Group training, HR engagement will make way for personalised attention

At a mid-sized IT firm in Pune, 30-member group trainings will no longer be conducted in 2018. In a departure from its norm, the company has approached an external agency to have structured training programmes, tailor-made for individual employees. The mode of delivery — online.

HR experts anticipate that personalised training and engagement for employees will replace the current group-based learning and development sessions. Catering to employee-specific needs rather than dissemination of generic information will be the goal.

“Technology is able to support it and managers will be able to assign specific courses to individual employees that they can do at their own pace,” said Aditya Narayan Mishra, CEO, CIEL HR Services said.

Industry experts feel IT sector will be the top spender on personnel training.

Also, classroom sessions for employees with similar roles are expected to make way for niche personalised sessions, thereby helping firm meet expenditure budgets. “It makes no sense to spend one day on a training session for 20-30 employees when the needs of each one of them is different. Costs will have to be aligned to see that their requirements are fulfilled, while at the same time budgets aren’t overshot,” the HR chief of a mid-sized IT firm told Moneycontrol.

The personalised training initiatives, including rewards and recognition programmes, will be lead by external vendors and gradually other sectors to will join the bandwagon, CIEL HR Services' Mishra said.

Human resource firms said that touch-points of interaction with the employees will involve only information that is relevant to them. “Nobody is interested in surfing the intranet of a company anymore. Hence, companies are looking at personal interests of individual employees and catering to their needs, specifically,” he said.

The shift in rewards programmes was partly witnessed in 2017, when corporate gifting changed from standardised items for all employees to giving them gift cards that enabled them to buy products of their choice.

Such is the extent of personalisation that rewards and benefits for personnel with elderly parents will differ from unmarried or newly-wed employees.