Root 5 Systemics Research: Working Draft / February 2013
HR, TRAINING, & DEVELOPMENT: TRENDS SUMMARY
GLOBAL OVERVIEW
The following is a summary of significant trends in human resource management,
training, and development. The purpose is to explain how Prelude and its four resource
tools can help optimize individual, team, and organizational performance levels. This
summary is distilled from a larger document of 75 pages, representing an in depth
review of hundreds of articles, surveys, websites, and related material.
OUTLINE
1. HR CHALLENGES
2. FIVE WORK ROLES
3. ONBOARDING
4. MULTIGENERATIONAL
WORKPLACE
5. NEUROSCIENCE & BRAIN
6. EMOTIONAL QUOTIENT
7. PSYCHOMETRICS &
EVALUATION
8. TRAINING & EVALUATION
9. TEAMS & TEAMING
10. CORPORATE CULTURE /
CLIMATE
11. ENGAGEMENT
12. TRUST
13. NEED FOR MEANING
14. WELLBEING & WELLNESS
15. FLOW
16. GAMIFICATION & BADGING
17. SOCIAL MEDIA: GENDER,
BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
18. CREATIVITY & INNOVATION
19. INDIA IT INDUSTRY
1. HR CHALLENGES
• HR easily loses out to the internal competition
• HR becomes the poorest cousin in terms of IT systems
Information Overload
• Online recruiting produces resume overload
• Management dashboards generate bar chart and pie chart overload
• Employee survey results with too many options for “slicing and dicing” overload
Recommendations
• Innovative thinking about core HR systems
• Requires broader, more creative perspective
• Equip individuals to be more self-reliant vis-à-vis performance, career, financial
security, health and wellbeing
2013 Trends
• Changing Customer Behavior
• Volatility and Uncertainty
• Shifting Priorities
(2013 Chief Strategy Officer Survey Results)

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2. FIVE WORK ROLES
Baseline
1. Job Holder Role
Employees do the job listed in job description
Discretionary Effort: Above & Beyond
2. Team Member Role
Employees help members of their teamwork toward common goals
3. Entrepreneur Role
Employees seek / generate new ideas to improve business
4. Career Role / Brand
Employees actively develop career
Differentiate self
Increase profile / visibility
5. Company Role
Employees promote / help company beyond individual and team roles
(Corporate Leadership Council / Driving Performance and Retention Through Employee
Engagement”, 2004)
3. ONBOARDING
Best Practices:
• Helping new employees understand company vision, mission, culture,
challenges/opportunities, decision making-problem solving protocols, and role
• Providing online tool new employees can access prior to starting work
• Training on mobile devices or integrated into social networks
• Strategic socialization
Best Practices result in:
• 90% new employee retention
• 20%+increase new employee discretionary efforts
• 58% retention after 3 years
Leader Onboarding includes:
• First 90 Days - 7 Benchmarks
• Diagnosis
• Alignment
• New relationships / Internal network
• Understanding communication styles, company “communication culture”
• Clarified expectations
• Team assessment
• Identified opportunities / early wins
Poor Practices result in:

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• Poor employee fit
• 40% - 50% new CEOs fail in the first 18 months
• 50% newly hired executives quit or fired first three years
4. MULTIGENERATIONAL WORKPLACE
Overview
• Four generations working together, first time ever
• Each Gen has very different leadership, communication and work styles
• Traditionalists (born before 1945)
• Boomers (1946-1964)
• Gen X (1965-1980)
• Gen Y/Millennials (1981 – 2000)
Opportunity
• Wisdom and organizational knowledge of the older generation
• Creativity of the younger generation
• Digital natives’ ability to: make connections, connecting dots, infer meaning, & work
in a virtually connected way
Millennials On Innovation
• 78% believe innovation is essential for business growth
• 62% would describe themselves as innovative
• 66% say innovation is key ingredient for employer of choice
• 60% believe that they work for an innovative business
(Deloitte.com/MillennialSurvey)
Encore Gen
• 60 million ages 55+
• 9 million (ages 44 to 70) new meaningful careers serving society
• 31 million interested in finding their own new careers
Age Discrimination
• Younger employees seen as more innovative and flexible
• Older employees associated with higher costs of salary, benefits, healthcare needs
5. NEUROSCIENCE & BRAIN
Reptilian Complex
• Third base level of brain
• Limbic system
• Location of instinctive states related to survival
• Difficult to affect changes in lizard brain
• Need to imprint a new neural pattern / behavior in the basal ganglia
Negativity Bias & Positivity
• Consistent across cultures
• Overcome the bias
• Understand and anticipate resistance to change

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• Experience at least 3 to 1 ratio of positive thoughts/experiences over negative ones
• Build up (and reinforce) positive memory systems
• Threshold only 10-20 seconds for a positive thought or experience to start to be
effective
• Performance improvement professionals underestimate the amount of repetition of
the new behavior is required in order to successfully
• Many efforts aimed at achieving and sustaining a change in behavior fail
Stress
• Stressed neurons generate a weaker signal, handles less blood flow, processes less
oxygen, and extends fewer connective branches to nearby cells.
• Unpredictable stressors severely impair the brain's capacity to learn and remember
(Yang et al., 2003)
• Chronic, unmediated stress
• Allostatic load is "carryover” stress
• Prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, crucial for learning, cognition, and working
memory
• Area of brain most affected by cortisol, the so-called "stress hormone.
• Fight or flight
• Chronic stress linked to over 50 percent of all absences (Johnston-Brooks, Lewis,
Evans, & Whalen, 1998).
• Impairs attention and concentration (Erickson, Drevets, & Schulkin, 2003).
• Reduces cognition, creativity, and memory (Lupien, King, Meaney, & McEwen, 2001).
• Diminishes social skills and social judgment (Wommack & Delville, 2004).
• Reduces motivation, determination, and effort (Johnson, 1981).
• Increases the likelihood of depression (Hammack, Robinson, Crawford, & Li, 2004).
• Reduces neurogenesis (growth of new brain cells) (De Bellis et al., 2001).
• Stress works against development of a trusting disposition
• Frowns are contagious
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/09/23/bobby-mcferrin-dont-worry-be-
happy-neuroscience-psychology/
Neuroplasticity
• Brain’s capacity to create new pathways
• Recent research reveals amazing abilities
• Brain changes and alters shape result of experiences and repeated use
• Creating new connections and thickening existing ones
Fluid Intelligence/Reasoning
• An aspect of IQ
• Includes inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning.
• Capacity to think logically and solve problems in novel situations
• Especially scientific, mathematical and technical
• Identify patterns and relationships that underpin these problems
• Extrapolation using logic
• Independent of acquired knowledge
• Fluid intelligence, allows people to solve unfamiliar problems by understanding
relationships between various concepts independent of previous knowledge or skills

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Crystallized Intelligence
“People whose ability depends on experience, wisdom and judgment — medicine, law,
writing, teaching — keep improving. Philosophers, historians keep accruing knowledge
and do good work.” (Craik)
• Ability to use skills, knowledge, and experience
• Rely on accessing information from long-term memory
• One’s lifetime or intellectual achievement
• Shown largely through one's vocabulary and knowledge of world affairs
• Improves somewhat with age
• Ability to build on what we already know
• Depth and breadth of general knowledge
• Product of educational and cultural experience in interaction with fluid intelligence
Arts
• Engages many different areas of the brain, all of which must work in tandem
• Many reports people take up a new sport or a musical instrument in 50s or 60s
Meditation/ Mindfulness
• Can change the inner workings and circuitry of the brain
• Allowing people to achieve different levels of awareness
6. EMOTIONAL QUOTIENT / INTELLIGENCE
The social and emotional skills of an organization’s managers and staff are crucial to its
success. These skills are also known as EI, for emotional intelligence, and EQ, for
emotional quotient. People who accurately perceive others’ emotions are better able to
handle changes and build stronger social networks (Salovey, Bedell, Detweiler, & Mayer,
1999 cited in Cherniss, 2000).
• 80% of adult “success” due to emotional intelligence (Daniel Goleman, 1995)
• 36% identify their emotions correctly as they occur (Emotional Intelligence 2.0)
• 32% of the workplace’ experience bullying daily (ABC News, 10/09)
EQ Aware Workplace
• Best-run firms promote emotional ties and wellbeing
• Employee attitudes and wellbeing are linked to financial results.
• Re-shaping corporate culture is as important as monitoring $ results
• Compelling place to invest is a compelling place to work
• Employees who feel they count predict financial results
(www.mentalhealthroundtable.ca)
EQ Training
• 80% reduction in grievances
• 50% reduction in lost time accidents
• 17% increase in production
(Pesuric & Byham/Porras & Anderson)
Participants of the experimental group received a brief empirically derived EI training
(four group training sessions of two hours and a half) while control participants
continued to live normally. Results showed a significant increase in emotion
identification and emotion management abilities in the training group. Follow-up
measures after 6 months revealed that these changes were persistent. No significant

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change was observed in the control group. These findings suggest that EI can be
improved and open new treatment avenues.
EQ GAP
• Rising Conflict
• Rising Bullying
• Declining Productivity
• Declining Morale
• Rising Absenteeism & Turnover
• Rising Depression & Anxiety
• Rising Health & Benefits Costs
• Increasing Disability Premiums
Workplace Conflict Causes
• 94% employees have worked or currently work with a toxic person
• 86% - Warring egos and personality clashes
• 73% - Poor leadership
• 67% - Lack of honesty
• 64% - Stress
• 59% - Clashing values
(2009 Psychometrics Canada Survey of 350 HR professionals; 2009 University of
Toronto Survey of 1,800 US employees
Executive Derailment Causes
• Difficulty in handling change
• Inability to work in a team
• Poor interpersonal relations
(Center for Creative Leadership)
90% of executives derail professionally due to lack of emotional competencies including
inability to handle interpersonal problems; unsatisfactory team leadership during times of
difficulty or conflict; or inability to adapt to change or elicit trust
(The Center for Creative Leadership, 1994; www.talentsmart.com)
Emotional Contagion
• "A tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions, vocalizations,
postures, and movements with those of another person's and, consequently, to
converge emotionally"
(http://www.mendeley.com/catalog/emotional-contagion-social-judgment/)
• Introverted people tend to be more affected by others' positive emotions
• Extraverts tend to be more affected by others' negative emotional expressions
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraversion_and_introversion)
7. PSYCHOMETRICS & EVALUATION
• Top 5 products ranking – 360, Myers Briggs, Emotional Intel, DISC, Strengths Finder
• 80% of coaches use top five assessments
• For executive coaches, ‘360’ assessments lead with 25% market share
• Market share 15%: DISC, Meyers-Briggs, Emotional Intelligence, and Strengths
Finder.

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• 20% 50 different assessments
Challenges
• Limited follow-up support integrated into the assessment process
• Many fail to offer appropriate strategies for team development
• Not conducive to an evaluation of organisational outcomes
• Examples - Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance (DiSC(R)) system
(Mills & Associates, 2005) and the Team Management Index (Margerison &
McCann)
• Danger in stereotyping individuals before they have had opportunity to demonstrate
their knowledge and skill-base
MBTI Biases
• MBTI indicates clear gender differences
• 66% all men are ‘thinkers’
• ‘Thinkers’ are typically preferred to ‘feelers’
• Reflects current economic rationalist tendencies
(Hoffman, 2002)
8. TRAINING & EVALUATION
US STATS
• 2012 - 12% growth
• $60 billion on training / USA
• 50% on tech, tools, coaching, & other "non-instructor led" resources
• $2 billion on E-learning growing
• Highest rate in 8 years
• Skills are hard to find
• Jobs more specialized
• Professional reinvention
• Graduates work skill readiness gap
• Learner experience focus
• Highly tailored to working environment
• Sales training integrated with CRM
Recommendations
• Sense of urgency through positive team-member energy
• Delivering learning in small chunks
• Quick practical application
• Understand what “above and beyond” behavior is
• Need multiple ways to assess engagement
• Conduct measurement more frequently
• Metrics must include performance measures
Training Outlay
• Spending levels from $200 to $3,000+ per year depending on industry
• Online training is $5 per employee per hour
• Face-to-face up to $50 per employee per hour
(Deloitte's Leadership Academy)

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Retail
• High levels of turnover
• Employ lower wageworkers
• Less per employee
• Deliver more hours
• Delivered by store managers
• Local programs supplemented with online programs
Professional Services Organizations
• Consulting firms 10X retailers training spend
• Programs must include: many hands-on exercises/activities to develop strong client
management skills
Evidence & ROI
• Training viewed as event not process
• Systematically used to measure knowledge acquisition
• Rarely used to measure changes in professional behaviours
• Almost never used to measure impact on business performance
• 96% of senior managers want data proving training impact
• Only 8% of training departments provide training impact data
• Only 13% of companies have robust evaluation protocols
• Significant lack of methodological rigour
• 56% of HR Professionals acknowledge weak skills processing/interpreting data
• 80% Immediate Post Training Evaluation
• Rapid memory loss / 80% 3 weeks
Distance Learning Evaluation
• Most widely used indicators – login rates, completion rates, hours
• Satisfaction measured only 60% of the time
• Knowledge acquisition only 35% of the time
(CrossKnowledge, 2011)
Perceived Obstacles
• Insufficient demand
• Fear of the results
• Complexity
• Implementation Costs
• Work (overload)
• Lack of skills
Workplace Formative Assessment
• Asynchronous online learning, formative assessments flexibility
• Support wide range of learning strategies
• Employ quickly and effectively
• Strategies allow learners to assess their progress and accomplishments
• Reduces decreased motivation, confidence and understanding

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9. TEAMS & TEAMING
F2F
Teaming is the engine of organizational learning
(Professor Amy C. Edmondson, Harvard Business School)
• Fast moving work environments need people, who know how to team
• Less than 33% of companies provide proper training framework
• Lack of familiarity time / sharing of personal history /
• 32% of employees see their organization as highly collaborative
Teamwork Skills
• Recognizing and clarifying interdependence
• Establishing trust
• Coordination
• Capability for sharing crucial knowledge quickly
Negative Team Experience & Causes
• 81% employees say poor communication cause for cross-team failure
• 68% with team experience have experienced dysfunctional teams
• 24% prefer to work on teams
• 36% workers (18-24) prefer to work alone all of the time (but recognize importance of
teamwork)
• Verbal Confrontations - 40% observed
• Physical Confrontations - 15% observed
• Scapegoating - 40% observed
• Spreading rumors - 32% observed
(www.esi-intl.ca/teamcollaborationstudy)
(University of Phoenix Survey)
VIRTUAL TEAMS
• 25% of workplace teamwork now virtual
• 66% of multi-national organizations use virtual teams
• 80% companies of 10,000+ employees use virtual teams
(Institute for Corporate Productivity)
Virtual Team Development
• Pro-actively build interpersonal relations
• Enable employees to learn about others
• Encourage personal connections
• Help build empathy
• Establish synchronous / asynchronous rhythms
• Leverage "swift trust"
• Expertise-based trust
• Showcase team member expertise/competence
• Intranet site with social-networking features
• Distributing leadership
• Create non-project related tasks prior to main work
• Engage the entire team in online group activities

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• Allow each person to comment on / contribute to every facet of overall task
• Multiplayer games - breaking teams into sub-teams
• Art of storytelling
• Making the invisible visible
• Visible to the team itself
• Knowledge stored in the collective repository
• Annotated and author identified documents and drawings
• Team members become more aware of each other’s skills and expertise
10. CORPORATE CULTURE / CLIMATE
• All living systems are inclined toward light, positive energy, and growth
(Ctr. for Positive Organizational Scholarship)
Workplace Culture: Executive – Employee Divide
• Correlation between clearly articulated and lived culture and strong business
performance
• Only 19% of executives and 15% of employees believe strongly that their culture is
widely upheld within their own organizations.
(Deloitte | Core Beliefs and Culture)
Factors Impacting Workplace Culture
• Executives have inflated sense
• 84% executives believe senior leadership regularly communicates company’s core
values/beliefs
• 67% employees believe senior leadership regularly communicates company’s core
values/beliefs
• 81% executives believe senior leadership acts in accordance with the company’s
core values and beliefs
• 69% of employees believe senior leadership acts in accordance with the company’s
core values and beliefs
• Executives rank tangible elements highest
o Financial performance (65%)
o Competitive compensation (62%)
• Employees rank tangible elements lowest
• Employees rank intangible elements highest
o Regular and candid communications (50%)
o Employee recognition (49%)
o Management/leadership (47%)
(Deloitte | Core Beliefs and Culture)
11. ENGAGEMENT (DISMAL)
• 80% of workforce not fully engaged by their work
• Employee disengagement cost $300 Billion in lost productivity annually in USA
• CEOS identify as top critical human-capital priority
• Only 25% of employees are passionate about their work
• Only 15% thought talent were in a "sweet spot"
• Employee satisfaction directly correlates with customer satisfaction
(The Conference Board and McKinsey)
(Human Capital Institute 2010 Survey)

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(Towers Watson Global Workforce 2012 Study)
(Gallup)
Gallup’s Engagement Assessment
• Gallup’s G12 feedback system
• Determines whether people are actively engaged, disengaged, or actively
disengaged
• Measures employee-engagement conditions:
1. Contribution employee makes to organization mission / purpose of the organization
2. Opportunities each employee has to learn and grow on the job
Strong Affirmative for 1 & 2
92nd percentile engagement
Strong Affirmative for 1 out of 2
69th percentile engagement
Most engaged employees
Being able to strongly agree with just one of the two items boosts employee engagement
to above-average levels
Cannot Strongly Agree either 1 out of 2
20th percentile engagement
Employee Engagement Recommendations
• Managers must “own” employee engagement
• “Leadership through example”
• Owned by each level of management
• Each manager him/herself benefits
• Share with subordinates
• Over-invest in training and development
• Make career paths / training opportunities clearly visible
• Most desired benefit
• People need to own their career path
• What qualifiers and steps need to be taken to achieve their career goals?
• Implement dynamic enabling technologies with mobile and social connectivity to
career opportunities in your organization
• Develop leadership capabilities of middle managers
12. TRUST
• Swift Trust occurs when groups first form (honeymoon)
• Trust is developed via relational capital
• 27% employees with high trust level
• 73% lesser levels of trust
• 9.2M+ employee engagement survey (all industries, job levels)
• “Less than half of all US employees respond favorably when rating their degree of
confidence in their company executives. This finding… paints a less-than-favorable
picture of the perception most employees have of those leading both large and small
organizations.” (DecisionWise)

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13. NEED FOR MEANING
• Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-
being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency,
enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression.
• 40% of Americans haven’t discovered a satisfying life purpose
• 40% either don/t think their lives have a clear purpose or are neutral
• 25% don’t have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful
(Center for Disease Control)
14. WLLBEING & WELLNESS
• 86% of people believe they have the power to change their own level of wellness
• Growing awareness of mental health issues
• Multiple studies positive correlation between social support and wellbeing
• Protects from stressful events adverse effects
• General belief that ‘remaining positive and happy’ is the most important ingredient in
maintaining our overall health and wellness
• Growing awareness of mental health issues
• 1 in 10 people have diagnosed themselves with depression after Internet research
15. FLOW
• Flow is completely focused motivation
• Single-minded immersion
• Represents the ultimate in harnessing emotions in service of performing and learning
• Emotions are positive, energized, and aligned with task
(Csikszentmihalyi)
16. GAMES & BADGING
• 70% large global companies will have at least one gamification application in place
on their learning management system 2014
• Bring Your Own Device policy improves employee motivation, cuts IT costs
(Mozilla Foundation)
17. SOCIAL MEDIA: GENDER, BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
• New study suggests Facebook useful for all kinds of self-affirmation
• Someone who is sad is cheered visiting his or her Facebook profile page
• Someone who looks her or his Facebook profile page for a few minutes will accept
criticism more readily
Females
• More communication partners
• Engage in economic activities to a greater degree
• Attract positive behavior
• Organize in clusters
• Reciprocate friendships
• Take fewer risks than men
• Show a preference for stability in local networks
Males
• Try to talk most often with those who talk with many
• Reciprocate friendships with other males much less frequently
• Respond quite quickly to female friendship initiatives

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http://mashable.com/2013/02/07/facebook-helps-ego/
18. CREATIVITY & INNOVATION
• 60% of CEOs say creativity top leadership trait over next 5 years (IBM Global Study,
2010)
• “Many mature adults find that "child's play" is so difficult and taboo, that most
experienced group workers need specially tailored "play" strategies to reach them….
(Indeed) mature adults usually need much "group permission" before indulging in the
relaxed spontaneity of play therapy”
(http://everything.explained.at/Play_therapy/)
• Two neurocognitive channels
• Visual knowledge processing
• Verbal knowledge processing
• Picture Superiority Effect
• ‘Visual highway’ faster, more efficient
• Also underused
• Pictures remembered better, longer
• We remember the picture
• We forget the word
Appreciative Inquiry
“The artful creation of positive imagery on a collective basis may well be the most prolific
activity that individuals and organizations can engage in if their aim is to help bring to
fruition a positive and humanly significant future” David Cooperrider, PhD.
19. INDIA IT INDUSTRY
Retention
• High staff turnover
• High competition for staff
• Little loyalty
Work Cycle
• 70-90% of work is in temporary project teams
• Full pay when on project team
• Partial pay when on bench
• Goal on bench time to upgrade skills for next project
• Online, self-directed training for certification
• New team projects start with a Kick Off orientation
Generational Divide
• Digital natives make up the wide base of the IT employee pyramid
• Digital natives live in a virtual global world of abundance
• Middle and upper management are not digital natives
• Older more senior employees grew up in an era of scarcity
Soft Skills Training / Assessment / Professional Development
• Support and resources available for middle to senior management
• No support and/or resources for base of employee pyramid

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Corporate Retention & Talent Management Notes
The following summarizes several recent studies on the particular challenges and
opportunities vis-à-vis Indian corporate employee recruitment, development, and
retention.
General
• Higher pay number one motivator for job change
• 54% of Indian workers are seriously considering leaving their jobs
• 66% in the 16-24 year age bracket
• 48% of turnover to poor relationships between employees and their supervisors
• 53% were dissatisfied with their immediate manager
• 76% of Indians surveyed reported satisfaction with their jobs
• 75% surveyed reported satisfaction with their organizations
• 78% Indian millennials aspire to senior executive and/or CEO roles / impatient
• 98% highest short- and long-term career aspirations comparison to China, Indonesia
• India needs estimated 2,735 additional managers annually, only 1,740 in pipeline
• 60% employees don’t understand their role in fulfilling company mission / Unclear on
how they will grow in their organization
Middle Management & Character Traits
• New Research “surprising and perhaps a little disconcerting” according to authors
• Relative importance of four character strengths: integrity, bravery, perspective and
social intelligence
• Integrity – the ability to act with authenticity, honesty and trustworthiness
• Correlation with performance
• Predictor of good performance
• C- suite leaders – yes / top of list
• Middle Managers – no / secondary behind social intelligence
• More time navigating both subordinates and their own bosses
• Adept reading social cues, managing office politics
• Ethical acumen secondary
• Signal risks / Middle managers moving up
• Co-related to ethical failures of some corporate leaders
• Executives tend to overrate their own integrity
• Honest feedback re. Blind spot
Work-Life Solutions
• Mismatch employees’ workplace flexibility needs & work-life programs
• Men / women value good fit between work & personal lives
• Indian women - lack of workplace flexibility is a career obstacle
• India overall workforce
• 80% men / women - existing flexibility policies did not meet their work-life needs
BPO Sector (Business-Process-Outsourcing)
• $50 billion industry –domestic market expanding / 12% 2011
• BPO jobs unattractive
• 28 % employees strongly agree intend to stay for two years
• Low level of loyalty

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• Employee turnover costs
Employee Engagement Recommendations
• Over-invest in training and development
• Make career paths / training opportunities clearly visible
• Most desired benefit
• People need to own their career path
• What qualifiers and steps need to be taken to achieve their career goals?
• Implement dynamic enabling technologies with mobile and social connectivity to
career opportunities in your organization
• Develop leadership capabilities of Indian managers
Howard B. Esbin, PhD
Heliotrope, Founder & Director
www.prelude2learn.com
www.root5systemics.com
Skype: Heliograph
T: 416 342 0210