Narrow the Intent-Content Gap !!!

When Content does not Match up to Intent,  you are likely to  lose credibility.  The writing on the wall is loud and clear.  If we fail to live up to the talk as HR professionals then we are seen as folks "throwing the cannon balls" at the party.

Have you experienced that people speak about some new concept they heard of,  bring in a whole lot of jargon and then quickly adapt and adopt what was working somewhere and which they claimed could be a cure all, a solution for tomorrow and then .... Bingo !!! it all fizzles out as quickly as it got created.

If this rings a bell then it is probably a case of intent-content gap at work.  What you wanted did not happen and what you expected did not turn out to be.  Here are four reasons why this happens.

a) The concept did not fit into your context:  Understanding the context is key to successful implementation.  What works for A situation does not apply to Situation B.   Try remembering the last time you tried a least common denominator approach to employee engagement.   Wont' work -  it has to be segmented if it has to work,  Not everything that motivates an employee in second year of his job career can motivate the one with a decade or more.

b) Concept not thought through:  If you tried an approach that resembles tunneling your way through the mountain then at best you can see the other side.  If you want to see the top you need to climb the mountain.  Ask few of your HR teams what a normalization process intends to achieve and see how much they can explain.... or even simpler ask what the philosophy for performance management is and if you have a common response you are doing well otherwise the concept is not clearly understood.

c) Rome was not built in a day:  Big Bang roll out without a prototype or a working model is a sure way to rework, or in all likelihood failed implementation.  Ever remember a day when your folks at work decided that you need a new process or system from the scratch, from the ground up to replace the current one.

d) You put the squirrel to do what the turtle was supposed to be doing.  Climbing trees is best done by the squirrel and swimming across the current in the river by the turtle. If you ever tried switching roles in the name of meeting goals of  job rotation then you will be in for a surprise.

Good One !! On Big Data

A nice interesting perspective on Big Data from HBR Blogs in the link below

Read here (External Site)

Thanks

http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/10/does-bigger-data-lead-to-better-decisions/#!

Is Promotion a Reward for Performance - Part II

In an earlier post (Is Promotion A Reward for Performance) I had spoken about how organizations can stall the outcomes of an important process by positioning it inappropriately as something which is attributed as a reward for performance.  However performance is a necessary but no sufficient condition for a promotion.

Take the simple case of A being the best territory sales representative for Pharma Co.   As a Territory sales person he is responsible for ensuring good services to clients within a geographical boundary, increasing sales all at optimal travel and overhead costs. He is the star performer among sales folks.  A is a a go-getter, loves traveling, loves meeting people and extremely achievement oriented.  He always prefers to be in the limelight,  gets excited and highly motivated when receives a praise and recognition from the Regional Sales Head or the Territory Sales Manager.   The Regional Sales Head had just received a resignation letter from the Territory Sales Manager and was contemplating making A the new Territory Sales Manager in next 3 months.

When he discussed the proposal with the HR Manager he got the following feedback. A loves to follow schedules,  meet Doctors as per assigned protocols and engage with them in a very pleasing and detailed oriented manner. However he really hates managing outcome of others.  He just can't lead a team, motivate performance,  coach or mentor others.  He prefers being a star and can't stand losing out on sales targets.  He gets completely dejected and takes the failures to meet targets as his own doing. 

The regional sales head knows this very well and is not sure how to retain A if he is not able to promote him in at least next 2 years.  But the question is will he be setting up for failure.

It is in the interest of the organization to do something else to retain him.  So promoting your best sales guy might end up in your having a bad fit for a Territory Manager role because he has to fix targets for others,  drive up motivation,  arrange team meetings,  take stock of weekly performance all of which is not something that A is very keen on.   He needs a fair bit of coaching before he can take up the role of Territory Manager and the HR team feels that this can happen only after 2 years of inputs

So what options does a manager have to retain A.    Here are three ways it can be done.  While the first is essential you have a choice among the other two.

• Assign a performance coach and work through action and improvement areas. Needs to be a two way process starting with establishing objectives,  working through with understanding barriers to improvement and then action planning followed by action to change 

•  Have an alternative engagement model for motivating and incentivizing the Sales Person (A in this case). This is very important and should be done in parallel to the coaching assignment.  That way A is focused on the achievement and it is important this laddering (showing few more steps on the path towards something different or a new role is to be done)is important.  Most organizations fail on this count and thus are unable to retain your good performer and lose them for lack of action taken.

• Look for a rotation to a new location or new product line in same role and change the context for the individual. It is more likely he / she will be engaged for the period since the change and parallely you need to work on the coaching bit

At times you may be promoting someone into his or her area of expertise or capability then in such case it may be a good thing but if not then it is a sure shot for failure.

Look forward to some ideas and comments and if you liked it feel free to share.

You may also want to read

Is Promotion A Reward for Performance - Part I

The Normal Curve in PMS

BPS Industry in India: Some Sectoral Challenges

Earlier I had written about the BPS industry being at a sweet spot.  However the bitter truth is that we are staring at big numbers when it comes to employability too.  A survey by Aspiring Minds (www.aspiringminds.in) in 2013 reports that about 47% of graduates are not employable in any area primarily due to poor cognitive as well as English language skills. Computer knowledge and application is another weakness.  Only about 21.37% of the graduates are employable in the ITeS sector and mostly for non functional roles.  

If India has to maintain its competitive advantage in the ITeS sector (today it is talent availability more in terms of numbers) then quality and consistency are key in the future.  With forecast 2020 revenues in the region of 50 Billion USD my estimate works to about 1.9 million direct employment in this sector by 2020.  Around that time we can compute that the ITeS industry alone would need about 100,000 to 150,000 graduates per year.    This is based on the trend where we grew from < 1 Billion USD in 2001 to about 16.8 Billion USD over next ten years.   

Each year Indian universities and colleges graduate about 5 Million every year from over  30,000 colleges and of this over 85% are non-engineering graduates.   If you look at the demographics as per the Aspiringminds report female to male ratio is about 100 to 109 for general degree programs versus 100 to 196 for engineering degree programs. 

Reasons for lower employability is that today's curriculum is not job oriented and from our experience in working with colleges and universities the curriculum lags by anything between 1 to 10 years from what industry demands across various skill areas in ITeS. 

While the ITeS sector caters to several global clients the challenge is that today organizations don't have the luxury of training (unlike previous decades of 60's to 80's) hires for extended periods of time.  Today's customers need a quick turn around in taking over their business processes and running them real time.   So it is not about one organization in India losing business to another rather it is about other countries vying for the same business.  We have a threat from Latin America,  Eastern Europe as well as Asian Countries like Philippines.

Unless something drastic is done on the employability front it would be futile for India's competitive edge in the coming decade.   Solution required cannot be only in hands of the education sector.  Lot of investment has happened in education but it is only a collaborative effort with industry working closely with academia that can bring about this change in focus.

More on how and what can be done in a later post

You may also like to browse

BPS Industry in India: In a Sweet Spot

Responsible Leadership : Abstract of Case Study

Responsible Leadership: The Case of Tata Consultancy Services

Rajiv Noronha, AVP & Head Organizational Effectiveness (BPO Services)
Ranjan Bandyopadhyay, VP & Global HR Head (BPO Services)
Venkatnarayanan N K, AVP & Head- HR, Banking Services (BPO Services)

All Authors from Tata Consultancy Services

Paper was presented by Rajiv Noronha at the Symposium on Responsible Leadership at XLRI Jamshedpur and won the Outstanding Paper Award

Abstract

Responsible Leadership is about making business decisions that, next to the interest of the shareholders, also takes into account all the other stakeholders such as workers, clients, suppliers, the environment, the community and future generations[1]. Since 1991 Indian economy has made significant progress and opened up new opportunities for the youth. Yet two areas we have not addressed seriously as a nation, in order to keep up with the pace of changes that happen around us, are employability and education. On employability - today job opportunities are much more abundantly available for graduates and those with advanced degrees in their field of study. Talent supply from colleges has also increased several fold since 1991 but the paradox is that there is a shortage in the midst of abundance. This is primarily an outcome of the lower levels of employability. Several studies and surveys have indicated employability levels of between 20 to 30% among all graduates. In many cases the graduates are employed in jobs that are far below their real potential leading to disguised unemployment. On education – the issue that one needs to worry is the extent of contextual relevance of the curriculum being imparted. Industry captains have been talking about the time lag to update the curriculum to make it relevant to current industry practice. In the learning imparted at colleges we are few years behind in terms of what the industry does and what students learn thereby making it a problem both for the students as well as for the industry. Significant time and effort in training the fresh graduates to make them up to date before they can be gainfully productive can be avoided if this gap is minimized. This case study highlights how Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has been able to display the well intentioned facets of responsible leadership to address these two critical challenges that we face as it is directly relevant to the business we are in. A significant point of departure of this case study is that we look at defocusing “Leader” in the sense of a person and focus more on “Leadership” and how the organization can create significant capability in terms of making the difference, enabling a culture that facilitates the needful display of leadership that builds on synchronous and pressing needs for organizations, individuals as well as the nation. We call this a win-win-win and try to understand facets of Responsible Leadership at TCS through this case study. While there are numerous examples that one has seen at TCS we try to bring out how Responsible Leadership is fostered by using two examples from recent years.

[1] Financial Times: Internet reference http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=responsible-leadership (Acc: 10 Sept 2012)

BPS Industry In India....In A Sweet Spot

Why a blog post on the BPS industry (business process services for the uninitiated).   Well actually it is not  just this one but several forthcoming one's including this one.  And the key reason if I may say so is that I currently work for this industry.  I take care of the Organizational Effectiveness Function for the BPS Line of Business of Tata Consultancy Services  (popularly known as TCS).  

Truly a people intensive and fast growing industry and very relevant for discussing people related matters.

The BPS line of business accounts for about 12% of the overall revenues of TCS.   (closed FY13 with  overall revenue of INR 62,989 Crores or 11.57 Billion USD) 

Well BPS industry in a sense changed the fortunes of many many people in India.  Job opportunities shot up and the industry has contributed significantly to direct employment which grew from about 70,000 in 2001 to over 0.85 Million in 2011.

Also from revenues of < 1 Billion USD in 2001 the industry crossed about 16 Billion USD in 2011 and today its revenues are in the range of 20 Billion USD which represents about 20% of the IT/ITeS industry.    

Slated to grow at a rapid pace even in the coming few years NASSCOM has projected a revenue of 50 Billion USD for this industry in 2020.  This surely implies that we are in a sweet spot today as far as potential and growth are concerned.

The industry hires employees with graduate, post graduate and higher advanced level degrees across a range of degree streams (Commerce, Finance,  Mathematics, Statistics, Biotech,  Pharma and Life Sciences,  Management,  etc... to name a few) and hence truly a big contributor to the diversity focus also.  In fact most companies in this sector have in upwards of 25% female composition in their workforce when some even have as high as 40 to 45% women in the workforce.

In my next post  I shall discuss some challenges on the people front for this industry and what can be done to overcome these.

The Good The Bad & The Ugly: Role of HR in Enabling Knowledge Management

Ever wondered why knowledge management initiatives also fail many a times.   Why would anyone want to avoid pursuit of knowledge. It is all about cause and effect.  What does that knowledge being captured yield at the end of the day.  Are we enabling some capability that we use?  Are we ensuring people overcome fears,  develop a strong perspective how the KM pursuit fits the larger picture about where the organization is headed.

HR plays a vital role in enabling knowledge management.  Read about it below.

XLRI Synapse 2012 Article on Pages 13-15

More Here

Quote

Here is a favorite that I use....

"Field of Managing People has parallels' like driving a car,   You Need to Make Deliberate Attempts to Lead & Manage.  It is not the mountains that are a challenge, rather the small rocks, pebbles and stones on the road traveled."

Daniel Goleman's New Focus: Focus on Attention

After Emotional Intelligence and Primal Leadership now Dr. Daniel Goleman has shifted his attention to something which is in short supply today...   ATTENTION

In the last few years when I wrote mails to bring a point in focus I generally used a line 

"Kindly give your undivided Attention to this"  Maybe that's what we want people to be doing more especially to achieve something important...Pay More Attention 

In his new Book,  In Focus what was just released recently Daniel Goleman offers some insights to high performance & fulfillment: Attention

Various dimensions of attention are discussed and message is to sharpen your focus to survive in the complex world.  Dr. Goleman discusses inner, outer and other focus.   He has drawn from sports (competition), arts, business and education and discusses how high-achievers need all three kinds of focus dimensions.  

Reading is bit heavy so set aside undivided attention to read this piece.

Keeping Tab on Executive Level Pay: Companies Act 2013

When I  talk of executive pay it is in the sense of how it is used in US.   It is about salary received by the Board Members, CEO and other senior most executives of the organization.   It appears often in news that shareholders are questioning the enormous pay packets to C level executives and not being able to see a justifiable relationship between the compensation received and the performance of the company.  

This escalation in executive pay can lead to myopic decisions that focus more on here and now and leave the long term sustainability of the organizations in question.  While this may not be the norm it is surely a possibility and there are several cases where pay received and performance are questioned. 

As per a Forbes Article CEO Median pay which remained at about 1 Million Dollars from the 30's to the 80's (5 decades) shot up about 9 times by the first decade of this century (all the decades adjusted for today's dollars to be comparable).  This increasing trend has caught the eagle eye of policy makers in India too...

If you read Section 197 of the recently approved Companies Act 2013 (Government of India) you will find an interesting point. (quoted below) related to executive level pay.

"Every listed company shall disclose in the Board’s report, the ratio of the remuneration of each director to the median employee’s remuneration and such other details as may be prescribed."

This is an important change and it is interesting that even the SEC (US) actually has incorporated a similar provision recently.  So surprising that US is following India in the thinking along these lines.

When companies actually start reporting this out it would become another important metric to compare across companies in a given industry. This would put pressure on decision makers (compensation committees) to find a acceptable level that does not remain outlier in the tables that would be scrutinized with a magnifying glass by analysts and other well wishers (sic !) of the company.

Other interesting areas (from people / HR perspective) which the Companies Act 2013 also addresses are gender equality in board composition,   making CSR spending mandatory (a pursuit so far) and allowing for class action suits to be filed.   More on these in a later post.

Finally looks like CAD is set to show some improvements

Good news... Bad News  come in sinusoidal patterns.... After weeks of  bad news it is now time for some good news flowing in.  

The September trade deficit was lowest in over 2.5 years as per data released today by the Commerce Ministry, Govt of India.

With this one possibility is a lower Current Account Deficit than what was estimated (70 Billion US Dollars)

Looks like better days ahead for the economy in the months leading to Gen Elections 2014. 

Power of Alumni? But How: Part I

There are two ways in which alumni are a great source of positive contribution to your organization.  First they are a great talent pool to hire from for key high impact areas where you can bank on this talent segment.   Second they are your brand ambassadors and more importantly so if they are working with your clients or partners other organizations who are not in your direct competitive set.

The question is how many organizations actually end up leveraging this network of alumni.  The big boys of consulting actually do it really well.  A lot of leads for their new business and connects on research projects and gathering data come from the alumni at these power houses of business consulting.  

First let us talk about rehiring alumni.  You wouldn't want everyone who worked with you in the past.  You would probably look at those were hard hitters and most valuable players in specific areas which you need to re prioritize or refocus growth or some area which requires complementary skills and capabilities which your alumni had when they left you. 

You would want those who left on good terms,  who contributed well,  who left for reasons like a better prospects or in many cases (first time job holders... especially) they leave just for getting a different perspective and may never had any push factor that drove them away.  Many of them may have been very good contributors too.

In early 2013, Yahoo Inc.  send Welcome Back packages to alumni including VP's ,  Tech Engineers and others providing them insights as to how things had changed since the days the new CEO took over. (Ref: www.techcruch.com)  The writing on the wall was clear...  We will be happy to have you back with us. 

However from practical stand point the question is what can the HR folks do to facilitate the influx of ex employees. in a later post I will be sharing seven ideas on how this can be facilitated and how you can really extend a red carpet to the folks whom you want back at the table.

Elusive Shorter Work Weeks

I took a poll recently on CNN where the question was what would your preference be ; if you were to choose between more pay and a longer weekend.  80% of respondents polled said they preferred the latter. But is this what reality dishes out

Earlier in the 20th Century Economist Keynes had predicted that work week would get shorter as technological advancement made work faster and tasks could finish in fraction of time it took in the 1930's. 

Where did that benefit or improvement go?  What accrued as gains probably did not result in gains for leisure since people became more keen on consumption and spending that they had to earn more and therefore get more pay.  This is the contrast we see even today.   Given a choice one says "prefer more leisure (or weekend extended) but that is not happening due to need to earn more for ever growing needs and wants which is pushing us to earn more.to satisfy needs and wants.

On good shift we had in India since about 1980's the concept of five day work week came about in India and the number of hours worked per day went up to maintain the overall weekly work hours.   This meant longer week ends and more time for self and family.  

Some argue that in countries with lower productivity people are actually working more (See Link Below)  You will find that German productivity is 70% higher than Greek even though Greek work hours are much more than in Germany.

(http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/working-hours)


However the question for us to consider : Is the productivity being high a outcome or a precedence to less working hours.  I think it is more to do with being able to spare more time since you are at advanced levels of productivity.   

Five Success Quotes I loved... and Put up on My Wall

There are many but these are real beauties.  

I have couple on my wall and one on my e-mail signature for over five years now.

"Anger Is One Letter Away from Danger" -  Elanor Roosevelt 

"Success is not final,  failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts" - Winston Churchill

"The way to get started is to stop talking and begin doing" - Walt Disney Inc.

"Kites Rise Highest Against the Wind, Not With It"  - Winston Churchill

"A Man is But the Product of His Thoughts.  What he Thinks, He Becomes."

                                                                                       -Mahatma Gandhi

Learning from The World of Practice: Lessons from Stevie's

http://blog.stevieawards.com/blog/bid/86134/103-Preliminary-Judges-for-The-International-Business-Awards

Some months back I happened to get yet another opportunity to be on the jury for the Stevie's International Business Awards 2013.  The Stevie's are akin to the Oscar's of Business

It's a very nice learning experience to know what companies are doing in space of people management for e.g. how a company in eastern Europe is engaging young mothers coming back to work or how a company in Europe came up with a most incredible way of engaging its workforce or how a gentleman in the Middle East has completely changed the way his organization benchmarks the industry they operate in and extending this to several other countries.

It takes a good bit of investment of  time but is worth the effort.

Organizations should encourage their employees to network and benefit. Thats the future work model and as per Ben Casnocha organizations should encourage people to network with other individuals in their professional peer groups both within and outside the industry.

When they network they get diverse perspectives, when they get diverse perspectives they bring back some of it as tacit knowledge to the organization and the probability that they are able to apply it to their own organizations is much higher... however that requries some encouragement

Remember...the learning and insights they get would be far beyond the cost of facilitating this


.Judging for IBA, Stevies International Business Awards

No Time for Elaborate Appraisal Discussions Try Performance Boosters !!!

It is part of the human DNA to know how we are doing... and as individuals we look for reinforcement... for feedback and this applies both in our personal and work lives.  

These days in the fast paced organizational routines managers  are so busy and find it extremely difficult to find time to go through elaborate feedback sessions. Even when they do it, the rituals seem like extended yoga sessions.

The managers with larger teams stare at significant time that they would have to invest in providing feedback...often causes anxiety in the subordinates as well as managers. This results in dissonance at the time of the periodic appraisal when people don't see the link between their perceived performance levels and the appraisal rating as they did expect it and may have always thought they were doing well... Also a common concern is that managers don't provide sufficient and timely feedback...leaving individuals dissatisfied with the overall appraisal process. 

A very quick and effective way to provide this feedback in our busy work days is an approach we can call as "Performance Boosters" which is a simple 5 minute process which can be very powerful mechanism in absence of elaborate and ritualistic type feedback processes. 

In simple words the five minutes spent include focus on pleasantries, what's going well, what can be improved, what needs to be done different in coming days/weeks.  Finally a minute to hear out the other person on what he / she feels about the feedback.

This process can be done taking a small walk in the campus or in the cafeteria or anywhere in an informal manner.  

Suppose a manager does this three times in a six month period it leaves the employee with fair degree of inputs on how he / she is doing at regular intervals... Imagine a manager with 10 subordinates to appraise... all he would need is a total of 15 minutes in a half year period per feedback recipient and in all it is 150 minutes or 2 to 2.5 hours of time.  Give this a efficiency factor of 0.5 and you can still provide feedback to all your reports in total of about 5 hours in a 6 month window which is a small ask for a manager.  

What about dreaded documentation.... Don't worry... In this process the individual who received the feedback quickly summarizes in a para and sends a mail back to the manager. That way all your feedback is summarized and stored in your mail box for later reference at the time of EOP appraisal discussion.  This process can really help individual to take corrective action and not wait for the appraisal discussion to know something went wrong... Also positive feedback reinforces and motivates... No elaborate setting up of meetings...No rigorous and dreaded planning and implementation.. rather a high impact and quick way but sufficient to cover all individuals.  

Is Promotion A Reward for Performance?

A Very Interesting  Point to Consider.  Given that many feel it is a reward, however I strongly believe that it really is not.  Organization's that send this signal are up for failure in their ability to manage expectations of the performers.

I made this provocative & bold statement in one of the Town Hall Meetings recently and many were puzzled.  Some of them came back to me later and said they never looked at it this way.

Promotion is recognizing someone's capability for a job and making that fitment.  If you had to promote someone for his good performance then you can be setting him up for failure.   Remember the famous saying.  "Your best operations guy may end up being your worst sales person"

Common mistake is managers try to play god at times when it comes to promotion. They try to give the promotee a feeling that they worked a lot through the network to manage his / her subordinate to get a promotion.

So it may be incidental a person who is promoted is a good performer but not always true the other way round.

How you manage the process in your organization will determine how others view it and who you promote matters because people read the message loud and clear when you promote the wrong persons and punish the right guys by not giving them the role they truly fit into

The challenge for HR managers would be how else do your reward high performers and your stars.  Ideas welcome.

Hello ! Holla ! Blogging World

Finally the Day I decide to start a blog ...whether it ends up surviving is the big question.  Rather to restart a aborted attempt on HR Vitamins that I started in 2009.  However post about a dozen posts I did not get further. So now I have archived the earlier posts of HR Vitamins.  And to relaunch it in a new form barely couple of days after we celebrated the Birth Anniversary of  Mahatma Gandhi means it is just the right thing to remember couple of his quotes that is relevant to us in organizations.

"The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problem.”

how true?  They say that we use very little of our potential and it would take some serious to do much more than we think we can.

Maybe Calvin Coolidge was probably right when he said many decades ago...that... unrealized potential is the most common commodity found in his country. (USA)

In 2009 Tata Consultancy Services drew up a very popular quest for it's associates when the CEO brought these three words as matter of focus for every one in the company "Realize Your Potential".If one need is not met the operant behavior would be manifest to satisfy that need.  This is similar to the Need Hierarchy of Maslow.

The second quote of Mahatma Gandhi that I would like to draw upon is

"Action Expresses Priorities"

People act on things that mean most to them.  They need therefore they do... It is like the proverbial Maslows' hierarchy.  You tend to go after things or prioritize based on what level of needs have been satisfied.

Then the question arises to your mind?....

Why do some people spend so much time finding fault with everything around?  Have you come across this proverbial cribber... They made it their life motto to criticize to curse and to find fault with anything and everything from how the buses run in the city, to how the company conducts its business to how their better halves cook food etc.