HR professionals see the old and new meet in India: SHRM travels to booming country.

In the streets of Delhi, a tour bus carrying HR professionals visiting India with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) came to a standstill. It was too big to fit on the city's old streets.

In moments, the tour group's coordinator had rounded up several two-person rickshaws

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He said he called them on their cellphones.

The incident was one of several that showed the HR professionals how Indian companies and workers are combining old and new technology to create one of the world's most rapidly growing economies.

India is the world's second-largest country, with 1.1 billion inhabitants. Almost one-third of that population lives below the poverty line. The population is segmented by caste, and marriages are still arranged by young adults' parents. But residents with college degrees and who live in urban areas are experiencing unprecedented success. Universities struggle to prepare students for the changing business world, as national and multinational companies clamor for educated workers' skills.

The delegation discovered that Indian HR professionals face challenges similar to the ones at U.S. companies--turnover, retention and so on--if on a somewhat larger scale. Some of the most striking differences between the two countries and cultures, said some delegates, surfaced in the ways those challenges were met.

Over the 10-day trip, April 3 to 13, the 22 HR professionals and two SHRM senior staff members visited Indian companies and universities in New Delhi and Mumbai. They sat down with academics at the Management Development Institute and SP Jain Institute of Management and Research. They heard from the leaders of two HR organizations, the National Human Resource Development Network and the National Institute for Personnel Management, as well as from the National Association of Software and Service Companies, an organization that represents and helps create public policy for India's software industry. And they spoke with senior HR executives from Genpact, Johnson & Johnson, JP Morgan Chase and Zenith Computers. Indian companies included Reliance Retail, Mahindra and Mahindra, Wartsila India Ltd., and Walchand People First.

HR Similarities ...

A SHRM delegate, David G. McCoy, is vice president of HR for Jarden Consumer Solutions in Boca Raton, Fla. Jarden produces small appliances under the brands Mr. Coffee, Oster, Crock-Pot and others. According to McCoy, Jarden wants to expand its sales and distribution efforts to India.

On the trip, he met Charles Snyder, who is the former head of training and development for Wal-Mart and the current vice president of talent transformation for Reliance Retail, the second largest company in India. Reliance is modeling itself after Wal-Mart, McCoy said. Jarden and Reliance might be tapping similar markets, he added, citing Indian employees at Jarden who report that significant numbers of Indians in America are repatriating to their homeland--and taking their American spending habits and expectations back home with them. "It was extremely valuable to chat with him and understand what to expect," McCoy said.

The group visited the offices of Genpact, a business process outsourcing company, and was impressed with the HR practices there. Companies need cutting-edge HR practices to combat extremely high rates of turnover, the delegates said. Because so many businesses are growing so quickly, the demand for qualified employees is huge.

Instead of offering applicants more and more money, only to lose them when another company makes a better offer, Genpact focuses on screening applicants, onboarding, continuing training, career progression and engaging the employees' families.

"We hear how pay scales are accelerating" to attract and keep employees in the United States, "but they don't throw money at it in India," said delegate Mary Helen Waldo, vice president of global HR at Serena Software in San Mateo, Calif. "There's a science around return on investment, investing in up-front costs ... how extending length of service goes straight to the bottom line. They see HR as elemental to the business."

... And HR Differences

While the companies and universities that the delegation visited were top of the line, delegates said, they couldn't help but notice the abject poverty outside school and business walls.

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"In professional settings, it seemed like I was in a country on the brink of breaking forth as a powerhouse," said Marilyn Kendrix, SPHR, senior organizational development consultant for AT & T. "But then they are in this country with hundreds of millions of people living below any kind of poverty we encounter here."

One of the encumbrances to succeeding in India is lack of infrastructure, though people find ways around the lack of roads, water and electricity--such as combining rickshaws and cellphones.

"They don't always give up on the old ways," Waldo said. "If a horse cart works, you continue using that. We [in the United States] take new technology and throw the old away."

Delegates learned that students and professors interact in very different ways from their peers in Western schools. From childhood, Indians are taught not to ask questions--it's a sign that the student isn't learning and reflects poorly on the student and the teacher, Waldo said.

"Translate that to a manager-subordinate role, and there's a completely different set of expectations" than in Western companies, Waldo said. A Western manager might be frustrated to find that Indian employees don't alert their bosses to potential problems and instead might tell their bosses only what they want to hear.

Learn More About India

Nina Woodard, SPHR, GPHR, is director of business development for Strategic Human Resource Management India Private Limited, SHRM's subsidiary company in Mumbai. Woodard helped coordinate the trip.

SHRM plans educational seminars in India for Indian HR professionals, Woodard said. Pages will be added to the SHRM web site for Western HR professionals to learn more about performance management, training and development in India.

"Right now, HR is very valuable in India. There is a lot of economic activity, and at the core of that is how people are treated," Woodard said. However, "there is a huge gap between qualified HR professionals and the requirements of businesses."

BETH MCCONNELL IS SENIOR EDITOR FOR HR NEWS.

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