High Performance Companies Focus on Performance Management

December 31st, 2009 Gireesh Sharma

We often listen from the successful business leaders that “People are our strength”. Recently I read the book “The High Performance Entrepreneur” written by Subroto Baghchi. He is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Mindtree Consulting, one of India’s most admired software companies.

Mindtree has grown from 0 to 3500 people and crossed $ 102 Million in revenue, all in six years, making it one of the highest performing companies in India.

Based on Subroto’s personal experiences, the book is all about entrepreneurship and how an organization can achieve high growth. Being involved in development and implementation of Performance Management Systems, one paragraph caught my attention.

Under chapter “Getting Good People and Keeping Them”, Subroto says’ “I can never overstate the importance of five things in managing high performance professionals: setup a performance management system that everyone understands, communicate with people with evangelical regularity, listen to the voice of your people through forums and regular perception surveys that are conducted by an outside agency, focus on development of leadership and finally create a support network for your leaders. If an organization knows how to do these five things right, it can scale without breaking up.”

He further tells about the processes at Mindtree, “The annual business plan of the company flows from the vision and in turn, determines the allocation of the resources. Individual objectives then flow out of the annual plan and people get their performance evaluation done at the end of the year, based on these objectives.” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Employee Appraisals, Employee Rewards | 4 Comments »

Case Study: Performance Management System for Educational Institutions

November 5th, 2009 Gireesh Sharma

As the need for talented workforce is growing worldwide, so is the need for faculty & staff with requisite skills in the educational institutions to produce the base for generating such a work force. Businesses are continuously demanding fresh talent which can meet challenges of twenty-first century through innovative and out-of-the box thinking. Business leaders are counting on educational institutions: schools, colleges, universities and other training establishments for infusing well-qualified fresh talent into industry.

In turn, educational institutions are continually striving for improving their output both in terms of numbers and the quality of talent offered for varying jobs in different types of organizations. The excellence of output from an educational institution depends on the quality of their faculty, support services and infrastructure. To achieve higher levels of excellence, institutions need to set high performance goals for their academic and non-academic staff. These goals should be effectively measured at frequent intervals to bridge performance gaps, if any. Institutions which can effectively manage the performance of their faculty and other employees can leave their mark on industry.

Thus, having the best of class performance management software is not only a need of the hour but an enabler of excellence in an educational institution.

EmpXtrack team has published a case study on Performance Management System for Educational Institutions.

Downlaod Case Study: Fill this form to download the case study:

Posted in Case Study/ White Papers, Employee Appraisals, Goal Setting, HR Technology, Human Resources | No Comments »

Post-Recession Challenges of Talent Management

October 12th, 2009 Gireesh Sharma

Recovering Economies

After a year or so the news on recession is taking a U-turn (not a V-turn though). Officially, analysts are reporting that recession is over, including Google CEO. While it will take some time for recession to pave the way for prosperity and growth for business in general, the prosperity is already on its way to certain economies such as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

HR May be Caught Off Guard

Although this is good news for business operations, including marketing and sales, it poses new challenges for human capital. Businesses would no longer run on the old rules, but new out-of-the-box solutions, more comprehensive efforts, innovative thinking, and new skills and competencies would be required to grow and prosper. Needless to say, the demand for both the quantity and the quality of talented employees will grow worldwide. Companies that have fired employees in the past are already feeling the pinch, as they do not have enough bandwidth to execute.

Bloggers like Jon Ingham, who champion the cause of Human Capital Management, are being invited to speak on performance management. The need for performance management is pressing.

Talent Scenario During Recession

The law of demand and supply mercilessly applies to human resources, also. During the economic downturn, companies were able to downsize by getting rid of redundant work force and dead wood. They also restructured the employee compensation (mostly by decreasing) to stave off financial losses. Only those employees were retained who proved their worth. The employees had to accept all kinds of compensation-related compromises while maintaining the same or even higher level of efficiency and productivity. They could thus survive the financial tsunami.

These survivors got the opportunity to handle a variety of tasks that further sharpened their skills and made them multi-skilled. Thus, overall quality of talent has increased. At the same time, those who were out of job lost this opportunity to hone their skills in a new challenging environment. Adding to our woes, slashing of training and development budgets has led to a depletion of the number of skilled employees within the companies.

And a Difficult Road Ahead

Such steps from companies have created an altogether tricky scenario: The quality of talent within the companies has increased (raising the bar of the talent), while the quality of skills available in job market has dwindled. Now, recruiters can hire the required quality talent not from outside but from inside their competitors’ workplace.  Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Compensation Planning, Economy, Employee Appraisals, Employee Rewards, Performance Management | 9 Comments »

Importance of HR Data for a CEO

August 9th, 2009 Gireesh Sharma

I used to believe that HR Data was useful for HR Departments only since the department was responsible for employee development & management activities. Alternately, the CFO and CEO were only interested in metrics such as cost of hire, total compensation, cost for training etc which were more oriented towards financial goals and treated employee costs as a “cost-center”. My perception changed in a recent customer interaction.

It was during an EmpXtrack training session for one of our clients in India, when their HR Director asked that we provide extensive HR dashboards to their CEO. While these reports were available for the HR Managers, I wasn’t sure if it could benefit the CEO in any way and hence I resisted.

Since the HR Director seemed to be a nice & patient gentleman, I thought of arguing a little and also better understand why he believed that the CEO would want to look at all this data. There were over 25 crucial dashboards already available for the CEO and what could be the benefits of having access to 100s of additional reports. Many questions came in my mind like –

• Will the CEO have time to go through the reports,
• What will be the implication of training him in using these?
• What if one of the reports doesn’t work correctly? (It does happen!!!)
• Was the CEO from an HR background or believed in Jack Welch’s theory of HR Management etc. etc.

The HR Director was obliging and I got some deep insights into how CEOs think and work. This also helped me better understand the needs of an effective HR department – especially for a company that has global ambitions and aggressive growth plans.

The HR Director said that they are into a Knowledge Intensive Business Services and their core strength lies in the quality of their people. While meeting potential investors and even large customers, our CEO is often asked following questions:

1. What is it about your management team / people that makes them uniquely capable of executing on this business plan?

AND/OR

2. Do you have the Right Leadership?

AND/OR

3. Does the team have passion for the business? Have they done it before: experience; market experience; intimate contact with potential customers, partners, and suppliers; etc. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Employee Appraisals, HR Best Practices, HR Technology, Human Resources, Motivation, Performance Management | No Comments »

Free Human Resources (HR) Software Download Facts

April 22nd, 2009 Gireesh Sharma

Free HR Software

Many visitors on EmpXtrack’s website come to look for Free HR software. Because there are many softwares in different domains that come for FREE, they expect that there can be a Free Human Resources Software too. This post will discuss “Is there any free lunch (software) at all?” for Human Resources Management. I will also try to bust the myths about the softwares that are available for Free.

Why HR Software is NOT free?

Let me begin with why there can’t be free software in HR Domain.

My first argument is that it takes lots of efforts to develop an HR Software, because an HR Software is not merely a plain database of employees information fields (like in an Excel Sheet or MS Access) but a large collection of various types of information which are linked to each other in a logical way so that an output can provide a Common Sense View about the employees.

If I need to define HR Software I will say “HR Software is a process for the collection, analysis, interpretation and presentation of employee’s data. It can provide tools for prediction and forecasting based on data. Thus it can be used for a wide variety of management decisions, financial decisions about manpower, performance of people, succession planning and removal of non-performers.” Such an important software, which provides a total MIS on human resources has to be created with great care. How can you get it for Free. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Employee Appraisals, Goal Setting, HR Technology, HRMS (HRIS), Human Resources, Performance Management | 13 Comments »

Employee Appraisal Scores can be DECEPTIVE

March 30th, 2009 Gireesh Sharma

Recession has done at least one good thing for organizations. Shifting the FOCUS from Gut-feelings to qualitative and quantitative analysis of business performance and decisions.

“I think Steve is a great guy.” doesn’t work anymore. It has to be “Look at John’s sales performance report. It says he is doing great job.”

The next thing that comes into picture is Employee Performance Appraisals. More than ever organizations are looking to set SMART goals and conduct performance appraisals honestly. But does HONESTY itself gives accurate results?

Consider the case of three managers in the same department of an organization in Year 2007. The performance of the teams of these managers was at par with marginal differences.

Manager A: Ram is one of the youngest managers and hails from Generation Y. He is very optimistic and looks for positive side of the employees. He believes in motivating by carrots.
Manager B: Sonia is in the middle of her career. She has high career prospects in the company and looking for promotion in 1-2 years. She likes to play safe.
Manager C: Johnson is an ex-government employee. For him discipline and loyalty come foremost. He cannot tolerate any deviation from policies and authorities. He believes in the stick.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Employee Appraisals, Human Resources, Performance Management | 9 Comments »

Why employee performance appraisals are ineffective, sometimes?

January 12th, 2009 Gireesh Sharma

One of my HR Community friends,  Basheer wrote to me:

> Dear Mr. Gireesh Sharma,
>
> When most people consider traditional performance appraisals a time consuming and expensive task, I also believe they are ineffective in the present work culture of organizations.
>
> I would like to hear from you the better ways to get the performance appraisals done effectively ,successfully and quickly. Or is there a way out of performance appraisals?
>
> Regards.
> A.A Basheer

Basheer’s concern was to a large extent genuine. I would like to share with you what I replied to him:

Dear Mr. Basheer,

Thanks for writing.

I (to some extent) agree with your thought that “most people consider traditional performance appraisals a time consuming and expensive task“. Is there a better way to do it? Yes it is! Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Employee Appraisals, Human Resources, Performance Management | 5 Comments »

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.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Employee Appraisals, HR Technology, HRMS (HRIS), Human Resources, Performance Management | 5 Comments »