Sunday, May 30, 2010

Silent! Policy making is in progress.

I remember the days when I got the summer internship in one company at Nashik. This company is well known infrastructure company which has built most of BOT projects in Maharashtra.

The HR Head was crazy guy who was more interested in instructing and guiding on snacks, lunch and dinner required during different meetings and events. His another expertise was in policies and SOPs. There were policies for everything in the organization.

Once somebody complained that they do not get newspapers to read during lunch break. This issue was serious according to him and he instructed to his team to make the policy on this issue. Team deliberated for few weeks and drafted two pages policy on “Newspaper reading”.

Once there was an issue of hiring the caretaker for director’s house. Director’s wife told administrative officer to replace the caretaker. This could not happen due to specific reasons. Finally the issue is tabled on desk of HR head. He asked the reason to the administrative officer. “Sir we are making a policy for this.” He calmly replied.

There was a big file of policies signed by him. Policy for telephone, policy for tea breaks, policy for reading newspapers, policy for making tea in pantry, policy for electricity and other payments. You just name the issue; you will find the policy on those issues. If not just raise the issue, the policy would be ready within two weeks. Execution of policies was the major challenge; hence the organization established “Corporate Planning & Policy Deployment Department (CPPD)”. There were three employees whose responsibility was to audit and check the implementation of these policies. Another factor was SOP, (standard operating procedures). Once the policy is made, CPPD department would make the SOP on execution.

My period was for two months in that company as a summer intern. One guy from CPPD made his career in HR in another organization; another started his own consultancy and third left the organization. I do not know what happened to CPPD department and HR Head afterwards.

2 comments:

Muthu Krishnan said...

He must been expelled by the company for not showing results.

Dinesh Divekar said...

Dear Mr Vinod Bidwaik,

I have gone through your article. You have written instance that happened when you did your summer training. It appears that you did this training in pre-liberation era or you did the summer training in post-liberation period however, that company had strong hangover of pre-liberation management style.

Nevertheless, the instance of this kind abound everywhere. I too have seen or rather suffered because of the instance of these kind. I found many Fortune 500 company delay their suppliers or service providers payments by three to five months because of their process. Suppliers take this delay in their stride because they wanted to associate with companies of that stature.

About two months ago I had raised a question on prominent networking website LinkedIn. The question was "Experts: How process-centric culture of organisation is different from bureaucracy? Does process centricity bring bureaucracy?". I got scores of very good answers. You can refer various HR Groups of this site to read the replies. You can click here to read few of the replies.

Neither management nor the professionals of top-notch B-school understand the dividing line between process centricity and bureaucracy. The understanding is what their leadership is!

Thanks,

Dinesh V Divekar
Management & Behavioural Training Consultant
Bangalore - 560094
+91 9900155394

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