WE HAVE MOVED TO A NEW LOCATION

We recently launched our new website and our blog has also moved to a new location. We urge you to check our new blog :

http://www.acengage.com/blog/

Thank you for your support over the years and we look forward to seeing you at our new blog.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Yes, 2014 is being branded globally as the year of the Employee. So go out there and make it happen. 

Seize the day and the year !

HIGH PERFORMERS DON'T ALWAYS MAKE GREAT MANAGERS!

By definition managing means managing people and in that context, it all comes down to getting team members to deliver the team goals. 

A high performing individual contributor is driven by the sense of “wanting to be the best” as compared to the rest.  This sense of competitiveness and the appetite to win always starts individualistically. 

It is only natural that someone as competitive and successful will naturally extend that thinking and actions to fuel their future ambition.  At an individual level, high performance and bigger ambitions fuel each other and are comfortably self-fulfilling.

In the workplace, there comes that point where individual performance starts interacting with other aspects of the business and these intersects becomes increasingly evident as the vintage increases. 

Having spent some time as an individual contributor and having delivered consistently good performance, this tailwind of success comes face to face with one’s own ambition to grow to the next level in the organization.   Past performance and the urge to grow both become clear and present especially when an opening gets created for growth to the next level.  At that point, the only barrier one needs to overcome is to be better than the other contenders for that post...or so it appears!

Function, process and domain knowledge, skills and experience are extremely important inputs to succeed.  However, key determinants of success as a team always goes way beyond those inputs.  It is very important to realize that irrespective of the function in focus for example sales, production, operations, finance, HR etc. the most critical ingredient for team success will always be "people skills".

In determining the employees most suited to move into a managerial function, it is vital for the evaluator (the decision maker on the promotion) to recognize that past performance alone would be insufficient and there must be potential to deliver well in the next level.    This becomes the moment of truth.

This potential to deliver as a team is solely dependent on the people abilities and skills the high performer carries within self and is able to put it to good use.  This assessment of potential is just loosely connected to the past performance. 

It is at this point that the evaluator responsible to assess, select and prepare this individual has the greatest responsibility and must execute this decision very carefully.  To manage other team member is a specialized skill.  Everyone has this skill to varying degrees.  Developing these skills is a matter of coaching not a training room agenda.  These skills must be polished and brought into work every day.  It takes a while, almost 3-4 months to bring about this transformation.

In the recent years as IT, BPO and other rapidly growing industries have witnessed this challenge and consequently, some may of these challenges might have got severely complicated in terms of business performance.  These challenges manifested as poor business performance combined with underperformance on employee engagement, experience, satisfaction and employee retention are not restricted to rapidly growing industries but extends easily albeit slowly in the other industries.  Depending on the severity and prevalence of managerial underperformance, business impact could be restricted to a few select teams or cut across large sections of the organization.

A study of over 100,000 exits and over 1,000,000 survey responses clearly suggests, the immediate manager directly or indirectly influences every decision made by a team member at work.

By design HR teams must guide and support resolve people issues that line managers have to deal with in their teams.  HR teams of some of the high growth organizations and industries have to deal with this class of self-inflicted challenges which do not seem to disappear easily.

Here’s what HR and Business leaders can attempt from this point on, to ensure all managers of all vintages deliver on the “people skills” front.  Here below are three key steps to follow :

• Discount the past performance of the manager (when he/she was an individual contributor)
• Assess employee engagement, experience, satisfaction and retention of the team members.  This study of feedback from the team and the manager’s manager elicits the areas of improvement and coaching objectives.
• Create and implement a coaching program (not a training program) for each manager.  Such transformation requires roughly 3 months of supervised coaching.  Assess improvement after coaching.

Much like how one learns to swim just once in a lifetime and never forget, managers who complete the coaching successfully will deliver consistently high team performance going forward without too much help going forward.  Those who are unable to transform, will remain useful to the organization but are best left to deliver as individual contributors.

OUR PERSONAL STAFF - MAIDS, HOUSEKEEPERS, COOKS & DRIVERS DELIVER MORE THAN WE'LL EVER KNOW ...THEY ARE OUR OWN PRIVATE GURU'S FOR PEOPLE MANAGEMENT SKILLS

IF ONE CAN AFFORD OR BE PRIVILEGED to have help at home of any kind such as house-keepers, maids, cooks and drivers, at no extra cost they also become our greatest teachers of people management skills, way beyond what one can learn by way of management degree or the experiences at the workplace.

They are best teachers for every aspect of people skills needed across all HR functions throughout an employee lifecycle.  Let’s see how…

Starting with sourcing of these profiles is the first lesson in safe, cost-effective recruitment.  Typically, you let a few close friends, relatives or colleagues know that you are looking for help.  Going to an agency is usually a result of our inability to find the right profile through the network.  Albeit in a very colloquial way without any help from the employee handbook of procedures and policies, the very first meeting with a potential hire helps the uninitiated learn and establish the essential of role clarity, work hours, total compensation, bonus and incentives if any.  It is also the first time that one wakes up the reality of associated risks of such hiring and therefore key elements of risk mitigation and a draft process to follow if the first candidate does not get the offer.

A cook or a driver while servicing a four member household is more than a university to teach every key concept of resource management, process management, internal communication, customer and employee satisfaction.  They can expose all our weaknesses around reporting structure, key processes and procedures, delivery obligations, money, effort and time management.    

Nobody can train us better in our ability to set expectations, the art of extracting appreciation from the boss and the correct way to reprimand.  Above all for those willing to learn, these gurus will expose our minds to the accommodating, accepting and fair treatment of fellow humans and while doing all this, they also teach us humility to understand what it takes to excel in the workplace especially in the services sector.   Our personal staff is the absolute and final authority in teaching management of challenges of the one employee -many bosses environment.

They are the best and beyond the 36th chamber of Shaolin in teaching us the impact of sickness-absenteeism, poor performance and employee attrition. 

While all of us have unique schizoid ability to behave somewhat differently at home and in workplace, our personal staff will seamlessly blur that gap. 

The takeaway from all this is very simple, if we manage, engage and retain our personal staff very well, we are automatically best equipped to getting our teams to deliver well at the workplace.   

Their(our personal staff) fearless acknowledgement of us being a "good boss" will always outweigh our pride in them.

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS DURING EXIT INTERVIEWS

I hit upon this very interesting article earlier today.

Sitting down with departing employees before they leave can provide managers with valuable insight.

Exit interviews are often – and perhaps unsurprisingly – referred to as the cockroaches of human resources practice. They can be viewed as unnecessary, invasive and irrelevant, particularly if a boss has waited for an employee to resign before bothering to ask how he or she rates their work environment.

AIM facilitator Stephen Abraham says exit interviews have “great potential to give valuable feedback about what’s really going on in the organisation and how it can be improved”, however, often they’re too little, too late for the departing employee.

“Organisations who invest in initiatives to keep their employees engaged will outperform their competitors through their motivated, productive and innovative people,” he says.

However, when carried out correctly, exit interviews can be useful, as a major US technology company found when trying to reduce its 51 per cent annual turnover among call centre staff. Exit interviews revealed that workers were leaving because of issues with flexibility, coaching, compensation and the nature of the job itself. Management fixed these problems, and in two years reduced staff turnover by 25 per cent, saving 3750 employees a year.

Tudor Marsden-Huggins, managing director of recruitment solutions firm Employment Office, says exit interviews are crucial for effective people management.

“In the same way you do an interview before someone starts working at your organisation, you should conduct one when they leave. It ascertains people’s motivations and experiences, and the strengths and weaknesses of both the individual and the organisation,” he says.

It’s not uncommon for employees to be guarded in exit interviews, fearing that honest comments may affect their chances of receiving a positive reference in the future.

Marsden-Huggins says asking a third party to conduct the interview can help eliminate such concerns. “You should have a reasonable and objective person, like the HR manager in larger organisations, conducting the interview rather than the person’s manager,” he says.

“Hopefully the HR manager takes the good, the bad and the ugly and turns it into data, leaving the person’s direct manager to write an objective reference later on.”

Marsden-Huggins recommends conducting exit interviews between one and two weeks after an employee has left the organisation. “You’re asking for objectivity. If he or she still has their final payout outstanding, they’re not going to be objective. Once the dust has settled, they’re less likely to be worried about entitlements. They would also have had a chance to calm down if they left the organisation on bad terms,” he says.

His preference is doing exit interviews by phone.

When it comes to conducting the interview, Marsden-Huggins recommends beginning by stating the purpose of the call. “Let the person know that you’re keen to use the feedback to improve the organisation and to benefit future staff,” he says.

Once the interview is over, Marsden-Huggins says it is important to remember to use the data.

“Don’t just leave it in the employee’s file and never look at it again. It’s one thing to do exit interviews, but if you don’t do anything with the data then it’s a waste.”

Key Questions:

1. Why did you decide to leave?

2. What could have prevented you leaving?

3. How do you feel about the organisation?

4. How would you describe the culture?

5. What were some positive and negative aspects of working at the organisation?

6. What could you have done better if we had given you the opportunity?

7. Did you receive adequate training/ support/induction for your role?

Getting off on right foot can help avoid missteps.

Staff inductions provide the perfect opportunity to cement a healthy culture.

For many new employees, a staff induction means following a bored manager around the office as he or she points out the fridge, evacuation points and bathrooms. If you’re lucky, you’ll have access to the computer system by lunchtime on your first day. If you’re unlucky, you won’t have a desk for the first week. Brian Briscoe, managing director at Briscoe Search and Consulting, says inductions are one of the most important – and most frequently overlooked – parts of the recruitment process.

“People think of inductions as a health and safety overview or as an orientation exercise that lasts for the first two or three days,” he says. “Few people think ‘how are we getting this person to settle in to our community?’”

“Whether you’re a multi-national blue-chip organisation or a five-person company, you are still dealing with humans who have insecurities about being the newest person on the block,” he says. “You look at hour one, day one, week one, month one. There are things you should do at each of those stages to help people settle in. You want to meet with the new employee within the first hour if you’re an employer. Everything is new and volatile, and a friendly face and a welcoming process can take that apprehension away.”

On the first day, non-negotiables include making sure the employee has a desk, a computer, spare pens and required logins and passwords. A welcoming morning tea is also a friendly gesture.

“I know one company that used to take a photo of a new employee on their first day, with their whole team around them. At the end of the day they received a framed photograph to keep,” Briscoe says. “It takes almost no effort, but goes a long way towards making people feel included.”

Line managers should schedule regular check-ins (particularly after the first week and the first month) to make sure new workers are settling in well. People make decisions about the long-term viability of a new job within the first 90 days, so poor inductions can have a crippling impact on staff retention and productivity.

For this reason, Briscoe says even small organisations should consider implementing formalised induction processes.

Amy Birchall is a staff writer at ‘Management Today’, AIM’s national magazine for members.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/wa/19822872/opportunity-knocks-during-exit-interviews/