Other side of the talent

By Vinod Bidwaik

We always speak about employee engagement, employee satisfaction, talent management and everything about the talent. Off course, it is very important for success of the organization. However we rarely speak about employer satisfaction and employer expectations. We rarely speak about the human nature of indiscipline and the tendency of dissatisfaction. We rarely speak about the checks & balances on the talent and we rarely speak about the bottom 10 employees in the organization; and what’s about employees who are miscreants in the organization?

Recently one IT company in Pune filed a case against Sr. Customer Support Executive who absconded with laptop and data of the company. I have one case where one female employee (who worked with Wipro- Hyderabad as a recruiter) joined us. After joining she took the loan, applied for a leave for two months and then absconded at Canada with her husband. Such cases are increasing day by day. Employees expect that company should be transparent and open but they don’t want to be transparent with the company.   

Theory X and theory Y (of Douglas McGregor) explains the style of managing people. X type of style, believes that average employee does not like to work, people normally are not self motivated. They are undisciplined and they have the tendency to cheat the people. They can not work without supervision and they like wasting time and spent their time on gossiping. Still these people expect security. 

Y type of style, believes that by nature people like to work, they can be motivated if they are involved, they like to take responsibilities and they should be managed properly.

Employees come from different cultures; their behaviour is the result of influence of their family, school, surroundings. Human being has the tendency to be influenced by the dominated and assertive people. Trade unions, politics and social work are the best examples of this.  Even Big Boss is the best test lab for this. Majority of people in society and organization choose to be silent.

And this is the problem in society and even in organizations. The main challenge in talent management is to deal such different personalities. The first belief, we HR professional should have that every human being is unique. While dealing these personalities, general rules will not apply. You have to find your own style to deal such people.

The first check point, gate keeping is your hiring process. I think we need to go beyond the competencies and also assess the candidate on their behaviour which we normally don’t do. We assess competencies, we assess knowledge, skills, but we do not go beyond this. 

We also need to give the strong message to such employees.