Not just Change Management-Moving to Keep &Kare!

When something that is experienced is put down to words usually the skill is lost.What's left are clinical checklists that are followed for repeatable and reproducible results.With products, applications, literature& equipment
this is fine. Each of these will still have a human to interpret and experience them in his/her own unique way and add value. 10 people experiencing a product leads to 10 different experiences. If those experiences are captured on a lickert scale, 1,2,3,4 and 5, 4 and above is termed as satisfactory. A clinical term for the joy of experience but necessary for the business to continue and improve.





In services however, the modus operandi is different. If you have served coffee to a customer, you cannot give him the same scale to rate his satisfaction. Even if he did mark 1 as least satisfied, how would you ever know why, what, when, where and how the coffee failed.

When your focus is a human, then all math fails. Continuous or discrete data means nothing. Year on year employees leave the organization they work for, after they are irrationally fitted into a bell curve . It seems to be a dreadful case of short sightedness to refuse to see real value and opt for as assumed value based on lag data for a fiscal year. It is also true that the ones who leave the organization the fastest are the ones that other companies need-your competitors!
Whether its an internal employee or an external customer, people need to be dealt with differently. Below are some of the things that affect an individual while working for a company
1. Share value 2. salary 3. brand value 4. training 5. managers capability 6. work pressure 7. OJT 8. Bonus 9. appraisals 10. org climate 11. benefits 12. Rewards &recognition 13. Roles &responsibilities 14. promotions 15. Cross functional experiences 16. job satisfaction.
Many companies try to touch on these areas and make several attempts to be the most favored employer. Somehow, its unfortunate that the focus is more on external talent than internal. The focus is the new hire. The possibility more than the current ability.
Humans are generally easy prey to brand value, money and benefits, but once in, other than the grind of working towards an annual appraisal there is very little focus
1. No business focus
2. No customer focus
3. No financial focus
There is only top management and manager focus!
In India we have quite skewed stats. For every job that comes in, we replace one worker with 3-4 Indians. Cost arbitrage makes the model look stable, but we all know its not going to last. We have to do the load leveling-between the hard workers, the smart workers and the goof offs!
We need a different model-Like Google!

Local quirks to Performance perks!

Understanding the local culture before you set up business is a due diligence that you cannot skip or keep for later. Harnessing local cultural quirks to gain business benefits is easy and effective. Working in India has not been an easy task for many companies from different geographies, but that's because they missed the point. Treating India as one country is a big mistake. North to south of this country is the same as traveling from United kingdom to Sicily and right back. That's the distance roughly. How could we assume that the culture would be the same throughout? Specially since India was not even a single country till a little while ago.
I am planning on writing a separate blog for each of the major states and pen my experience working with the strengths of each of those natives and their cultural quirks we could utilize to benefit the organization.
Certain states display loyalty to their bosses to extreme lengths. Beware! in this state, the staff will leave when the boss quits. Your attrition will always be in large numbers if the manager is unhappy-but here's the flip side;just keeping the boss happy will keep the team working, even during the economy downturn when you cant promise a bonus. How's that for starters?

An Australian company started a company in the south of the country and was hit with cultural issues, one after the other. Fresh from Down Under, the 10 man army was just not a match for the strong people network, incompetence in aggressive sales and high attrition. Two years later, they are finally settling in! Just the cost arbitrage did not help. The emerging markets are definitely India, Philippines, Korea, China...The future of your company lies not in knowing your competition; it lies in knowing your employees!