HR Globe

It's the choice of 42 percent of men and 39 percent of women, although business casual is a close second choice for 37 percent of both men and women, with men opting for trousers and a collared shirt and women slipping on trousers or a skirt and a collared shirt.

And while 25 percent of workers and nearly 45 percent of recruiters say their employer has instituted "casual Friday," everyday is casual clothing day for 32 percent of workers and 25 percent of recruiters.

There are a few hold-outs—26 percent of workers and 12.6 percent of recruiters say their employer never has "casual Friday," and 17 percent of workers and recruiters say dress-down days are attuned to the winter holidays or the dog days of summer.

Findings are based on 2,198 responses to a survey Yahoo! HotJobs and clothier Banana Republic distributed in June 2006 to job seekers and active employees across its network.

Most respondents—55 percent were men and 45 percent were women—worked in areas with more-casual dress standards, such as technology/telecommunications; nonprofit organizations or customer service; manufacturing/operations or health care.

The Financial Express , New Delhi Edition, 9 Feb.

Indian Call Centre Professionals Are Better Taken Care Of Than In US

Call centre professionals in India are well taken care of by their employers, a lot better as compared to the US, where the workers were treated as a "commodity". "The call centre environment in India is much better. In the US, the employers are not considerate about the workers. They treat people as a commodity," said Mr Steve Tirza, president, CWA. Taking exception to the argument that many jobs are outsourced to India for cost-cutting purposes, he said that even while doing this, the salaries of CEOs in the US get fatter and fatter, negating the cost advantage.

TIMES NEWS NETWORK , AUGUST 17, 2006 01:06:06 AM

NEW DELHI: Money, it's a gas / Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
New car, caviar, four star daydream/ Think I'll buy me a football team

Well, to twist that Pink Floyd wisdom a little bit, Money Inc has gone ahead and floated for itself a rock band. Closet rockers in the corporate world are coming together and the HR mavens are spotting yet another opportunity for employee retention. Enter a new clutch of in-house rock bands — Pink of Hutchison, Algorythms of Infosys, Bandchoz of JWT, and Motorola India's MAD, among others. These bands are increasingly making their presence felt within and without their respective companies.

Globally too, bands like The Raving Daves (PeopleSoft), Negative Feedback (eBay) and Spurious Freedom (Texas Instruments) have made their mark in the dog-day world of rock-n-roll. Back home, more are joining the rocker's league — Genpact, Convergys, Flextronics and EXL offering more examples. And some have taken it to the next level by participating in concerts like the Seagram Corporate Carnival and Touchbass. Some even nurture dreams of rocking at the Fortune Battle of Corporate Bands, the touchstone for amateur bands. However, HR mavens are more thrilled about what this kind of bonding can bring to the workplace.

Analysts say the trend helps in bringing a sense of harmony in employees' professional lives and motivates them. "It's one of the positive HR initiatives that companies are taking up. Such efforts provide an outlet for pent-up creative energies of employees. More importantly, it's also a strong retention tool for companies," says Soumen Basu, executive chairman, Manpower India.

Conceptualised as just another idea to extend the list of fun things to do in the company, JWT's Bandchoz dreams to participate in international corporate band challenges. "The idea of having a band was to have fun at work, but the guys have taken the job seriously, putting heart and soul into creating music," says Rohit Ohri, senior VP & area director-Delhi, JWT. A year old, this band with a distinct name, (deliberately done so as to be identified as a Delhi band), has participated in the Seagram Corporate Carnival held in the city and performs at in-house gigs.

Motorola, too, allows its employees to live their passion. The group called MAD (Music, Art & Dance) has a 12-member team that performs at in-house gigs and puts up shows to liven up the office atmosphere. Says Motorola's HR chief, Raghuram Reddum: "Life goes beyond work, and music is an important medium to showcase your creativity. It's an initiative that allows you to extend your college years and gives you due recognition while you are still following some other vocation."

Unpaid advertisers

Profitable customers are those who continue to buy our brand in preference to the competition, regularly and in good enough quantities. The cost of servicing them, as a proportion of their revenue potential, is a small, declining fraction. The happier they are, the more likely they will be to talk about it to other friends and become the unpaid advertisers and brand ambassadors for you. After all, when buying an expensive consumer durable, say a car or a washing machine, whose opinion would weigh with you, your best friend's or a nameless and faceless endorser of the brand in print or TV? There is also the prospect of the regular user becoming a heavy user, trading up to more expensive models or a wider range, all of which considerably reduces marketing costs to the brand owner.

Kind of people matter

Something similar happens when it comes to attracting the scarce, expensive and highly mobile young talent in today's competitive world. The young have little experience, but plenty of opinions, which they are ready to display among their peers. Not surprisingly, among the most powerful reasons given by new employees for their choice of a job, along with pay and benefits, is the `kind of people who work for you'. They go simply by who else among their mates already works in the same place. This is not merely to have people to chat to and have a gossip with but also a sense of reassurance of the quality based on the reputation — again much the same way as in customers.

As we know only too well, some customers are fickle and would easily switch to another brand. The purpose of all good marketing people is to minimise this, by some methods that increase the switching costs, or make it unattractive to leave. Loyalty programmes that involve accumulation of points for continued patronage and a graded system of privileged access to service (such as gold and platinum cards from banks and airlines) are one example. There are better means available, however, that take some effort but cannot easily be emulated, such as exceptional service in times of need.

One-to-one marketing

Free replacements, quick turnaround in repairs, upgrades at little or no costs, benefits for bringing in other customers and individual attention to the needs of a customer through a genuinely responsive and sensitive relationship management team — all of these can add sustained long term preference for one's brands. Not surprisingly, the benefits of such real one-to-one marketing are most visible in consumer durables, although the advertising-based brand-building is more obvious in household and personal products. It is in the high-ticket valuable items that require long-term care that a good service and customer relationship policy pays rich rewards. The core of good competitive strategy as always is to obviate the need to go head on!

Now, try applying the same ideas of non-price competition to people. If you apply the same levels of care to the needs of individuals and let them bring out their best for the company, they will reward you doubly, not only with better performance but continued loyalty as well.

New Delhi, Oct. 9 - Business Line

Indian job site Naukri.com has partnered with the US-based Careerbuilder.com to provide job seekers in both the countries access to job opportunities in every industry. Naukri.com claims to have a database of more than 6.5 million registered users and CareerBuilders.com has about 23 million visitors. This will also offer the employers to choose from a wider pool of qualified individuals. The online job market in India is estimated at about $33 million in 2006 and is expected to reach about $53 million in 2007, said a press release.

Mumbai , May 6 - Business Line

Corporates must invest in HR, says PM

More business houses should invest in the development of human resources, just as they invest in making their firms more globally competitive, the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, said extolling the house of Tatas for their initiatives in education and research in the country.
While laying the foundation stone for the Jamsetji Tata Centre for Disaster Management (JTCDM) at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) here, Dr Singh said improving the quality of manpower in government programmes is a major challenge facing the nation today. An equally important challenge is to improve the quality of management of the non-government sector.
JTCDM was inaugurated at the institute's 66th annual convocation. It is being set up with an initial contribution of Rs 11 crore from the Jamsetji Tata Trust.