lewis story is characterized by success on three fronts – sales, online and people.

They have ridden out the recession in the UK and have used their online channel to script a successful, “Brick and Click” strategy. Sales as of December 2013 were £ 11 bn, with the online channel contributing £1 bn.

The company is entirely owned by the employees. There are no external shareholders.

Laura Whyte, Personnel Director, John Lewis delivered the Key Note speech at the session on “Emerging People Management practices” at RAI’s Retail Leadership Summit in February 2014. STOrai presents some insights from that speech.

Employees are partners: John Lewis is entirely employee owned, and is one of the largest retailers in the UK – sales of £11 bn. The People management Model is based on the principle that “A happy, engaged workforce and a long term focus delivers shareholder value”.

The proposition to employees is about outstanding leadership and training. John Lewis believes that employees, will then deliver a customer satisfaction proposition, sufficiently differentiated as to create value.

Profits are either ploughed back into the business, or redistributed back to the employees. Everybody gets the same percentage of profits irrespective of grade / level.

The nomenclature used to refer to employees is different. They are consistently called “Partners”.  The Partnership model has three key principles:

• Purpose: Empower Partners with the knowledge and desire to provide outstanding service
• Power: Generate incremental sales through customer loyalty
• Profit: Enable the development of deeper customer relationships

Leadership Compass: John Lewis has internally developed and articulated a “Leadership Compass” (see image). The compass measures the balance between Strategy vs. Execution on its vertical axis, and the ability to keep the balance between “Legacy v/s Change” on the horizontal axis.

The Leadership Compass recognises the contradictory pressures that Partners are expected to manage. By measuring both sides of a skill set (i.e. strategy AND execution / Legacy AND change) – it acknowledges the fact that these will not always be in perfect balance. Partners are expected to use the compass to maintain a ‘creative’ tension, while driving business towards a goal.

Partners concerns can range from advertising to the environment

The John Lewis Own Brand swimsuit campaign:
Please could you confirm the stance the Partnership takes on using models smaller than UK dress size 10, and whether these models used fit the Partnership’s criteria?

Business expenses:
We have recently seen a lot in the media about the abuse of financial allowances and MP’s expenses. Can Partners be reassured that controls are in place to ensure no abuse takes place in the Partnership at any level?

Plastic bags:
As a responsible retailer, why are we not leading the field
All concerns are carefully debated, considered and voted upon.

Implementation: Partnership principles are implemented through the following:

• Each week – two magazines are published in-house – a local, store specific edition and a national magazine.  Any Partner can write in anonymously to these magazines and their manager must respond. No editing of the letters is permitted – unless the Chairman approves. Partners concerns can range from advertising to the environment – and all concerns are debated carefully and publicly and then voted upon.
• Employee attitude surveys are used to gauge feedback. Feedback must be implemented, if this is the opinion of the majority of Partners.  Response rates to these surveys are 88%.
• Partners decide the final % of profits to be redistributed.

Does it work? If the ‘proof of the pudding is in the eating, then the John Lewis model does work’.

“Most UK retailers reacted to the 2009 recession classically – they cut inventory and head count. John Lewis decided to continue its approach of focussing on the long term. “Let the profit takes its course” was the majority view of the Partners” says Laura.

In 2009, the company did not make money for 5 months – but the Governing Council decided to continue with the strategy of using online as a low cost channel for growth. They saw the online channel as an opportunity, and in 2010, increased SKU’s from 45,000 to 200,000.

Over the next four years, the channel became a growth engine – 2013 online sales crossed £1 bn.

What next: The Company’s focus now is to consolidate and expand its online success.  “We expect that by 2020 – Bricks and Clicks will be equal contributors to sales” says Laura. The next part of the story is to go mobile – in 2013; the company spent £40 million on its website and mobile offerings.

Online success is about controlling the supply chain on an ‘end to end’ basis – John Lewis is building the second fully automated distribution center @ 750,000 sq. feet to match its twin.

A large segment of the online customer is young – 39% are less than 35 yrs. old. This is good news for a brand that has often been considered, “solid, stable, middle class” in the UK market. To cater to this demographic, the company has created designer collaborations – and developed a master brand in Fashion & Home.

• Over 2,000 Partners registered for an external qualification in 2013
• Address concerns that retail is not a “proper job”.
• 335 Partners achieved a qualification in Distribution
• 215 Partners achieved a Contact Handling qualification
• New JL apprenticeship programme

• John Lewis is an employee owned Retail company

• It is one of the largest retailers in the UK – sales of 11 bn pounds.

• The People management Model is based on the principle that “A happy, engaged workforce and a long term focus delivers shareholder value“.

• The proposition to employees is about outstanding leadership and training.   John Lewis believes that employees, will then deliver a customer satisfaction proposition, sufficiently differentiated as to create value.

How the partnership model works

• No external shareholders – the company is entirely financed through internal accruals and borrowing.

• Profits are either ploughed back into the business, or redistributed back to the employees.

• Everybody, gets the same percentage of profits irrespective of grade / level.

Laura Whyte, Personnel Director, John Lewis

Employees are “Partners” in the business.

The principles of the “Partnership Model”

Behaviours which epitomize the Partnership model.

• These have been articulated, crafted and adopted by Partners.

Developing a Leadership “Compass”

• Partners have created a Leadership “Compass” – Critical behaviors that are required by current and future leaders which recognize the conflicting tensions that they are expected to reconcile.

Leaders are expected to balance and maintain a ‘creative’ tension, while driving the business towards the goal.

Mechanisms that John Lewis uses for getting things done.

• Partners decide the final % of profits to be redistributed.

• Each week – two magazines are published in-house – a local,  store specific edition and a national one

• Any partner can write in anonymously – their manager must respond.

• No editing of the letters is permitted – unless the Chairman approves.

• Employee attitude surveys are used to gauge feedback – which must be implemented, if the it is the opinion of the majority of Partners.

–Response rates to these surveys are 88%.

On employee attitude surveys:  “If you are not prepared to change, don’t ask the question”.

Partners concerns can range from advertising to the environment

All concerns are carefully debated, considered and voted upon.

What happens when things get tough?

• Most retailers reacted to the 2009 recession classically – they cut inventory and head count.

• John Lewis decided to continue its approach of focussing on the long term.  “Let the profit takes its course” was the majority view of the Partners.

• In 2009 the company did not make money for 5 months.

• Saw the online space as an opportunity, increased SKU’s from 45,000 to 200,000.

Taking decisive action – the online story.

• Expect that by 2020 –Bricks and Clicks will be equal contributes to sales.

• Website / mobile enablement is key.  2013  – spend of 40 mio pounds on the website.

• Online success is about controlling supply chain – end to end:  building the second fully automated DC @ 750,000 sq feet to match its twin.

• A large segment of the online customer is young – 39% are less than 35 yrs old.   This is good news for a brand that has often been considered, “solid, stable, middle class” in the UK market.

Panel: Emerging People Management Insights

Panel from L-R:

• Aditya Narayan Mishra, President (Staffing), Randstad India
• Ajay Kaul, CEO, Jubilant FoodWorks Ltd
• Dr Nitin Sanghavi, Manchester Business School
• Laura Whyte, Personnel Director, John Lewis

Does the retail industry represent an attractive career option for Indian youth?

Moderator: Prasenjit Bhattacharya,
CEO, Great Places to Work Institute

At the stage of lifecycle that we are in, retail industry does provide quality jobs and growth opportunities to the youth.

– Ajay Kaul, CEO, Jubilant Foodworks Ltd

As a employer, the retail industry requires the “5 R’s” – Recruit, Reward, Retrain, Refresh and Retain.

There is a huge skill set and knowledge base in the country that can be tapped by retail.
– Dr Nitin Sanghavi, Manchester Business School

The John Lewis People Management Strategy

• Define company culture in terms of employee behaviour
• Power and profit sharing. For example, the employees of John Lewis choose to work longer hours during Christmas sales with the knowledge that they will share greater profit at the end of the holiday season.
• Choosing leaders who can strike a balance between strategy v/s execution and legacy v/s transformation.
• Democratic engagement: At John Lewis, we run a magazine whereby employees suggestions are published and acted upon immediately.

 Laura Whyte, Personnel Director, John Lewis

The John Lewis People Management Model

How to bridge the skill gap in Indian retail?

• Retail requires more soft skills that technical skills.
• Hence, it is essential for employers to clearly define the kind of talent they are seeking.
• Skill gap is not a phenomenon unique to India – it’s a natural result of a high growth market. However, many retailers have come forward to invest in the right talent.

Aditya Narayan Mishra,
President (Staffing), Randstad India

How to bridge the skill gap in Indian retail?

• At Domino’s Pizza, we have a philosophy of “Make, Bake OR Take”.
  Everybody in the company must either Make  pizza, Bake it or Take it (to the customer). And anyone who doesn’t do that needs to help others who do.

• Thus, we glamorize mundane jobs like pizza delivery to make young people feel empowered.
• We have an active suggestion scheme which takes into account  and acts upon feedback from all employees irrespective of rank.  Out of 3000 suggestions received, 360 have been implemented.
• We have a policy of ‘No sub-Franchising’. Hence, everyone is part of the Domino’s family.

Ajay Kaul, CEO, Jubilant FoodWorks Ltd

“Front line employees need to see management “walking the talk” – i.e. ‘Make, Bake OR Take’

In Conclusion

“Glamorize mundane tasks to empower ground-level employees.”
Ajay Kaul, CEO, Jubilant FoodWorks Ltd