Name- Swethambari Talwar

MBA HR, IMED

HR Internship Tasks

Outlook Publishing (India) Pvt. Ltd

Task 1: Appraisal Strategy:

◊ Take 2 companies one which uses the appraisal system and one which doesn`t use the
appraisal system-

Appraisal system:

An appraisal system manages the employee performance process of an organization to

evaluate the job performance of a team. It includes capturing quantitative and qualitative
feedback and turning them into actionable insights.

Compare and contrast how the appraisal system is important for company-

 Appraisal system provides a means of systematically evaluation of employees across

various performance dimensions to ensure that organization is getting what they pay
for, while there is no mean of evaluation of work performance to ensure the ability of
employees.
 Appraisal system provides valuable feedback to employees and manager as so that they
get know about their work performance. While in companies without appraisal
system employees can't know and get feedback of their work performance.
 Appraisal provide the opportunity to recognize and reward employees and to ensure
they feel valued for the work they do, while there is no such system in the companies
who doesn't use the appraisal to recognize and reward employees for the work they do.
 Appraisal system leads to improve organizational performance.
 Appraisal system serves as a basis for changing behaviour towards more effective
working habits, while employees of company without appraisal system work on their
pace without any changes in behaviour towards work.
 Appraisal system is an effective tool for motivating employees to work effectively. While
there is no motivation tool for the employee who works in companies without appraisal
system.
 Appraisal system increase competition among employees to work excellently to earn
appropriate reward and promotion. While there is no competition among the employees to
work hard and earn rewards in non-appraisal companies.

Benefits of non-appraisal system in companies: There are many benefits to the companies who
doesn't use appraisal system.

 The first benefit is there is feeling of competition among the employees to earn rewards
and promotion so they work on their on their pace and fairly with cheating others.
 Another benefit is employees work without exception of performance review at work.
 Employees focus on their work performance instead of their appraisal sheet. There is no
categorization among employees basis of their appraisal.

◊ Prepare an in detail Appraisal Strategy for the Outlook Group which can benefit the
employees-

Management by Objectives (MBO): In a modern corporate setup, management by objectives is

one of the most common methods of performance appraisal. Management by objectives
mainly consists of four steps. 

 In the first step, employees are informed of the goals they are expected to fulfill. These
goals might be personal in nature or related to the project that the employees are working on.
For each employee, a personalized set of goals is assigned. 
 In the second step, the parameters on which the goals will be evaluated are determined.
These parameters are dependent on the kind of goal assigned and might be continuous or
discrete in nature. 
 In the third part of management by objectives, the extent to which the employees
attained the goals is compared to the previously agreed goal standards. This allows employers
to decide why these goals were met, not met, or exceeded. 
 Lastly, a periodic review is carried out, as a part of which managers and employees
reporting to them discuss the employees’ development. The employees are informed of their
shortcomings, strengths, and opportunities, enabling them to do better in the next stipulated
period of time.

Assessment Centre Method: An assessment center is an entirely different form of performance

appraisal. In the assessment center approach, employees gather together at a specified center
to be assessed by their managers. They are given tasks, both group and individual, and
evaluated based on their performance in these tasks. 
 The tasks are generally designed by the managers in conjunction with the organization’s
human resources team and senior management. The employees might be judged qualitatively
or quantitatively or using a combination of both these types of measures.
 This approach, despite being an innovative performance appraisal process, suffers from
several different limitations. The first of these limitations is that the process is very costly. 
 While other methods of performance appraisal cost little to nothing, this form requires
time to conduct separately. Hence, it also comes with the cost of the work that could have been
completed at that time. 
 In the assessment center method of performance appraisal, an employee’s work over a
sustained period matters much less than the employee’s performance during the assessment.
Otherwise, great employees who have bad days can suffer due to this.

Critical Incident Method: In this method of performance appraisal, managers will log the critical
incidents that a particular employee was involved in. Critical incidents don’t just have to mean
negative incidents in which the employee’s performance was below par. 

 Critical incidents do not happen regularly and might even require employees to think on
their toes. There is no specific definition of critical incidents; rather, they depend on the
manager’s thinking. 
 During the course of a typical day, a manager might observe exceptional dedication or
hard work from an employee. In such a case, the manager will note this down in a journal and
provide a recollection of the event during the performance appraisal process.
 The critical incident method suffers from a host of different limitations. Among these,
the most severe limitation is that regular work might not be rewarded.  Suppose an employee
has gone through a month or quarter without any critical event, but outputs have been
constant. In that case, the manager might not necessarily have any critical events to talk about
in the appraisal. This is the reason that this method of performance appraisal is only sparsely
used.

Rating Scales Method: The rating scales method is a traditional method of performance
appraisal that is extremely popular. It isn’t just a traditional method of performance appraisal
of employees, but a very popular method of any type of performance appraisal.

 The manager rates the employee based on several different criteria, such as dedication,
punctuality, problem-solving ability, etc. 
 The scale is generally from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. Based on the manager’s rating and their
relative weightage to the employee, decisions regarding the employee’s place in the company
are taken.
 The most significant advantage of this method of performance appraisal is its simplicity.
The manager needs to do nothing more than just rate the employee on a set of parameters.
There is generally little to no writing involved, and comments might be optional. 
 However, this simplicity can also be the greatest drawback of this method of
performance appraisal. Since ratings are generally unitary, the employee’s salient features and
characteristics that are not covered by the survey might never come to the fore.

Cost Accounting Method: This is one of the most objective among performance appraisal types.
In this performance appraisal method, all that matters to the employer is the profit you have
generated for them. 

 From the wages that you earn to the cost of the time it takes your manager to fill your
appraisal, every penny is accounted for. 
 Based on this accounting, the employer will reach a value for your contribution to the
company’s profit. Based on the amount of profit or loss that you have led to, for the company,
decisions will be made regarding your future, salary, promotion, and other considerations.

360-Degree Feedback: The 360-degree appraisal is a method that involves multiple people
when developing a comprehensive review of an employee’s performance. Every person who
has had an interaction with an employee gets to give the employee a review. 

 All the employee’s team members, including the employee’s manager and the
employee’s juniors, all pitch in with their appraisal. The assessment may be wholly quantitative
or a mixture of quantitative and qualitative metrics. 
 Using the review of every person who interacts with the employee, the human
resources team and the senior management can build a realistic assessment of an employee’s
performance.
Task 2: Recruitment and Selection:
◊ What should be the key components of staffing that a Print Media can implement to be
Profitable?

Key components of staffing that a Print Media can implement to be Profitable are:

1. Estimating Manpower Requirements:

Before starting the work, the manpower requirement of the organization is assessed. Here, two
aspects need to be taken into account while determining the requirement of manpower i.e.
Type of Employees & Number of Employees. Also, the job requirement, desired qualification,
relationship between different jobs, etc. are clearly drawn out.

2. Recruitment:
Recruitment is the process of searching and motivating a large number of prospective
employees for a particular job in an organization.

3. Placement and orientation:

Placement involves putting the selected man at the right place considering his aptitude and
ability. It is the actual posting of an employee to a particular job for which he/she has been
chosen.

4. Promotion:
It is a process through which employees get a better salary, status, position, more
responsibility, etc. In this step, employees earn their promotion to higher posts on the basis of
their performance.

5. Promotion:
It is a process through which employees get a better salary, status, position, more
responsibility, etc. In this step, employees earn their promotion to higher posts on the basis of
their performance.

6. Training and Development:

The term training implies a systematic procedure of imparting knowledge and skills for a
specific job. It benefits both the enterprise & the employee. Training increases the skills and
abilities of employees to perform specific jobs.
◊ Why is staffing is important for any company?
Staffing is a management function which includes hiring, motivating, and retaining the best
people available to achieve a company’s objectives. It is essentially the task of getting and
keeping the right people.
Staffing involves filling, and keeping filled, the positions in the organization structure. This is
done by identifying workforce requirements; inventorying the people available; and recruiting,
selecting, placing, promoting, appreciating, planning the careers of, compensating, and training
or otherwise developing both candidates and current job holders so that tasks are
accomplished effectively and efficiently.

Staffing is important due to the following reasons:

Facilitates control: Well trained staff works according to plans and helps in the achievement of
the organizational goals. They help in reducing the deviations in performance. This helps the
managers in controlling various organizational functions.

Optimum Utilization of Human Resources: In order to get the optimum output from the
personnel, the staffing function should be performed in an efficient manner because a huge
cost is involved in the selection and training of staff.

Long-term implications: Investment in human resources has long-term effects. Since staffing
function has long-term implications, these decisions should be taken with utmost care. The
decisions are crucial for the efficiency of the staff in the organization.

Efficiency: Since staffing helps to place the right person, with the right knowledge, at the right
place and the right time to perform the organizational activities, efficiency of the organization
increases.

Motivation: The workers can be motivated through financial and non-financial

incentives. Financial rewards are important but acceptance and recognition by managers are
also strong forces of motivation for the employees. There should be a balance between
financial and non-financial incentives to motivate the employees.
Support to other functions: Staffing is the key to efficient performance of other functions of
management. If an organization does not have competent personnel, it can’t perform planning,
organization and control functions properly. Staffing supports other functions of management.

◊ Formulate a Workforce Planning process for Outlook India-

1. Evaluate the mission, vision, and objectives of your company:

 Strategic workforce planning involves hiring by looking towards the future. The desired
future for your company is determined by your corporate objectives, mission and vision.
 So, before you begin your workforce planning, consult with your departmental heads
and C-suite executives to understand their plans for the company’s future. Find out
what the company wishes to achieve and where it sees itself in the next decade or two.
Find out what each leader/manager considers to be the obstacle for goal achievement.
Then start building the profile of the ideal candidate who can help your company
overcome these obstacles and reach these goals.  
 You should do this for each job role and identify how each role contributes to the
achievement of the mission and vision.

2. Identify competency gaps in your existing workforce:

 It’s essential to conduct an exhaustive analysis of your current workforce before you
plan for a new one. This will prevent your duplicating the competencies that already
exist in the company.
 You can implement workforce analysis by:

 Administering job skills tests and simulations

 Asking for self-administered feedback
 Seeking team reviews about each team/member
 Contacting customers and other external stakeholders for feedback

 This type of workforce analysis will tell you about the quality of your existing staff and
the potential they have in-store. You will also be able to identify any skills and
competency gaps in the workforce and determine if re-training or replacement hiring is
the right solution to plug-in these gaps.
 In addition to understanding the current skills gap, forecast the competency gap you
may have in the future. For this, you need to first consider how you’re planning to plug-
in the existing skills gap. Then you need to understand how the needs of your industry
or job role will change in the future. That way, you can get some idea about the type of
skills that will be necessary, say 5 or 10 years down the line. For example, there was a
time when cashiers at retail stores needed to have excellent calculation or accounting
 skills. But today’s cashiers need great technical skills to run the machines that do the
calculation/accounting.
 Additionally, when hiring a candidate, you should check whether they possess the
characteristics of a leader or manager. After all, they may one day be at the helm of the
company.

3. Consult stakeholders for their inputs

 When it comes to hiring stakeholders, there are two groups of people who will be
affected by the new hire. The first is the internal stakeholders – departmental heads,
line managers, project managers, hiring managers, team leads and other employees.
The second is the external stakeholders – customers, suppliers, logistics partners,
banking partners, manufacturers, external agencies, consultants, government, etc. 
 During strategic workforce planning, you must consider how stakeholders affect the role
you’re currently hiring. How closely will the new hire engage with the stakeholder? Will
there be any direct impact on his/her performance or the completion of the
task/project? What expectations does this stakeholder have from the new hire?
 It’s important to consult with all relevant stakeholders and discuss these questions with
them. You will have to clearly define the right channels of communication & feedback
between the role and the stakeholder to ensure smooth operations.

4. Automate your hiring processes

 According to a study on recruitment automation, 67% of the respondents believed AI-

enabled technology could save time during hiring, 43% believed that AI automation
could reduce recruiter bias, 31% felt that AI technology could improve hiring accuracy
and 30% of the respondents felt that AI automation can save a lot of money during
hiring.
 So, before implementing your strategic workforce plans, put in place effective AI or
predictive analytics tools that can make your recruitment & hiring process faster and
more effective.

5. Overhaul your existing HR policies & programs

 Companies have outdated HR policies, practices and programs that don’t support
strategic workforce planning endeavours. The only way your workforce planning
strategies will yield positive results is when the existing HR frameworks change.
 The best way to transform your HR policies & programs is to consult the people who are
directly impacted by them. Bring up the issues during your corporate meetings or
organize an idea exchange event where employees and executives can share their ideas
with you. If you need more help, you always have the option of consulting an external
specialist.
  This process of overhauling your HR policies & programs must start ages before strategic
workforce planning since change doesn’t happen overnight.

6. Hire according to company culture

 A total 91% of managers believe that a candidate’s cultural alignment with the company

is more important than his/her competencies. Conversely, employees who don’t find a
culture-fit with their workplace are 24% more likely to quit within months of coming
onboard.
 Whichever way you look at it, company culture is immensely impactful on the quality of
your hire and their experience while in the company. You can’t expect to run your
strategic workforce plans successfully without considering company culture.
 When hiring, you should not only consider the current cultural-fit of the candidate, but
also the flexibility and alignment he/she should have as the company’s culture evolves.

7. Monitor and modify your strategic workforce planning process as needed

 Once you’ve developed your strategic workforce plans and implemented them, you
need to keep track of how they’re performing constantly — making notes of the
successes and identifying causes of failures by putting technology to good use. These
days, there are software which give you the tools to analyze the quality of your hiring
strategies, while workforce planning, recruitment, hiring and onboarding are in
progress. You can make the amendments to the strategies as necessary, in time for the
next hiring cycle.

◊ Model an effective employee Recruitment Process for outlook:

1. Identify Your Needs:
Create a list of needs before you create a job posting. It may seem easy to identify the
hiring need when you’re replacing an employee who just left, but the task gets more
difficult if you’re creating a new position or changing the responsibilities of a role.

2. Prepare the Job Description:

Creating a good job description is a vital piece in crafting an effective recruitment
strategy. Once you understand your business and department’s needs, you should
determine the duties and responsibilities of the role and write them out.
Job descriptions help communicate the organization’s needs and expectations to a
potential candidate. It’s essential to be as specific as possible in the job description to
attract and meet candidates who can sufficiently meet the demands of the role.

3. Create a Recruitment Plan:

 Save time and energy by creating a recruitment plan. Strategize the best ways to get the
word out about the job. Determine who will be reviewing resumes, scheduling
interviews, and deciding on the right candidate.

4. Start Searching:
Use keyword recruitment tools to cut down on your search time during the recruitment
process. This can be the most time-consuming part of recruiting, and keyword tools can
weed out unqualified applicants.

5. Recruit Top-Tier Candidates:

The best candidates likely have many options, and you’ll need to maintain timely
communication or they’ll quickly move on to other opportunities. Use a mobile hiring
app to review top candidates quickly, right on your smartphone, whether you’re in the
office or on the go.

6. Conduct a Phone Screening:

Once you have your eye on certain applicants, conduct a phone screening to narrow
down the selection process and make sure you want to take the time to interview the
candidate in person. Make a list of the best interview questions to ask before you get
started.

7. Interview in Person:
Interviews should be conducted soon after a phone screening—ideally within a week.
The process shouldn’t stretch on too long, or candidates may lose interest.
Communicate with the interviewee about where you are in the process and how long it
will take to get back to them with your decision. And then be sure to follow up, even if
you decide they’re not a good fit. Be sure to allot enough time so you can focus and give
candidates your undivided attention.

8. Offering the Job:

Just because you offer an employee a job doesn’t mean they’re going to accept. Take
great care in this step of the process to present a desirable offer the candidate won’t
want to pass up. Over 90 percent of people report being contacted by a manager can
make them accept a job offer faster, so don’t be afraid to reach out. But expect the
process to take time, and be ready to negotiate salary and benefits.

9. Onboarding a New Employee:

Now that you’ve determined which candidate will be joining your team, the real work
begins. Implement a new hire onboarding process so the candidate has a positive
experience and can easily dive into the job you’ve hired them for.
 The onboarding process shouldn’t simply focus on new hire paperwork—it should focus
on processes and resources that will help new hires transition successfully into the
company. For example, assigning a mentor or a buddy and setting up one-on-one time
with managers can help expedite new hire proficiency.

Task 3:
◊ Conduct a comprehensive study and find out employees from which of these organization has
the best work life balance-

FMCG,s FMCD

BFSI

Media

IT

Primary research to be conducted with minimum 50 persons per sector.

  From someone who you have seen working in these industries, which is beneficial and in
which sector the employees enjoys best work-life balance according to some votes are:

71 votes
9
12.7%
FMCG - Fast-moving consumer goods
4
5.6%
FMCD - Fast Moving Consumer Durables
20
28.2%
BFSI - Banking, financial services and insurance
8
11.3%
Media
30
42.3%
IT

Task 4:
◊ Sales people are pressurized with targets. Most organization hires trainees and irrespective
of their domains they are provided with sales target. The young mind gets depressed because
of this and tend to burn out. The bosses always pressurize their juniors and makes them feel
inferior. This causes depression amongst employees who end up committing suicide in many
cases.
1. Incentivize.

 There’s no way around it, stress drives activity and sales managers know this. The key to
sales success is to harness the right kind and amount of stress to motivate your
employees rather than discourage them.
  So how do you do this correctly? Incentivize your people. Consider building a
quality sales scorecard. When you set an ambitious goal, or organize competitions, you
put on the pressure in a healthy way and bring out the competitive nature in people.
 With a sales report, managers can take a look at your sales metrics and conduct one-on-
one meetings with your team to set realistic goals and offer rewards that will truly
motivate.  Start small, and expand your incentive program as you learn and grow.
 Reps, tap into your competitive side and accept the challenges your manager puts on
your plate. If your manager knows how to motivate, they won’t ask you to do anything
you’re not capable of.
2. Take it one day at a time.

 While this advice may sound cliché, it really is important for sales reps to approach their
quota one day at a time. Think about this way, if you don’t make prospecting a daily
habit and only focus on the deals at hand, how will you meet your goals next month or
the month after that?
 If prospecting becomes part of your day-to-day routine, each call becomes less stressful
and the stakes are lowered. This way, if you can’t connect with a prospect or lose a deal,
you begin to form an “on to the next one” mentality—nothing to stress about!
 If you save prospecting for the end of the month, your quota suddenly becomes much
less attainable in the upcoming months. Do yourself a favor and build up your pipeline
as you go.
3. Get the resources you need.

 When you break it down, stress is relatively easy to cure—you either need less pressure
or more resources to handle the pressure. Unfortunately, in sales, the pressure never
lets up; there’s never enough revenue, clients, or deals.
 So if your team is feeling unusually stressed, they likely need more resources. These
resources may come in the form of sales enablement tools, more team members, or
additional sales training.
 If you’re a manager, conduct interviews with your team to determine where they could
use a little more help. Are they overwhelmed with leads? Hire new talent. Are they
having a hard time staying organized? Look for a better CRM. Need more pipeline? Look
into prospecting tools.
 If you’re a sales rep, don’t be afraid to ask your manager for more resources—they want
to see you succeed.
4. Communicate.

 As we’ve already referenced several times within this blog post, communication
between reps and managers is key to achieving sales success.
  If you’re a sales manager, it’s important to understand what your team struggles with
most, what takes the most time out of their day, and what would help them better
reach their goals. You will never get the answers to these questions if you don’t foster
an environment of open communication.
 If you’re a sales rep, speak up. As the age-old saying goes, “You can’t get what you don’t
ask for.” If you need more resources, support or guidance let your manager know.
 5. Manage your expectations.
 If you’re a sales rep and you expect every sales qualified lead, or SQL, to be ready to
buy, you’re sadly mistaken. As seasoned reps will tell you, the sales process looks
different at every company.  So while one company might fill out a form and buy your
product the next day, many are just collecting research for a purchase down the road.
 Although it’s important to go into each sales call with confidence, if you expect each call
to turn into a deal you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. If a sales rep is
repeatedly disappointed, that disappointment can soon turn to stress.
 What helps most reps manage their expectations is to change the goal. Instead of
focusing on a deal, focus on using each call to build a relationship. This will take the
pressure off and increase your chances of making a sale in the long run.
6. Learn to say no.

 Although most sales reps are accustomed to saying yes, sometimes stress can be
mitigated by simply saying no. Whether it’s your manager asking about a specific deal, a
prospect asking about price, or a colleague asking for help, sometimes you just need to
say no.
 Forget your fear of letting someone down and be reasonable. Can you handle your
workload? Can you finagle a deal for a client? Or can you pick up a coworker’s slack?
Don’t be afraid to say no and ask for help when you need it. Your manager can only set
realistic goals if you’re honest with them.
7. Leverage sales analytics.

 For managers and sales reps alike, analytics can be the key to relieving stress. Think
about it, if you analyze your performance or your team’s performance over time, you
can begin to predict how your actions will impact the bottom line.
 For example, as a sales rep, if you understand the average number of calls it takes to
make a sale, you can better predict your performance based on how many calls you
make daily. If you’re not making enough calls, you won’t reach your quota. However, if
you plan your day around these numbers, your monthly results won’t come as a surprise
to you—mitigating the stress of not knowing.
 As a sales manager, analytics can inform nearly every decision you make from assigning
quotas, to territory size, to the number of reps on your team, to the amount of revenue
 you can expect your team to bring in. Get comfortable with your analytics and you’ll find
your job suddenly becomes easier.
8. Take a break.

 In sales, and any job really, it’s often frowned upon to step away from your desk or take
time off. But sometimes, that’s exactly what you need to clear your mind and increase
your productivity.
 For managers, this means fostering a workplace environment that recognizes the need
for an occasional break. Your employees should be capable of recognizing when
they’re burnt out and should feel comfortable telling you so. Be receptive to this
honesty and reap the benefits when they return rejuvenated and ready to sell.
 For reps, this means admitting to yourself that it’s time to take a break. Whether this
means a long lunch, a walk around the block, or a week away—recognize how important
it is to give yourself a break. Doing the same thing day in and day out can get old fast—
don’t lose your drive to sell because you’re burnt out.
9. Keep your calendar full.
 We’ve already made reference to the importance of a full pipeline, but we can’t stress it
enough.  Managing relationships with current customers is important, but new
conversations with new prospects is what keeps companies in business. Remember to
juggle your responsibilities evenly.
 While it may seem counterintuitive to keep yourself busy, it really does reduce sales
pressure. Think of it this way, if you have ten calls on your calendar today, are you going
to feel stressed about the first one? Maybe a little. But what if it’s your only call of the
day? That one call just became a lot more stressful.
 Prioritize prospecting and keep your calendar and pipeline full.
10. Always follow up.
 80% of sales require 5 follow-ups, yet 44% of sale reps give up after only one follow up
(source). Do yourself a favor and continue to follow up with leads and prospects. You’ll
make more sales and reduce the stress of continuously finding new prospects.
11. Make preparation a priority.

 As a sales rep or manager, you work hard to secure phone calls with important
prospects—but once you’re on the phone it’s easy to lose focus or let your nerves take
over. The only way to prevent this from happening is to prioritize your preparation.
 When you’re prepared for a call you can anticipate objections, personalize your sales
pitch, and have a genuine conversation with your prospects—ultimately erasing some of
the pressure you feel to have a good call or make a sale.