Shaping IR in Liberalised India

A strategic HR thinker and a senior HR professional with over 18 years of experience at Company and Group level leadership in Telecom, IT, Engineering, Steel, Power, Financial Services, Media and other diversified domains, Sudhanshu Tripathi, Group President HR, Hinduja Group, brings a strong insight of Business Operations to HR. Besides shaping Hinduja Group’s Human Capital Strategy and its execution, his responsibilities include supporting Group Companies’ Board of Directors on Strategic Leadership and Value Creation. In his keynote address at a recently held NHRDN IR Summit, in Mumbai, Sudhanshu Tripathi, talks on the need for shaping Industrial Relations (IR) in liberalised India

We tend to answer a question as it is defined to us. We rarely pause, think and say if it is the right way of articulating an issue or is it the question. Therefore, when I was reading the summit brochure, I was thinking if it is framed rightly. Is it talking too much of what I call ‘otherness’, is it talking of a government, which has an important role to play. Is it talking about the labour unions and all others, and is it looking at their issues.

Industrial Relations (IR) today

People of my age who are little older than most of the people here in the audience say that IR has evolved. Where has it evolved and what has happened? Lets’ look at the context per se. First, the labour profile has changed a lot. When computers came for the first time, everyone was as worried as many are about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots today. Believe me, the country has evolved, the industry did well, workers welfare was fine, their standard of living has increased, they have become more aspirational.

What has happened to the labour today?

So, lesson number one, whatever shift we are talking about, it is a lot more about our anxiety because it’s you rather than the certainty that’s going to turn out bad. So, what has happened to the labour today? They are tech savvy and they are very aspirational. What used to be the labour fifty years back, is not the labour today. Earlier, labour was lower-class, today, labour is the middle-class. Most of the labour do not walk into a job, believing that’s what they will do all their life. Therefore, it is extremely important for us to recognise that they are not there for life long and they have aspirations.

Number two, a lot of automation has come in with computing and AI, therefore the labour that we have today are far more skilful. One particular issue in IR that is not talked about is that today more than half of the labour class is outsourced. And therefore what we have done is, what we use to think as problem we have already shifted so, today the kind of workers we have are not the kind of workers we used to have fifty years back. Now they are educated and they are aspirational. And to that extent, as in industry and in HR forums, we forget that millennials are labours too. Every insight we have and the kind of proactive initiatives we take within the organisation to address those so called millennials, is confined to only the people we call managers and normally our thought does not go to the labour.

"Understand in terms of understanding people. Understand what happens on the ground, so that in your time when you grow and become an HR leader, you are not a leader in a closed chamber, but an HR leader with very strong links to the ground, knowing exactly what happens, why it happens, what works and what doesn’t work"

Things have shifted

Hinduja Group of companies is a large group and we had a strategic HR presentation in one of the largest blue chip multi-billion dollar market cap company and after the HR blue-print was presented, the HR head came to me and expected me to be very happy about it. He asked, how was the presentation? I said that I am very unhappy. I said, in your five year perspective of human resources you simply excluded the seventy per cent of your people there was nothing about workers. So, that’s changing and somehow in my mind, the stereotype that I have is continuing from what it was fifty years back, but things have shifted.

The concept of self-managed team

Third thing that has happened is, the layer of supervision that we use to see 40-50 years back, no longer exist. What is the implication of it on labour today? With the fact they are millennials and highly educated, with the fact that more mundane jobs are already automated or outsourced, these people are intelligent and therefore a lot of them are managing things themselves. The concept of self-managed team, are things that we are talking about. People like these aspirational millennials, not because you give them the right to decide what they do, essentially because you give them the ownership of process and outcome. That has happened in whatever little practices we have done in many places and we have seen them work. But, that does not find a discourse in the industrial relations scenario today.

Labour unions are no longer what they were earlier

What has happened is, just because of the number of people who are outsourced today and as they are not part of standard IR and union scenario, number one, their leverage has gone down; number two, there are smaller and higher number of unions today. Even in government or private organisations, the number of unions are more and each union is increasingly representing less and less people. Number three, because of their aspirations and because of their intellect, today’s worker is not interested in disrupting the business, is not interested in going on a long strike, is interested in collective bargaining and is interested in getting a solution and moving on. We have enough of inno-vation to happen, it’s a different setup that we are talking about. There is a logic why they are that way.

Then there is the service sector

Today, a lot of employment is happening in service sectors and our focus on that is still not there. When you speak up the complaint of an industrial factory worker compared to that from service sector, it fails, because the difference between the industrial worker and service sector worker is that the service sector worker today is directly in touch with the client. He is seeing what the business stands for. Every Domino’s delivery man who does not deliver the pizza within half-hour, knows what will happen to the business. So, they are far more responsible and smarter. Therefore, we need to remember that today when we talk about IR and Employees Relationship (ER), I don’t see any difference. I see it as understanding who they are and how do I link to their aspirations, rather than look at a possible conflict and how do I manage that. If you look around for what is happening in global best practices, this is the trend happening globally.

If these are the trends then what is our problem?

Here, as we are all HR and IR teams, we will look at problems that we face or we create, rather than look at the outside problems. The unions are a necessary nuisance for us, some how or other to be managed. We want them to come to collective bargaining and negotiate we don’t take the responsibility to inform them. We don’t take the responsibility to tell them about the business per se. We don’t take the responsibility of beginning to trust. I use to work with Tata Steel in 1995, one of the early things started there was making a business presentation to the union. I will go beyond that, I am still starryeyed about Tata Steel and its labour practices, but suffice to say that the last disruption happened there in 1957 there must be quite a few things they must be doing right.

"The more we look at ourselves, as to how do we recognise the shift, how do we harness the shift, how to understand the person on the other side and how do we come up with something, that’s’ when we come up with solutions and collaborations, which are jointly owned and created"

We ignore the socio-economic shift

Initially, we had talked that most of the time we ignore the socio-economic shift that has happened within the country and the society. We still expect the workers to behave the way their fathers and grandfathers used to work. It’s not that subconsciously we are not aware, we are. Those of us who have drivers, cooks and maids the way we treat them today is very different from how we treated them thirty years back. We recognise their aspirations though they are not educated and they work for Rs.5000-10,000 rupees I have this knowledge and most of time I realise that at the workplace also, I have to bring the same understanding.

We do not initiate union participation voluntarily

For us talking to union comes every two-three years or whatever our negotiation cycle is to engage with them, and not on a regular basis, as people who manage the industry and business together. When I say we do not, I am not blaming each one of you, it’s not our tendency some places we do and where we do, we reap the benefit. We talk a lot about local based practices to manage and so on we implement a lot of them, but rarely with the spirit that they were conceptualised. Rarely in a quality circle, we give them problems to solve, but we actually give them solutions to accept. And to that extent, the ownership doesn’t get built and we are not plugging into their higher level of education, awareness, aspirations, and being a part of a solution. We still use collective bargaining as an economic activity and not as a participative activity. It’s about getting the best deal or no deal, like someone said and that deal primarily is economic. We still do not invite them to talk to us. We don’t realise that’s the culmination of something larger.

So what do we do?

Upskill yourself: First and foremost, because I am an HR person, we upskill our IR and HR skills. We rarely upskill ourselves. What is important is the ability to understand people, ability to understand their aspirations, ability to negotiate for a win-win strategy, ability to take the issue to the table rather than predecide and force people to accept, recognise the demographic skills of the workers.

Supervisor selection is critical: One important thing that we recognisethose of who have worked on the shop floor know, that the last part of the dispute arises because of supervisor incompetence as well. And by default, we have taken the supervisor side as the right side and therefore my humble submission would be that they are not always wrong, but they are not always right too. One of the things that we as HR could do is that as we identify the people who will supervise workmen, we also identify the skills that they need to have, test them for those kind of skills, provide them for those kind of skills, become available rather than saying he is the boss and senior person, so he is always right. So, it is important that supervisor selection becomes very critical thing for us.

Recognise the gorilla in the room: : The real gorilla is more than half the workmen outside your structured employment. Recognise that they form an increasingly larger and larger part of your workforce. Recognise that as their size becomes larger, because you find easy to outsource, their criticality for us increases and bigger the differential we create between their benefits, their education and our investment in them and the people who are part of collective bargaining it’s a time bomb waiting to explode. And to that extent, to recognise and what to do with that is something we have to be aware of. I cannot give a checklist of what to do about it, but each one of you is smart enough to look into it and find out what we need to do.

Share information: Engage with workers and union proactively. Not to say that this is what I have decided that you will do or this is what I have decided you will get. How do you solve this problem? Some of the innovative solution you will hear during the day, respect for the other person’s ability to understand the problem and his willingness to work with you to find a solution.

Stop seeing IR as necessary: : If you study in a government medical school, you will have to compulsorily do a rural stint. And the general tendency of the doctors is to somehow finish those two years and come back to a bigger city and have a big life. IR today among HR professionals continues to be seen as a necessary stint, then get out of the way, put a tick in the box and work in so called corporate sector. I keep saying about the younger people’s proclivity to work only in strategic HR, as if 60-70 per cent of my employees are not strategic enough. The responsibility is on the leaders to know that you are touching something that the cat got in. You are doing something so critical for the organisation’s survival, growth and well being. Understand that it is not only a matter of order or how to manage goodwill or negotiate to get the best deal. Understand in terms of understanding people. Understand what happens on the ground, so that in your time when you grow and become an HR leader, you are not a leader in a closed chamber, but an HR leader with very strong links to the ground, knowing exactly what happens, why it happens, what works and what doesn’t work.

Last word

In any kind of negotiation situation, there is always another side. In any kind of negotiation situation, it is only fair that I only feel it is my right to maximise my benefit the other person would do the same. In any kind of negotiation situation, for me to expect the change in practice and behaviour from the other side is a wish, but what is in my hand is to continuously enable myself better and better and to get into that kind of interaction situation. And the more we look at ourselves, as to how do we recognise the shift, how do we harness the shift, how to understand the person on the other side and how do we come up with something, that’s’ when we come up with solutions and collaborations, which are jointly owned and created. Our people are not only aspirational, they are also highly self-esteemed and proud of themselves. The social shift of how do we think of HR and IR in a collaborative way is the way to go forward.