Have you given your employees the power of a Mentor?

I’m surprised by the number of organisations that don’t have a mentoring framework for their employees. An effective mentoring program goes a long way in solving problems like employee retention and improving productivity at the workplace.

There are multiple mistakes made by management when it comes to mentoring. While some believe that the role of a mentor is anyways provided by the supervisor, others believe that a strong training program eradicates the requirement of a mentoring program. Some even make the grieve mistake of allowing a mentor to become a complaint box.

The truth of the matter is that a mentor should be someone who is senior to the mentee and is not his / her direct supervisor. The areas of mentorship should be limited to the career growth path, leadership grooming and emotional support to the employee. Ideally there should also be a separate knowledge sharing platform at the company, so that technical guidance doesn’t get merged into the mentoring program.

A typical reaction to a mentoring program is that it fails over a period of time. But this problem emerges only if the management doesn’t make efforts to sustain, monitor and reward the initiative.

The other failure on the part of companies is to realise the benefits of a good mentoring program, particularly ‘grooming future leaders’. All leaders have to be a ‘people’s person’. You want your managers to have as much exposure to this as possible. And getting your employees to spend some time with seniors in the system will give them leadership exposure unlike any training / workshop.

I strongly urge all companies to implement a mentoring program. Put in efforts to sustain it and make it effective. You will soon see the benefits pay.

Suhail
:peoplehood

Applying for the ‘best employer’ in the country is only meant for the ‘big boys’!

You are shooting yourself in the arm if you think this way. Every company should aspire to be the best employer.

Multiple institutes like Great Place to Work (GPTW), Aon Hewitt, Fortune and Dataquest conduct an annual study to find the ‘best employers’ in the country. Each institute has their own unique approach to evaluating companies, but they don’t limit the candidacy to the ‘big boys’. GPTW Institute for example allows companies with even 100 employees to apply. In fact, in their 2011 ranking, SAS Institute with just 106 employees was ranked at number 16.

(A quick note here, registration for the GPTW 2012 ranking closes on 30^th November.)

But the point that I wanted to stress upon is not whether you are eligible to apply, but why should you apply in the first place. Certainly the recognition of being one of the top employers in the country is good enough, but that’s not the end of it.

You will find that talent acquisition is not much of a concern anymore. Today’s well informed talent pool will automatically get attracted to you. Your campus recruitment team will hold an edge over the other companies present. Management too will see the business benefit of such recognition. Not to mention, your PR team will have their work cut-out.

But I feel that one of the biggest take-away is the learning that will come out of the application process itself. GPTW Institute, for example, uses the lenses of Trust and Culture, across employees and management, for their evaluation. This approach is generally lacking in most ESAT surveys. This will help the HR Manager get a deeper insight into the running of the company.

Similarly you can look at the approach various ranking institutes take, and pick the one that works best for you. Just make sure you don’t dismiss it as ‘yet another survey’ or feel that you are too small an organisation to even apply.

Suhail

:peoplehood

Connect your employees – it pays dividends!

There are many issues that plague today’s HR and Internal Communications Managers – be it attrition issues in a rapidly changing economy to cultural disconnect in a fragmented organisation. Their job gets tougher with modern day requirements like finding new tools to communicate with diverse workforce or creating brand ambassadors out of all your employees.

While multiple things are being tried out to address these issues, I suggest starting with the basics – ‘bring your employees together’. If your workforce doesn’t feel like one unit and doesn’t connect with the vision of the organisation, any measures taken will only be futile.

I think that the first exercise a HR or Internal Communications Manager should do is connect all its employees across geographies and shifts. You can do this by maximising your intranet utilisation and introducing elements of social media.

The moment you get all your employees together, you will find that everything else becomes easier:

• A connected workforce is a stickier one. With friends and like minded people around attrition will take a backseat.
• Channel everyone towards the organisation goals through consistent common messaging.
• By creating a social medium to talk to your employees, you not only get a new tool that connects with Gen-Y, you also get a medium to listen to your employees.
•  Ideal platform to create brand ambassadors out of everyone.
• Advance cultural integration.
• Regardless of geographies or shifts, you get create a single unit out of all employees. 

Be it a 100 or a 100,000, every employee works for one organisation. Don’t let these hindrances come in the way of communicating or enabling this.

Suhail

:peoplehood

Leaders: Catastrophe groomed vs. B-school trained

I simply couldn’t resist sharing this very interesting article I saw on Delanceyplace. It is a thought stimulator that compares leaders that have been groomed by catastrophes like World-Wars or recessions, with the ones produced by top B-schools. Certainly calls for a further read too. Here it is:

______________________________________________________________________

Business Education:

In today's excerpt - writing in the late 1990s, the authors contrast the business leaders of the immediate post-World War II period to contemporary businesses leaders raised on a steady diet of business publications, management books, MBAs and consultants - and conclude that it is unadorned critical thought, not the current business fad, that brings business success. As T.S. Eliot lamented in Choruses from The Rock:

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

"During the 1990s virtually an entire generation of top executives left their businesses, retired or passed away. Many of these executives had achieved legendary status - [David] Packard at Hewlett-Packard [Akio] Morita at Sony [Sir John Harvey-] Jones at ICI [Sam] Walton at Wal-Mart and [Jan] Carlzon at SAS to name a few. These leaders shared some notable characteristics that differentiate them from their successors. They lived through the Great Depression, which crippled the world's economy in the 1930s; they experienced the horrors of World War II; they served their business apprenticeships in the postwar rebuilding period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. But what may differentiate them most from their counterparts of today is the issue of management.This 'old guard' was the last of a breed of executives who developed their management skills almost entirely in the workplace. They were building businesses while management 'science' - if it can be called that - was still in its infancy.

"In 1948 ... the Harvard Business Review had a robust circulation of fifteen thousand. That number had reached nearly two hundred fifty thousand by the mid 1990s. The Harvard Business School itself and the few other graduate business schools in existence in 1948 awarded 3357 MBAs--a far cry from the 75000 MBAs awarded forty-five years later. Even McKinsey the best known of consulting companies was a relatively small firm with annual revenues of under $2 million compared with 1994 revenues of more than $1.2 billion. Management guru Peter Drucker was a youngster of thirty-nine. Seven-year-old Tom Peters was probably 'in search of' a new bike.

"The executives of [the immediate post-war] period were not uneducated - in fact many were extremely well educated - but they did not learn their approach to business from a business school a management expert a celebrated management book or an outside consultant. Options such as these were not generally available. These executives learned their business skills in the industrial jungle.

"The forty-year-old executive of the 1990s by contrast probably holds one of the tens of thousands of MBAs awarded each year. His formal management education is supplemented by dozens of business periodicals and hundreds of management books. If however a situation seems resistant to even this mass of management wisdom there are several hundred consulting firms and more than a hundred thousand consultants ready to provide additional management skill and knowledge. In 1993 businesses around the world spent $17 billion for consultants' recommendations and AT&T alone lavished $347.1 million on outside expertise.

"That does not necessarily mean that the business executives of the past were superior to those of the present. ... Still we suspect that if those [managers] of years gone by found themselves at the helm of any of today's extraordinarily complex and competitive business enterprises they would steer a straight and successful course."

author:	Quinn Spitzer and Ron Evans
title:	Heads You Win!
publisher:	Fireside Simon and Schuster

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Do you have a 360° employee engagement plan?

So, what is your idea of an employee engagement plan? I have been shocked to meet clients who believe that a wholesome engagement plan simply constitutes quarterly outings + team offsites + an annual family day. If you find nothing significantly wrong with this plan, please read on.

It is critical for us to have a 360° perspective of an employee engagement plan and the benefits it can lend to an organisation. Employee engagement is one of your most effective tools to bring your employees together as one unit. Please do not make the mistake of viewing it as merely fun and games and a budget that has to be exhausted by the end of the year.

Although your employee engagement plan will have a fun-at-work element, its utility doesn’t end there. Engagements can also be used as one of your most resonating communication tools. Messaging that is picked up during an interactive fun session has a more lasting impression. More important, the messaging is not ‘in your face’.

Your engagement plan is also an effective way to connect your employees, thus creating a sticky workplace. Engagement always brings like-minded people together, creating a community. A culture like this at work will have a positive impact on your retention rate.

All employee engagement plans should also contain a health-and-wellness angle to it. Having a long-term perspective on this will give you results in the form of reduced sick leaves and a lower health insurance premium.

Don’t forget to add your CSR initiatives to the employee engagement plan either. Apart from joining hands with the employees to contribute to society, you also help build a strong value system into the organisation.

Also make sure that your employee engagement plan works in your favour when you apply for the ‘Great Place to Work’ ranking (I do hope you apply for it each year). Being ranked a top employer is your assured source of quality talent pool to hire from.

Apart from ensuring that your employee engagement plan is a sum of all of the above-mentioned parts, I have two key points for you to keep in mind:

One – make sure your employee engagement initiative is run by a brand, not a department. Most corporates make the mistake of not having a brand that holds all these parts together. We can learn from the likes of Intel, for example, which has a brand called ‘Sparsh’, and Dell, which has ‘Well at Dell’ to constitute its wellness initiatives. It is very critical for you to have this in place at the start of your employee engagement initiatives and bring all your efforts under one umbrella.

And two – make sure you tightly integrate your management and the internal communications team into the plan. To ensure that your plan is effective, you need your management to first buy into it and your internal communications team to support you throughout. Help your management see the positive business impact of your initiative and the new communication channel that you are enabling for the internal communications department.

Do not limit your employee engagement plan to individuals or a team…take the organisational view with regard to it. There are millions of opportunities you can tap into. Your imagination is the limit.

Suhail

:peoplehood

Benefits, the entitlement mindset and going too far

Here is a hardliner, yet valid, take on the 'excessive' benefits being offered by today's corporates to its employees. A very interesting post written by Arvind Krishnan, CEO of The Fuller Life. 

Benefits, the entitlement mindset and going too far

The old contract between employer and employee is null and void. The new contract is still being framed. Managing this transition is part of all of our jobs.

Our parents worked under the salary-for-work construct. The average youth in today’s workforce works under the  (salary+incentive+lunch+pickup and drop+cola machine in office+emotional fulfilment+stock options)-for-work construct. Part of the reason for this switch is that expectations have risen on both sides of the table. Employees throw more of themselves into their jobs and companies expect more than just 8 hours work.

While the details of this relationship are still being worked out by each company to suit their own circumstances, there is  no doubt that the old equilibrium is done and dusted. 

In such a situation, i do think it is possible to go too far in trying to make the employee happy. Remuneration aside, i do believe that companies actively run the risk of going overboard without considering the following:

1. You can never remove a coffee machine from the canteen: Once a benefit is offered, there is usually a serious exit barrier in removing it. You certainly can’t do it without seeming to be heartless, needlessly frugal or petty. None of those are good wickets to bat on.
2. Our first responsibility is to the company, not the employee: Being extremely understanding about a leave of absence has to be tempered with the thought that one can harm the company by the person not being there  – and our fiduciary responsibility is to the company first.
3. Stay on the professional side of things, not the personal: It is in the company’s interest if the employee is healthy, so i can understand running a fitness program in the company. However, when a company offers counselling service for people who abuse alcohol or drugs (often when their policies are intolerant of these things), I think we are overstepping boundaries.
4. Offer nothing that can hurt the employee in the long-term: We should do all we can to help the employees do better. When companies offer employees a pile of junk food for free near the coffee machine, i wonder how it aids the cause. Also, free internet at home is fine if it is for a short-term crisis. But expecting the employee to log in every night after dinner is building a very damaging equation.

The above may sound very hardline, but I think that these are good business guidelines to work with. The flip side of this, given below, are norms for benefits to employees. We certainly follow these at The Fuller Life.

1. Do no harm: We seek to make the employer-employee construct long-term. So keep them healthy. It will pay dividends later.
2. Keep things professional: The employer-employee relationship is a business relationship. So, know the boundaries and draw them in hard lines.  That works both ways. Do not intrude on family/ weekend time. That includes expecting people to answer email on holidays and travelling  on weekends without any compensatory leave. 
3. Vary the benefits that you give employees: Do not get locked into the coffee machine syndrome. Give them different things at different points. It maintains your flexibility and the variety is usually appreciated.
4. Keep them engaged: This flows from the new construct (everything-for-work) that we now inhabit. We need to keep the employees  engaged such that they not only enjoy themselves, but bring more of themselves to work, the company will benefit. 
5. Nothing should be absolutely free: Offering a benefit for free is not the best path. Two reasons. Firstly, it is not fair for those who do not use the benefit (e.g. free counselling) and secondly, it devalues the benefit.  A better approach is to make the employees part-pay. 
6. The business should benefit: Whatever we offer to the employees has to have a business benefit. If the advantage to the company is tough to identify,  you are better off axing it. Every employee engagement activity too should have a work goal e.g. the long service award (sent home) should make the family appreciate one of their members working in the company (and therefore create an exit barrier).

These views are personal and i do realise that this column will not win me any popularity contests anytime soon. But I do believe that these are norms to follow in the future.

(You can reach the author on arvind@TheFullerLife.com)

When nobody is investing, invest in your people.

Given the intense speculation that another meltdown may be looming in the skies, everyone's happy basking in the shadow of liquidity. With the strings getting tighter on corporate wallets, managements are happy to put a hold on most 'unimportant' expenses. Unfortunately, these could include hiring plans, marketing budgets and training expenses. At times like these, it is the HR Manager's biggest responsibility to ensure that employees do not feel that this cloud of uncertainly is hovering over their job security. 

I had heard my mentor once say, "In times of peace, one must prepare for war". I think that such a time of peace is upon us now. It is time for us to train and look within the company. 

To ensure that this cloud does not affect employee performance, there are three things that an HR Manager should prepare to do right away:

1. Talk to all employees
• Brush away any job security concerns
• Get them in on the management's plan to battle a possible recession
2. Invest in one's people
• Ensure that employees stay engaged with the company
• Look to create the next set of leaders
• Prepare managers to ride the boom wave, when it arrives
3. Make everyone a single unit
• Connect employees through networking
• Get everyone focused on just the primary tasks at hand

While we hope for minimal impact from the recession, the least that we can do is not repeat the same mistakes that we made during the last one. The idea is very simple: battle the possible meltdown positively, as one unit, and come out stronger on the other side to take on competition.


Suhail
:peoplehood