Indian HR

Six Sigma is a business process improvement strategy which essentially checks that a business is doing what its customers want, that the process employed is the most effective known and that variation is removed from that process to provide significantly improved consistency.

First introduced back in 1986 by Motorola - who began achieving significant results just two years later - it is not a methodology solely for manufacturing industry, far from it. It is equally applicable to any process in any business sector - from banking to construction and much, much more.

The Literal Definition of “Six Sigma”

Literally speaking, the 18th letter in the Greek alphabet, sigma , is the symbol for standard deviation. It is a measure of variance. The goal of Six Sigma is to reduce variation so there are no more than +/- six standard deviations (Six Sigma) between the mean and the nearest specification limit. When a process is operating at Six Sigma, no more than 3.4 “defects” per million opportunities are produced.

Six Sigma means something different to every company. For some, Six Sigma is a total management philosophy, for others it is simply a process improvement effort designed to increase productivity and reduce costs. Regardless of the way it is used within your organization, Six Sigma means data driven decision making!

In its most simple sense, Six Sigma is a highly disciplined approach to decision making that helps people focus on improving processes to make them as near perfect as possible.

The term “Six Sigma” relates to the number of mathematical defects in a process. Six Sigma practitioners focus on systematically eliminating the defects so they can get as close to “zero defects” as possible.

Done properly, Six Sigma ensures that internal processes are running at optimum efficiency.

This powerful strategic tool is customer focused and is ultimately designed to increase profit through improved quality. Companies that practise Six Sigma identify and eliminate costs that provide no value to customers. They analyse their processes to find out where and how defects occur, measure them and eliminate the problems. Its benefits are seen as significant cost reduction, improved customer service and enhanced employee productivity. Research is aiming to identify best practice and challenges in Six Sigma implementation. A Six Sigma Best Practice Implementation framework has been developed as shown below.


MANAGEMENT STRUCTURE & CULTURE

* Major roles in a Six Sigma organisation
* Role of top management in creating and maintaining an enterprise wide vision and culture
* Managing the politics of Six Sigma

PEOPLE MANAGEMENT

* Selecting the right people for Six Sigma implementation
* Involving people in Six Sigma implementation
* Skills required
* Training needs
* Overcoming resistance to change

TOOLS & TECHNIQUES

* Identifying and understanding customer requirements
* Measuring and analysing organisational performance
* Achieving Six Sigma process improvement
* Six Sigma process design/redesign

DEPLOYMENT PROCESS

* Selecting business process for improvement
* Planning for Six Sigma
* Communication
* Six Sigma Implementation
* Managing the initiative
* Integrating Six Sigma with the organisational 'way of doing business'

Key Ingredients for a Successful Six Sigma Program

Strong leadership and top management commitment

Many previous quality initiatives, such as TQM, have been faced with a major difficulty, which has been a leadership attitude of ‘ Do as I say….. not as I do’. Some initiatives also faded out because the company leaders lost focus (Pande et al., 2000).
In order to overcome this problem, company leaders have to ensure that the Six Sigma initiative is a momentum for process improvement and hence it must be sustained over the long term.

Good support from top management is imperative in the restructuring of the organisation and achieving the cultural change and motivation of employees towards quality and the Six Sigma strategy to the business. The leaders have to be strong advocates of Six Sigma. Eagerness and enthusiasm shown by the leaders can go a long way in getting the rest of the employees on board.

Organisational infrastructure

In addition to top management support, there also needs to be an effective organisational infrastructure to support the Six Sigma undertaking. A great deal of work in Six Sigma is done by teams. The various roles played and positions held by the team members are explained under the belt system. Pande et al (2000) suggest that a good number for any project team is between 5 to 8 people. Many of the project teams will require cross-functional teams in order to successfully tackle the problem and implement process improvements. In many organisations practising Six Sigma will have project sponsor and process owner in launching and supporting the projects.
Sponsors (also called champions) are senior management staff that guide the team and negotiate resources for the team. Process owners, on the other hand, are individuals responsible for a particular process. The process owners are involved in identifying the opportunities for process improvement. The timing and readiness of the organisation is also important. This is because the introduction of Six Sigma within an organisation requires a great deal of resources, commitment of leadership, time,investment, etc.

Cultural change

The successful introduction of Six Sigma requires adjustments to the culture of the organisation and a change in the mindset of its employees. Employees have to be motivated towards the introduction and development of Six Sigma program through various reward and recognition schemes. There can also be a problem of employees dismissing Six Sigma as the latest fad or hype. To overcome this problem and also to allay the fears that employees may have, there has to be early and effective communication to all employees on the why and how of Six Sigma.

Eckes (2000) identifies four different factors of resistance, which are:

¨ Technical – frequently people find difficulties in understanding statistics within Six Sigma program. Education and involvement is needed.

¨ Political – it is based on seeking the solution to be implemented as a loss, real or imagined. The strategy to avoid this is creating the need for change and then showing how change can be beneficial for them

¨ Individual – it consists of employees who are highly stressed as a result of personal problems. The strategy could be to try to reduce stress with a less workload.

¨ Organisational – this occurs when an entire organisation is committed to certain beliefs, which are usually instituted and communicated by the management. Reluctance to change can be diminished by communicating to the managers the benefits of the initiative. Many authors and theories have been developed to reduce this behaviour (Rao, 1996; Bounds, 1994).
For many successful companies in Six Sigma (GE, Motorola, ABB, Sony,Honeywell), a key factor in communicating over the commitment and enthusiasm of Six Sigma has been the direct involvement of their top leaders.

Training

Training is a crucial factor in the successful introduction and development of Six Sigma program. It is important to communicate both the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of Six Sigma as early as possible, and provide the opportunity to people to improve their comfort level through training classes (Hendricks and Kelbaugh, 199. There is usually a hierarchy of expertise, which is identified by the belt system. Within GE, the belt system is fundamentally divided into (Henderson and Evans, 2000):

· Champions – fully trained business leaders promoting and leading the Six Sigma deployment in significant or critical areas of the business
· Master Black Belts (MBBs) – fully trained quality leaders responsible for Six Sigma strategy, training, mentoring, deployment and results.
· Black Belts (BBs) – fully trained experts leading improvement teams across the business
· Green Belts (GBs) – individuals trained in Six Sigma supporting Six Sigma projects
· Team members – individuals supporting specific projects in their areas The good thing about the belt system is that everyone in the organisation is speaking the same language. Another important by-product of such company-wide training is that it fosters a culture whereby the ownership of quality is viewed as the responsibility of the entire organisation and not just of the quality department (Hoerl,199.

Although investment in training is a key factor, in order for people to successfully use the knowledge, it is important for the training to be structured such that it is relevant to employees’ everyday jobs. The best way to achieve this is to provide ‘hands-on’ learning such that people can put key concepts and skills into immediate practice.
Moreover, the examples and exercises used in the training have to reflect the needs and challenges faced by the particular business.

Understanding the Six Sigma Methodology, Tools, Techniques & Metrics

A healthy portion of the Six Sigma training involves learning of the theory and the principles behind the methodology, i.e., DMAIC cycle. The elements of the DMAIC cycle (which stands for Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control) are explained below.

Define Phase

This phase involves:

Ø Who are the customers and what are their needs and expectations?
Ø Understand the customer CTQs and transform them into project CTQs
Ø Develop a project team charter (who is doing what, determine project goals,what are the key deliverables, benefits of going the project, costs issues, etc.)
Ø Gather data from customers to understand what exactly they want from us (use of customer surveys, benchmarking data, Quality Function Deployment, etc.)
Ø What is the process? Use tool such as high level process mapping to map out core processes

Measure Phase

This phase involves:

Ø How is the process measured and how is it performing?
Ø Decide what to measure and how do we measure it?
Ø Measure current performance of the process (Throughput yield, DPMO,capability , etc.)
Ø Do we have a capable measurement system?
Ø What is the variability contributed by the measurement system to the total variation?

Analyse Phase

This phase involves:

Ø Identify the root causes of defects or failures ?
Ø Understand the data (using simple statistical tools such as scatter plot, histograms, etc.
Ø Use of simple tools ANOVA, Hypothesis test, Regression analysis, etc. to analyse the data
Ø Select the ‘vital few’ causes from the trivial many for improvement phase

Improve Phase

This phase involves:

Ø How can the causes of defects or failures be removed?
Ø Identify the key variables which causes the problem
Ø Document solution statements
Ø Test solutions and measure results

Control Phase

This phase involves:

Ø How can the improvements be maintained or sustained?
Ø Document the new methods
Ø Select and establish standard measures to monitor performance
The employees must be capable of choosing the most appropriate tools and techniques for their situations. There are three major sets of tools/techniques that are required within the Six Sigma problem solving framework. These are outlined below
(Henderson and Evans, 2000) .

¨ Team tools – responsibility grid, threat versus opportunity matrix, action workouts, etc.

¨ Process improvement tools/techniques – brainstorming, Pareto analysis, process mapping, cause and effect analysis, Design of Experiments, Process FMEA, etc,

¨ Statistical Tools – Hypothesis tests (t-test, F-test, Chi squared, test), ANOVA, scatter plots, capability analysis, control charts, regression analysis, etc. In addition to the tools and techniques, we also need to have a clear understanding of the common metrics used within Six Sigma business strategy. Examples of these metrics include: costs of poor quality, number of customer complaints, defect rate, throughput yield to mention a few.

Linking Six Sigma to Customers

Six Sigma should begin and end with the customers. Projects should begin with the determination of customer requirements. The process of linking Six Sigma to the customers can be divided into two main steps:

a. identifying the core processes, defining the key outputs, and defining the key customers that they serve.

b. Defining the customer requirements

The first step is based on Porter’s concept of value chains (Porter, 1985), which aims at representing the organisation as a collection of activities. Core processes are usually chains of tasks involving various departments and functions that deliver the products or services to the customer. Core processes are supported by a number of enabling processes that provide vital inputs to the value-generating activities.
Therefore the companies first need to identify, define and prioritise its core business processes. The next stage would then be to define the key outputs from the core processes and the key customers that these outputs serve. Using this information,
process maps can be produced for each of the core processes and how they interconnect. This helps to create a better understanding of the business and its interdependencies.

Having defined the core processes, the next step is to define the customer requirements. The organisations need to recognise the fact that the needs, demands and attitudes of customers change over time. The organisations therefore need to prioritise projects that enhance the ability to meet the customers’ needs. In line with the data-driven philosophy of Six Sigma, the business needs to have a “Voice of the Customer (VOC)” system to gather customer data. This VOC system becomes valuable only if the data is analysed and acted upon. The insight gained from this data can then be used to establish guidelines for performance and customer satisfaction.
The data can also be used to analyse and prioritise customer requirements and hence link these to the company strategy.

Project Prioritisation and Selection

Poorly selected and defined projects lead to delayed results and also a great deal of frustration. The following three generic criteria may be used for the selection of projects (Pande et al.).

¨ Business benefits criteria

§ Impact on meeting external customer requirement
§ Impact on core competencies
§ Financial impact
§ Urgency
¨ Feasibility criteria
§ Resources required
§ Complexity issues
§ Expertise available and required
§ Likelihood of success within a reasonable timeframe
¨ Organisational impact criteria
§ Learning benefits – new knowledge gained about the business,customers, processes, etc.
§ Cross-functional benefits

For many organisations, financial returns to the bottom-line is the main criterion. Therefore the projects should be selected in such a way that they are closely tied to the business objectives of the organisation (Ingle and Roe, 2001). The scope and the lead time of projects is crucial during the early stages of the Six Sigma effort. Many complex projects require long term efforts and huge investment leading to long lead times for payoffs. This can be sometimes frustrating and discouraging to many people in organisations. Hence it is imperative to keep projects small and focused so that they are meaningful and manageable.

Linking Six Sigma to Human Resources

Human resources-based actions need to be put into effect to promote desired behaviour and results. Some studies show that above 60% of the top performing companies practising Six Sigma link their rewards to their business strategies. At GE,
for instance, for any manager to be considered for promotion, they have to be Six Sigma trained. Likewise, up to 40% of top management bonuses are tied to their specific Six Sigma success (Henderson, 2000).

IT infrastructure

Six Sigma is about change and change requires action from top management. Purposeful and useful action cannot occur without a system to monitor and control it.
Hence effective Six Sigma implementation requires an IT system to receive, organise and help translate this information into effective decisions for the organisation. For such a system to be active and functional, it requires an underlying IT infrastructure.

The following are some of the main roles an effective IT system would be required to play (Kendall and Fulenwider, 2000).

Support the collection of data from the process
Provide a means for effective communication and sharing of data/information across the organisation
Provide an easily accessible database holding information regarding all ongoing and completed Six Sigma projects
Provide an interactive training tool for employees to learn the Six Sigma methodology and the tools within the methodology for problem solving activities
Provide on-line coaching for Six Sigma tools and techniques
Provide software packages to assist with the selection and prioritisation of projects

Linking Six Sigma to Suppliers

Many organisations that implement Six Sigma find it beneficial to extend the application of Six Sigma principles to management of their supply chain. Referring back to Porter’s idea of a value chain, for a business to be successful, it must ensure a seamless and effective chain of supply to satisfy market demand. This alignment of the business towards the customer is one of the principal goals of Six Sigma.
Traditionally the approach was to have many suppliers in order to keep costs down. However, the trend now is to build strong partnerships and win-win relationships with fewer suppliers. Many companies such as Bose and AT & T have extended this even
further by having their supplier representatives work their engineers. This has led to substantial improvement in their product quality. Therefore, strong supplier involvement on Six Sigma programs can be beneficial in bringing the supplier closer to the customers and hence improve the quality of the product/process.

Conclusion

Six Sigma provides a comprehensive and flexible system for maximising business success. It has been considered as a revolutionary approach to product and process improvement through the effective use of statistical methods. This paper illustrates the key ingredients one should consider before a Six Sigma program is initiated in their organisations. All these ingredients are essential for the successful application of Six Sigma principles to any business process. If any of these ingredients is missing during the introduction and development of Six Sigma program, it would be then the difference between a successful implementation and a waste of resources, energy, money and time.


References

1. Pande et al. (2000), The Six Sigma way: How GE, Motorola and other Top
companies are honing their performance, McGraw-Hill, USA
2. Bounds, G. (1994), Beyond TQM, McGraw-Hill, USA
3. Eckes, G. (2000), The Six Sigma Revolution, John Wiley and Sons, USA.
4. Rao, A. (1996), Total Quality Management, John Wiley and Sons, USA.
5. Hendricks, C. and Kelbaugh, R. (199, Implementing Six Sigma at GE, the
Journal of Quality and Participation, Vol.21, No.4, pp. 48-53.
6. Henderson, K.M. and Evans, J.R. (2000), Successful Implementation of Six
Sigma: Benchmarking General Electric Company, Benchmarking: An
International Journal, Vol.7, No.4, pp. 260-281.
7. Hoerl, R.W. (1998), Six Sigma and the Future of the Quality Profession,
Quality progress, June, pp. 35-42.
8. Porter, M. (1985), Competitive Advantage, The Free Press, NY.
9. Ingle, S. and Roe, W. (2001), Six Sigma Black Belt Implementation, Vol.13,
No.4, pp. 273-280
10. Kendall, J. and Fulenwider, D.O. (2000), Six Sigma, E-commerce Pose New
Challenges, Quality Progress, July, pp. 31-37.

Industrialization is the general process by which economies and societies in which agriculture and production of handicrafts predominates become transformed into economies and societies where manufacturing and relation extractive industries are central. This process occurred first in the UK during the industrial revolution and was soon repeated. In other West European societies profound changes in social organization of production and distribution are incurred especially a rapid increase in the division of labour both between individual and occupational group and also between industrialized and non-industrialized nation changes. When lead to a transformation of the techniques and the social organization of agriculture as well as of extractive and manufacturing industries. This change has also brought in a new concept of Industrial Relations, which studies the relation between employees and employers. IR basically refers to in the shop-floor (between the management and manual workers). However by the passage of time, IR shifted its focus to a new concept of employer relation which defines the relation between the white-collars and the management. This resulted due the shift in economic activities, economic organization and manufacturing process as a whole. Thus the concept has broadened itself.
The human resource management over the years has emerged as a new dimension to the practice of personnel management in the corporate world. The wealth and prosperity of a nation depends upon the development and effective utilization of human resource. A country which is unable to develop skills and knowledge of its people and employ them effectively will be unable to develop. Human resource management finds the earlier expression in the form of personnel management. It encompasses planning, organizing and controlling of the procurement, development, compensation, integration, maintenance and separation of human resource to the end that individual organizational and social objectives are accomplished. In practice, it has been seen as a somewhat lose conglomeration of discrete activities such as recruitment, training, labour welfare, labour loss and industrial relations; all working towards individuals. But the outcome of the research on need hierarchy, human relation and participative management, etc. by the management theoretician and practitioners have finally aimed at recognizing human resource at least as important as financial or material resources and advocate for careful and expert attention. Here a new technology called HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT replaced the earlier terminology PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT.
From the above discussion, it becomes clear that HRM particularly has 2 functions:
1) Utilization function (all functions of personnel management).
2) Development function (consider individuals as most valuable asset like other physical assets).
HRM and its development in the Indian contrast have its roots as in development of the functions of management in the West as an indigenous tradition, personalities and practices. The Western impact was felt in this country at 2 levels – a) Political and managerial. The reality of HRD in India is very complex contribution from the world of academics and among thinkers. Which has systemized local tradition to modern management concepts like the model of lurturant? “Task leadership� developed by J.V.P.Sinha, the “affection integration model as an effective style of management in Indian conditions� developed professor N.K.Singh and the team at the foundation for organizational research (FORE). The traditional HRD approaches in India are older than in Japan. They are nearly a century old in a giant company like the TATA Iron and Steel Ltd., the largest private sector company in India or in a much smaller organization like the Malayala Manorama which is India’s largest circulating newspaper and also in number of other companies particularly in the south.
The HRD values help impart dynamism and vitality to organization that they help tap the initiative and creativity of the workforce through clarity of goals, result oriented and team spirit.
T.V.Rao, a management academician cum practitioner clearly defined HRD in the organizational context as a process by which the employees of an organization and helped in a continuous planned way to:
a) Acquire and sharpen capabilities.
b) Need to perform various functions associated with them present and expected future role.
Develop these general capabilities as individuals and discover and exploit their own inner potential as individuals and discover and exploit their own inner potentials for their own organizational purposes.
Develop an organizational culture in which supervisor-subordinate relationship, teamwork and collaboration among everybody in the organization and that they contribute to the professional well-being, motivation and pride of the employees.
HRD systems include performance appraisal, feedback, creativity, career planning and training organizational development. Rewards, employee welfare and quality of life. The element of a whole HRD system comprising the various of the various organizations who based job, based factors as well as employee centered activities like corporate planning, manpower planning, recruitment, training, performance appraisal, job rotation, job redesign, talent spotting, career development and succession planning are to be sighted as intra-development elements.

Here are a variety of no-cost things you can do to begin building your employment brand.

Benchmark and learn all you can internally from successful product and employment brands. Do the same externally (especially look at Cisco, GE, HP and IBM).
Assess your organization's current management practices, benefits, culture, etc., to identify what you "have to sell" and what you need to improve.
Do a quick survey or assessment of your current employment "image" among employees, applicants and general public using surveys and focus groups.
Calculate the potential ROI for branding and sell the idea to management.
Develop a catchy slogan that highlights your very best "great place to work" feature(s).
Develop a people-program inventory that lists each of your organization's unique human resource or people programs. This list should be used as ammunition to highlight your best practices in marketing pieces and in media articles.
Identify company products and programs that involve innovation, help save lives or protect the environment. Use these stories and examples in recruiting materials.
Rename some of your successful people programs with "catchy" names that grab people's attention.
Do a side-by-side comparison of your benefits and people pro-grams against those of your talent competitors. Identify areas where you are clearly superior.
Identify and assess your competitors' employment "brand" against which you'll be competing. Develop a branding strategy that high-lights the differences between you and your competitor.
Compose one or two-paragraph profiles of individual employee "success stories" for use in articles and on the Web site.
Work with the CEO's office to get top executives to mention your organization's great people practices both in their internal and external communications. When necessary, write that section of the speech for the CEO.
Apply for listing in the Fortune 100 Best Places to Work list.
Work with the PR department to identify public events that the company is sponsoring. Send managers and recruiters to talk about the company's great people practices. The recruiting department should also add a few of the marketing staff to its advisory team to offer suggestions and to coach recruiters on the latest marketing tools and strategies.
Work with the sales department to identify public sales events and trade shows where materials highlighting your great people practices can be displayed.
Quantify the participation and usage of your work-life balance and other similar high-profile people programs. Quantifying the usage sends a more powerful message than merely saying "we have a program."
Rank potential media and tools to convey branding efforts (based on what your target audience reads or attends), and then select the initial media and methods to convey the branding message.
Review articles that mention different companies' people pro-grams. Then develop a list of the criteria used by local publications when they select a company or people program to feature. Utilize these criteria for selecting which program stories you should high-light in your branding effort. In addition, build relationships with local publications and their reporters. Volunteer to act as sources, and encourage them to write stories on your great people and management practices.
Identify the target market (the type of candidate you are trying to attract) for your branding efforts. Develop a target profile for them (who they are; where to find them; what they read; events they go to; etc.).
Get key managers to write articles and give talks at industry association meetings. Be sure they include great people practices in their materials.
Get managers to give talks at community meetings and at the local Chamber of Commerce that highlight your people practices.
Invite family and friends of employees on site to see "what it is like to work here" and the importance of employees' work so that they will help spread the word on what a great place your organization is to work.
Offer benchmarking sessions on your great "people practices" to teach your customers and suppliers how you do great people man-agement in an attempt to get the attendees to spread the word.
Profile key employee success stories and best management practices on your corporate career web site. Periodically highlight your great people practices in internal publications to remind employees of the great things you do.
Cosponsor "career workshops" in schools to build your im-age early.
Ask the union, if you have one, to help spread the word about what a great place to work you are.
Encourage local college professors to visit and write "case studies" and articles about the company's people practices.
Participate in industry-wide benchmarking studies to help build your visibility.
Have human resource leaders speak at public human resource seminars and write articles for human resource trade publications about your people practices. Have them join the boards of local nonprofit groups and associations to help spread the word.
Include marketing and branding experience in the criteria you use to hire additional recruiters.
Create a process to measure and evaluate the program's effective-ness, monitor its progress, and improve it.

LOW-COST BRANDING TOOLS
If you have a little money to spend on human resources branding, here are some low-cost things to do.
Re-energize your existing employee referral program and set "targets" for referrals from each department. Include participation as part of the normal performance appraisal process. Provide employees with cards listing the top ten reasons why it's great to work for your company.
Encourage employees to put decals, license plate holders, etc., on their vehicles to broadcast their loyalty. Sell or distribute employment-branded items (hats, T-shirts, pens, etc.) that depict work at your organization.
Participate in community clean-up programs; get your organization named on "clean-up" highway signs.
Develop an alumni club for ex-employees and retirees. Involve these former employees in the process of spreading the word.
Distribute logo book bags, T-shirts, and other similar items to children; sponsor school events.
Work with the advertising department to place ads that occasion-ally highlight your great people and management practices as well as your products.
Train and reward managers for excellent people-management performance.
Conduct surveys of college students, business writers, academics, executive recruiters, and influential business leaders as well as your employees to assess your perceived strengths, weaknesses, corporate culture and image.
Revise recruiting practices to include "wow" elements to make a lasting impression. Continually review your recruitment strategy and team capabilities.
Have the CEO or human resource vice president write a book about the organization's people-management practices.

POSSIBLE DISADVANTAGES OF BEING A SOUGHT-AFTER EMPLOYER
There is also a downside to being a choice employer--a possible downside to your branding efforts. Some of the possible problems include:
Executive recruiters often target your organization's management and its employees.
The strength of the corporate culture makes changing it (as well as many operational changes) difficult.
Because of their "fame," the organization's employees have a tendency to become overconfident.
Performance measurement and willingness to accept criticism often diminish due to this overconfidence.
The company's image must be defended continually. Minor errors can be blown out of proportion by the press.
Pay levels (and thus costs of production) can be high due to the high cost of maintaining a world-class workforce.
New recruits may have unrealistic expectations based on image that can turn into disillusionment if everyday reality does not match.
Being an employer with a great reputation helps an organization grow, and this increase in size makes maintaining the culture and the "choice employer" status difficult over time.

1. Brand equity: People still consider BPO to be 'low brow'?, thus
making it difficult to attract the best talent.

2. Standard pre-job training: Again, due to the wide variety of
the jobs, lack of general clarity on skill sets, etc, there is no standard curriculum, which could be designed and followed.

3. Benchmarks: There are hardly any benchmarks for compensation and benefits, performance or HR policies. Everyone is charting their own course.

4. Customer-companies tend to demand better results from outsourcing partners than what they could actually expect from their own departments. When the job is being done 10,000 miles away, demands on parameters such as quality, turn around timeliness, information security, business continuity and disaster recovery, etc, are far higher than at home. So, how to be more efficient than the original?

5. Lack of focused training and certifications

Given this background, the recruiting and compensation challenges of HR departments are only understandable.

Key To success

The key to success in ramping up talent in a BPO environment is a rapid training module. The training component has to be seen as an important sub-process, requiring constant re-engineering.

HR Practices being practiced by some of the Leading BPO:

WNS:

In a bid to retain its experienced professionals in the midst of growing demand for trained manpower, business process outsourcing (BPO) firm WNS Global Services (P) Ltd has opted for a competency-based framework for selection and promotion of its key personnel.

The idea is to fill up a majority of the leadership positions from within WNS instead of importing talent from outside. It is also an attempt
to keep out bias in the system and increase transparency. The program is performance-driven and puts in place a scientific process, which, matches employees’ knowledge, skills and attributes with the role requirements.

WNS is among the first companies in the BPO space to opt for a competency-based framework and integrate it with HR practices.

Apart from compensation, developing managerial talent from within the organization is considered to be an important retention tool. Skills of the middle management level would be critical as operations are ramped up. Identifying talent and building capabilities to enable them to handle larger teams and develop new skill-sets that drive business dealing capability is needed.

HSS (Skills and Behavioral Training)

HSS' work culture and value system are the key foundation and enablers in creating a unique workplace. There is a strong emphasis on Skill and Behavioral Training, Leadership Development and e Learning. Its practices are benchmarked by the entire industry. HSS is a winner of several industry awards for its HR practices.

EXL Services (the wholly owned subsidiary of Exlservice Inc., a Delaware Corporation)

In the words of Mr. Deepak Dhawan (VP-HR)

1) An offer of housing to all employees. (As housing will be offered alongside, our employees will no longer have to go through the trouble of searching for paying guest or rented accommodation)

2) Increased Out station Recruitment

3) At EXL people make it to middle management level with their compensation going up by five times in three years

4) At induction level and later, we make it a point to provide profiles of people who have grown with the company through its merit-based structure

The front lines of a corporate call center are often charged with emotion, and companies need to account for that when hiring and training workers to take on this critical role in customer contact, according to speakers at a recent Call Center Industry Forum sponsored by Wharton's Financial Institutions Center.

"There is a growing need for workers who have to deal constantly with the public to manage emotions - and this is especially true for those on the phones," said Steffanie Wilk , a Wharton management professor who has done extensive research on call centers.

Nancy Rothbard , professor of management at Wharton, presented the results of research on workers' mood, performance and burnout conducted by her and Wilk at a large property and casualty insurer. During three weeks in May 2003, a group of 40 call center workers received computer prompts to answer four
short questionnaires at the beginning and end of the day, and another two at random times, to gauge their mood. In addition, the researchers taped the workers during the period and are coding 6,000 calls to develop an objective measure of the emotions evoked during those calls. Each worker's overall positive or negative personal nature was also evaluated and controlled for in the research.

"When we think about call center workers, one of the biggest challenges is remaining resilient to the anger and hostility that can come their way. That's the negative side," said Rothbard. "But what about the positive side? If a client is pleasant and cheerful, does that infuse you with energy in the way I found it does when a positive mood from home spills over?"

The BMW Hostage Rothbard recalled one conversation in which a caller accused the call center worker of keeping her BMW hostage at a body shop for three weeks. "What we really heard in the calls we listened to, and in focus groups, was that there is a wide variety of emotions, from very negative hostile ones to very sad ones." In addition, there were "incredibly difficult calls" coming in that referred to events surrounding the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, said Rothbard.

Earlier work, she added, shows an emotional spillover between home and work for employees. She suggested that problems at home do not necessarily lead to problems at work. "I found there was more evidence of enrichment - where positive emotions from home spilled over and caused people to be more engaged with work. Negative emotions also spilled over and caused people to be more engaged with their work.
Employers fear spillover from home will cause workers to be disengaged, but people try to escape from a negative experience by throwing themselves into another role."

Preliminary results of the insurance company call center research show that workers' moods coming into the job surface throughout the day,Rothbard said. If workers arrived in a positive mood, they were likely to stay that way and the same held true if they arrived in a bad mood.
As for the contagion effect of customers, Rothbard said there is spillover, but more for positive interactions than for negative ones.
"My guess is [employees] are skilled and able to segment that away from themselves, but they let in the positive if the customer is cheerful and happy . Perhaps it's a coping mechanism."

In focus groups, according to Wilk, call center workers routinely say the hardest part of their job is that they know how to help the customer, but do not have the authority to take action, such as waiving a late fee. This forces the customer to get angry enough that he or she asks to speak to a person who has authority." "It's incredibly frustrating" for the initial call center representative.

Wilk said call center processes and operations should be better designed to anticipate callers' needs and make sure those calls are routed most effectively to people who can actually help the customer. "In the command and control model, in essence you set it up so that the customer has to get angry or upset with you before his or her issues can get resolved. You're signaling to the customer that talking loudly and screaming gets you what you want."

With the increasing use of foreign call centers, U.S. workers can feel even greater pressure, which then leads to burnout, added Wilk. "Only a small percentage of these workers are in a union. With technology, a flick of a switch can move their jobs away. Workers say that they are afraid to complain" for fear of being let go.

Hiring and Training
According to Daniel J. Ostgaard, president of Human Resource Advisors in Minneapolis and a consultant to several large call centers, it is important for companies to stick to fundamentals when hiring and managing call center employees.

First, he said, companies must understand their own organization in order to select the right person for the job. "If we focus on understanding the job and build a selection system, we want to start with the biggest impact and build on that," said Ostgaard. For example,companies should consider whether the job opening is team-based or individually oriented when drafting selection criteria. "I think it makes a great deal of difference what product people are supporting," he said.

Ostgaard also questioned the practice of moving customer service representatives into sales positions in which people who are courteous and friendly may be uncomfortable selling. In addition, he said an overemphasis on courtesy can be damaging. "The danger is you have people with great courtesy and presentation on the phone and they give bad information all the time." Ostgaard urged employers to create ways to measure and evaluate their call center hiring. Call center managers, he said, focus on many metrics. "Why don't we do [the same thing] for the selection process? We probably know the manager that consistently makes the best quality hires. We should, and we can, measure that."

Ostgaard also cautioned employers against falling for vendors who emphasize speedy analytical technology over fundamental selection assessment. "Vendors promote their product on instantaneous results and an easy-to-read and easy-to-interpret report. Great. Now I can make a bad decision faster and easier."

Culture Fits, and Misfits
Malcolm McCulloch, senior research consultant at LIMRA International in Hartford, Conn.- a non-profit research organization for the life insurance industry - suggested companies make a better effort to hire employees who will fit into the culture of their organization. Call centers, he said, typically experience a 30% annual turnover in employees. "It's very costly. Anything over 5% is pain and I've seen it where the mean is 17 days."

McCulloch defined what he calls "person-organization fit" as the match between an individual's values and preferences and the characteristics of the work organization. He used the example of a claim center where accuracy and attention to detail are important. An individual who avoids risk and accepts supervision is likely to feel satisfied and comfortable in the job and develop a commitment to the organization. "On the other hand, a misfit at the claim center may have an entrepreneurial spirit. They're not going to be happy campers. They won't commit to the organization and they will soon leave."

Companies should develop measures to test for organization fit in hiring new employees, he noted. "In the business world a lot of people assume they know fit and talk about fit, but they really don't put a lot of rigor around it. They use a lot of subjective techniques. They say, 'My gut [tells me],' or 'My sense is.'"

According to McCulloch, companies can use front-line managers to develop a set of "descriptors" defining the company's culture. For example, one descriptor might be the word "predictable" - defined as an environment in which representatives know what to expect day to day. In a research project, Limra used 54 descriptors to create profiles of 11 companies that were matched against 360 employee responses. The employees were grouped into seven categories assessing the level of cultural match. Of the employees who were an extreme mismatch, only 11% were still on the job a year later. Of those with a very strong match to the organization's culture, 81% were still at their jobs a year later. Of those in the middle of the spectrum, with a moderate match, 68% were on the job a year later.

"The moral of the tale is that in an applied sense the person-organization fit was a significant predictor of turnover," said
McCulloch.

Pros and Cons of Scripting
Once workers are selected for call center work, most are trained for their specific jobs, but they should also be given a larger sense of the organization, said Larry Hunter, professor of management, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Hunter has researched the role of scripts in call center work and found some contradictions. While workers say using scripts improves their skills and makes it easier to do their jobs, they also react negatively to scripting and report that it leads to lower morale over time.

Describing research developed from 800 responses at a large telecommunications company, Hunter said scripts help employees interact with customers and improve product knowledge. Workers with more scripting agreed more strongly that scripts are restrictive and reported that the amount of scripting was not related to the perceived helpfulness of the scripts. Employees with longer time on the job also tended to like scripts less. "We see that scripting builds skills and managers have a reason to want them, but there is a downside,'" said Hunter. "More scripting is associated with lower job satisfaction,greater burnout and a higher intention to quit the job."

Hunter said companies should try to preserve the benefits of scripting, while protecting against the downside, by using two levels of training. The first level involves simple training in how and when to use the script. This is frequently done, but not always. In second-level training, workers are given a deeper understanding of why the script is being used and how it relates to efficiency and other goals of the organization, such as cross-selling. This kind of training is unusual for call center employees, said Hunter. "If you can do that, I suggest you will cut turnover and increase efficiency. Where people don't think scripts are going to reduce their autonomy, where they have the big picture . they are less likely to be burned out and less likely to quit."

The two-level approach to training could be used in many elements of call center work, not just scripting, he noted. "Helping people understand why they are doing these kinds of things is critical in helping them to survive what can be a really stressful environment."