Posts in category: HR Side Up – Case Studies

How do you choose which employee should get an award under the Reward & Recognition Program?

Is there a science behind deciding employee names for awards? Or is it pure art?

In reality, it’s quite a random process.

Most #peoplemanagers nominate their team members based on:

a) Please-All Methodology- In the last 3 R&R ceremonies, I have ensured all my Sales guys get awarded. I need to take care of their motivation levels, they say.

b) Ignore All Strategy- If I recognise Mike, Jack will get upset. So, let me not recognise anybody.

c) My Favourite is always the best- No matter what the contribution, there’s always one individual (or team) that gets the award.

To announce contests is a simple matter; to organize and execute them so that they are of benefit is much more difficult. Walter D Scott had written in his classic book Increasing Human Efficiency in Business.

Most #HR teams ignore the impact & importance of R&R programs. This initiative is run regularly. Nominations are sought, list of awardees finalised and a fun ceremony held. This is repeated quarter on quarter without any measurement of its impact.

Here are some ways you can really elevate the impact of this much-needed initiative.

– Build a healthy competition within teams.

– If more than one team is aiming towards the same goal, publish their regular progress. Build enthusiasm. Cheer them on.

– Make your awards really attractive. Make them aspirational.

– Make entry into the nomination cycle easy.

– Diversify the selection process- get cross-functional teams to decide on the winners of a category.

– Celebrate your winners, privately & publicly.

– Make it a BIG thing. Put frequent winners into a coveted club which opens up some really cool benefits for them.

– Keep a tab on data at all times. For your R&R winners, What’s the retention rate, what’s the performance trend, the engagement score of the team etc.?

– Have a pulse check built in- Do your employees believe the process to be fair & transparent?

Parting Note: Walter Scott had also said, Where it is not possible to carry on a contest and retain a feeling of comradeship between the men, no competition should be encouraged.

Hence, be wary of the success of your R&R program, if its not giving you the impact you seek, stop it.

Every #attrition should hurt.

Every individual going out should be heard.

Every concern raised should be addressed.

Go beyond & in complete depth of “Personal Reasons” & “Better Career Opportunities” as Reasons for Leaving.

Segregate your attrition basis:

– Avoidable & Unavoidable

– Female v/s Male

– New Hires v/s Tenured

– High Performers v/s Average

– Recently promoted v/s Not promoted for more than 3 years

– Recently rewarded v/s Never Rewarded

– Engagement Rate of Team v/s Exit Rate

– Managers with high span of control v/s low

Peel the onion, for as long as you can. Every single month.

As #HR if you don’t make the required noise, no-one else will.

I spoke to an #HR lady recently who is about to lay-off a bunch of folks from her organization.

Knowing that there’s no turning back for this loss-making business line, she was extremely concerned about the people getting impacted:

– How will they make their resumes?

– They have not given interviews since ages!

– They are not social media savvy, how will they see relevant job ads?

– They may need help with their financial planning.

Her genuine concern was heart-warming.

When I had first done such conversations back in 2013, I was extremely nervous. As HR team, if we get blessings for hiring, we also get a lot of brickbats for firing.

In my experience, it is not the act but the way of doing this act that people remember.

We (HR Team) are the people champions and it’s upon us to guide our business leaders on the best way to manage such exits.

Corporates need #empatheticleaders now more than ever.

For this HR lady to do these tough conversations on her own, and then to have an external partner like me help these people get relevant in job market is commendable.

Care for your people. They are HUMAN resources.

1) Knowing Your Business: What’s the sales target for the month? Are we on track? Why are we not on track? What are possible hurdles? How can we navigate them?

2) Understanding Team Culture: How do you manage work amongst each other? Who raises red flags? How are concerns & escalations managed? Who is the Go-To person for problem-solving? How do you celebrate success? What’s working well in your team? What’s not?

3) Exploring Employees’ Personal Stories: How do you manage your time? What do you do on weekends? What’s been your biggest career highlight? What enabled you to achieve that? What are your retirement plans? Who is your mentor? How do you manage emotions at work?

4) Dissecting Problem Areas: Why did you resign? What could have been better? Why is the team engagement score low? Why are you not filling your goal sheets? Why are training courses not seeing traction?

5) Sharing your Work Plans/Progress: This is what I am working which will solve this problem that I know exists. This is the progress/update of what I did. This is what I believe should be done next.

During each of these conversations, your intent should be to:

– Learn & Absorb new information.

– Categorise information.

– Provide information/positive reinforcement, where needed.

– Provide clarity, solutions, way ahead, when needed.

– Use this information to bring necessary changes at #workplace.

In the entire organization, only YOU, the #HR can do all this. It’s upon you to understand the pulse and provide necessary guidance to the leadership team.

See the change in your own confidence level to understand and deliver on people problems, once you do this.

Are your learning interventions falling flat? Many learning and development teams struggle to see real impact from their efforts.

Why? Here are a few reasons:

1) There’s no direct correlation between spending and the impact.

2) People are resistant to taking time out of their busy schedules for additional learning activities.

3) Employees often don’t understand why certain training is important.

It’s a frustrating cycle, but there are ways to break free.

If you’re in L&D and gearing up for your annual training calendar creation and execution journey, focus your energies in identifying the learning needs of your organization.

The following tips may help:

A) Managers may struggle to identify the necessary training interventions, even with a list of options. Instead, sit down with each team and conduct a 90-120 minute skill-gap identification process. Ask questions like:

– What are this year’s new targets?

– Did the team achieve last year’s targets? Why or why not?

– What key problems did the team face last year? How were they solved?

– What are the team’s current skills?

– What more is needed, and for whom?

B) Employees may not be able to assess their own training needs. Instead, send out a form with questions like:

– Did you face any difficulty achieving your targets last year?

– What hard and soft skills are required for your role?

– What are your core skills that have helped you in your career so far?

– What skills are needed to further grow in your role? Do you need to develop those?

C) The leadership team must meet their business targets without complications. Sit down with your leaders and make a plan for organization-wide learning interventions. These could focus on company values, ethos, or principles.

Invest your energy in these time consuming steps & see the difference in the way learning is embraced by your teams.

Are your employees fully aware of your company’s HR policies? Chances are many of them have never read any of them.

Some common problems with these policy documents are:

– Use of complicated words/jargons.

– Complicated sentences.

– Lack of structure.

– Repetition of same thing across different headings.

Here are some ways to write your policy documents:

– Have a common template/structure across all HR Policy documents.

– Begin with a clear objective & policy scope.

– Categorize related information together.

– Use simple, easy to understand words.

– Use direct and concise sentences.

– Use numbered bullets wherever needed.

– Ensure that the document flows logically, with each piece of information leading smoothly into the next.

With more than 16 years of HR policy writing & executing experience, I specialize in crafting simple and effective policy documents for organizations. If you require assistance with your policy documents, feel free to contact me.

Are you tired of the same old boring annual appraisal cycle? You’re not alone. The traditional approach to performance appraisals can be stressful and negative, leaving employees worried about receiving negative feedback or missing out on promotions. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Here are some ways #HR can turn the tables and bring about a positive, engaging environment during the appraisals:

1) Start by conducting an open townhall to share the compensation and performance philosophy with all employees. Announce the increment percentages for the year, how many promotions are budgeted, and how those will be decided. Encourage employees to ask questions and receive direct answers.

2) Set aside just 2-3 days for the completion of self-review. Turn it into a collaborative event where employees can come together to offer each other support and encouragement. Provide conference rooms where employees can seek help from HR partners when writing their self-reviews.

3) Get your higher most people managers trained on how to give ratings, write performance feedback, and conduct performance discussions, just a day prior to the start of the cycle. Encourage these leaders to take the lead in completing Manager assessments. It’s going to act as a cascade effect. When one manager experiences a well-structured discussion, he will conduct the discussion with his team in a similar manner.

4) As HR partner, make yourself available at all times to mediate and coach employees who are not happy with their discussions, ratings, increments, or lack of growth.

Remember, performance management is a known devil. The more you push it under the carpet, the bigger it will emerge to hurt your organization’s culture.

Embrace it, learn from it, and strive to make the experience better for your employees every subsequent year.

Save up to 50% of your interview time by following a simple candidate checklist.

There is no standard template of resumes that you get. It is extremely time consuming to sift through all that text to find what you need to know about the candidate. As a result, most #hiring managers do not even read the resume before starting the interview process with a candidate. They end up using the first 30 minutes of the discussion in just getting basic information.

I like spending quality time with candidates on discussing their career journeys, what career stage do they find themselves in, what they aspire to do next and how can this current role can fit in their planned career trajectory.

A candidate’s time is as important as mine. Hence, I follow a simple resume parsing technique. I ensure that before every interview I have a candidate checklist filled in (attached as image with this post). Between the CV and recruiter interaction, most of this information is available. Whatever is left to be known, I get that information in the first 5-10 mins or would email the candidate to share with me before the start of the interview.

Hence, the 45-60 mins of allocated time for our discussion is well-spent on understanding the individual and the fitment with the role in hand.

All the clients for whom I do hiring for mid-senior roles, have appreciated getting candidate information in this simple template form instead of CVs.

Why do you need to an #HR round? I’ve selected the candidate and I have found him to be a fit for the role. Pls don’t waste any more time and initiate the offer process.

If this is what a functional manager tells you, what should your response as an #HR professional be?

An Art based response (e.g it helps us inform candidates about policies & culture, or we would understand if the candidate is really keen to join etc.), would surely make your Functional Stakeholder feel it’s a time waste round.

Always give science based answers when your stakeholders question the WHY.

What would a Science based answer be for this question?

You’ve surely checked the job-fit aspect of the candidate, however, it is important to know the Organization-Fit as well. It is proven that if an organization has a dynamic and changing environment and needs employees to be able to change tasks readily and move easily between teams, it’s more important that employees’ personalities fit with the overall organization’s culture and not only with the characteristics of any specific job. This is exactly what I intend to understand when I do my HR round.

Show them the value, always.

Diagnosis is an important step of the #performancemanagement process. It is a step where both the Employee & the Manager pause & reflect on the reasons of non-achievement of goals.

In my experience as an #humanresources professional, this step is often ignored/avoided.

With the tight timelines to complete the self review, Manager feedback and closure of ratings and normalization, practically there’s no time left to spend on Diagnosis. Hence, what follows is the Manager’s assumption of what would have gone wrong.

– The individual lacked the necessary skills- We should put him in training.

– The individual lacked the intent- HR should motivate him by increasing his salary.

This is how most cause-effect performance analysis at #workplace happen.

Very rarely do we sit down with that individual to take his point of view. There is an underlying worry with this step:

– this can open up a can of worms regarding lack of direction, clarity, resources etc.

– the individual will always defend his performance.

– If he is doing, he can’t be knowing what’s gone wrong, someone else is better placed to tell him.

For these reasons, individuals aren’t really asked. They are told (if at all), that you couldn’t achieve this task because of this reason.

So, what’s a desired way?

– Regular Check-ins and performance conversations.

– A Mandated recording of observations by the Manager.

– A list of work completed on a daily basis by the employee.

– Sharing of notes on a monthly basis.

What would happen when this is done?

Absolute clarity. Higher Chances of achievement. Feeling of trust & respect between Manager & Employee.

A lot of HRMS Tech platforms have built this recording as a feature of their #PMS modules. Problem is adoption.

#communication always takes time & efforts. But it always is the only solution too. Choosing when to do it is in your hands as a Manager, Employee and HR.