Workosphere :: The Working Place Enigma

How to bring joy back to your work:
Joy at work is not a matter of working in a lavish infrastructure, earning countless dollars and partying out every night. It is rather a practice of being happy with what you are doing and more importantly for whom you are doing.
People working in the biggest companies, earning millions of dollars are not the happiest ones always. Someone working in a local company with much lesser salary can be happier. Do you remember the old days when you passed out from the college and landed up your first job?
The excitement of going to work could be seen bubbling out but as the time passed, things changed. Going to work became an obligation rather than an enjoyment. Do you realise what changed in these few years?
Here are some tips to help you regain that joy in your work:
1. Be realistic:
We often have a habit of setting unrealistic goals for ourselves. We expect more than what we are capable of and when we are not able to meet our goals, depression seeps in and the work becomes a source of unhappiness rather than joy.
See, if you also aimed to touch skies overnight. If yes, set S.M.A.R.T goals for yourself. SMART here means: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely.
2. Turn to the office with a right mindset:
Enter your office with a positive mindset about your work, colleagues and employer.
Bearing negative thoughts about your workplace will not only hamper your performance but will not let you like your work.
3. Maintain a good rapport with everyone at office:
This is something said ad-nauseam times but not practiced very often. The best way to do is to maintain an open communication with your boss and colleagues.
Practice small things like helping people wherever you can, pass a gentle smile as you see a colleague and you will see that you will always have some to help or advice you when needed.
4. Try to fix the problems rather than complaining:
Most of us have a habit of sitting and criticising things.
Rather than just discussing the problems around it will be a better idea to find a solution to them. This will not only create a healthy work atmosphere but also give you a sense of achievement.
5. Focus on your KPAs:
Many of us feel that we are doing a lot of work which is not recognised. This acts as a source of depression at work.
The best way to come out of such a situation is to focus on your Key Performance Areas.
If you do everything but your actual job, your performance will never be appreciated. So, see if you are doing the right things.
6. Maintain transparency:
If you are a boss or a senior person at your workplace, try to maintain transparency in the work culture.
Well informed employees are easier to work with and will reduce your worries. Moreover, you will see that they will stand by you in the hour of need.
7. Celebrate success with juniors:
Keep patting for the next batting.
Celebrate success with the junior members of your team. If they are happy and motivated, half of your worries will evaporate themselves.
Also, such informal gatherings bring your team members closer and increase the compatibility quotient.
8. Accept new challenges and risks:
A common feature of most of the happy professionals around.
This will give you not only the joy of recognition but also a feeling of satisfaction. Identify new challenges and volunteer to handle them.
If you are offered an opportunity to handle any new project which might be totally new for you, accept the challenge and do all that is required to make it successful.
9. Stay away from dirty politics:
Dirty office politics will not let you do your actual job affecting your performance, will keep your colleagues away from you and won't let you think constructively.
So, keep away from politics and blame game. If you have committed a mistake, accept it gracefully and learn to correct it.
10. Take a rejuvenating break from work:
There will be times when even after practicing all the above mentioned things you will feel exhausted. This is an indication from your body that it needs rest.
So, take a break and rejuvenate yourself for the next inning.

Don't Do List::Slow Poison for Organisation

Twenty Things Organizations Do to Mess Up Their Relationship With People:

Here are the twenty mistakes organizations make to mess up their relationships with the people they employ:

1. Add another level of hierarchy because people aren’t doing what you want them to do. (More watchers get results!)
2. Appraise the performance of individuals and provide bonuses for the performance of individuals and complain that you cannot get your staff working as a team.
3. Add inspectors and multiple audits because you don’t trust people’s work to meet standards.
4. Fail to create standards and give people clear expectations so they know what they are supposed to do, and wonder why they fail.
5. Create hierarchical, permission steps and other roadblocks that teach people quickly their ideas are subject to veto and wonder why no one has any suggestions for improvement. (Make people beg for money!)
6. Ask people for their opinions, ideas, and continuous improvement suggestions, and fail to implement their suggestions or empower them to do so. Better? Don’t even provide feedback about whether the idea was considered.
7. Make a decision and then ask people for their input as if their feedback mattered.
8. Find a few people breaking rules and company policies and chide everybody at company meetings rather than dealing directly with the rule breakers. Better? Make everyone wonder "who" the bad guy is.
9. Make up new rules for everyone to follow as a means to address the failings of a few.
10. Provide recognition in expected patterns so that what started as a great idea quickly becomes entitlement.
11. Treat people as if they are untrustworthy - watch them, track them, admonish them for every slight failing - because a few people are untrustworthy.
12. Fail to address behavior and actions of people that are inconsistent with stated and published organizational expectations and policies. (Better yet, let non-conformance go on until you are out of patience; then ambush the next offender with a disciplinary action!)
13. When managers complain they cannot get to all of their reviews because they have too many directly reporting staff members, hire more supervisors to do reviews. (Fail to recognize that an hour per quarter per person invested in development is the manager’s most important job.)
14. Create policies for every contingency, thus allowing very little management latitude in addressing individual employee needs.
15. Conversely, have so few policies, that employees feel as if they reside in a free-for-all environment of favoritism and unfair treatment.
16. Make every task a priority. People will soon believe there are no priorities. More importantly, they will never feel as if they have accomplished a complete task or goal.
17. Schedule daily emergencies that prove to be false. This will ensure employees don't know what to do, or are, minimally, jaded about responding when you have a true customer emergency.
18. Ask employees to change the way they are doing something without providing a picture of what you are attempting to accomplish with the change. Label them "resisters" and send them to change management training when they don't immediately hop on the train.
19. Expect that people learn by doing everything perfectly the first time rather than recognizing that learning occurs most frequently in failure.
20. Letting a person fail when you had information, that he did not, which he might have used to make a different decision.

These various ingredients add up to a recipe for disaster if you want to be the employer of choice in the next decade.

Change Management

Change Management

Whether the change is large or small, the ability to manage it is a critical component of high performance. I am sure this piece of article helps organizations prepare for coming changes, manage the complex organizational and workforce transition to the desired end state. This essentially becomes successfull once a business solution or transformation is in place to realize the greatest long-term value from their business improvement efforts.

Transitioning Through Change

A common fallacy is that change can be dictated or mandated. Leaders and managers who employ this strategy typically do so by delivering the change message through orders that direct employees to align to initiatives with little to no background on why a change is necessary and or valuable. It is common for employees to respond to this approach through resistance, defiance and withdrawal.

Positive behavior is not typically affected by directives or edicts. To effectively drive change in individuals, teams or companies behavior, you must affect their belief system. For example, vehicle seat belt laws are enforced by levying fines against individuals who do not adhere to the law. There are those that resist using seat belts despite the fact that that it may be in their own best interest to wear them. It is when the value of the seat belts safety is understood that their belief system may choose to embrace use of the seat belt for their own benefit.
It is more common for people to embrace change through knowledge, encouragement and support from leaders. Seems easy enough, however it can prove to be difficult for individuals to become leaders of change, as they often lack the education and experience to implement change through the development of supportive relationships.

Change will prove to be more effective and lasting as leaders engage personally with their teams and at the individual level. It is essential to create trust among people. Strong leaders will be able to accomplish this by making themselves more aware and open to communicating with their employees. Developing trust with team members is the key to the success of implementing change within an organization and having the team follow you.

Creating a Reward System
It is important to design and implement a system that rewards individuals who embrace and evangelize change. Leaders should consider the following ideas when evaluating reward systems:

Create milestones that have visibility throughout the organization and celebrate each milestone as it is achieved

Publicly acknowledge and promote those who evangelize and help drive change.

Consider financial incentives or bonuses to those who support and execute against stated objectives and milestones

Solicit candid feedback from individuals and teams and incorporate ideas whenever appropriate it.

Develop teams comprised of individuals representing as many of the different business units as possible who will be impacted by the change.

Working through the Transition
Change almost always involves the elements of risk and reward. Initial reactions from people, when faced with change, is often marked with fear and uncertainty. When this happens, people almost always resist the change. It is typical that over time, the change will become more accepted as people become more educated and comfortable with the reasons for the change.
To shorten the acceptance curve, it is important that people understand why change is being introduced and what it will ultimately produce. The capability of individuals to understand the “big picture” should never be underestimated. Once they understand, accept and promote change, the closer you are to successful implementation.

The 4 Phases of Transition

There are four major phases of transition: Denial, Resistance, Exploration, and Commitment. During any type of change initiative people will focus on the past and what worked well. This almost always leads to people pushing back on the change that has been introduced. People will often go through a period where they evaluate how the change will impact them personally and where it may leave them. People will initially evaluate if the change will impact them in any negative way evaluating if they will be able to operate successfully in the “new” way. This is when resistance is usually experienced.

As people enter the exploration and commitment phases, they start to better understand the change, they will start to understand to better understand what the change has to offer them personally. Most everyone moves through these phases and usually at different rates.

Knowledge and understanding is key to successfully moving quickly through these phases. The ability of a an effective leader to illuminate the possibilities and vision, while removing fear and doubt, can help people and teams to be more successful and efficient in implementing the change.

Denial – This phase typically represents people’s ability to ignore the immediate impact of change. People will continue to ignore change until forced to confront the change.
Resistance – When people are continually confronted with change they will eventually start resisting change by becoming angry and laying blame on others.

Exploration – Faced with the inevitability of change combined with knowledge and understanding, people will start embrace the change., experimentation and innovation are likely outcomes for this phase.
Commitment – This phase is typically achieved once the change has been accepted and integrated by individuals and teams. Once this is achieved the foundation for additional change has been created.

Summary
As a change leader, it is imperative to fully understand the transition phases. This will enable you to develop strategies and methodologies for leading people through these phases quickly and successfully. Strategies should incorporate the sharing of drivers and expected outcomes of the change and ensuring that information is shared and understood by the team while gathering feedback from individuals and teams.

Competency Mapping::Alignment of Humane Behavior with Company Objectives

Competency Mapping is a process of identify key competencies for an organization and/or a job and incorporating those competencies throughout the various processes (i.e. job evaluation, training, recruitment) of the organization. To ensure we are both on the same page, we would define a competency as a behavior (i.e. communication, leadership) rather than a skill or ability.

Tips:

The steps involved in competency mapping with an end result of job evaluation include the following:


1) Conduct a job analysis by asking incumbents to complete a position information questionnaire(PIQ). This can be provided for incumbents to complete, or you can conduct one-on-one interviews using the PIQ as a guide. A sample PIQ that we use when conducting this step with our clients was provided to this client. The primary goal is to gather from incumbents what they feel are the key behaviors necessary to perform their respective jobs.


2) Using the results of the job analysis, you are ready to develop a competency based job description. A sample of a competency based job description generated from the PIQ is provided to the client. This is developed after carefully analyzing the input from the represented group of incumbents and converting it to standard competencies.


3) With a competency based job description, you are on your way to begin mapping the competencies throughout your human resources processes. The competencies of the respective job description become your factors for assessment on the performance evaluation. Using competencies will help guide you to perform more objective evaluations based on displayed or not displayed behaviors.


4) Taking the competency mapping one step further, you can use the results of your evaluation to identify in what competencies individuals need additional development or training. This will help you focus your training needs on the goals of the position and company and help your employees develop toward the ultimate success of the organization.


This deposition is just a tip of an Iceberg when we try to think about the Competency Mapping Exercise. A more detailed approach is available with the author, which includes the need, process, analysis & application of this tool in Organizational development.

Performance Appraisal::Goal Setting and Goal Achievement

Today's Competitive enviornment has intimidated every organisation to reserve the right people for the right job, although there are mismatches every where. Yet, the amount of people an organisation has does not necessarily reflects its strength in terms of production or success. Thus, there is a need of goal setting in order to align the individual performances along with the Company objectives. There have been so much which has been written & published about goal setting & acheivement. It is also now being widely practised in an array of organisations. However, many people comment that they are not satisfied with their performance in achieving those goals.

This article is intended to address not only the effective setting of goals, but also to identify EIGHT steps to ensure that you achieve the goals you have set.

To begin, let's be sure we have a clear definition of what constitutes a goal. There have been many definitions of a goal; for purposes of this article, I would like to define a goal as follows: "A written statement that clearly describes certain actions or tasks with a measurable end result."To elaborate on this definition, a goal must be written. If it is not written, it is merely an idea with no power, conviction or motivation behind it. It will lack energy and purpose. A written goal will allow you to remind yourself and others exactly what has to be done. Rereading this written goal on a regular basis will help provide the motivation to achieve the goal.A goal will clearly describe certain actions or tasks. A goal that is clearly described will eliminate misunderstandings between you, your colleagues, your staff and your boss. Clearly described goals will include action verbs such as create, design, improve, organize, purchase, etc. A test to determine the clarity of your stated goal is to show the statement to at leat 5 people from various streams(not necessarily from diff. depts). Ask each of them individually to explain the purpose and objective of the goal. If each one has the same response, your goal is clearly stated. If the responses differ, even in the slightest, it is a signal to make your goal more clear.Goals must have a measurable result with a timeframe for completion. A measurable goal is quantifiable. It is described in such a way that the actual result cannot be disputed. If you cannot measure something, chances are you cannot effectively manage it.Now that you have a written goal, what steps can you take to ensure you achieve the goal?

TIPs

The following will help you:

(a). Regularly and vividly imagine your goal as accomplished:

(b). Share your goal with as many people as possible so they can support and encourage your actions to achieve the goal.

(c). Break the goal down into small steps or tasks and set deadlines to complete the smaller steps.

(d). Review your progress regularly.

(e). Plan each task or step on your calendar by making a appointment to work on a particular part of the task. Block out the time necessary and try to not allow interruptions, phone calls or other tasks distract you.

(f). If you are having trouble or getting backlogged, ask for help. Also, allow yourself to help others who may be backlogged as well.

(g). Make the decision that you will accomplish the goal.

(h). Plan a reward for yourself for the accomplishment of the goal. Even if no one else (like your boss) will provide a reward, there is no reason you can't reward yourself- a movie, a massage, a walk in the park or something that is meaningful to you. This will also help to motivate you to accomplish the goal.

What have been outlined here is a process for effective goal setting and achievement. A process will work if two components are present -- the process itself is sound and the people utilizing the process have the discipline to follow the process through. The process described above is sound and has worked in thousands of situations. However, you may follow up these in consultation of your guide/boss suiting to the over all need of your organization. The discipline is up to you.

Empowering Employees::Delegation in the right Manner

Employee Empowerment is a term used to express the ways in which basically the non-managerial staff [now here we assume that the Managerial Staff take decesions by themselves] can make autonomous decisions with/without consulting a boss/manager. Mostly, these self-willed decisions can be small or large depending upon the degree of power with which the company wishes to invest in employees.

Four Elements to Practice:

Much has been written about empowering employees—to the point of becoming a cliche—but far too many companies pay little more than lip service to the subject or else give employees more responsibility but little compensation or strategic direction from leaders. Why?

Despite all the literature and conferences on this subject, top management still has little understanding of delegation and even little desire to delegate authority/power to fully empower employees. Yet without employee empowerment they will never tap their greatest resource — the knowledge worker. The following sections will more precisely define the four fundamental elements that truly empower employees.

The fundamental elements are:
1. Vision, Value, & Strategy sharing

2. Information flow from the source

3. Relevant training

4. Power and authority sharing

As is the case with the crucial elements leaders must establish before launching an organizational transformation, these four employee-empowering elements are intertwined in such a way that a high-level of employee involvement will not be manifested if even one of them is out of alignment or under-implemented.

Vision, Value, & Strategy Sharing: Inviting employees throughout the organization to contribute during the initial stages of the transformation phase, i.e., strategic planning, is the best way to ensure that employees make future decisions that are in line with the company's strategy. If an organization is going to put decision-making power in the hands of employees, a shared strategy (with shared values that everyone can relate to and live up to) will replace the need for a detailed list of procedures for how employees or employee teams should handle every situation.

Information Flow from the Source: In order to do their job effectively, employees need access to all kinds of information. The best type of information is direct and immediate feedback from internal or external customers. Examples include information from customers in the areas of service quality, turnaround time, price, and overall satisfaction. In traditional, hierarchical organizations, information filters through several layers of middle management before it is finally delivered to the frontline employees. In a high-involvement organization, the information flows from the source, customer, process, etc., to the frontline employees.

Without access to this type of information, employees will have difficulty in better serving their customers or becoming involved in the daily problem-solving tasks that would help an organization to continually improve. As said in Chapter 1, organizations in today's business environment must respond quickly to their customers and constantly foster new ideas about products, services, and processes if they are to succeed.

Relevant Training: Organizations must provide employees with relevant training if they are to acquire decision-making responsibilities, have di¬rect customer contact, or work effectively in a team-based environment. For employees and the company to benefit from training sessions, the employee must immediately and consistently put these newly acquired skills to use. Merely having a training budget that sends the employees through the motions of learning something without real consequences is wasting the employee's time as well as the company's money.

Power and Authority Sharing: Giving up power and authority is probably the most difficult element for all levels of management to share, yet it is the most important element for empowering your employees. It is difficult because for decades the old-school, traditional organizations have rewarded and advanced those who oversee big departments and have power over a large group of people. Instead of being rewarded for business results these managers are rewarded for building large departments from which they can oversee and control the largest number of people.

To break this paradigm all levels of management must share decision-making power and authority with employees. A failure to do so undermines the entire empowerment effort. Remember, the whole point of employee involvement (or empowerment) is to create an environment where employees throughout the organization make accurate and timely decisions on a daily basis to best respond to customer needs and de¬sires. Managers from all levels must relinquish and redistribute some power and authority if the organization as a whole is to respond quickly to customers and foster innovation.

Source of Reference:Christopher Head, Beyond Corporate Transformation: A Whole Systems Approach to Creating and Sustaining High Performance

Happy Employees::The Real Assets

Can you recollect a day where you woke up at 5:00 am, got ready quickly and waited to do something exciting? Was it your college annual day function? Or a competitive exam? Or maybe a first date? Maybe it was your wedding day. Is it Monday morning to work? If the answer is the last, surely you are a happy employee.
Though the above occasions may not have a lot in common, excitement and motivation can be attributed to almost all of them. However, at the workplace, it is almost impossible to find both or any one of these attributes daily. But, being happy or unhappy is always in our hands. That's the choice we make and we are the creators of the outcome by our actions. Let's look at what might make an employee unhappy.

A.Unfair rewards and recognition
B. Office politics
C. Un-cooperative team
D. Unreasonable boss
E. Insufficient compensation
F. Constant threat to job security
G. Lack of responsibility in the current job
H. No clear career path
I. Seating Ambience
J. Lack of basic facilities at workplace

& the list goes on and on. Some of these things may not really propel an employee to quit, but it might lead to negative energy which leads to low productivity. When an employee is under-productive he or she will be the first target when companies look for opportunities to give pink slips.

As mentioned earlier, being happy is always in your hands. A happy employee is more productive and gives more than an unhappy employee. So let's look at some ways to up the happiness factor.

1. Plan your week on Sunday night:

Look at your work calendar and plan your week on Sunday night or Monday morning. This would include important meetings, deliverables, a brief summary of things that are pending from last week and any tasks to be achieved during the week. Though this might look like a time management tip, at the end of the week, on Friday night when you re-visit what you have achieved over the last five days, the satisfaction is immense.

2. Undertake activities that you are passionate about even though it might not be in your job profile:

Start an initiative that you would love to do irrespective of whether it is required for you to do or not.
Send a daily newsletter to your team on the topics that most of them will be interested.
Do a presentation on the topic that you are passionate about.
Organise a small sports event for your team.
Call everyone in your team for a team coffee, breakfast or lunch break
Appreciate colleagues in your team or in a cross-functional team who did a great job
Write a poem on your team's achievements
Arrange a potluck lunch

3. Do not indulge in the blame gameIf something goes wrong do not blame others blindly:

If you commit a mistake, do not hesitate to accept it. As Gauthama Buddha said, there are three things we can't hide for long: the sun, earth and the truth. Accepting your mistake gracefully will only make you look like a true professional and also give you the satisfaction of not cheating.

4. Communicate more often in person:

Utilise all the opportunities where you can speak to an individual in person rather than e-mail or phone. But be aware of the other person's time and availability. Listening to a positive answer from a person will give you more happiness than if it is done over the phone or via e-mail.

5. Know what is happening at your workplace:

Will this make a person happy? Truly, yes! Imagine a cricket team that doesn't know how many runs to score to win a match? More than losing the game, the player will never be interested or motivated to play well.
Attend all meetings that are addressed by the CEO to your immediate manager to know what is going to happen around you. It could be the company's growth plan or your department's next big project. Jack Welch mentions in his book Winning "every employee, not just the senior people, should know how a company is doing."
You will also get an extra edge if you are in a position to answer queries raised by your peers or juniors. This is not just for the good reasons, but bad reasons as well. You do not want to be the last employee to know if your company is laying off employees (in the worst case, if you are the one who is on that list).

6. Participate in organisation-level activities:

This could be as simple as spending one weekend for a corporate social responsibility activity or attending a recruitment drive to help your HR team or arranging a technical/sports event at the organisational level. Most of these events will be successful as people do come on their own to contribute.

7. Have a hobby that keeps you busy and happy:

Many people say their hobby is watching TV or listening to music or reading the newspaper. These aren't hobbies, they are just ways of passing the time. Some hobbies are evergreen and will keep you evergreen as well: dancing, painting, writing short stories, poems, blogs and sharing your experiences.

8. Take up a sport:

While choosing a sport make sure that there is physical activity. There is the danger of becoming addicted to sports where there is less physical activity (like computer games, chess, cards etc). Physical activity keeps a person healthy and happy. If you pick up one sport well, you can represent your organisation in corporate sports event too.

9. Keep yourself away from office politics:

Politics: as a practice, whatever its profession, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. -- Henry Brooks Adams
Politics is everywhere and the office is no exception. Playing politics might be beneficial but only for the short term. So the best thing to do is play fair.

10. Wish and smile:

More often than not, there are fair chances that the other person will smile back. This could be your security guard at the gate, your receptionist, your office boy, your CEO or your manager -- never forget to wish them and smile.

11. Volunteer for some activity:
"The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable of receiving."

- Albert Einstein
Do at least one activity without expecting anything in return. There is no set frequency for this. This could be once in a day or once in a week or thrice in a week. It could be as simple as making tea at the office for your colleague, helping a colleague who is working in another department by using your skills, dropping your colleague at his door step in your car, going to your manager or colleague to ask if there is any help you can extend, contributing to technical or knowledge management communities in your organisation etc.

I hope this gives a fair idea about how to engage yourself with the brighter side of your work. Be happy & keep others too.