A Complacent employee in an organisation never helps

Tom Dumez, vice president (HR) of Kent Records, discussed employee engagement at a conference in the US. Excerpts: "Let me challenge you with some statistics. Did you know that 46% of employees are either reactively or actively disengaged, have misguided loyalty, or are actually there mostly to negatively impact your business? These employees cost us way too much money year after year, yet we usually keep them because they have been here so long. Why do most companies historically hold onto the 'fat' for so long, instead of trimming it?"

In an era where talks on cost cutting measures are more than just whispers in the office aisles and have moved beyond the water cooler chats, it's surprising that complacency still exists. But it's a malaise every workplace is stricken with. 

Sandeep Choudhary, regional practice leader at Aon Hewitt, a human resource consulting major, doesn't mince words when he calls it a disease. "Generally speaking, everyone's intelligent, obedient and fit for a particular job considering they have fulfilled the requirement spelt out by an organisation. What differentiates the complacent from the driven is the initiative," he says. 

It's this lack of initiative, which Dumez termed 'fat' and Choudhary 'disease' that has led to companies take employee engagement seriously. Case in point: National Thermal Power Corporation. The old-world mammoth has quite a few initiatives in place to address and avoid complacency. Among others, it sponsors employees for full time BE, MTech and PGDBM programmes in reputed institutes. "This helps give a fresh start to their careers and avoid mid-career slump," says an NTPC spokesperson.

Disease Alert 
In the workplace, complacency can be defined as a sense of comfort coupled with a lack of interest in addressing key organizational issues or areas that need improvement and growth. Mid-career is the operative word here, as most employees who get disengaged fall in the mid-level management. 

Companies are realizing the importance of keeping the employees engaged. Take for instance, ONGC that has launched Gyandhara e-learning programme last year where online certification courses were provided to field executives. "Studies have shown that lack of required abilities and skills cause disengagement. Such factors can be addressed through HR interventions," says an ONGC spokesperson. 

Even private institutions are recognizing the need for such interventions. Sunil Goel, director, Globalhunt, an executive search firm notes that New Age businesses like IT, BPO, financial services and also other MNCs have significantly brought down employee complacency levels. 

"Many organisations have idle workforce, which they don't optimize and utilize properly. Invariably, some become complacent," he points out. The tricky bit: employees don't even recognize when they get infected. Complacency stops you from putting in your best and the quality of work inevitably suffers. 

 

Courtesy by: http://mailer.timesjobs.com/tech01/Mailers/HRDialogue/oct11/landing/in_focus.html

 

Wish you Happy Diwali and prosperous New Year....

 

 

 

 

Happy Diwali and prosperous New year !

 

The Six Attitudes Leaders Take Towards Social Media

Slowly but surely, business leaders are shifting their attitude toward social media — from seeing it as a threat to discovering its very real opportunities.

And their attitude matters, a lot. Social media is about people, not technology. Its business value does not come from social software or a snazzy website, even one with 800 million users. Its value stems from how business leaders, from senior executives to managers, use it to foster new collaborative behaviors that materially improve business performance.

Leadership attitudes, and the organizational culture they spawn, are critical to social media success. They are among a company's most fundamental social media assets — or liabilities. Here are the six basic categories that business leader attitudes toward social media fall into:

Folly:
Leaders with this attitude consider social media a source of entertainment with little or no business value, and they typically ignore it. Where a folly attitude prevails, the approach to a social media strategy must emphasize direct business value tightly tied to well-known and recognized organizational goals or challenges — and it must avoid flabby value statements around improved collaboration and stronger relationships.

Fearful:
Fearful leaders see social media as a threat to productivity, intellectual capital, privacy, management authority, regulatory compliance and a host of other things, and often discourage and even prohibit its use. This attitude can reduce the potential risk, but it also stifles any possible business value. To counteract fear, the strategic approach should focus on relatively low-risk initiatives, even if other, higher-risk opportunities might offer greater business value.

Flippant:
These leaders may not ignore or fear social media, but they don't take it seriously, either. This typically leads to a technology-centric approach where the company simply provides access to social media and hopes that business value will spontaneously emerge. This rarely bears fruit. Important in countering this attitude is convincing leadership that purpose matters, and that they should progress beyond the technology and identify good purposes for social media — causes that are strong enough to catalyze and mobilize communities of people to act in a way that delivers value to the community and the organization.

Formulating:
Formulating leaders recognize both the potential value of social media as well as the need to be more organized and strategic in its use. The right approach here should build on this positive foundation, emphasizing the broader strategic value of social media and mass collaboration, with a succinctly expressed set of business opportunities that (1) demonstrates social media's potential impact across many areas of the business, and (2) is strong enough to capture the attention of the most senior leaders.

Forging:
In companies where leaders have a forging attitude, the whole organization is starting to develop competence in using social media to assemble, nurture and gain business value from communities. To keep progressing, leaders should recognize previous successes, capitalize on growing momentum, advocate continued evolution and increase investments. They should also promote additional grassroots social media efforts as critical in becoming a highly collaborative social organization.

Fusing:
This is the most advanced attitude, and still rare. Fusing leaders treat community collaboration as an integral part of the organization's work, ingrained in how people think and behave. This is a description of a social organization, and in such organizations the need for an explicit vision and strategy subsides — all business strategy and execution already include community collaboration where it's appropriate.

How do most leaders shape up? Right now, our analysis indicates that leaders of most organizations have yet to progress to the Formulating stage, which accounts for the high social media failure rate. We know treating social media as strategic can lead to tangible business value and competitive advantage, so the goal is for business leaders to move quickly past the Folly, Fearful, and Flippant stages and get right to Formulating. Ignoring social media, or throwing it over the fence to Marketing or IT could create serious business risk.

Where does your organization stand?

 

Mind the genie in the lamp.

There once was a very poor man, who woke up hungry with only 1 rupee left in his pocket. He decides to go to the market and see if his rupee can buy him some left over fruit. At the market he meets a fancy clothed man behind a table with a beautiful oil lamp on it, and a sign that reads "1 rupee". The poor man can't believe his eyes, and asks the man what the catch is. It's true, the lamp only costs 1 rupee, the man says. And he explains that in the lamp there lives a genie, who fulfills all your desires. "Then why do you sell it?", the poor man wants to know. "Well, the genie is always active and rather impatient", it is explained. "And if you don't pay attention to him, he'll start taking things away again". "Well OK", the poor man says. "Since I don't have much to lose I will buy it from you".

 

When he arrives back home, he rubs the lamp and the genie appears. "How can I serve you, master?", he asks. "Prepare me a meal worthy of a king", the poor man commands. Within a second the genie serves an opulous meal with 87 courses. The poor man is delighted, but when he wants to start eating, the genie asks again - "And how can I serve you master?" Keeping in mind that the genie can also take away all the goodies, the poor man commands: "Build me a beautiful castle, suitable for a maharaja!" Only a few seconds pass by, and the man now finds himself in a beautiful palace. He likes to explore it, but there comes the genie again, asking "How can I serve you, master?" Every wish is immediately fulfilled, and when ignored, the genie takes away everything.

 

The poor man is annoyed and goes to the village sage, where he explains his problem. After a silent conversation, the poor man steps to the genie and says: 'Genie, build me a large pole and stick it in the ground". The genie immediately builds a pole and sticks it in the ground. "Now genie, I want you to climb up and down the pole, over and over again". The genie starts climbing right away. And now the man has time to eat his meal, explore his palace and do other things. When he and the sage go to see what the genie is doing, they see that he has fallen asleep next to the pole. "And so it is with the thinking genie of every man", explains the sage. "It is restless in its desire to satisfy every desire, and fragments our being. The pole is a tool called a 'mantra'. By repeating it over and over again, our restless mind is kept busy until it gets so bored that it falls asleep. And this way our true self can enjoy the world."

Lesson: you are more than your mind - don't worry and enjoy your self

 

How we succeed by failing...

By the time Steve Jobs’s Wikipedia page had been adjusted to past tense, eulogists had added a footnote to his biography of success. Failure.

Jobs, though wildly successful, also failed often and badly. Therein, we note, lies perhaps the larger lesson of his life: Sometimes you have to fail to succeed.

The truth is, you usually have to fail to succeed. No one emerges at the top. Even those born lucky eventually get a turn on the wheel of misfortune. Anyone with a résumé of accomplishments also has a résumé of failures, humiliations and setbacks. Jobs was fired by the company he co-founded. Yet it was during this period of exile that he picked up a little computer graphics company later called Pixar Animation Studios, the sale of which made him a billionaire.

This is to say, to fail is human. To resurrect oneself is an act of courage.

Jobs himself recognized his failures in a now-famous 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. He recalled sleeping on the floors of friends’ dorm rooms and walking seven miles to a Hare Krishna temple for his one good meal of the week. One needn’t make an appointment with the Genius Bar to glean the moral of this story.

Fear of failure isn’t only an adult concern. From an early age, we are plagued with anxiety about performance. This seems a natural-enough evolutionary development. The strong and savvy survive (and get the girl). The less accomplished eat scraps and enjoy the company of human leftovers. “Losers,” we call them. So habitual is our attention to failure that we even have a word — or at least the Germans do — for enjoying others’: schadenfreude.

What possibly could make us take pleasure in another’s failure? Simple. We love the company.

A history of human failure would make for a long and interesting read, yet we prefer books about success. We thrill at the end-zone victory dance, applaud the extra point, admire the perfect 10. In literature, what is redemption but recovery from human failing? We love no one more than the man or woman who says I made a mistake, I’m sorry, please forgive me. Forgive? We want to hoist the penitent on our shoulders.

An entire lexicon of cliches has evolved around the idea of failure and recovery. It’s not the thing attained that matters; it’s the journey that gives us life. The act of creation — the struggle — far exceeds the pleasure of the thing created. Unless, of course, it’s an Apple iPhone 4S. BlackBerry? Not so much.

Recent acknowledgment of the power of failure, inspired by Jobs’s too-soon demise, provides a welcome spiritual uplift for stressed-out adults. But we’re missing an even more important morality tale that has profound consequences for our nation’s future. Our obsession with success and our fear of failure has trickled down to ever-younger humans, our children, at great cost not only to their psychological well-being but also, ultimately, to our ability to compete in the global marketplace.

We’re so afraid that our kids won’t measure up that we drive them crazy with overbooked schedules and expectations and then create a sense of entitlement by insisting on assigning blame elsewhere when their performance is lackluster. Sideline parents, first cousins to back-seat drivers, who challenge coaches, teachers and umpires on behalf of their children are a relatively new development that can’t be considered positive. When I wrote recently about the failure (there’s that word again) of colleges to teach core curricula that engender critical thinking skills, dozens of professors wrote to complain of students who aren’t willing to work hard (or show up) yet still expect good grades. Even in college, they said, parents pester professors for better marks for their little darlings.

In another famous commencement address, J.K. Rowling’s to Harvard in 2008, the “Harry Potter” author eulogized her own valuable failures. “Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations,” she said. “Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.”

If we agree that wisdom, confidence and a better Apple are gifts of failure, then why are we so afraid to allow our children to experience it? In a culture where failure is not well-enough understood as necessary to growth — and accomplishment is diminished by a code of equal outcomes that enshrines entitlement — then no one gets wiser or better. And a nation populated by such people may not survive.

Courtesy by: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-we-succeed-by-failing/2011/10/14/gIQAnDgykL_story.html?tid=sm_btn_linkedIn

3 Types of Networks You Need

The old adage "It's not what you know, it's who you know" is truer than ever in today's organizations. But how do you know whom to know? Here are three types of networks it pays to have: Personal support. Form relationships with people who help you get back on track during a bad day. These may be friends or colleagues with whom you can just be yourself. Purpose. Include in your network bosses and customers who validate your work, and family members and other stakeholders who remind you that your work has a broader meaning. Work/life balance. Seek out people who will hold you accountable for activities that improve your physical health, mental engagement, or spiritual well-being.

Courtesy by: http://web.hbr.org/email/archive/managementtip.php?date=101311

Happy Dassehra...