HR learning: 07 Aug, 2017

1.

How to wire a growth mindset in your organization?

Senior HR leaders brainstorm ideas on how to bring about a growth mindset at People Matters' Tech HR 2017. 

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of a growth mindset? Is it the willingness to learn? or the essential behavioral traits? Is it the necessity of coaching or mentoring? Or is it the need for an enabling eco-system? At People Matters Pre-Conference, a team of senior HR professionals led by Ms. Kiran Brar, Philips Lighting brainstormed about what a “growth mindset” means in companies today and the kind of solutions or interventions that are needed.

Fixed vs Growth

While a fixed mindset views talent and capability as being limited, a growth mindset is one that recognizes that everyone is capable and can get better. 

Best practices across employee lifecycle

There are a number of interventions that organizations are turning to. And these solutions are not necessarily the mandate of the learning function alone, as creating a culture of growth mindset impacts different activities throughout the employee life cycle – right from talent acquisition, learning and development, and performance management.

2.

Furthering the development agenda

Can the direct impact of various channels like e-modules, gamified content, simulations, and academic projects on development be measured? Read on to know more.

Recently, I was part of an HR roadshow in my organization which touched close to 700 employees. In that exhibition, I interacted with many employees who spoke of their understanding of the word 'development.' I realized that everyone talked primarily about the same areas – those of increasing skills, capability, movements, promotions, etc. in the context of development. One thing stood out – people spoke of development and training in the same breath.Therefore, in their opinion training equaled development. 

Today, we have moved on to various channels of education and learning – we have e-modules, gamified content, simulations, academic projects and mobile learning, to name a few. The question is: do these unique channels have a direct impact on development and can this be measured? Although we have moved leaps and bounds in technology and the digital age, we still deprioritize development and push it to the back burner. Often, people want specific time set aside for developing oneself. I could think of the following reasons why: 

Our conditioning all through K-12 which 'tells rather than asks,' confirms rather than confronts and is probably one of the reasons why we want to delegate our development to a third party
Our hesitance to saying yes to new experiences which are not yet 'Accepted' by our larger society. For e.g. taking a gap year after college or after a few years of work to explore the world is a great way of developing oneself and gaining perspective. Does corporate India consider it thus or are we looking for valid reasons why the person had a break from employment while hiring or while giving them opportunities?

In my opinion, a person truly develops when they experience things that have a direct impact on their job. Anything else gets classified as input!

Often, in the hope of giving our employees a uniquely engaging experience, the relevance and linkage to immediate work are lost. This is a crucial piece in any development journey. 

3.

Making workforce future ready

Human Resource representatives play a pivotal role in building a workforce which is future ready. To enable this, employees must be multi-skilled, domain and function agnostic.

There is a new world and economic order shaping up and world trade is being transformed. Developing countries are in the process of joining the Western powers as world’s largest economies. The new world and economic order in the VUCA world (VUCA is an acronym used to describe or reflect the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of general conditions and situations) dictates the need for permanently osmotic sharing of talent by countries and corporations. Instead, we are seeing that the changing geopolitical scenario is taking the world towards an increasingly protectionist business environment. We need to break out of the shackles of connecting Human Capital to Nationalism and to create an environment which defies this trend. 

As votes are increasingly based on Jobs, our effort must be towards building a visa agnostic work environment. Such an environment is devoid of boundaries as country and nationality. Nobody should be able to contain people