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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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 »

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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 »

Denying Leave can cause emotional distress – Granting Leave can hamper project deliveries! What to do?

September 9th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

I read an interesting case study in Human Capital magazine that was titled ‘hey! I put in my papers!”. The case study was about a brilliant engineer joining a big brand employer and leaving the organization within 2 years with dejected feelings. Among many unfortunate things that happened to this engineer, the most prominent was related to one of the most common problems in the organizations – employee leave and absenteeism. This engineer needed 1 months leave to prepare for his entrance exam to a business management school. Instead of being straight forward, he asked a leave on pretext of being ill. When he reported back, he was asked lots of explanations and was asked to report to HR. Whatever happened left him and others hurt . This incident prompted him to seek opportunities outside the organization. Lastly, he left – at a hefty 60% financial growth to one of the competitor. Who lost - individual or the organization? Read the rest of this entry »

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Evolution of the HR Function

August 18th, 2008 Tushar Bhatia

Introduction

A few years back during a client interaction, while being quizzed on our capabilities, I was surprised by a question on security practices in our company. The reason cited was that the customer measured the maturity of their vendor on the basis of the security practices prevalent in the vendors premises. After all they wanted to entrust their data with us!

Around 5 years later, we were asked a similar question where another customer evaluated our HR practices at a significant level of detail to gauge our competence.

In subsequent discussions, I have found that the question on HR maturity is being asked frequently by potential customers, investors and even prospective employees. The answers indicate maturity, stability, long term sustainability and delivery capabilities of your organization and hence are very important.

So what is HR function growth? Read the rest of this entry »

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SaaS gets its due recognition

August 14th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

It was refreshing to see the perspective of a leading monthly magazine DARE which talked about SaaS as a

way to lower IT costs. Makes me proud since we were covered as one of the top provider in HR. You can read about the article and even view the coverage here.

And to begin with, we faced our set of challenges too. Many companies are skeptical about security of data, continuous availability of Internet, bandwidth limitations, etc. but many have hopped across to try the new business model. Google’s soaring profits are a testimonial to this.

While reviewing my list of clients in India, I was surprised to see that almost 75% of our customers had adopted the SaaS way of doing things. And most of these companies are not really small. The smallest is about 30 employees (who are using us to manage their sales force) and the largest has over 3,500 employees using our system.

Continue to look here for a detailed cost-benefit-analysis of using the SaaS model vs. an outright purchase of software.==============

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

Why Employees Don’t Do What They’re Supposed to Do..

June 17th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

The interesting title of this post in indeed title of a book Why Employees Don’t Do What They’re Supposed to Do and What to Do About It by Ferdinand F. Fournies, where he reveals the findings of a research done on this subject.

The reasons that he listed are:

1. They Don’t Know Why They Should Do It
2. They Don’t Know How To Do It
3. They Don’t Know What They Are Supposed To Do
4. They Think Your Way Will Not Work
5. They Think Their Way Is Better
6. They Think Something Else Is More Important
7. There Is No Positive Consequence to Them for Doing It
8. They Think They Are Doing It
9. They Are Rewarded for Not Doing It
10. They Are Punished for Doing What They Are Supposed To Do
11. They Anticipate a Negative Consequence for Doing It
12. There Is No Negative Consequence to Them for Poor Performance
13. Obstacles Beyond Their Control
14. Their Personal Limits Prevent Them from Performing
15. Personal Problems
16. No One Could Do It

[Source: http://www.leadershipnow.com/leadershop/4255-9.html]

Many of the issues discussed above are related to employee engagement level at the job. It is important for the leadership in any organizational to align the objectives of employees to its corporate objectives. Individual Employee goals should be linked with corporate objectives related to finance, customer, internal improvements & other strategic parameters. This will ensure that employees are engaged in productive tasks most of the time while they are at job. For medium to large organization it can be done only with help of a Organization Alignment Tool, which can help you to create a focused organization: all looking in the same direction.

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