Managing Men (and Women!): Get it right or get left!

STRANGE things are happening, we hear of companies downsizing then right sizing and then upsizing all in the space of a year. There are companies which have gone to a great deal of trouble to outplace their faithful employees, providing them with training and the proverbial golden handshake, and now those very companies who were busy pulling out the pegs of their tents suddenly start recruiting, sometimes their old employees, sometimes fresh ones, spending twice as much as they need to! These are the people who are painting themselves into a corner. By downsizing they have very effectively thrown the fish they have caught back into the nets of their competitors. This is where the wise HR manager shifts his view from the balance sheet to look at the bigger picture.

A via media

The ideal strategy having found the best resources is to support, manage and thereby retain them. To do so, certain steps are essential:

Provide job security

Hire carefully

Have exciting incentives

Give opportunities for ownership

A chance at self-actualisation and independent responsibility

Provide for individual growth

Benchmarking

Job security

Make employees feel needed. Nothing de-motivates as much as an atmosphere of callous disregard by the management. A cherished employee will be loyal, committed, willing and happy to put the organisational interests above his own. A caring attitude from the top will percolate to the very bottom resulting in a happy, productive organisation. With this, employees will not waste their energies speculating about their future in the company!

Careful hiring

Any right-thinking organisation must hire the best it can afford, so the search should never be rushed. The important attributes are a great attitude, team-spirit, an open personality, good domain expertise and an ability to give of himself to others. Having found the right people with the right profile, the process has to be swift. Keeping gems lying around is an invitation to others who will steal them! Hire people who will `fit' in with the culture of the organisation, training people to get used to it will take too long and may not work.

Incentivisation

Money is a great motivator! All the talk one hears about it `not- being-about-money' is manure musing! If the industry demands good pay why should people work for you for less? With no financial worries, the hire will be tension-free and productive! Add to a good pay, benefits to boast about and you'll have people queuing up outside the HR department for jobs. People talk, happy employees brag! And they will work that much harder to stay on. Why do successful businesses have club benefits, health plans and constant festivities? They want employees' families to be happy too so that family pressure to stick on will be an added boost to HR retention initiatives!

Ownership

People like to feel they matter and if they think they own a part of the company in terms of being responsible for a part of the process, they will feel obliged to give their best to their `patch of sunshine'! ESOPs were one way, but that is nebulous, the other is, owning a channel or a part of the production process. Pride of possession works wonders for productivity!

Self-actualisation and responsibility

Being part of a winning team is wonderful and empowerment is everything! Being in charge of one's own area or team without `down-the-neck' supervision is a great feeling and instils an employee with the feeling of responsibility to the organisation. Constant support from top management and encouraging advice when sought is essential to make this work. Flat hierarchies are the order of the day and with the vision of the new-age management process, self-managed responsibility is a productive reality! Collective wisdom is the order of the day so ideas must be gleaned from every quarter to promote a feeling of being an equal partner in progress.

Individual Growth

When everything is tickety-boo, the pay is good, the perks are good, the environment is good, what more, one could ask, would any right-minded employee want? Personal growth! A productive employee worth his salt will want to be a learner all his life and if opportunities are provided for him to better himself, and do his job better or more innovatively he will jump at it. This will be organisational money well spent because the results will result in increased productivity and greater organisational profits. Many corporate bodies in the country today provide their prized employees with online and offline training, sometime a combination of both. Progressive companies monitor the progress of their employees through various levels of competency till they progress to reach the top of their ability!

Benchmarking

Fair and free appraisal is essential to good employee management. Employees need to know how they have performed, how they have measured up to the expectations of the management. While competition between employees is healthy to a limited extent, too much of it can be disastrous. It is best to benchmark against an agreed standard of achievement and perhaps also against a self- set standard that is likely to be far more rigorous! Often if there is no benchmark, or if there is a benchmark and no fair appraisal is made, organisations deteriorate into degenerative organisations closed to change and innovation, with very little scope for positive growth.

Endspeak

Managing a set of productive employees is a task that is not difficult if the manager is blessed with the vision of equitable balance and just measurement of progress.

Too much bias to one side or the other will tip the scales and result in a skewed organisation working often at cross purposes to its stated objectives.

It is also to no effect if individual teams are managed well and others in the organisation are not because the result will again have no positive outcome.

The top management must ensure that all components function in clockwork harmony so that institutional progress is ensured.

S.RAMANUJACHARYA

professor1@sify.com