Vidur Gupta talks about the changing trends that are likely to be seen in the HR department in the coming years not just globally but also in India
What are the possible trends that we are likely to witness in HR in 2016IJ
I don’t see any major changes in terms of demographics and society. However the present challenges haven’t been addressed. The major trends that we have already started witnessing are organisations becoming more and more global and at the same time concentrating on workplace diversity.
We have already seen a major acceptance and change drive initiated by many organisations towards greater gender diversity and empowerment of women. These drives are likely to further intensify. One big development we have seen is in companies starting to tap tier II and III cities for obvious reasons of cost, stability and tapping local talent. One question that is still very difficult for companies to answer is how to maintain diversity by ethnicity, gender etc in these regions.
Is there an upturn or a downturn in the global and Indian economyIJ
This is a situation that will be answered differently by different people. To give you an example, BPO’s are still on a very good growth phase in Phillipines. However, in India the growth remains slow. On the other hand the decline in commodity and oil prices have led to slowish conditions in the gulf however has become a boom for nations low on their oil output.
Overall, the Indian market should grow at a very good pace in manufacturing though services are not showing the same sort of growth signs. While jobs in the global market will continue to grow, owing to an ever increasing number of consumers, India is expected to grow at an outstanding pace owing to various Government measures coupled with currency deviations.
What is the role of technology for HRIJ What role do you believe is technology going to play in the coming yearIJ
Technology is, of course, an important arm for HR. Right from reaching out to people, to training, feedback, recruitment and performance management system, tech plays a pivotal role in HR. There are plenty of complete HR management systems available in the market which have added great efficiencies to the HR department.
Today, to get our payslips, raise concerns, training, etc all we need to do is to login to our internal intranet and initiate the same. Though these systems are being followed in most of the larger companies, cloud computing has changed things and now even smaller companies have started deploying systems.
Do you believe that increased employee data discrepancy particularly in core sectors like IT is going to see an increaseIJ
No. As a matter of fact employee data discrepancy is reducing today. Because of today’s technology and social websites, it is becoming increasingly difficult to misrepresent.