Howzzat! HR masterstrokes for BCCI

HR Consultants Proffer Suggestions
Malini Goyal NEW DELHI

RELIGION is often beyond reason. And in a country where cricket is religion for many, reasoning and rationale has to take a back seat after a devastating World Cup loss. But let’s for a moment step back and think of Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) as a corporate body and cricket players as its employees. And look at the players, their compensation structure and restrictions on them through the eyes of HR experts. After all companies have done a great job of balancing conflicting stakeholders’ concerns, achieving difficult tasks while balancing individual vs team rewards in an extremely competitive and global business environment.

Here are some of the issues and suggestions that HR consultants and heads have for the BCCI. Not all of them may be implemented - but if the BCCI can pick up at least some of the ground rules that India inc has learnt over the years to win business and manage employees, cricketing at least would gain. If some of the outpourings below feel emotionladen, just discount for the passion these experts may have for the game.

BCCI as a corporate body If BCCI wants to become a world-class company with a world-class cricketing team it has to have a clear business plan with well-articulated time frame and key milestones like any business proposal. It also needs to identify what it needs to get there – money, infrastructure and of course best team, best coach etc.

For each of them - coach, selectors, players, even board members – their roles, the key deliverables and targets have to be clearly defined with accountability and responsibility fixed. “One has to see where are the failures on the deliverables before talking about sacking the coach or the player or the selector,” says R Sankar, head, Mercer India. Role clarity is very critical at all levels and the measures to vet performance have to be put in place. Performance review has to be regular and in a more structured rather than a reactive manner - the way its been happening.

And last but not the least, the board members have to be accountable for their jobs. “Right now its (the board) being used as a facility for gaining social respect,” says K Ramkumar, HR head of ICICI Bank. Maybe board members should be charged – Rs 1 crore – to get a board seat, and in times when the team isn’t doing well they could be penalized with Rs 2 crore fee,” he says.

GROOMING leaders & team This is a place where guys with far lesser experience can be asked to lead the team of people with far more experience. It happens frequently in the corporate world and they do it all the time. But the cricketing world is far more challenging - There are many prima-donnas here with high public stature. Add to it the fish-bowl experience of being always under media glare and public scrutiny. Amid all this when some of them are pitch-forked in leadership roles at a relatively young age without any formal grooming, it creates enormous leadership challenges. From a holistic HR perspective there should be a formal intense process of grooming prospective leader and this could not just be left to chance, says Hema Ravichandar, a strategic HR consultant and ex-HR head of Infosys Technologies. But once chosen a leader, the captain has to walk the talk and be a leader standing up for his team. “Dravid has acted as a stooge either for the coach or the board. How will he derive any respect from the team,” says Ramkumar.

SALARY bouncer How best to remunerate players? What could help align individual performance with the team? Should there be a graded system? What’s the crticilaity of the variable pay? In most of the above issues, opinions vary, but here’s snapshot of what they have to say.

VARIABLE vs fixed pay Variable pay, which is performance-linked, has to be a critical component. That’s the only way wins can be rewarded and losses can be penalized. Most HR experts recommend in the range of 40-50% of the total compensation to be variable. Variable pay can have two components they suggest – team performance and individual performance. While team performance can be rewarded at the end of every match win, ICICI’s Ramkumar warns that individual performance should be assessed on an annual basis. “Right now they have a warped variable pay which rewards players deal by deal. That’s a very narrow and short-term approach,” he says. Assessing annually will help avoid short-term approach to performance and it will also allow for bounce-back for players who may have short spells of bad form. Also they suggest that, there could be differentiated slabs for rewarding individual variable pay - for example those making 100 runs, those making more than 200 runs annually can fall in two slabs.

SKIPPER vs rest The thumb rule in the corporate world is that the leader gets at least double the remuneration than the person next in line. And ideally, HR experts would want the captain and vice-captain to get far more than his team members simply because he has two roles to play in the game. But the experts differ in how the two should be paid higher. While Ramkumar suggests that the captain’s compensation should be structured such that the variable component is higher than the others. For example, if for the players, 50% of the compensation is variable, for captain it should go a notch higher to 60%, he suggests. But Piyush Mehta, HR head of Genpact, differs. While the percentage rise in variable salary is a given in the corporate sector as you move up the hierarchy, it should not be the case in cricket, he says. This is because the ability of say a CEO to change the flow in an organization is quite high as compared to a cricket match where a skipper’s efforts can play only a marginal role.

Source:- The Economic TImes