What is a bigger problem: Managing employee appraisals or writing accurate appraisals?

December 24th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

While, I was organizing a software training workshop for a major Electric Power Distribution Corporation in New Delhi, I asked Vikram Singh, one of the participating Senior Managers, who has a team size of 150 employees for performance review, “What is the bigger problem when conducting employee appraisals: managing appraisals or writing accurate appraisals?“.

[Background: This 2,500 employee big company opted for EmpXtrack Performance Management System. Prior to using a web-based performance management system, they used paper based appraisal forms.]

“I have a team of 150 people to review, for me managing employee appraisals is a bigger problem. With an experience of 10 years, writing accurate appraisal is not so difficult. It may be difficult for younger managers but not for an experienced one.“, said Vikram. He continued, “For senior managers like me who also have to review appraisal of my juniors’ teams (I have 8 juniors managing teams of 15-20 each), managing appraisals is a far bigger problem. There is already a long list of urgent tasks with me and then managing 150 employee appraisals, usually in a span of 1 month. It makes me sweat.”

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Posted in Employee Appraisals, HR Technology, HRMS (HRIS), Human Resources, Performance Management | No Comments »

Successfactors of a Leader – Remembering Names

December 10th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

Sometimes back I wrote a post ‘What’s in the name? SuccessFactors for HR‘ where I mentioned the special skill of an HR manager who knows every employee by name. While I was reviewing a new feature in the software EmpXtrack, called Employee Hierarchy (similar to an Organization Chart), I recollected a motivating incident.

It was in the beginning of year 2002, I worked with a business process outsourcing organization. One day I was working quite late and trying to finish a training project before leaving for the day. The Managing Director, Mr. Aashish, just passed by and saw me. Five minutes back, he came back to my desk and said ,”Hi Gireesh, why are you working so late today?” The rest was a normal chit chat.

This incident left me highly motivated for many months to come. I was amazed by the fact that my Managing Director knew me by name, while I was merely a grass-root level executive, almost a nobody in the organization which was 2500 big. Sometimes later I discussed this incident with my manager and he revealed that on seeing me working so late, MD has called him just to ask my name.

Later on a friend’s recommendation I read “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. In this book Dale Carnegie (Section “Six Ways to Make People Like You”)says, “Remember that a man’s Name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”, which highlights how important it is to remember and call people by name.

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Posted in HR Best Practices, HRMS (HRIS), Human Resources | No Comments »

Do your rewards motivate or else!

December 4th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

During one of my conversation with a CEO of a start-up company the discussion turned towards Compensation Planning to motivate employees, especially the talented ones. It was agreed that the most talented ones need a continuous motivation to maintain their momentum. During the discussion, the CEO narrated one of his bad experiences about one of his talented employees, whom he admired, wanted to reward, motivate and compensate appropriately.

Tom worked with John, the CEO of the company, and was a very talented employee who worked diligently. John being happy with the Tom’s work, rewarded him with a cash prize of $ 1000 (which was a significant amount ), in anticipation that Tom will be motivated to perform better. He also had lots of plans for Tom in the back of his mind. Both Tom and John seemed happy and thought that they did a good job.

Contrary to John’s belief Tom submitted his resignation within a much shorter span. During his exit interview, Tom did not state any specific reason for his resignation too (although, it was found later that he left for a better compensation package). His resignation came as a shock to John, who was genuinely interested in retaining good employees and did all what he could do to ensure it.

‘Where was the mistake?’, questioned the CEO to himself and to me too.

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Posted in Compensation Planning, Employee Rewards, Motivation | 9 Comments »

Ten Tips For Downsizing with Grace in Difficult Economic Times

November 26th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

Difficult economic times call for tough calls, and, downsizing is one of the toughest calls that leadership and HR have to take. Though downsizing is the most hated task and nobody wants to do it; it is a necessary evil for saving a company from an economic collapse.

With little efforts organizations can minimize the effect of downsizing on economy and employees to a some extent.  Here are 10 tips that one can consider while downsizing:

1. Do a manpower analysis before you Downsize!

Think twice, do you really need to vacate those seats and happy faces. Do not make subjective decisions!

Work and re-work on your manpower requirements - for today and for tomorrow. A good manpower planning software can assist you and your mangers to accurately assess your manpower requirements. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in HR Best Practices, HR Technology, Performance Management | 2 Comments »

Top Ten Bad HR Practices

October 14th, 2008 Maj. Gen. B.K. Bhatia

Every body talks about the best HR practices, it is good, but merely bringing in the best cannot give the desired results if some Bad HR practices co-exist in the organization. So what are those Top Ten Bad HR practices which caution & alert an organization.

1. Employee has no access to personal data (over-confidentiality): Can’t view, can’t update personal information; has no access to his/ her Leave records, salary data, attendance record, training & promotion details. Not sure if the management’s decisions are based on correct information. This breeds suspicion since there is a perceived lack of transparency.. Impact is on employee-employer relationships.

2. Lack of clarity on Deliverables: Absence of a well-defined job-description leads to lack of accountability. Nether the employee nor his/ her immediate superior (boss) are able to define the job-deliverables. Result is the loss of focus & interest.

3. Absence of Goal-based performance: Employee is unaware of the goals to be achieved during the year. There are no quarterly targets and no process to track their completion. The organization carries out merely an end of the year postmortem of an employee’s performance. The unaccomplished tasks go unnoticed. Difficult to build a performance culture in such organizations. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in HR Best Practices, Human Resources, Motivation | 1 Comment »

Invite your CEO to wear HR’s Shoes

September 29th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

I posted one of the Talent Junction blog posts to CiteHR.com titled “How HR Manager can improve Performance“. It was very well received by the HR community (Read by 2,879 HR professionals and 54 posted thank you comments and still continuing.) One of the HR professionals on reading this post sent a very interesting email seeking help. Here it is…

“Hello Mr. Gireesh,

I have read your Article. It’s Brilliant. I am working in an Airlines Sector as an HR Executive and doing routine work (Salary Processing, PMS, Recruitment etc.). I want to increase my work area in HR so that I can also give my contribution in increasing the performance and lowering the attrition rate of my company.

My biggest problem is my own Management. As they do not want to have Policies, Procedures etc.). Could you please give me some suggestion so that I can improve the performance of my company?”

This mail has two messages: One, the restlessness of a self-motivated HR Manager to improve the performance of his organization and two, her unsuccessful attempts to involve the management into development of Human Resources. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in HR Best Practices, Human Resources, Motivation | 1 Comment »

Leadership insights on “Budgeting for Growth”

September 26th, 2008 Maj. Gen. B.K. Bhatia

I was invited to a attend a seminar conducted by a local chapter of a management group. The conference was titled “Budgeting for Growth” where experts and industry leaders were invited to share their views on optimizing budgets for Marketing, Infrastructure, Information Technology and HR.  Since my interest is in the area of HR, the viewpoints of a cross-section of the audience on budgeting for HR are shared below:

CEO of a Logistics Company: “Our IT budgets are managed by the IT department. They spend it mostly on hardware & support besides investing marginally on software purchases. Our VP - HR is exploring on-line systems through which he would be able to explore employee profiles quickly. I have no budgets allocated for this.”

MD of a Publishing firm: “My CFO feels that we have limited budgets for HR automation, but we may hire two additional executives in the HR department to manage the increase in workload as we expand. Additionally, our CFO is worried about hiring an expensive IT resource to manage any new HR system. We are in a dilemma!” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in HR Best Practices, HR Technology, Human Resources | No Comments »

What the hell has an “Axe” to do with Performance Management business?

September 23rd, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

Thomas, Karl, Steve, Martha, Matthew, Bill and so many others in the organization complained of work pressure, unachievable targets, peer pressure, time management and loss of work life balance. Despite working hard, their performance was going down and impacting organization’s bottom line.

Who is to blame for poor performance of employees and business? Ask line managers; they blame it on HR for poor hiring. Ask HR; they blame it on line managers for poor management skills. Ask me, I would say, the Axe???? Now you will ask what (the hell) an Axe has to do in performance management business? Let me tell you a small story…

Once upon a time, a very strong woodcutter asked for a job to a timber merchant, and he got it. The pay was good and so were the working conditions. For that reason, the woodcutter was determined to do his best. His boss gave him an axe and showed him the area where he was supposed to work. The first day, the woodcutter brought 18 trees “Congratulations,” the boss said. “Carry on that way!”. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in HR Best Practices, Motivation | No Comments »

You Can Only Improve What You Can Measure

September 11th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

Going through a book on Six Sigma, I came across this very popular statement “You Can Only Improve What You Can Measure“. Does it hold true for HR also? Why not?

If the answer to above is ‘Yes’, then for HR to improve its processes it is important to measure the current effectiveness. Here is a tool at EmpXtrack’s website which can help you to measure the effectiveness of your HR.

‘CEO’s checklist for HR Effectiveness‘, a tool designed by Maj. Gen. B. K. Bhatia, helps the CEO or Head HR of an organization to measure the effectiveness of their Human Resources Management functions. It is based on 20 most important criteria which constitute the framework of modern HR. Each criteria has a unique weight determined by the size of an organization.

Click here to use this tool to measure the effectiveness of your HR.

Posted in HR Best Practices, HR Technology, Human Resources | 2 Comments »

10 things about Technology every HR Manager should know

September 11th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

After spending a lot of time working on HR technology, I have just tried to collaborate some of the technology knowledge that any HR Manager should know.

1. The Era of Excel is over, its no more the most Powerful tool.
There was a time when Excel Geeks were highly in demand. Everybody will approach them for a solution. However, with the arrival of softwares like SAP, where HR can ask the software team to create personalized reports, Excel has been moved to the corner. With the amount of analysis and metrics that appear today, Excel is just insufficient. Added to it is the cost of acquiring MS Office. Open Office and Google Docs have appeared as the free alternatives to Excel. Sharing Excels sheets is fun with Google Docs. Though none of these serves as an alternate to customized HR software.

2. Locally developed softwares are out of fashion.
The technology is growing at such a pace that the small and one-room-run software vendors are unable to infuse the technology and dynamics that world of HR needs. Don’t you remember the important updates that you required but your software vendor was unable to do. People are changing, become more tech savvy, blogs are swarming all over - so how can you expect your employees to appreciate your locally developed software. And then there is no need to worry, the latest SaaS technology offers high degree of customization to develop a system meeting your specific needs.

3. Web based Software is the new affordable tool
The huge success of Monster.com, Salesforce, EmpXtrack, SuccessFactors, et ecetra is enough to prove that the era of web 2.0 has begun. Most of these, especially, EmpXtrack provides updates to the software at the fly, the price of these softwares is unmatched and no need to keep in-house support staff. So why would anybody keep the old, poorly interfaced software in HR. Would you? Click her if you want to see how a web-based HR software works.

This was HR in 1960s

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