The Last Working Day!

So the last working day of 2012 is a Monday. For a change, we hear stories of joy (away from the usual 'Monday Blues' discussions) on how we survived the Mayan prophecy and the  corporate world lives on to see another appraisal cycle! As we prepare to put our feet up and party, we thought it would be prudent to share a few thoughts on the year to come and our view on Employee Engagement & People Management and some of the people challenges for 2013! 

While the job market is open for the ‘right candidate, one of the key challenges that human resource managers have faced across industries is ‘engaging talent’ once on board. Another challenge that remains is ‘building effective and transparent’ dialogue between the core management team and everyone else. There is no dearth of employable talent with the sheer number of employable ‘Gen Y’ candidates coming from colleges and B-Schools across the country, we feel recruiting people who ‘fit the company culture’ needs to take precedence before their pedigree. Only then can we have the right task force.

With a fresh batch of employees joining each year, a clear cut strategy on their career progression during their stint needs to be in place and this needs to be communicated regularly and effectively. Especially since this new and diverse breed of employees also come with a different set of expectations as compared to their predecessors. Managing these expectations in an attempt to curb attrition seems to be one of the biggest challenges HR professionals face today.  Attrition numbers in the first year or 1.5 years across companies or industries is an indicator of the amount of work that is needed in the space of active employee engagement.

While companies remain open to caring for their employees and paying ‘attention’ to engagement scores, organizations need to truly start looking at employees as their greatest asset (not necessarily just a cost center)  and undertake initiatives and prove this belief on a consistent basis.  This can be either to rewarding emotional intelligence or taking steps to build the right ‘top down’ culture across the company by ingraining company values while remembering that this is not a one-time task. We sure have miles to go before we sleep

On this note we wish you a happy new year. May 2013 be stress-free and; may you remain hale and hearty. May your bonuses multiply and appraisals be a cake walk. Here's  to the new year and a fresh start!  

Maintaining Work Life Balance.

7:00 a.m: Alarm rings

7:30 a.m: Breakfast with newspaper

8:00 a.m: Leave from home for work

9:00 a.m: Office starts

8:30 p.m: Leave from office 

10:00 p.m: Reach home

10:30 p.m: Dinner with news

11:00 p.m: Slumber

Remind you of your daily routine? Well, it’s time to stop and think! Just take a look at the routine. When do you have your lunch? When do you spend time with your family? Most importantly, when do you spend time with yourself? Remember that work is a part of life and not the whole of it? 

With evolved lifestyles, working professionals are finding it increasingly difficult to find the right mix between work and life. Life is dominantly about making the right decisions at the right time and maintaining balance between the different roles we perform in our day to day lives. The task to separate the personal and the professional becomes exceedingly tough with better positions and promotions. However tough the job might seem, the need to undertake such a task is undeniable.

Question yourself. Are you really enjoying life? One of the main reasons behind taking up any job is the desire to lead a good enjoyable life. But are you actually fulfilling that desire? You earn the bucks but you do not have the time to spend it, to enjoy life with family and friends. Does that really make sense? Your heart will certainly say ‘No’. Just take the initiative. The rest will gradually fall into place.

How to start? Here’s how!

Once too much pressure builds up, learn to unplug. Disconnect yourself from your mobile phones, emails, letters and chats. Give yourself some time to unwind completely. Spend time with yourself. Do things which you like doing. Take this time to relax.

Choose your profession carefully. Take up something which you want or have always wanted to do. Do not do a job only because you have to. If you choose something that interests you, then you can keep fatigue and stress strikes at bay. Doing something you like does not leave you exhausted. On the contrary, you would feel satisfied.

Plan properly. It helps to make proper use of time and best use of money. Organizing things properly will actually help understand requirements. That will help you allocate time and resources to things that are essential and necessary.

Do not get swayed by the 'herd'. Stay away from fierce and unhealthy competition and mindless rat race. Doing what everyone else is doing is the easiest way out. Our lives have both good and bad moments. No one takes decisions for us. We do it ourselves. So take decisions which you think are correct. This goes a long way to keep the balance between work and life.

Opt for flexibility in timings whenever you get the option. Many organizations offer this as an option to make your life more valuable. Always keep in mind that work is only a part of life, not the whole of it. There are other important things in life and there are people who make our lives complete. Do not let work consume you so much that you forget this elementary point. 

Take some time out every day to exercise and do not keep any other work scheduled for that time. If any work crops up at that time, you can always re-schedule it to some other time.

We all have one life. Spend it wisely we say.  

Corporate India is not up to the mark !

Mumbai: At a time when leisure time physical activity — or LTPA, as it is increasingly being called — is emerging as the global mantra for health, urban India seems clued out. A new survey suggests that one of the reasons that Corporate India is sluggish could be the poor levels of physical activity among its white-collar workforce. About 60% of the 17,000 corporate employees who participated in the pan-India survey admitted to exercising three times a week and that, too, for less than 30 minutes at a stretch. The benefit of a brisk walk or the power of 10,000 steps daily in shaping one’s health is clearly not popular as yet here. 

    

In corporate India, the daily step count rarely crosses 3,000. “The average number of steps that urban Indians take would be between 2,500 and 3,000, especially if they don’t take the public transport that entails walking across bridges and platforms,” said Dr Aashish Contractor, a preventive cardiologist at Asian Heart Institute in Bandra Kurla Complex. LTPA is different from a planned exercise regimen. Instead of pumping iron, the World Health Organisation has said people can be healthy by being active — like walking briskly, skipping and swimming— for up to 30 minutes every day. A study in Lancet recently estimated that inactivity caused 6 to 10% of all deaths from major non-communicable diseases such as coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and breast and colon cancers.

WORKOUT JOURNAL 

• Over 60% exercise 3 days a week Over 58% exercise for less than 30 minutes a day 
• Over 77% take less than 10,000 steps a day* 
• Over 43% are sitting for 8 hours or more a day Over 44% rate their sleep as less than restful 94% eat less than 3 pieces of fruit a day 84% eat less than 3 servings of vegetables a day 

*10,000 steps = 6.4 km (approx) 

*17,000 respondents polled across 8 Indian cities 

HEALTH MATTERS Not even 5k steps a day? Sedentary life 

It showed that inactivity caused 5.3% of the 57 million deaths that occurred worldwide in 2008. The idea of underlining the problem was to show that the solution was simple: increase in leisure time physical activity. “Research has shown that leisure time physical activity is beneficial for all,” said Dr Contractor. In fact, the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine has categorized people on the basis of the number of steps they take: people who take less than 5,000 steps a day are sedentary, those who take between 5,000 and 7,500 are low on activity, those taking between 7,500 and 10,000 are somewhat active and the active ones take between 10,000 and 12,000 steps a day. In the 60s, Japanese walking clubs adopted a local pedometer’s nickname for their product —manpo-kei (translated as ten thousand step meter) — as the standard. The Japanese mantra of 10,000 steps a day translates into walking 6.4 km a day. The survey shows as much: 77% of the respondents admitted that they fail to take more than 10,000 steps a day. The reason is not hard to find: around 43% confessed to sitting for eight hours or more a day. Moreover, while doctors say five servings of vegetables and fruits daily can keep heart diseases at bay, the corporate sector is not a follower. Around 94% said they ate less than “3 pieces of fruit” a day and 84% said they ate less than 3 servings of vegetables. 

The Lancet’s special issue on physical activity just ahead of the London Olympics said physical activity is a neglected dimension of prevention and intervention worldwide, especially in low- and middle-income nations. “One problem is that physical activity is often perceived only in the context of controlling obesity.”

Article Credits: Malathy Iyer TNN, Snippets from an article that appeared in the Times of India FP, Mumbai.

Fostering Creativity @ Work

It's a fact that a lot of us work long hours... sometimes six days a week. And then we go to sleep! Which means that majority of the time we are awake is spent in our little cubicle (or a corner office if you have one). Here’s to the thought that the right environment at work goes a long way in fostering creativity and ensuring that organizations have a happy & engaged workforce. After all, if most of the time that we are awake is spent at office, why should that space be boring?

Research shows that staff performs better when they’re happily engaged at work and this includes the environment they work in. An office with interesting and creatively done interiors is a compelling reason for people to be able to think out of the box. The right environment pushes employees to think of possibilities, gives them new perspectives to look at things which, is the stepping stone towards innovation and fresh ideas. What if one day, you walk into office and find that the chairs in your meeting room have disappeared? Instead, you find an XBox and a few bean bags or couches? Makes you go WOW right?

It also makes you want to come to work the next day knowing that you are not entering a 'cube farm' or for that matter a dull place. In a market as competitive as ours, if fresh ideas and innovation is the key to success, then the environment in which ideas are developed goes a long way in ensuring this. A cool workspace does more than just take more pictures at work. In fact it can de-stress you (after rush hour traffic) and even inspire you to come up with solutions that work :) 

New Hats For The Chiefs !

New Hats for the Chiefs

Companies are doing away with time-worn designations and introducing creative concepts in naming key roles. Others are doing away with terms like ‘employees’ and ‘heads’, in an attempt to break down hierarchies and bring in more colour to their jobs 

Job titles that say, ‘agile evangelist’ or ‘chief pusher’ may conjure up images of work involving two extremes — one, a crusader, and the other, connecting to the seamier world of narcotics. But with a bit of lateral thinking, these can also be perfectly operational, senior corporate designations.

Corporate India is tossing out the old, stodgy nomenclature in favour of creative, personalised designations. At Bangalore-based start up Teleradiology Solutions, the CEO is called the ‘chief pusher’, quite simply because he pushes and nudges employees into delivering the goods. The organisation also has a chief listening officer (HR head) and chief enabler (technology head). “It creates an environment where designations do not matter,” says chief dreamer, Sunita Maheshwari.

Instead of being called ‘business development head’,Maheshwari prefers the quirkier title she now has. In most organisations that work on similar lines, executives want their titles to resonate their approach to work instead of seniority. It breaks down hierarchies; Maheshwari, for instance, plans to knock off the ‘chief ’ in her title.

In most cases, though, the choice of designation is reserved for those who have proved themselves. The rest of the employees can stick to well-worn labels. The core content of the ‘glamorised’ role does not change.

The Label Says it All 

Chief Listening Officer

THE WAILING wall for all employees. Looks after policies, compensation and career growth. Also known as the human resource head

Chief Pusher

OTHERWISE CALLED the chief executive officer. Now wears the ‘nudging’ badge high

Chief Dreamer

IDEATES TO get more clients and business. In the traditional hierarchy, is called business development head

People Success

A HUMAN resource officer who involves himself or herself closely in career development, and is a success enabler of employees and the organisation

Chief Ethics Officer

KEEPS A check on fraudulent behaviour, and a close watch on every business unit

Agile Evangelist

THE ROLE involves promoting the adoption of Agile software across businesses

Story by Devina Sengupta @ Times : Snippets from ET, 13 April 2012, Page 6. 

Life @ Work Tee Design Contest !

Here's your chance to Startdom and take home some some $$. Get inspired by the fun culture at work, go beyond and enthuse some "Masti" into a t-shirt that would liven up meetings!". 

What's The Brief ? 1) Design a T-Shirt keeping the ideology around Never Grow Up and what Life @ Work is all about. Designs may have ‘Never Grow Up’ infused in the creative (if you think it’s cool) 2) Restrict your design to a maximum of five colours.3) Keep in mind a workable area of maximum 11 x 16 inches for your design.4) All submissions will also be eligible to be a part of the SheepStop Evergreen Competition. 5)You may submit more than one entry.

The deadline to submit your design is Sunday, February 12, 2012. The winning designs will be announced online on February 27, 2012

Loot for the Never Grow Up "Life @ Work" Tee Design Contest:

• 1st Prize: Rs.5000 + Your winning Tee + Royalty
• 1st Runner Up: Rs.3000 + Your winning Tee + Royalty
• 2nd Runner Up: Rs.2000 + Your winning Tee + Royalty

That's not all, the final three tshirts will be printed and sent to Sheep Stop distribution stores across the country :) Submit your entries @ http://www.sheepstop.com/contests/nevergrowup 

"Never Grow Up" and the "Never Grow Up Brown box" logo are registered trademarks of Never Grow Up Workshops Pvt. Ltd. The design used in the contest creatives have been created exclusively for Never Grow Up WPL. All rights reserved.© 2012

Pehle Aap (People First) !

It’s been said that ‘Home is where the heart is’ well the same applies for any organization. Work, check; place, check; pay hike, check, office-they say. Be it sole-proprietorship, partnership, joint-stock, all initiates with money, material, machinery, method and Man. (err, women too). And the man being referred here as the company or the employee of the organization. The fact is the company grows, spreads gradually with the employees, along with them. Yes selection, recruitment are only process and types. Nothing beyond it. Man-made process, machinery, idea is all cost and figure but the real thing comes with the employees. An identity or existence of a particular organization is again through the employees, directly or indirectly. Company cultures are like country cultures’- Peter Drucker, and the citizens are working men. When we talk about the ‘aam aadmi’, it connects like nothing else.   

Research and experience clearly show it’s worth the time and money to build a high performing workforce. The cost of replacing an employee typically ranges from one to three times his or her annual salary and the average company loses about $1 million with every 10 professional employees who leave. The investment side is also affected. According to a recent analysis done by investment firm Frank Russell Co for the Great Place To Work Institute, money invested in a portfolio of stocks of Fortune 100 Best Companies in 1997 and held through 2003, returned almost three times more (72.9% return) than the same amount invested in an S&P 500 portfolio (25.2% return) during this six year period. Customers, contractors, advertisers, other agencies, shareholders, & valuation fluctuate but the employees are a bit more. Belonging-ness and esteem are two basic human needs, and if it is provided, things just fall into place. Grievance, suggestions, advice, interest, loss, advantage, risk all are primarily known, spoken, heard by them. Making sure employees are happy and satisfied with the job, the working environment, remuneration, and most importantly the sense of belonging does work wonders.

                                                                              

Because the security guard you pass by gives you that welcoming smile, or a ‘salaam’ while entering the office premises.      

Because the receptionist gives that warm gesture while passing his/her desk and comes forward to help.                        

Because the departmental manager stands informed about the records enquired the very last day.                               

Because the whole thing works, very much like this. So the first priority should ideally be to accurately gauge the true sentiment of the employee so that strategic and tactical changes can to put into motion to promote employee satisfaction which adds the real value. 

  -PEHELE AAP, dear employees.

Guest Writer Submission: The Author, Ankita P is currently pursuing English honours from Calcutta University. The views mentioned above belong to the author. © Never Grow Up.2011.  

The 10 Commandments !

No matter the size of your company, having a team of motivated employees is critical to your business success. There are 10 simple ways to ensure your team is enthused, productive and ready to give their all.

Build a foundation: It’s important to build a rock-solid foundation for your employees so they feel invested in the company. Tell them about the history of the business and your vision for the future. Ask them about their expectations and career goals, as well as how you can help them feel like a part of the team. Create a positive environment: Promote an office atmosphere that makes all employees feel worthwhile and important. Keep office doors open, and let folks know they can always approach you with questions or concerns. After all, a happy office is a productive office. Put people on the right path: Most employees are looking for advancement opportunities within their own company. Work with each of them to develop a career growth plan that takes into consideration both their current skills and their future goals. Educate the masses: Help employees improve their professional skills by providing on-the-job training or in-house career development. Allow them to attend workshops and seminars related to the industry. Encourage them to attend adult education classes paid for by the company. Employees will feel you are investing in them, and this will translate into improved job performance. Fun factor: Once in a while, put your work aside and do something nice for the people who work for you. Treat the office to a pizza lunch or take everyone to the movies. These little diversions can go a long way toward improving productivity. Acknowledgement matters: You can make a huge difference in employee morale by simply taking the time to recognize each employee’s contributions and accomplishments, large or small. Be generous with praise. Give out incentives: Offer incentives, either with something small like a gift certificate or something more substantial such as a performance based bonus or salary increase. Also, give out awards such as “Employee of the Month”. Such tokens of appreciation will go far in motivating employees. Deliver what you promise: Getting people to give their all requires following through on promises. If you tell an employee that they will be considered for a bonus if numbers improve or productivity increases, you’d better put your money where your mouth is. Failure to follow through on promises will result in a loss of trust. Helping hand: Help employees reach the next level professionally by providing on-site coaching. Bring in professionals to provide one-on-one counselling, which can help people learn how to overcome personal or professional obstacles on their career paths. Make the right match: You can improve employee motivation by improving employee confidence. Assign individuals with tasks you know they will enjoy or will be particularly good at. An employee who is successful at one thing will have the self-confidence to tackle other projects with renewed energy and excitement.

Source: Allbusiness.com , Expresscomputeronline.com , ET Special Issue, Nov 2011.

To Tell or Not To Tell ?

The Gossip Paradox : We all do it. We like to share stories but the trick is to set boundaries at work. A sample of senior vice-presidents of communication at Fortune 500 companies stated that harmful rumours reached their ears on an average of nearly once a week. Gossiping at work is also about passive workplace aggression. Even those in leadership roles indulge in making remarks about others. Be cautious, because that’s how negative reputations are made.

The urge to gossip can get you in trouble. Billionaire Ray Dalio, Wall Street heavyweight, has a new stringent diktat! He’s banning office gossip and sacking employees who are caught gossiping more than three times. His policy is ruthless: If employees are caught tongue-wagging about their bosses or colleagues behind their backs, they get two verbal warnings. It’s an unlucky third time when they get fired on the spot. In the company email, he wrote, “Never say anything about a person you wouldn’t say to him directly. If you do, you are a slimy weasel.” Psychology Today reports, “Gossip is like sex. It is so much fun that people can’t stop themselves from doing it.

Can chitchat help you get ahead? 

Even though gossip gets a bad rap, experts also believe that nuanced chitchat may be essential to getting ahead in a career. “If you must be negative, be smart not only about what you say, but also how you say it. Anyone who is an achiever or has good looks or their boss’s favourite will be an easy target. Some disclosures are deliberately spread by senior management in the form of gossip to make people more alert (or so is rumoured). 

Edited from Times Life : September 2011.  

Do Happier People Work Harder ?

Do Happier People Work Harder?

Research shows that staff perform better when they’re happily engaged at work

Americans (And if we extrapolate this to our country) now feel worse about their jobs – and work environments – than ever before. And there’s no reason to think things will soon improve, according to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which has been polling more than 1,000 adults every day since January 2008. Employee engagement may seem like a frill in a downturn economy. But it can make a big difference in a company’s survival. 

In a 2010 study, James K. Harter and colleagues found that lower job satisfaction foreshadowed poorer bottom-line performance. Gallup estimates the cost of America’s disengagement crisis at a staggering $300 billion in lost productivity annually. When people don’t care about their jobs or their employers, they don’t show up consistently, they produce less or their work quality suffers. 

Over the past decade, the research looked into the micro-level causes behind this macro-level problem. To gain real-time perspective into everyday work lives, nearly 12,000 electronic diary entries from 238 professionals in seven companies were collected. The analysis revealed their inner work lives – the usually hidden perceptions, emotions and motivations that people experience as they react to and make sense of events in their workdays. 

The results were sobering. In one-third of the 12,000 diary entries, the diarist was unhappy, unmotivated or both. In fact, workers often expressed frustration, disdain or disgust. Research shows that inner work life has a profound impact on workers’ creativity, productivity, commitment and collegiality. Employees are far more likely to have new ideas on days when they feel happier. Conventional wisdom suggests that pressure enhances performance; the real-time data, however, shows that workers perform better when they are happily engaged in what they do. 

Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Steven Kramer, an independent researcher, are the authors of The Progress Principle:  The New York Times / ET Mumbai , 13 Sept. 2011

Preoccupations : Trust Evidence !

Preoccupations : Trust Evidence for Effective Management

Failure to consider sound evidence repeatedly inflicts unnecessary damage on employee well-being & group performance

Consider this hypothetical situation: You have a serious illness. Your doctor prescribes an intrusive, painful and costly treatment. What she doesn’t say — because she hasn't consulted the research — is that most studies find the treatment ineffective and fraught with negative side effects. You go through the procedure, which doesn’t work. You later find the research your doctor failed to consult. When you ask why, she answers: “Who pays attention to studies? I have years of clinical experience. Besides, the protocol seemed as if it ought to work.” Does that sound like malpractice? It does to us. Fortunately, pressures to practice evidence-based medicine are reducing preventable errors. That isn’t the case, however, in most workplaces, where failure to consider sound evidence repeatedly inflicts unnecessary damage on employee well- being and group performance. It doesn’t have to be that way. Consider the issue of incentive pay. Many people believe that paying for performance will work in virtually any organization, so it is used again and again to solve problems — even where evidence shows it is ineffective. As The New York Times reported in July, a study found that the effort to link incentive pay to student performance “had no positive effect on either student performance or teachers’ attitudes.” But that bad news could have been predicted long before spending all that time and money. After all, the failure of similar efforts to improve school performance has been documented for decades. 

Here is another example: Research has shown that stable membership is a hallmark of effective work teams. People with more experience, working together, typically communicate and coordinate more effectively. Although this effect is seen in studies of everything from product development teams to airplane cockpit crews, managers often can’t resist the temptation to rotate people in and out to minimize costs and make scheduling easier. 

Another workplace danger is excessive self-confidence, which can help people rise to positions of power but can also render them less effective leaders. Overconfident decision-makers use a practice that is ineffective for most others — but they believe they are so talented that the usual findings don’t apply to them. In medicine, the evidence-based movement arose in response to thousands of deaths and billions of wasted dollars that could have been averted by applying proven practices. Similarly, in other fields, the growing pile of studies on the human and financial costs of employee disengagement, management distrust, poor group dynamics, faulty incentive schemes and other preventable damage suggests a need for an evidence-based management movement. Some organizations are leading the way. It’s time for many more to follow suit. 

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton are professors at Stanford : The New York Times / Condensed from the ET Mumbai 13 Sept.