Abhijit Bhaduri’s Blog
I write about careers, skills and the world of work. The cartoons and sketches are mine.
Reimagine HR for a New Reality
Once upon a time, an organization was a closed ecosystem, insulated from the rest of the world, and as long as the employee played by the rules of the organization, the employer would guarantee life-time employment. One set of rules governed everyone. The pedigree of the degrees was a predictor of performance. Hierarchy mattered. Communication was top-down. The leaders always had access to information that the employees did not.Until one day the digital tsunami changed everything.
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 ...
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 ...
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
9 Must Ask Follow-up Questions in Interviews
According to a new research by Harvard Business School professors Alison Wood Brooks, Karen Huang, Michael Yeomans, Julia Minson, and Francesca Gino, people who ask follow-up questions are perceived as higher in responsiveness, an interpersonal construct that captures listening, understanding, validation, and care. Here are 9 follow-up questions you can ask.
2018 - The Year of HR Data Theft
The pattern is clear about data breaches. The hackers sneak in to the databases. Since they are in stealth mode, their presence is not detected for months. Could it be that your employees’ data has been compromised and you are blissfully unaware?
McKinsey Jobs Report for 2030
Automation is inevitable to drive productivity and growth. 60% occupations will see 30% automation by 2030 says McKinsey’s latest report. This means a lot of people will need to make mid-career transitions.
How To Hire Someone Who Is Not Good at Communicating
Although most of us spend more time communicating online than offline, recruitment methods are still heavily skewed towards analogue or physical communication skills, particularly the job interview. Indeed, interviews favor those who can communicate their ideas fluently and come across as likable. How can we discover talented people who are not good at communicating but are otherwise terrific at delivering top-notch performance?
How Office Politics Corrupts the Search for High-Potential Employees
Few topics have captivated talent management discussions more intensely than potential. But how good are we at evaluating human potential? The answer is, it’s mixed. In the real world of work, organizational practices lag behind, with 40% of designated “HiPos” — high-potential employees — not doing well in the future and at least one in two leaders disappointing, derailing, or failing to drive high levels of engagement and team performance. Despite the tools being available, political processes derail how talent is identified in organizations.
Binge Learning - is that even a thing?
Pyschologists will explain this as Goal Gradient effect. We start to hurry up and put in more effort as we get closer to the finishing line. While doing push ups, try counting backwards 10... 9... 8... instead of the usual 1... 2... 3... and see how how it affects your motivation. Rats run faster as they approach a food reward. Humans increase effort as they approach rewards such as gift certificates or goals such as visual finish lines.
Citius Altius Fortius Jobs Will Go Away
The jobs that follow the “faster, higher, stronger” principle will progressively be taken over by machines. It is easy to program the robots to do something repetitively and do it blindingly fast. Not only can robots do the work faster than humans, they do not have Monday morning blues. They do not seek vacation days nor do they object to working on weekends. They can go through mountains of data in a moment and identify anomalies. They are better legal assistants than humans. They make better radiologists than humans. Any job that is faster for machines to carry out makes it uneconomical to be left to humans. That means we will have many of these jobs carried out by robots replacing humans – men to be precise.
Flip the Channel - Omnichannel Learning
With the Fourth Industrial Revolution bringing in exponential changes, leaders are missing one important element — rethinking the process of learning. People are learning in multiple ways. Paperbacks exist with e-Books. Analog business models exist with digital. Physical stores exist with online formats. There is another word for it – omnichannel, and that is what learning must be.
Six Qualities Winners Share
Winners are a rare breed. We look up to them. We admire them and their achievements. But in reality, winners are not different from you and me. Each one of us has the same qualities that are needed to win. We do not leverage it often enough.If you think about the times when you have been extremely successful (or failed badly), you would have demonstrated the same six qualities that winners demonstrate. The six qualities are common to every winner.