Transform HR or Perish

Another train accident, few people dead, many more injured and a dozen enquiry committees to do a post-mortem of what wrong. Months of wait before the report comes and then the usual finger-pointing, some token compensation to the injured or to the next kin of the deceased and more departmental enquiry based on the earlier enquiry report...the process just keeps becoming longer...and soon public interest is lost...as is everything else. If you live in India then getting used to such things doesn't take too long.

Anyways that's not the point. Some recent independent reports points to the fact that the human error is behind most rail accidents and even more shockingly the fact that most train drivers areoverworked & underslept. Some stats on how most train drivers are being given night duties at a stretch without the requisite break, much against the norms, to a large extent explains the increasing probability of human error. Putting employees and public life to risk consciously, is unacceptable.

Recently, the apex central bank of India RBI's data showed that for the first time the cost per employee of publicsector banks have exceeded that of private sector banks. On the other hand, it is a common knowledge that in the past less than a decade the private banks have long overtaken the public sector banks in terms of efficiency, performance and customer service. What does all that mean? Very simply, in the past couple of years whereas public sector banks have added more employee costs,, the private banks have added more customer & revenues. Despite the fact that public sector banks spent more per employee why did they did not do as well as the private banks?

So what is the point? Most Indian organizations especially the governmental instutions are in serious need for HR transformation. It has reached to a stage of transform or perish. For organizations like railways, PSU banks, the latter may be staring at their face soon, unfortunately. Air India, currently on life-support system, is already in that mode. Transforming HR is preceeded by understanding the new business imperatives, which in turn is preceeded by a firm's ability to appreciate the changes in the environmental context that includes political, economic, social, technological, legal etc.

My pessimism for the likes of railways, PSU banks comes from the fact that they are still ignorantly unperceptive about the drastic changes in the environment  Hence their chances of progressing further on the value-chain is negligible. Engagement of the internal and external stakeholders is only possible through transforming human resource function in such organizations. HR transformation requires organizational structures to alter.