Engaging a New Employee

 

Recently I came across this interesting article/practice at Patni Computers:

 

On his first day to work at Patni Computers, 23 year old Arshad Shaikh had sweaty palms and an itchy neck. The mild apprehension of how his first day at work would be was worrying him. But, surprise surprise! A badge with a smiley face and ‘Just Joined’ stamped on it was given to him. “I can’t tell you how good I felt that day. There were unknown faces coming up to me and offering help. This practice we have, called ‘Just Joined’ is a great HR practice,” gushes Shaikh, senior analyst, Patni. “Moreover, all the process related information was shared with me right on day one to make things easier. I felt settled from the first day itself,” he adds.

 

There are numerous reports that would tell us how 70% of employees leave within the first 1 year of joining. People who stay on for more than a year have a high likelihood of completing a good run with the Company. Knowing this fact the entire period of pre-joining formalities, induction program and post joining first 1 year of engaging employee becomes extremely important. Having said that most of the companies have a ‘standard’ induction manual that’s delivered like work as usual in first week of joining etc and else everything just operates as usual for all employees. There isn’t much to differentiate between programs or ways of engaging employees as far as new employees are concerned.

 

While I have come across some very interesting practices in various organizations, I found this something very interesting….small initiative but interesting. Might be bordering more on a IT/ITES (BPO) environment though.

 

Have you come across any interesting practices in Service Industry in particular….???

 

~~Rohit~~

Organization Brand Vs Person Brand

There are two distinct ways of promoting and creating a successful organization brand. One approach is to promote and ‘Create a brand for Organization’ which in turn will grow the business and people; the other is to promote and ‘Create a brand for an Individual’ which in turn will promote the organization and business. For different set of groups, organizations both work very well.

 

Several small to mid political parties are good examples of the second approach. They often create their media plan, campaign around the head of the party because that’s what is likely to get them most mileage. Once they are able to create a strong brand for that person, the organization tends to ride on their brand. They find it easier to differentiate and strong play the characteristics of an individual in most of the cases as against that of the organizations. A strong individual brand is something that has seen to be in many walks of life. Look at some of the following examples:

 

-          When a political party makes agitation or strong remarks against a certain Amitabh Bachchan, or a Sharukh Khan does an advertisement, they are all trying to get mileage out of a personal brand.

-          In corporate world you have example of L N Mittal, now amongst world’s richest person, who has done a great job of creating a personal brand through self marketing. Before his organization reached a new country for a takeover, his personal brand had reached before and in many places government actually went all out to help him. Ones which did not, as in case of Arcelor takeover, could not stand against his strong brand eventually.

-          In education field Arindam Chaudhry of IIPM has done the same thing. Frankly with all due regards ‘Beyond IIM’ is a joke…but then he has created a strong brand and at the back of that the institute has presumably done some good work as well

 

The common thing in most of the above cases is they are usually single person dependant to take them to certain milestone of success and driven by personal charisma and characteristics of that person.

 

On the other hand several very large political parties, established institutes, corporate houses follow the principle of creating an organization brand and use that to promote its people. This is ofcourse a time tested formula and needs no detailing.

 

As much as it might look natural or juvenile in some cases due to the kind of incidents, taglines etc that you see, both methods of creating a brand are infact well thought through management concepts. They require strategic thinking and some intelligent planning of actions, marketing and media.

 

~~Rohit~~

 

Theory of Employee Engagement and Motivation

Over the years I have come across several models of calculating levels of employee engagement and motivation. Whether that’s a Hewitt Model of Employee Engagement or Gallop’s model, all of them have there own unique strengths.

 

However when it comes to means of improving and changing that, almost all of them lead to some kind of action planning around pain areas. While I am in agreement with planning around specific pain areas, I have formulated my own theory of how to keep employees engaged and motivated. Through my experience I have rarely seen this not working in organizations.

 

So here go 5 salient features of my theory:

 

Keep them occupied: Nothing is more disengaging then sitting ideal. It’s the start of most of the problems. Like they say ‘khali dimaag shetaan ka ghar’….almost all of them are happier working hard and working late. They would all crib about late hours at times but its much more motivating situation than sitting ideal. For lack of better way to explain it the feeling of getting your salary after hard days work is an motivation in itself.

 

Intellectual pressure Not Delivery Pressure: The more you create a thinking environment where everyone is getting pushed to think new and think different its very satisfying. Most of the organizations create pressure on delivery and targets which infact often works in opposite direction and shuts thinking part of the mind.

 

Plan for Individual’s Success Not Failure: It’s very important that organizations create an environment and opportunity where individuals can look back on the year and see some personal achievements and not failures. Several organizations thrive on keeping unrealistic targets around everything so that there is always something more to achieve. While to some extent I agree with theory of stretch one must ensure an employee has some proud moments to look back upon. Trust me you can plan for such moments and it will be very satisfying for them.

 

Provide Variety: Get them to work on different aspects of a job and try their hands on multiple things. It will make them feel important in every aspect of organization, create skill enrichment and provide back up support for every job.

 

Enlarge Opportunity Size: If they have achieved and delivered X size, provide them with an opportunity to try their hands on 2X, once they do that provide them with opportunity of 4X and so on. Give them a chance to feel they are constantly growing.

 

Now most of the above things need not require job rotation, career planning and such other formal frameworks. I believe we are fortunate to be in a growth economy wherein it’s much easier to create such an environment. It’s no rocket science actually. If usual day of an employee is well earned, interesting and full of high, he or she is likely to feel engaged and motivated. Unless you make the usual life for an employee interesting, all kind of formal programs would achieve very minimal.

 

~~Rohit~~

 

Indian MNC’s – Hidden Employer Brand…

Some time back recently I met some senior folks at Wal-Mart head office in US…whilst we were talking about the Indian business landscape someone asked an interesting question:

 

“How are the Indian professionals likely to look at Wal-Mart as an employment opportunity?”

 

I thought about it for a while and first came some obvious thoughts:

• It’s a brand that would create a lot of excitement
• Larger employable population loves to work for MNC’s
• Thought of working with Fortune 500 leader would be exciting to say the least
• Start up with such global footprint would create an excitement of its own

 

However would they find it easy to hire and retain the best of talent…not really. There is an increasing brand of Indian Companies growing multinational which are creating tremendous amount of excitement as well….some stand out features about them being:

• Career graph in these companies mirrors the growth of the Company, which is a steep north looking graph
• Since many of these companies are fast learning the art of unlocking the value in their subsidiaries and the value in backward-forward value chain integration (concept pioneered by Reliance), the exposure is unparallel
• The wealth creation stock options of Indian companies are offering is difficult to match for any multinational….think about it, time to IPO or exit from commencement of business has come down to 4-6 years from what earlier would have taken 15-20 years

 

So much talk about softer aspects of creating Employee Value Proposition and Employer Brand….if the Indian Companies could start to package some of these hard hitting strengths with some international policies and work environment, they would be tough act to follow in the current growth wave.

 

Rohit