Posts Tagged Business
The Bane of Sytems / Processes
I came across this picture in one of the forwarded messages in my inbox and it reminded me of situations employees find themselves in so often.
To me, this picture depicts situations where companies burden themselves and their employees with cumbersome processes / tools for simple tasks. Don’t all of us agree that many of the organizations we work with have a little too much of systems / processes and tools? 10 forms for joining the organization, 20 for leaving. And between those two, a multitude of unwieldy processes to follow, forms to fill and redundant tools to use. We could do a lot with simplification - minimalistic organization structure design, minimalistic processes etc. But, how to make this a reality?
Add comment November 12, 2008
Managing Differently in Challenging Times
As everybody talks feverishly about the world economy slipping into a recession and people draw numerous parallels between previous depressions and the current situation, I thought about putting down 5 broad management principles that we can adopt and do things differently this time around:
- In most downturns, managers typically tend to narrow their focus on operational efficiency and cost-optimization alone. A better way to manage will be to be “ambi-dexterous” and maintain focus on both topline and bottomline.
- In most cases, downturns have trigerred the tendency to source talent from low-cost talent pools with a view to minimize costs and at the same time ensuring ‘adequate’ staffing. Instead, organizations should be looking at tapping diverse talent pools to build up a diverse work-force which ideates using different perspectives. This enriches the problem-solving processes with alternative thinking. Some cues can be found in the Creative Class.
- Most downturns are accompanied with a free-fall of the “axe” or downsizing. Instead, forward-looking leaders need to focus their existing people assets on most “high-yield” activities and maximize gains.
- Economic slowdowns tend to create a general environment of gloom and employee morale takes a big hit. It is critical to keep employees motivated and engaged during these trying times. And, who is better placed to drive engagement than the “people managers”. From “employee engagement” being a HR responsibility, leaders need to ask their managers to be accountable for employee engagement.
- Finally, like most situations in life, we tend to take a short term view in times of a slowdown. From a short-term focus on protecting margins and pleasing the stock markets as much as possible, leaders and managers need to take a long term view towards balanced and sustainable growth. We need to remember that equity, as an asset class, has a tendency to trend upwards. So, we just need to be doing the right things and in due time, value will be realized.
1 comment October 21, 2008
Report on “Key Human Capital Trends” - PwC
I came across this very interesting report from Pricewaterhouse Coopers on the Key HR Trends for 2008. It serves interesting information and analysis under 5 main sections: Human Capital Impact, Human Capital Drivers, Human Capital Foundations, Human Capital Future and The HR Function.
I found the section on “The HR Function” most intersting, espcially when the report talks about how employees perceive the effectiveness of the HR function and what kind of reputation HR enjoys. Here is a chart that talks about this:
Add comment September 22, 2008
Article in Deccan Herald
My article “What Soft Issues Mean for Hard Numbers?” got published in today’s Deccan Herald DH Avenues.
Here is the online link http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/Aug62008/avenues2008080582926.asp
Add comment August 6, 2008
Organization Effectiveness Simulator
I came to know about this interesting Organization Effectiveness Simulator created by Booz & Co. through Gautam’s blog. This is a little dated, but an article from Booz’s website says that over half of the organizations are either “passive-aggressive” or “overmanaged”.
Take the short survey yourself and find out what kind of an organization you work for.
Add comment July 3, 2008
The Managerial Rub-Off Effect
I have been musing about the “managerial rub-off effect” for a long time. Essentially, the hypothesis is that if you have a great manager, it would have a positive rub-off on you, and you would manage your team well in turn. What it means is sub-cultures get easily created within an organization by managers and there could be positive and negative aspects to it based on how managers manage. Here is a simple matrix to explain what I am talking about:
Optimized: Managers who have great bosses create high levels of engagement within their teams
Concern: Managers who do not have great bosses, in turn are not able to create high levels of engagement with their teams
Striving: Talented in terms of people management - these managers create highly engaged teams, despite not having great bosses.
Sub-optimal: Despite having a great boss, these managers are not able to pass on the “rub-off” effect to their teams. Possible talent issues, poor selection of teams, need for coaching?
In one of my drill-downs into employee data, I found that in almost 65-70% of the cases there is a direct linkage between how a manager is managed and how he manages. This clearly indicates the power of managers to create sub-cultures within organizations (with positive or negative weaves). This makes a strong case for senior managers to lead by example when it comes to people management and thus, foster a productive and engaged workplace.
1 comment June 2, 2008
Infosys - Reporting the Intangibles
I finished reading Infosys’ Annual Report 2008 last evening. The report was far more professional and comprehensive than anything I have seen from Indian organizations. The first thing that struck me was that the reports begins with the company’s main assets - “people” and a nice quote from Mr. Murthy - ”Every evening our core assets walk out of the gates. We need to have a way to bring them back every morning.” A good twenty pages, right upfront, is dedicated to employees and what Infosys has been doing about them. The report talks at great length about training, development, organization restructuring, learning programs, employee well-being etc. This is in stark contrast to something like Reliance Industries’ annual report, where “Employee Activities” is a mere 3 paragraph lip-service.
More interesting pages follow after the key financial data - on the intangibles. The company presents a simple, easy to understand brand valuation, a score-sheet for intangible assets and many more. The focus on the intangibles is a welcome phenomenon to corporate reporting, which relies overly on business numbers.
5 comments May 27, 2008
Employee Engagement: What Soft Issues Mean for Hard Numbers?
Scene in the boardroom of a typical company:
HR Head: “We are proposing an Employee Engagement survey to be done in the company. It will give us insights about what people feel within the company. It might give us a handle on the attrition situation as well and we will know which specific areas to focus on.”
Executive I: “Well, that means money. We are tight on the budgets because of the market situation. We need to be focusing on getting more business. All I want from you is to make the employees more productive. We need to squeeze the last drops out of the system.”
Executive II: “But, I think doing a survey is not such a bad idea after all. Our competitors mention that XYZ firm does an employee survey for them in their pitch presentations. If we employ a reputed consulting firm, it would be nice to have their name in our official marketing materials.”
HR Head: “Yes, true. Moreover, employees too will feel a sense of being heard. After the survey, we will take focused action to change things.”
Executive I: “I remember clearly that we did do an employee survey about 6-7 years back. What did we do with it? Did the HR take any action based on the findings? It’s a useless waste of money. Fluff stuff.”
HR Head: “No, but this time it is going to be different…”
Sounds familiar. I think so. Many a times hard-nosed business executives miss the point of employee surveys. If the right metrics are used, flawless execution is achieved and there is executive intent to do something about it, employee engagement could unlock a lot of value for companies. Organizations focused on achieving sustainable organic growth can leverage the emotional economy - the power of human emotions - to build a large base of engaged employees and drive business outcomes.
Many organizations think of all this as a “process” which should be done once in a year or a “nice-to-do”, so that they can talk about it at various forums. Often surveys are done and the reports are shoved off in some cabinet and comfortably forgotten about. But, senior executives are missing the big picture. Employee Engagement is critical to business performance. Think this is all “fluff-stuff”? Think twice before jumping off to a conclusion. Take a look at some masked slides I created based on real data:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3071101/Employee-Engagement-Impact-on-Business-Outcomes
This clearly shows how improvements achieved on employee engagement levels as a result of focused actions and Organization Development interventions can yield better business performance. For instance, in the presentation, business centers which improved their engagement levels, improve their sales figure by almost twice more than centers which had a decline in engagement levels. Think of potential upsides on business measures that you can have, if the variance in engagement is reduced and engagement levels rise up.
Top executives need to get off the rhetorical “We are all about our people - our people make us what we are” and show more strategic intent towards their people. When all the process engineering is done, all the money is pumped into capacity-additions and every process is being monitored by six-sigma black belts, and you still want some more juice - you know where you should be looking at - your people.
Take a hard look at the soft numbers!!
P.S. - It’s important to note here that “employee engagement” has been defined differently by leading experts. When I refer to employee engagement, I am specifically talking about engagement levels with one’s manager or workgroup. It is there where bonds with a company are formed or broken. And don’t we know that there is no such thing as corporate culture; there are as many cultures within a company as there are managers. Each manager, with his own style, creates sub-cultures which impact the lives of employees.
1 comment May 24, 2008
What I Want from Google
Google is becoming an increasingly integral part of our lives. At first, it was pure-play search and targeted ads, then came along a whole bunch of communication services like Gmail, Gtalk, Orkut, Blogger etc.. We got Youtube, Picasa, Desktop Search, Reader etc.Then, they started offering hosted services like Docs, Google Apps etc. Finally, as the mobile web took off, they got busy in bringing Google services on mobile devices. I personally spend lot of time using the Google Mobile App and the Google Mobile webpage. As Google continues to touch our lives in more and more ways, I really feel they could do a bit more for us consumers, so that we stay hooked (and click on more ads!!). Here’s a short wishlist:
- First things first - let’s talk about Gmail - the killer email service that gave Yahoo and Hotmail the jitters of their lives. Now, Google provides its Gmail users complete access through POP3 / IMAP, so that they can access their mails from a desktop client like Outlook or from mobile devices. They also have a neat application for mobile phones, that brings the real Gmail experience on the small screen. But, this application misses something which is the “in-thing” today - push email or the ability to fetch email as soon as it arrives, without having to manually check mails. I think this should be an important addition to the product.
- Gtalk was “love at first sight” for me. The neat, simple interface was a great relief from that of Yahoo Messenger. I got hooked. And then I wanted it on my mobile phone as well. Apparently, Google does offer a Gtalk client for Blackberry phones, but not for others. What sin has Symbian or Windows Mobile committed? I agree that there are tons of companies offering Gtalk clients like Talkonaut, EQO, Nimbuzz, Fring, Morange etc., but I really don’t feel very comfortable keying in my password on these applications. After all, I use my Gmail for receiving statements from my bank account.
- Google has a wonderful collection of essential softwares which it bundles and offers as Google Pack. Can we have something like that for mobile devices? A single download that offers essential communications, productivity, entertainment and security tools.
- And, how about a Google Mobile Suite - a collection of apps that provide close to full-blown (with all the limitations of mobile devices) experience of all Google services.
- Currently Google allows its mobile users to access Google Docs on their devices. But, users can just view their documents and not edit them. There are so many smartphones out there in the market which suffer from the same handicap - their devices come installed with Office-like software that enables them to view, but not edit documents. How about Google removing this handicap and getting more eyeballs on Google Docs!
- Google acquired Jaiku, a micro-blogging service, sometime back. Google - can you please give us some information on what are you doing with this? Twitter and other micro-blogging platforms are going to eat you for breakfast. It would be great to have a Google micro-blogging platform which is well integrated with Gtalk, Gmail, Orkut, Reader etc.
- Finally, I know you have a great SMS search service. India has one of the largest number of mobile users in the world and SMS as a service is quite cheap. People do not hesitate to pay premium charges for SMS to vote for their Indian Idols or participate in a game show. I am sure that Google’s SMS service can take off in a big way. Most mobile users in India still don’t use GPRS/Internet on their phones, so SMS can play a big role in bridging the information divide. But, there are two stumbling blocks - awareness and localization. How many people know of this service? A miniscule proportion. First of all, Google should popularize the SMS-based search service. In doing so, they need to push mobile operators as well, since they pocket the lion’s share of the SMS revenues. Secondly, if they succeed in providing the service in local languages, the potential simply doubles or maybe even more. Instead of going to ITC’s E-Choupal centers to get weather information or commodity prices, farmers would get the information in their fields, in their palms, whenever they want. That’s going to be huge!
Dear Google, a little more is all we want!!
3 comments May 17, 2008
Change Agents
Many, I would say most, organizations struggle with managing and implementing change. Change, though regarded as the only constant, is at best handled quite clumsily in most organizations and most companies grapple with it. Management experts mention ‘Leadership Commitment” as a critical driver of change and it is indeed so. But, many a times, even with strong leadership support change management programs falter. After all, leadership commitment, a sound plan and a great execution strategy is as good as the people who implement it - the Change Management team.
Many organizations focus a large part of their time and efforts on devising strategies and formulating plans for bringing about transformational change in the way it does business. But what is often overlooked or given less attention is the Change Management team. Very little effort is put in in identifying ‘change agents’ and thinking about how the implementation will be done. More often than not, change agents are not empowered in the right way. They are expected to bring change while functioning in the traditional prevalent hierarchy, which is a huge constraint. By quantifying the impact of change, leaders should focus on building a team which is freed from the day-to-day menial tasks and cuts across hierarchies to focus on implementation. The reporting structures need to be altered so that they are no longer reporting to line managers, but report directly to the program sponsor or the senior management. Building credibility for the team is as importance and this has to be completely driven by the organization’s leaders, else front-line people may view the change management team as ‘intruders’. Also, it is best to ensure heterogenity in the team, so as views of people from different functions are taken into account. This also leads to a better understanding of constraints and opportunities. Particularly, in large organizations (read geographical spread and headcount), it is more advisable to have decentralized team spread across locations. This leads to inclusion of a wider set of views being incorporated while developing plans & quick implementation of solutions. However, for a smaller organization, a centralized team would work well, given that its focus is sharper and is better-suited for standardization of processes.
While working with a Earth-Moving Equipment major recently, I saw great commitment among senior management to drive change and transform the way they handle their customers. While the management often came up with programs to manage customer expectations using sophisticated tools like TQM, Six Sigma etc., they have not seen any meaningful change. What they have ended up with is a large pool of Six Sigma experts who just crunch numbers, while the customers are complaining about delivery schedules and non-availability of spares. After our first round of measurements, we proposed an action-planning session, involving a team of change agents. In-depth root-cause analysis and brainstorming was done and each of the ‘change agents’ presented their plan for the outcomes they wanted to impact. While the senior managers took responsibility of the process-related far-reaching changes, young managers took up the responsibility of bringing about hygiene-level changes. As always, I was worried about the entire initiative losing steam mid-way and a half-hearted implementation. The management as well looked in no position to free the change agents from their usual grind and focus exclusively on driving change. A work-around to this is to build accountability. We summarized all action plans in a document and circulated within the team. From the documents, it appeared that all the change programs should have been implemented in the next 6 months (that’s what individuals had mentioned for their action plans). Realizing that 6 months is enough time for the initiative to lose pace, we proposed monthly calls with all members of the change management tea to take stock of the progress and course-correct, if necessary. Using group dynamics might work for this organization in creating accountability.
It is surely not easy to run a change management program, but most leaders do recognize its importance. Leaders can avoid the feeling of being left high and dry by expensive consultants by focusing more on creating the right team to implement. The ‘recommendations’ in the power-point may be very pretty, but you always need the right people to make your organization look pretty!
1 comment March 8, 2008
The Next Wave of Managing Customer Relationships
When I look at the companies across the service sector, I realize that most of these companies in businesses like telecom, banking, insurance, retail etc. have made considerable investments in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and continue to do so as I write. When I think of it, I realize that most CRM applications capture and report what a company knows about its customers. It monitors transaction data, market research data, website click-throughs etc. to give inputs on cross-selling and bundling of products with those with lower demand. It tells you to place diapers next to the beer rack in a retail store. It tells you that a particular mobile phone subscriber is not sending enough SMS messages and rolls out an offer to him to incentivize or create triggers for using this service more frequently. It tells a bank that a ULIP-based insurance buyer might also be interested in mutual funds. So much for number crunching and data-mining. But, I still feel that this is a reactive approach and is a lagging indicator of future business performance.
What companies need to work on is Customer Experience Management or CEM, which I believe is a more cost-effective and transformational approach. Put simply, Customer Experience is the response customers have to any direct/indirect contact with a company i.e. customer touch-points like stores, branches, website etc. Interactions with the touchpoints shape the perceptions about what a customer thinks about the company. CEM borrows from ‘voice of customer’ research to come up with insights about how the company performs on each customer touch-point. Since CEM focuses on how customers feel about the company and captures ‘emotions’ rather than ‘rationality’, it is a potential leading indicator of business performance. After all, the ‘economic man’ or the ‘rational consumer’ is resting in a grave. Purchaing decisions are increasingly governed by emotions. For instance, how many customers can discern the difference between Nike and Adidas shoes or why does a customer pay a premium to shop at a particular departmental store. CEM can throw up interesting insights about how is the company performing on each touch-point and what fine-tuning is required. And if you are able to slice the data by channels/locations/branches/stores, you have all the information about how the touch-points need to be refined at a local level apart from the enterprise level process changes. This surely is the next phase of managing customer relationships and creating advocates for the brand.
Of course, companies will take time migrating to this new approach because of the huge investments that they have already made in expensive CRM stuff and they need to show the return on it. But, the smarter ones will transition and start using CEM in combination to deliver value and create positive relationships with customers.
2 comments June 15, 2007
Reality Cinema
Last night I caught myself thinking about watching “Black Friday”, a movie narrating the tragic events around the Bombay bomb blasts in March, 1993. I suddenly realized we have so few films on issues of national or regional or individual tragedy. We haven’t created movies around events which have had dramatic negative effects on the collective psyche of the society. These are issues which play a substantial role around how we see other people, other regions, other religions and other ethnic group. These issues shape opinions and give direction to our thoughts and actions. Think of events like the partition or the various wars that the country fought. Finally, “Parzania” came to the surface after about half a decade of the massacre in Gujarat.
What are we afraid of? Is it the pain of tearing apart old wounds? Or is it the fear of reopening the debate and controversy? Or is it plain aloofness – absolute refusal to participate in things that directly don’t affect some of us? Or is it escapism – creating an artificial sense of well-being
We have loads of movies around fantasies – Switzerland romance, village damsels, rich-girl-poor-guy-and-no-consent-from-family, Supercops, Superheroes and Rags to Riches – talk of it and we have it. But, we have run away from reality. Of course, the 60’s and 70’s did give us movies relevant to the realities of that time – middle-class struggle, politics, bureaucracy, unemployment and the like. But, suddenly we chose to snap the strings that bound reality to cinema.
I really feel that “Reality” cinema is a huge opportunity waiting to be tapped. It has the potential to move from posh multiplexes to second-tier cities. Given the low cost of production, it can be a money-spinner. But, above all, it will help people closer to reality and will shape the psyche in a better way.
3 comments February 16, 2007
