March 22, 2018

How to Build Rapport with Your Team When You’re a New Manager

People advise you to spend time understanding the key challenges of the role. What they forget to tell you is how important it is to first build a rapport with the team that you will lead. This becomes all the more important when you’re managing a team you haven’t worked with before. How do you break the ice and get the relationship going? Here are some ideas ...

March 3, 2018

Thriving In The Gig Economy

Gig economy is a one-sided contract. The employers pay for the time the skills used. But staying updated costs time and money since gig-economy workers do not have access to the Learning & Development departments the way regular employees do, nor do they have the opportunity to build pension funds, medical insurance leave alone wealth creation opportunities like ESOPs. This is where the government needs to create laws that govern gig-workers.The gig economy works great if you have a financial cushion built in. Then it is a great way to explore the hidden talents you never knew you had. But being a gig worker is also full of insecurity, loneliness and income volatility. The unorganized blue collar workers have always lived without the safety net regular work provides. As 30-40 percent of the workforce of our country is joining this new world of work, it is time to rethink the labor laws. Read more ...

February 4, 2018

HR Brand Evangelist

Jason Levine is an evangelist for Adobe. His tutorials make it easy for users to learn tips and tricks of the range of products that Adobe has. His tutorials on YouTube unlock mysterious features of different products. He is known to his followers as Adobe Jesus. He makes technical training so cool. Imagine if you had someone like him to evangelize your latest L&D offering. We have no problem when companies spend big bucks marketing a soap that costs fifty rupees. But we shy away from evangelizing our training programs that could make the company stay on the cutting edge.

February 3, 2018

If You Want to Ace Your Group Discussion, Don’t Forget to Listen

While most people will elbow each other out to get more airtime, the one who listens to others, evaluates what they say carefully, and then speaks is often the one chosen for a follow-up interview.Here are four tips on how listening can benefit you in a group discussion:

January 25, 2018

Employment & employability: India’s dual challenges

98.6% of non-farm businesses have fewer than 10 workers. Entrepreneurs create jobs for themselves and for others. We have to encourage them to scale up. Here are some ideas for Budget 2018:Expand the definition of MSME to be Rs 50 crores.Tax agricultural income beyond Rs 20 lakhs per annum. This can form the fund that can be given to entrepreneurs.21% Indian companies with over $1billion in value have given more than 15% returns on capital. When companies have scaled up they have provided good returns. Getting our entrepreneurs to not just start-up but scale up may be the answer to employment and employability.

December 31, 2017

Equations will change in 2018

The new products and service will create new roles and new work opportunities. But they will need people to learn new skills. While talent is fairly uniformly distributed, opportunities are not. The impact of job redundancies impacts people at the bottom of the pyramid far more sharply than those who are well cushioned. Where do we begin to prepare ourselves for the future? Education is a good place to start. This time, education will have to be far more than a way to land a job. It has to prepare us to think of others and not just ourselves. The future of work has to be designed not just as a tech solution but also as an ethical choice.

December 26, 2017

Silicon Valley’s Blind Spot: Talent Management

If Silicon Valley’s data-driven approach to problem solving can be combined with an interest in organizational science—and an acknowledgment that there is a science to understanding and managing people—its key talent management processes may become not just more rigorous, but also cutting-edge. These firms need to invest equally in furthering people sciences to understand their employees, and scientific talent management practices without getting carried away by fads and hype.