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:

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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