#OddEven Rule – How does HR make the most of it?

New Delhi has woken up to the new year with much lesser traffic, thanks to the new #oddeven rule put in place by the Delhi government. I found a very interesting gif image on ibnlive depicting the traffic situation in Delhi today.

Let’s hope that this translates into a noticeable impact on the pollution levels as well. While the authorities are doing what they can, what can we, as HR professionals, do to make this initiative successful?

• Carpooling – The first thing that comes to mind is to encourage carpooling. What the HR team can do is program manage the car pooling initiative in office. This would require a certain amount of discipline and getting used to. However, positioning it as a win-win situation (a chance to develop new friendships, network, and even gossip :P) can go a long way towards employee engagement.

• Office Buses – For organizations that do not already have this option, give the employees the luxury of relaxing in a comfortable ride home which is managed by the office. Believe me, this will take away a lot of stress for them in terms of thinking everyday about their commute hassles. Plus it’s a much safer option as well.

• Healthy options – This can be used as an opportunity to drive health initiatives. Try and get a place where employees can park their bicycles if they use those to come to office. A further step would even be incentivizing this behavior to encourage employees to start using this mode of transport.

• Workplace Flexibility – Employees will love this. Try and institute a policy of working from home once a week. Ok, I know I’m pushing my luck here but at least some flexibility in working hours would go a long way in soothing the frayed nerves of employees every morning. 

While we all are working towards a less polluted city, let’s try and make the most of it and have some fun as well.

Do write in with your suggestions as well to make this a hassle-free transition for everyone.

Bye-bye to the bell curve

“Bye-bye to the bell curve” – These words will sound like music to employees and managers who have long been ‘victimized’ by the unfavorable wrath of the %s defined for the appraisal bell curve. Lately, all of us have heard in the news about major organizations including Infosys, Accenture, Cisco, Microsoft, Adobe, Kelly, and the likes having axed the bell curve out of their performance management process.

However, in conjunction, there have been muted questions on how the new system will work? How will we differentiate between performers and non-performers? Will there be any sort of documentation of facts / evidence on which the performance appraisal was based?

I had written on the need for bringing in leniency in the percentages defined for the bell curve based on organizational performance a few years back “Is the bell really tolling”. However, what we are witnessing today is the complete junking of the annual appraisal process and renewed focus towards quarterly discussions and the hope that these will be more productive and lead to greater employee motivation as well as developmental input. While some organizations (like Infosys) will still retain the ratings (eliminating the strict %s for the bell curve), others like Microsoft have chosen to follow a completely new system for evaluation of employees.

While this is a fresh new perspective on the way of looking at performance management, it does rely heavily on the maturity of the managers conducting these discussions. The role of HR here becomes even more important here as the onus of maintaining a system which is perceived to be unbiased falls completely on them. Evaluating managers will have to be constantly goaded and trained on the sensitivity of the discussions and a need to showcase unbiased performance orientation in all their decisions (whether it is of promoting someone, or deciding the pay for others). However, this is easier said than done. And hence the need for HR to be present in all performance discussions till the time this process stabilizes and gets institutionalized. We need to get answers to two basic questions from the assessing managers, albeit, in a sensitive manner:

·         Would you want the employee in question as part of your team going forward?

·         Is he / she ready for the next step towards greater job responsibility?

The answers to these will give us valuable data which can then be used to take other employee decisions in the performance management process.

This is a fresh change and we are hoping that this gives us what we have been vying for all these years through the use of the bell curve – employee performance orientation and clear differentiation. 

Employee Engagement – Not all Song n’ Dance

A few days back, I came across this graphic which shows Engagement of Employees as blocks of a house. Being in the Real Estate sector, this obviously aroused my curiosity.

What is interesting is that the foundation of employee engagement is the Organizational Culture and the Values being espoused at the workplace. This in turn shapes the job / organizational content for an employee. This content might include everything from the nature of the job, the work conditions, the associated rewards, the perceived value of the job, the attitude of the management towards the role, the person, and expectations along with a feeling of contributing to the success of the organization. All these factors in place, one can expect a great attitude from each employee, thereby leading to what is fancily called Organizational Citizenship.

However, this is a long list of expectations to be fulfilled, especially in the millennial workforce where the average job tenure is starting to be counted in months rather than years.  Hence, HR managers of today have to focus on what is most relevant to the workforce and what will have maximum impact in the shortest time.

Now what’s relevant might differ from one employee to another. Here the HR team has to do some legwork in identifying areas of concern / impact for employees to show to employees that the organization cares. I’ve seen an organization where the average age of the workforce was below 30 and they tweaked the compensation structure to maximize the take-home for the younger lot. The relatively senior ones were still given the option to safeguard or maximize their retirals. Small change, but high impact.

Some obvious quick-wins visible in the graphic:

·     Communication – I have seen examples of leaders / top management who go out of the way to make sure that the employees stay ahead of the rumor mills. Employees love such leaders. It gives the impression that the top management is accessible and human and makes the employees feel involved in the longer term vision.

·    Happy Workplace – As  Jack Welch famously said a happy workplace gives us happy customers, leading to better cashflows. Small things like impromptu public recognition meetings, go a long way in sustaining the morale of employees. Elaborate song n’ dance routines are effective if it is ensured that the involvement is from the larger workforce, and not restricted to the HR / Marketing teams. The process is more important than the end result.

·     Flexibility – Treating employees as humans. The line between ‘work’ and ‘life has become blurred. So practice it both ways. Not only work time encroaching into ‘family’ time. Give some flexibility in letting it work the other way. And see the results for yourself.

These in no way should take one away from the fact that the biggest X factor in employee engagement is the immediate manager. Most other factors impacting this metric are the responsibility of the immediate manger. Hence, a more longer-term ongoing imperative is training managers to become human and treat their team members as humans. The message has to be that in the longer term, only the creative and agile organizations will survive. And creativity is fostered in a positive environment only. So trust the team and treat them like you would want to be treated yourself.

Do we trust our employees!!

We all have seen elaborate HR manuals and policy documents specifying strict rules / procedures / systems around what an employee should do or not. Enormous amounts of time, money, and human resources are being used to set these systems in place and to efficient execution and strict adherence. But do we really need these?

Can we not ‘trust’ the people we hire?  If that’s the case, are we hiring the right set of people? And if either is not true, then why waste humongous resources to act like watchdogs over them.

Some simple examples:

• Leave – Most organizations have a standard range of Privilege Leave, Casual Leave, Sick Leave, Maternity Leave, Paternity Leave, Study Leave, etc etc. Why not treat your employees as mature adults and let them decide when and for what they want to take leave?

• Work Hours – Does this concept exist anymore? With technology and mail-on-the-go, the ‘seven day weekend’ can also be read as the ‘seven day work-week’. With almost all of us being available for office work during our waking hours, and work interspersed with our personal lives, are we not eligible for time-off during the so-called work hours. Are your mature and adult team members not smart enough to figure what and when something is important and needs to be completed?

• Attendance – Organizations have evolved biometrics, mobile check-ins, swipe cards, and lots of ‘sophisticated’ technology to track this. Why not have the default as the employee being ‘present’, and have systems to let employees inform only if they are absent.

• Travel & Stay – All Policy manuals have specific limits defined as per the level in the organization. Why not have the employees themselves decide how they want to travel and where they want to stay.

• Performance – Months and months of employee time is spent on assessing the performance and documentation of the results. Most of the times, the results are in your face and everyone knows where they are in the ‘normalized’ curve. Should this not be an ongoing exercise and a developmental one rather than focusing on the ‘rating’ and the related increment / promotion.

I admit that you will have 5-10% of the population taking advantage if you do not have the ‘watchdog’ systems in place. But I’m sure these 5-10% employees will be visible to everyone over a period of time. Does it then warrant subjecting the other 90% to painful approval processes and impediments for simple things? Is it fair to not ‘trust’ them? Think for yourself.

How we love Stories...

We all love stories – whether its telling stories, listening to stories, making up stories or finishing stories, the fact is that we, as a race love stories. Right from childhood, when we make our parents read out stories to us, to the most read fiction bestseller; stories have a way to ignite our imaginations.

Then why not make use of this penchant and love for stories to try and use it to build employee connect. Easier said than done – because employees like only interesting stories, and not all of them become bestsellers within the organization. But just like we have the huge rows and columns of shelves in large bookstores, and we choose the books we like, employees do lap up stories that affect them, that strike a chord with them, that make them laugh.

So, what does an HR person do.

Step 1) Find out the folklores within the organization. Easier for legacy organizations which are 100+ years old, lesser for startups which might be a 100 months/days old. But try and build these tales around personalities – the ones who have been able to survive the years of onslaught the organization has gone through / who are stars in the organization and employees look up-to them

Step 2) Have a catchphrase for your story a.k.a, brand your initiative. Take help if you have a marketing agency working with you or you have an in-house art/edit team. The visuals should be eye-catching and the tone must reflect the feel of the story.

Step 3) Market the story. Ask the people in the story to explain formally and informally (to juniors and newcomers) what they went through, how they were able to do what is showcased, and how things have changed.

Once you have this in place, you will find people aspiring and contributing for your next set of stories. And slowly and steadily, you will see a cultural shift towards the kind of stories you are showcasing. What one needs to be careful of is that the stories should focus on the direction in which you want your employees to think.

Each story we like leaves a little bit of it in us. Because we all love stories..and we remember them…like the race between the rabbit and the tortoise..:)

The best ways to disengage employees

Organizations spend a lot of time figuring out how to keep their employees engaged. What they fail to avoid are basic tenets that are real put-offs for high performing employees.

I just thought it would be worthwhile to put down the top ways to disengage employees.

• The ‘Culture’ at the workplace – Little things said or informal rules in the organization go a long way in employees forming an opinion about the workplace. Simple things like having to wait for the boss to leave or a casual comment like “Half-day today?” when someone is leaving at the official closing time goes a long way in forming the opinion in minds of the employees.

• The “dictatorial” managers – The best way to make an employee hate his/her job is giving them a “bad” boss. A “bad” boss could be defined as, but not limited to, anyone who:
  - does not value your time
  - expects you to be on his beck and call at all times
  - treats you as his “flunk”
  - shouts/abuses
  - does not guide you and expects you to deliver what he ‘thinks’
  - has no solutions when you go to him with a problem

• “Bad” work – A lot of employees, more so those who are fresh out of campus come to the workplace thinking that they would get ‘strategic’ work from day 1 without understanding what is going on at the grassroots. So any work you give them is not up-to the mark. This is not to say that there are cases where there is no realistic job preview at the selection stage thereby leading to dissatisfaction – both at the employer and the employee end.

• NO work – What is even worse than “bad” work is NO work. As they say, an empty mind is a devil’s workshop. Employees that have no work tend to spread their disgruntlement to others as well. They tend to waste their own time as well as that of others. Lot of employers tend to think that employees will get the message and leave when they have no work. However, I have seen employees who love it when they have no work and they are most comfortable in this setting.

• Poorly implemented PMS – A sure shot way of disengaging a high performer in your team is to keep giving him/her feedback throughout the year that he/she is god’s gift to the organization but conveniently forget this during the appraisal process. A high performer will most definitely leave if he/she feels that the ratings in the Performance Appraisal Process do not justify the effort put in relative to others.

• No Parity in Recruitment/Designation – I have seen a lot of organizations give a higher level/designation to newcomers. While this may be a good tactic to attract talent from the market, this can have disastrous consequences if you forget the existing employees in the organization. The reward for time spent in the organization has to be visible to everyone. If this does not happen, we can be sure of the attrition figures hitting the roof.

• Stagnant Career Path – If employees start to feel that they have hit a ceiling with regard to their growth path in the organization, you will see their performance dip with time, ultimately leading to attrition. This could even happen with a new manager coming in thereby giving the message to the team that they are not ready for the next step.

• Compensation – This is most often thought of as the first and the only way to keep employees motivated and engaged. I have deliberately kept it for the last because this is not true. While a threshold amount of money is always desirable, compensation is not the prime reason to leave any organization for most employees, unless it is a huge jump in the absolute amount. Compensation can serve as an effective tool for attraction – but most companies forget that as far as retention is concerned, compensation can only play a limited role.
  

So instead of giving flowers in the induction process (which is seen as a tool for engagement), let us try to get the basics right and try not to disengage employees.