Apr 20 2013
1 Comment
Business, Employee Engagement, Human Resources, Leadership, Management

Case Study: A Winning Workforce For A Winning Business

I had the opportunity to work with XL Axiata, a telecom company in Indonesia. The company has seen great success on both the business and the people front in recent times. We worked with XL on a short synopsis of the project. The case study highlights  Leadership, simplified communications and a relentless focus on “enablement” of employees as the key success factors of their Employee Engagement program.

You can access the article from Towers Watson’s website. Just in case it doesn’t work, you can also download the article from here.

Happy Reading!

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Apr 04 2013
3 Comments
Employee Engagement, Human Resources, Management

Making Work-Life Balance Work

While watching the news on TV the other day, I came across a story on the much-talked issue of work-life balance. And inevitably as the reporter started narrating the story, the video footage started showing employees working on laptops, tablets, answering emails on smartphones, working from home through VPN etc. To me, this is the most popular visualization of this issue in mainstream media. But is there more to work-life balance than merely tools and technology?

The issue of work-life balance is indeed important. According to Towers Watson’s Global Workforce Study 2012, 48% of workers in Singapore stated that they have been working more hours than normal in the last three years. And about 40% are reporting challenges in taking annual leave or personal time-off in the last few years. Elsewhere, the situation is not much different.

In today’s hyper-connected world, where companies expect an on-demand workforce, stress and a lack of work-life balance can potentially take a toll on worker productivity. The most talked about solution to address this issue is technology. When I talk to companies where employees report dissatisfaction with work-life balance, the response I get from senior leaders is that they already have policies around tele-commuting, smartphones for employees, flexible working hours, availability of video-conferencing through computers etc. These do sound like solutions, but there is something else missing. After all, why are employees still unhappy with their work-life balance?

The tools described above are important, but without the right enabling culture in the organisation, they are quite meaningless. For instance, an employee might have video-conferencing capabilities on the laptop, but if her manager expects in-person face time, the utility of the tool just goes to zero. A company might offer flexible working hours, saying that an employee can choose any 8 hours of working between 8am to 8pm. But, if the employee just ends up starting early and finishing early, the policy doesn’t work. A company might offer smartphones to its employees, but if the culture turns into one of “instant response” on routine issues after working hours or on weekdays, the purpose is defeated.

So, apart from putting these technology-driven solutions in place, companies will have to think about building the mindset or culture for work-life balance. This is the foundation on which an effective work-life balance program can be built. So, how do we do this? There are many ways, but I would like to touch upon three areas:

Leading by Example: One of the potential reasons why employees are not able to take full advantage of such programs is that they don’t see their leaders & managers supporting these programs. Leaders and managers need to set the tone by leveraging the work-life balance programs themselves. After all, if an employee never sees her leader tele-commuting, she might construe that it is not an acceptable practice.

Team-Oriented Goals: One of the challenges in implementation initiative like flexible working hours is the question “So how will the work get done when this person is away?”. One way to address this is to set team-based goals as a way to nudge employees to stand-in for one another. This helps to make team members responsible for each others’ work-life balance and still be accountable for the team goals.

Story-telling: Do we celebrate high-performing employees who enjoy a great work-life balance? Or are we rather talking hush-hush about them? One way to build the work-life balance mindset or culture is to share stories about employees who deliver great performance, and still manage to strike a balance.

All of the above help carry the message that “It is OK to do so.” These can help create widespread understanding of the work-life balance programs, an appreciation of how best to balance performance and persona life and help employees model their behaviours based on their leaders & managers.

What has been your experience? How are you addressing the issue of work-life balance in your company?

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Mar 26 2013
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Business, Economics, Human Resources, Management

Book Review: Talent Economics – The Fine Line Between Winning and Losing the Global War for Talent

I met Gyan Nagpal a couple of years back, when he was still at Deutsche Bank. Over lunch and a passionate discussion about innovation in HR & Talent practices, he mentioned that he was writing a book and since then, I have been eagerly waiting for it.

I finally got a copy of Talent Economics a few weeks back and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. While there are a number of books on the topic of talent and how companies can compete for talent, I liked Talent Economics because it draws from a large number of data sources to paint a picture of the global talent landscape and ways to navigate it. As Gyan says, “In a world full more connected and wired than ever before, we have more information and fewer answers. This is because a pond full of information can sometimes be less useful than a cup full of insight.”

The book brings together talent management practices and economic analysis in response to the war for talent. At a macro level, the book presents a comprehensive framework for looking at any talent marketplace. These are:

  1. Aggregate talent (driven by total populations)
  2. Replacement & mobility ratios (birth rates and migration trends in an economy)
  3. Age & dependency ratios (labour supply in the future; ratio of employable to unemployable people)
  4. Gender mix (women’s economic participation and their presence at various layers of management)
  5. Generational shifts (generational markers for different countries and their impact on work preferences)
  6. Educational proficiency (quality of education)
  7. Management proficiency (quality of tertiary education and supply for managerial talent)
  8. Governance & sustainability (focus on good governance and long-term social sustainability)

Again, using data from myriad sources, Gyan provides clear applications of his framework to generate deep insights about the markets companies operate in.

The book shifts gears to a micro-talent perspective in the second half, where Gyan outlines ‘must-have’ practices for talent management at the firm level. All great ideas, but I loved the ones about building unconventional talent entry-points. There are great ideas about Mid-Career Internships (allowing mid-career professionals who want a career switch to sample the job),  Returnships (especially for women who take a career break), farming alumni groups and also leveraging “open-source” talent. Another interesting concept is that of Cerebral Engagement, where organisations must assess if the workplace practices are enabling “flow”.

In defining your talent strategy, the book presents 11 continuums (like market opportunity, talent pipeline, pipeline proficiency, talent attraction, organisational structure, business ambition, market share, innovation etc.) to conduct a detailed diagnosis of the current situation and prioritize talent investments.

All in all, a great read and I highly recommend this book for business leaders and HR leaders alike.

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Mar 08 2013
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Passing Thoughts

Listening to Employees Across the Employee Life-cycle

Many companies survey their employees periodically to understand the pulse of their organisations. Typically, these surveys help companies understand the levels of Employee Engagement or Employee Satisfaction and establish the key factors which influence employees’ opinions of the workplace.

In most cases, such surveys are run every 1-2 years, indicating a significant interval between two such feedback exercises.

However, our workforce is changing everyday. Companies keep losing existing employees. And they keep hiring new people.

Social, economic and technological factors influence how employees think about their jobs and employers. In such a dynamic scenario, is it enough to generate workforce insights on a periodical basis?

There are two additional points in the employees life-cycle, from which companies could collect significant workforce intelligence – employees’ entry and exit.

Combined together with the other employee surveys, these can bolster your workforce insights strategy and help HR take better people-decisions.

Understanding the opinions of newly joined employees can help HR professionals in a number of ways. 

  • It can help them understand the key reasons why the employee chose their company over the others. This can also help in informing the company’s unique Employee Value Proposition.
  • It can provide insights about the experiences of the employees during the selection stage. This is an important initial phase in the employee life-cycle, where the employee begins to form initial impressions in dealing with the company.
  • It can serve as a tool to measure the effectiveness of on-boarding programs and thus, improve time-to-performance.
  • It can also help identify cases of pre-mature attrition, by identifying attrition risks among new joined employees.

Similarly, surveying exiting employees can help HR professionals by uncovering several rich insights.

  • It can bring clarity to the key reasons why employees leave and provide such insights for key employee segments such as critical-skill employees, high-performers, high-potentials etc.
  • It can help develop a deep understanding of disengagement and which aspects of the Employee Value Proposition are not being delivered effectively.
  • It can help in identifying potential targets for re-recruitment, thereby helping establish an alumni base.

One may think that these can be addressed by traditional exit surveys. However, exit surveys typically suffer form several limitations.

For instance, there is often a significant time lag between the time the exit survey is conducted and the data is aggregated & analysed. Also, many exit surveys are designed as qualitative research tools, rather than striking a balance between quantitative & qualitative approaches. 

Forward-looking companies, which understand the real value of their human capital, are increasingly looking at actively “listening” to their employees across the employee life-cycle.

And they are using these insights to make data-driven decisions about their workforces. Moreover, with the advent of technology, some companies are investing in real-time insights platforms, which allow HR professionals to do analytics in real-time. 

What approaches and initiatives are you exploring to generate insights about your workforce?

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Dec 17 2012
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Human Resources

Article in The Singapore Business Review

Employee Value Proposition and Employer Branding are one of the key issues in the minds of HR professionals – given the economic uncertainties, shortages in the talent market in certain countries, demographics shifts, changes in work preferences and the increasing need for an effective, affordable & differentiated attraction, engagement and retention strategy.

Here is an article I wrote for the Singapore Business Review on this issue. It talks about how HR could take cues from Marketing in doing this. Happy Reading!

http://sbr.com.sg/hr-education/commentary/how-boost-employer-branding-lure-singapore-talent

In the current volatile economic environment, several Singapore organisations are struggling to establish and maintain an effective and affordable strategy for attracting, engaging and retaining employees. The changes in the talent markets, demographic shifts in the labour pool and the changing nature of work preferences all add further to the situation.

In a recent survey conducted by Towers Watson, about 77% of the companies in Singapore reported challenges in attracting top-performing employees. 60% of these companies also cite difficulties in retaining such employees.

To address the situation, several HR professionals are actively looking at Employer Branding as a strategy to attract and retain great talent. As we focus on the branding aspect, we could probably borrow a page from the marketing professionals.

Before branding any product, a marketing professional focuses on establishing a clear and differentiated value proposition for the product i.e. what does the product promise to do for the customer, what is the value, utility or experience it offers. The brand messaging is derived based on this value proposition that the marketeer helps define.

Similarly, HR professionals need to define a clear and differentiated Employee Value Proposition (EVP), before they think about employer branding. An EVP goes beyond just the rewards that a company offers in lieu for the employees’ time and efforts.

It encompasses total rewards, purpose & values of the organisation, nature of job, culture and colleagues. In essence, it is the “deal” or “experience” that you offer to the employees. So, how could HR leaders approach this effectively?

The starting point would be in-depth research. HR leaders need to find out the key ingredients of their workplaces through quantitative research (employee surveys) or qualitative research (focus group discussions, interviews etc.).

The research would point us to the key factors which employees (and prospective employees) truly value about the organisation. Based on the research, we would need to identify the key themes or tenets that would make up the EVP.

These would be the key propositions why people should work for your organisation. And these would also inform your other HR programs and initiatives, so that they are aligned to the EVP promise.

Once the EVP has been established and validated with stakeholders, then we could move to the branding side of the equation. By defining the EVP and ensuring alignment of HR programs, the employer branding would be an authentic articulation of the “deal” that the employees get, backed by the organisation’s proven ability to deliver on the promise.

For those organisations, who still want to take it a notch further, they could think about how they can apply another Marketing technique to HR practices – Segmentation. The most forward-looking companies segment their EVP by the key workforce segments.

For instance, they provide a further differentiated deal to their top talent, high potentials or employees in pivotal roles. Or some offer a differentiated value proposition based on job families or demographics such as age.

Research evidence clearly shows that companies who are progressive towards full realisation of a formal EVP are likely to achieve superior financial performance and an engaged workforce.

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