Posted on January 4, 2010 by Tahlent Team
With the ill-effects of the recession fading away, employers are creating new job opportunities and looking for talent to fill positions. While finding new recruits should not be difficult, employers must focus on finding the right people for the job. More importantly, they must put in place strategies to ensure that they can retain their new recruits.
Here are few tips:
Hire right talent
Start on the right foot. Rather than make the mistake of hiring the wrong candidate to meet a target, focus on hiring the the right people. If you outsource your hiring requirements to an external agency, be clear and uncompromising about job descriptions and eligibility criteria. It’s better to delay hiring than hire the wrong person for the job.
Strong team player
While interviewing candidates for the job, look beyond the CV. Study attitude in addition to aptitude. Do background checks with the aim of finding out if the person you are looking to hire is a good fit with your work culture and ethos. Carefully consider if he or she will get along with the current team. During recruitment interviews, ask probing questions to learn more about his or her outlook and orientation with regard to teamwork and collaboration.
Communicate policies clearly
The recession has made employees more and more suspicious of company policies. More often than not, they will make plans to leave you sooner if they suspect that you are not being clear in communicating your policies. Ensure that official communication reaches all employees through an official channel. If necessary, have these policies reiterated to them through a special point of contact.
Work-life balance is critical
Employees have realized that a healthy work-life balance is their right. If your company does not already take measures to encourage this, it’s time to review your policies. Provide that your work environment and policies are accommodating of the needs of your employees’ family time and needs. At the same time, ensure that employees are made accountable for the time they spend away from the office by putting in place efficient time management and reporting measures.
Give recognition and share positive feedback
Happy employees are more productive. Put in place measures to encourage and reward performance at various levels. Commend exceptional performance widely across the organization. Groom leadership by inviting top-performing employees to contribute to important, high-visibility initiatives.
Tags: advice, Career advice, communication, Employee retention, employee satisfaction, feedback, happy employees, official communication, recession, recognition, retention strategies, rewards, Talent, tips
Posted on October 28, 2009 by Tahlent Team
Mobile communications and work-life balance
If we view the growth of mobile communications with rose-tinted glasses, we cannot help marveling at how it has potentially improved productivity both at the workplace and outside of it. Business leaders love to push home the point that mobile communications have improved the work-life balance of their employees.
With faster communication and seamless collaboration, one assumes that core work gets done more easily, leaving more time for activities such as brand-building, employee skilling, etc. But is this really true?
Recently, the Kelly Global Workforce Index reported that in a global survey of nearly 100,000 people in 34 countries, about 92 percent of Indian respondents asserted that mobile communications have “boosted personal productivity” and “transformed work-life balance”.
Reading between the lines we realize that, in fact, mobile communications have altered the concept of “going to work” so dramatically that the boundaries between what constitutes “office” and “home” have been challenged.
“The line between work and personal life is blurring as employees are integrating information technology into their lives at many levels,” said Dhirendra Shantilal, Senior Vice-President (Asia Pacific) of Kelly Services. “Employers who use technology to enhance working arrangements are also likely to reap productivity benefits and to be seen as employers of choice.”
That last point is of utmost interest. Today, most companies – even smaller ones –are accustomed to working with international teams spread over different locations worldwide. It is not always practical in such a scenario to demand that employees report to the “office” or meet in a single conference room. By virtue of being connected over a virtual meeting space such as a conference call or an online chat room, the meeting is called to order.
Looking deeper, we see that modern “work culture” is more wrapped up in the nature of the work itself. It does not matter if one of the participants attends the meeting in his pajamas or her nightshirt as long as he or she participates and contributes his or her share. The beauty of the virtual office is in that its participants, despite not actually going to an office, are considered present and their work is deemed to be done.
More and more startups are working successfully with this model, registering significant savings on overheads and paying employees (as consultants) for the time they invest in working for them. The time and expense saved on commutes, coffee breaks and water-cooler gossip translates to money in the bank.
Larger, less nimble companies are slower to make the transition, although in philosophy and principle their management agrees with the notion of a mobile office.
This dichotomy is particularly applicable in the case the IT and BPO industry, where on the one hand, companies preach and even build mobile office applications for their clients. However, these companies face a huge internal challenge in implementing work-from-home policies for their employees.
Since they bill their clients on the basis of time and material, IT and BPO companies are hard-pressed to find appropriate ways by which they can capture, measure and communicate the effort invested by their employees. More so, they are challenged to find ways in which they can marry the time spent working (not necessarily equal to time spent at the office) to billable metrics. In such a milieu, HR resorts to a convenient, more measurable method of billing – enforcing strict office hours and mandating that employees register and record the time spent per task, and further insisting that employees spend a minimum number of hours at the office. However advanced the degree of automation in registering employee effort, it is only a vague approximation of the amount of time actually spent working. To boot, it could be a spurious estimate.
Employees often view HR’s billing policies as draconian and rebel against it by not being productive enough in the time they spend at work. This consequence, needless to say, is counterproductive to the best intentions of the mobile office.
Work culture has a lot to do with productivity, and mobile communications may or may not effect the required change unless fundamental cultural changes are in place at the workplace.
What HR really needs to do is be cognizant of the need for work-life balance and formulate policies that enable employees to work from home or from any other wired location at least once or twice a week.
While this will ease the strain on shared office resources such as transport, cafeterias, utilities, etc, it will also lead to better emotional health of employees. For instance, it is estimated that office-going employees spend at least 90 minutes a day on phone calls to their home or to family members.
Perhaps it’s time for a more probing study of mobile communications and their measurable impact on workplace productivity.
Tags: BPO, career options, collaboration, communication, engineers, HR, human resources, India, Industry, IT, Kelly Global Workforce Index, Kelly Services, laptops, mobile communications, mobile phones, research, wireless technology, work culture, work-life balance, workplace productivity
