Curse of expectations: Leading to a dive in the Blue Ocean

The dire need for talent differentiation has led to the curse of high employee expectations. The demand for excellence has allowed talent the audacity to demand an ‘out of the box’ EVP. This has led to the increasing importance of the value of innovation & creativity in HR.

A Red Ocean represents an existing market that is well defined as well as heavily populated by the competition. So, a red ocean is more like the situation of perfect competition wherein the same product/EVP is offered to the buyer/employee at the same price. So, he has little incentive to buy you and you alone. There is zero security in your investment as an employer. Hence, in this ‘War for Talent’, a red ocean strategy would only be a futile attempt.

A strategically inclined HR would hence move towards application & creation of a Blue Ocean Strategies. As defined, the aim of a Blue Ocean Strategy is not to out-perform the competition in the existing industry, but to create new market space or a blue ocean, thereby making the competition irrelevant. Blue Ocean Strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost.

HR needs to achieve such heightened levels of innovation excellence and hence be able to produce Quality Classics for an EVP that cannot be replicated.

Some Diving Blue observations in HR:

1) Use of mobile devices for a LMS
2) Virtual Learning environments
3) Informal Learning
4) Stay Interviews as a means of facilitating an effective retention action plan
5) Social Networking Arenas as a means of effective recruitment
6) Development of Unique Organizational Capabilities
7) Unique Branding
8) Unified Recruitment+ Performance Management
9) Application of Appreciative Inquiry
10) Tempting Job profiles
11) Fancy Job titles

Michael Porter: “Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity”.