During bus journeys at times you may bump across very irritating people. The other day, I was able to secure myself a seat only towards the rear-end of a mini-bus. The roads and the worn-out shockers of the bus meant that my journey was quite bumpy and my bones & joints were tested once again. I however buried myself in a Ruskin Bond to take my mind-off the excruciating ride. From one of the stops boarded a middle-aged man with receding grey hairline and an outstretching waistline. He sat next to my seat in the opposite row. I and he were separated by a narrow alley. After sometime he stretched his hand across, to rest it on the back of the seat in front of me. He had not only blocked me in my seat but his hands were almost parallel to my face and I started to feel a little uncomfortable. He happened to know the person sitting on the seat ahead of me and started to loudly converse with him. After sometime he fell quiet and started to glance through a newspaper. Then he again patted the guy in front of me and gave him to read a comic strip that he had just read in the newspaper, with a wide grin on his face. His teeth colured by betel leaf were looking as if soaked in blood after a fresh hunt. He held his monstrous-grin till the other guy turned back and gave him a smile back. This turned the grin on the face of the ‘monster’ next to me into a loud roar-like-laughter. More than half of the bus turned back to see what had just shook the earth. But the ‘monster’ continued to be blissfully unaware of his actions and continued with more such misadventures till the end of the journey. By that time, along with my bones, my mind also felt cracking.
The lack of awareness about the implications of one’s actions on others is what makes a person irritating and at times obnoxious. However surprisingly many people suffer from such lack of awareness. When managers in any organization suffer from such syndrome then the impact that it has on his team or department members is always dysfunctional. Managers are key to engagement and one of the first steps towards improving effectiveness is to try to become more aware of one’s words and actions on others. The truth behind the famous adage that ‘people do not leave their organizations, they leave their supervisors (managers)’ makes such awareness even more important.
Recently, Nandini Piramal, Executive Director at Piramal Healthcare Ltd. said in an interview that – “The ultimate in people management is about how you make it a win-win situation for everybody involved. People have to want to do something for them to execute it well. In a way, I don't look at HR as a separate function. How you manage people, how you think about people, their careers — that's what a good manager should do. HR does provide structure in how you think about these things. But ultimately, if a manager doesn't think about these things, he's not playing a manager's role.”
Some of the things that managers usually do without realizing their implications are self-praise, crack loathsome jokes, steal credit, belittle junior colleague in front of the latter’s family, become rigid & bureaucratic, pretend, use wrong language, show cultural-insensitivity, show gender-insensitivity etc.
An airline recently started a system, by which using social media, passengers would be able to determine the person who shall sit on the seat next to him/her. Only if people could do the same in choosing their mangers! But since such an idea seems remote, hence the organizations can do better by training their managers on how to become better co-travelers in the organizational journey.
Showing posts with label Business Line. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Business Line. Show all posts
Monday, January 9, 2012
Friday, August 12, 2011
Business Media Comments...
Keeping employees engaged, involved
Anjali Prayag
August 12, 2011:
Mr N. R. Narayana Murthy, Founder of Infosys, once quipped that one of his worst fears was that the young employee who ‘walked out of his campus at 5 p.m. one day would not turn up the next day.'
CEOs and HR managers agree that keeping employees engaged is the only way to keep them away from the company's exit doors.
In their book Employee Engagement, academician Debashish Sengupta and HR practitioner S. Ramadoss have demystified, defined, illustratedand strengthened the case for Employee Engagement (EE). Although the introduction to the topic runs into almost three chapters, with exhaustive notes on the definition of EE, the reader gets the benefit from the fifth chapter onwards. The book turns interesting and quite insightful as it gives instances of employee engagement practices at both Indian and foreign companies.
Interesting analogy
Stressing the importance of the employer-employee relationship, the authors make an interesting analogy between a married couple and employee-employer partnership. They write, “Somewhere drawing the line, an employer-employee coming together is also like a marriage with the employer being the husband, because of the traditional perception of being the provider. Much like a marriage is solemnised, when both the parties feel a commonality they can share, an employer and the employee also choose each other based on the possibility of sharing such a stake.”
Very aptly, instances of companies calling their employees by different terms have been mentioned, indicating that the ‘relationship' is not just of the provider and the provided: Walmart calls its employees ‘associates', Starbucks Coffee as ‘partners' and the co-founder of MindTree Consulting is the ‘gardener'. “This automatically necessitated greater involvement and participation of employees, not only in work, but in policy formulation, decision-making and strategy design,” say the authors, pointing out various ways of keeping the employee engaged, in the work environment.
The later chapters draw out some of the best practices in employee engagement from the corporate realm, something that's useful for the budding HR practitioner. An in-depth case study of Taj Group's engagement initiatives helps the reader understand how the hospitality group recovered after the dastardly attack on the Taj Hotel in Mumbai in 2008. Similarly, watch and jewellery giant, Titan, has used employee engagement as the cornerstone to manage challenges, say the authors. Titan had to manage aspirations of two sets of completely different kinds of employees: one from the manufacturing pool and the other from its retail pool. Employees at the plant were encouraged to form a forum to represent the various needs and aspirations, which led to the formation of an internal union. For customer-facing employees, training and development are the supportive and engaging programmes. Other examples in the book give a peek into how companies are keeping their employees engaged: Underlying Google's free and casual culture is a serious purpose to ideate and create, say the authors. An interesting CSR programme at Bharti Airtel has become one of the most effective tools of employee engagement. “The company started a programme in which an employee could bid for the senior management's time via an online auction, the proceeds of which would be used for CSR initiatives.”
Challenges
However, according to the Towers Perrin Global Workforce Survey of 2006, that indicates the level of employee engagement in India, compared to other countries, the statistics aren't favourable.
In India, only seven per cent were highly engaged, 37 per cent moderately engaged and more than half the employees surveyed (56 per cent) were disengaged.
However, by 2008, as another survey indicated, nearly 34 per cent were ‘fully engaged' and 13 per cent were disengaged. Around 29 per cent of the workers were ‘almost engaged'. The challenges, clearly, are for companies to have their task cut out for themselves: not only to ensure higher levels of engagement, but to also ensure that there is a consistent level of engagement across all levels of the organisation.
Fourth chapter onwards, the authors have brought out an informative edition that is sufficiently illustrated with live examples on employee engagement. However, one feels that the first fifty pages could have been less scholastic and academic. (Source Business Line)
Anjali Prayag
August 12, 2011:
Mr N. R. Narayana Murthy, Founder of Infosys, once quipped that one of his worst fears was that the young employee who ‘walked out of his campus at 5 p.m. one day would not turn up the next day.'
CEOs and HR managers agree that keeping employees engaged is the only way to keep them away from the company's exit doors.
In their book Employee Engagement, academician Debashish Sengupta and HR practitioner S. Ramadoss have demystified, defined, illustratedand strengthened the case for Employee Engagement (EE). Although the introduction to the topic runs into almost three chapters, with exhaustive notes on the definition of EE, the reader gets the benefit from the fifth chapter onwards. The book turns interesting and quite insightful as it gives instances of employee engagement practices at both Indian and foreign companies.
Interesting analogy
Stressing the importance of the employer-employee relationship, the authors make an interesting analogy between a married couple and employee-employer partnership. They write, “Somewhere drawing the line, an employer-employee coming together is also like a marriage with the employer being the husband, because of the traditional perception of being the provider. Much like a marriage is solemnised, when both the parties feel a commonality they can share, an employer and the employee also choose each other based on the possibility of sharing such a stake.”
Very aptly, instances of companies calling their employees by different terms have been mentioned, indicating that the ‘relationship' is not just of the provider and the provided: Walmart calls its employees ‘associates', Starbucks Coffee as ‘partners' and the co-founder of MindTree Consulting is the ‘gardener'. “This automatically necessitated greater involvement and participation of employees, not only in work, but in policy formulation, decision-making and strategy design,” say the authors, pointing out various ways of keeping the employee engaged, in the work environment.
The later chapters draw out some of the best practices in employee engagement from the corporate realm, something that's useful for the budding HR practitioner. An in-depth case study of Taj Group's engagement initiatives helps the reader understand how the hospitality group recovered after the dastardly attack on the Taj Hotel in Mumbai in 2008. Similarly, watch and jewellery giant, Titan, has used employee engagement as the cornerstone to manage challenges, say the authors. Titan had to manage aspirations of two sets of completely different kinds of employees: one from the manufacturing pool and the other from its retail pool. Employees at the plant were encouraged to form a forum to represent the various needs and aspirations, which led to the formation of an internal union. For customer-facing employees, training and development are the supportive and engaging programmes. Other examples in the book give a peek into how companies are keeping their employees engaged: Underlying Google's free and casual culture is a serious purpose to ideate and create, say the authors. An interesting CSR programme at Bharti Airtel has become one of the most effective tools of employee engagement. “The company started a programme in which an employee could bid for the senior management's time via an online auction, the proceeds of which would be used for CSR initiatives.”
Challenges
However, according to the Towers Perrin Global Workforce Survey of 2006, that indicates the level of employee engagement in India, compared to other countries, the statistics aren't favourable.
In India, only seven per cent were highly engaged, 37 per cent moderately engaged and more than half the employees surveyed (56 per cent) were disengaged.
However, by 2008, as another survey indicated, nearly 34 per cent were ‘fully engaged' and 13 per cent were disengaged. Around 29 per cent of the workers were ‘almost engaged'. The challenges, clearly, are for companies to have their task cut out for themselves: not only to ensure higher levels of engagement, but to also ensure that there is a consistent level of engagement across all levels of the organisation.
Fourth chapter onwards, the authors have brought out an informative edition that is sufficiently illustrated with live examples on employee engagement. However, one feels that the first fifty pages could have been less scholastic and academic. (Source Business Line)
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Culture is the incubator of Employee Engagement
Without a strong and a breathing culture engagement practices cannot sustain too long...
Read my column in Business Line:
Human Resources: Employee engagement
'Employee engagement is the new corporate buzz-term. And many companies, looking at the benefits of engagement enjoyed by their competitors, want to jump on to the bandwagon and introduce practices that are mostly copied from the best ... '
Read my column in Business Line:
Human Resources: Employee engagement
'Employee engagement is the new corporate buzz-term. And many companies, looking at the benefits of engagement enjoyed by their competitors, want to jump on to the bandwagon and introduce practices that are mostly copied from the best ... '
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)