At one of my previous assignments where the organization had presence in close to 150 countries across the world, the think tank of HR came up that the single biggest problem statement that needs to be addressed was to provide a unified employee experience.
We worked tirelessly evaluating the design, partnering with HR stakeholders to create the right scope and the appropriate user journey etc.This got launched successfully and employees started using it wholeheartedly.
Analytics showed uptake month on month and there were discussions on how to enhance the product scope further.And then Covid happened….…Business saw a substantial decline with the leadership proposing a series of cost saving measures to ensure business stability and survival… What ensued was a series of discussions which finally led to the decision that the HR chatbot services would no longer be required.
What we as a project team realized that there were no concrete metrics where we had been able to quantify the benefit this virtual cognitive employee (HR chatbot) was delivering to our business.Gartner* describes Employee Experience asEmployees’ perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with their employer’s customers, leaders, teams, processes, policies, tools and work environment.What is employee experience?These employee experience factors needs to be measured objectively and its ROI arrived it to ensure its sustenance and survival in a world where each dollar spent needs to be justified.This leads to the classical dilemma of the HR function?How do HR functions continue with their focus on delivering value to the employee while keeping cost constraints in mind?Even as organizations are forced to shed jobs and dramatically tighten their purses, what initiatives can help retain and drive performance and productivity in their employees while delivering a superlative employee experience?The solution is to measure and portray the value – visible and clearly linked to business impacts.
The four key employee experience metrics which HR and digital teams could track is:Employee Effort ScoreEmployee Immersion scoreEmployee Net Promoter® Score (eNPS)Let’s take an example of how we can quantify one of these metrics say the Employee Effort score.Creating an employee experience is the first step towards delivering a customer experience that is both profitable and sustainable.
One of the main pillars defining employee experience is the effort they need to put in.Here we are not talking about the effort that the employee puts into his or her work every day- those are actually his deliverables.
Peer to peer trust is a key ingredient to activate self-managed teams in organizations.
Team members cite existence of peer to peer trust as a top reason for higher team performance.
Creating and fostering a climate of peer to peer trust needs focus from the organization.Why peer trust is important?The future of work involves setting up self-managed teams which result in faster execution with minimum governance.
As we look into the future, we firmly believe that self-managed are the way forward to create an agile organization and solving business-critical problems to sustain the competitive advantage.
Research has proven that building trusted relationships between employees leads to greater predictability of their words and action, leading to lower governance and supervision.
Peer-to-peer trust facilitates the flow of information through formal and informal networks leading to faster decision making.
Often people get locked into such routines – of tasks, meetings, and activities.
This was a certainly a jolt – creating a lot of challenge for people, particularly those working at the bottom of the pyramid.
Jolted to consciousness – even though momentarily.
Contribute to best of their abilities – and engage in socially beneficial activities and utilizing their skills and resources for the benefit of others.In such a sense, would it not be wonderful, if people just stay that way?
Serving and helping their fellow beings.And at work – is there a learning we may draw?
And then routines become the end, rather than the means, that they are designed for.
The Idea Of MindfulnessThe emergence of the concept of mindfulness is often traced as far as 2500 years back.
Mindfulness is generally understood as a form of sustained present-moment awareness of oneself, others and the environment.
This metacognitive dimension is what separates and accentuates the experience of mindfulness, and leads individuals to make better choices.
Instead of constantly feeling dissatisfied with our lives, mindfulness allows us to experience all aspects of life with warmth and uncensored curiosity.Mindfulness At Workplace The work environment has become highly disintegrated over the last two years with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing employees globally to work from home.
In addition, the programme was also was found to enhance interpersonal sensitivity, adaption of coping strategies and an increased level of self-compassion.Higher emotional intelligence and good work relationshipsResearch suggests that people who are stronger in self-management competencies on an average add 78% more profits than those who lack in these.
Mindfulness research suggests that those who practice mindfulness are shown to have higher levels of self-regulation and emotional intelligence.
The pace of change in the business environment is prompting organization to continuously innovate to stay ahead of the competition and retain their competitive advantage.
In such a scenario we are making a case for making teams autonomous or self-managed which will lead to greater execution and lesser management or governance.Autonomous teams and key characteristicsThe concept of autonomous teams is not new.
In fact, it’s more than six decades it was first introduced, primarily in the manufacturing sector and later saw adoption in service sector as well.
Few of the characteristics of autonomous teams are:Effective communication and independent decision-making.High employee involvement leading to trust, which positively contributes towards intrinsic motivation.Frequent feedback to enhance work quality and better engagement.Provide a sense of ownership amongst team membersGreater flexibility, faster coordination and access to informationWhy autonomous teams are the way forward?Increased competition has led organizations to continuously innovate to retain their competitive advantage.
A paradigm shift in the perceived notions about work, workplace and workforce has been observed in the past few years accelerated by technology integration, fragmentation of work and increased agility and dynamism on the business environment.
The teams are assigned decision-making authority for timely diagnosis of problems and implementation of solutions.
In this blog, we will discuss the effects of SKU proliferation and its toll on the triple bottom gains for the organization.The problem of SKU proliferationVarious research has proved that an organization can raise its overall market share by expanding its product selection and, thereby, appealing to a wider set of customers.
These costs can be broadly categorized into the following:Manpower cost – additional workforce required to manage complex warehouse and supply chainProduct stockouts – wider product range makes it harder to precisely forecast demand, resulting in mismatches between product supply and demandOperational performance – SKU proliferation can compromise operational performanceHow should organizations then balance the objectives of capturing the market share by expanding the product lines without hurting the triple benefits?Attributes based demand planningAttributes are the unique characteristics of a product, process, service, or resource to highlight value or compliance to a customer’s need.
For instance, consider Diamond, where the buying decisions are based on carat, color, clarity, cut.
Whether a customer prefers to buy a diamond of high carat or the one with better clarity, one comes up with the best combination which he perceives to provide the best value for money.
From a demand planning perspective, the right combination of the attributes, namely, carat, color, clarity, and cut must be considered and made available at the point of sales.
In conventional forecasting, data is organized in a strict hierarchy in traditional dimensions, such as region and product, with a fixed sequence of levels.
It may be assumed safely, therefore, that nature has designed humans to learn.However, modern systems that have evolved in the last few centuries have done a lot of injustice to learning ability of humans – in regimenting them to a sequential program and treating humans as sort of a pseudo-machine to deliver industrial rather than “industrious” work.
Is not a workplace about task completion in the most effective manner – and in that sense the focus being on productivity and availability of right resources at the right time.
Then on a second look, we find that industry had the biggest influence on education system in the first place – wanting silos, specialization, and limited abilities to carry out the rhythmic industrial tasks.
That is another story, that on the other side of the value chain, we also want the same people to be equally robotic in consuming.
While this had benefits in standards of living, it certainly is also devastating at the same time for human agency.
Now, there apparently are three issues involved in upgrading skills in a workplace – one, unlearning the previous way of working, sometimes something that is deeply institutionalized – in the name of process, efficiency, and productivity.
Many companies are wondering how to build a successful self-managed team organization.
This type of organization can be more productive and cost-effective for some businesses.
This is done by developing a mission statement that everyone can agree on.
Once that has been determined, it’s important to hire people who are committed to the company’s shared values and focus on finding those who are willing to be flexible when adapting strategy.
Employees should also give feedback and ask questions if they are unclear about what is required of them.
Establish a series of metrics and track progress towards those metricsA goal-oriented campaign needs to be planned carefully.
In my previous blog, I had provided a framework for an organization to adopt a systematic planning process for their supply Chain (S and S) and get all the data on a unified platform.
We observed that many of our clients are using spreadsheet modelling for their supply chain planning and have been asking us “why do we need dedicated software when we can manage with simple spreadsheets?” Let me attempt to show what are the undesirable business effects, which are invisible, because of the prevalent usage of spreadsheets for planning.
Let us first examine why, to begin with, organizations use spreadsheets.
When the organization is building any new planning system and trying to understand the data, a spreadsheet provides a very cost-effective platform to carry out iterations and build models and scenarios.
We have put together 5 challenges; organizations typically face with spreadsheets.Complexity – Generally, spreadsheets are used for Demand Planning, Sales and Operations Planning, Inventory Planning, or any other type of planning that one can think of.
Dynamism – By nature, the spreadsheets are static, and hence its ability to create a dynamic response, continuous re-forecasting, and simulating the alternative scenarios is very limited or absent.
But low-wage jobs, mostly low-skilled repetitive jobs will also rise.
The fourth industrial revolution is doing that even more and at a faster pace.
This post by Axios – talks about warehouse workers of the big retail giants.
Even Axios presents some interesting statistics on the job growth in this sector and predictions over next decade.In my view, robotizing human effort, even though for low skilled jobs is an immense disrespect of human ability and spirit.
How could we have a menial workforce engaged in activities, that takes away bulk of their daily time in repetitive tasks – that further reduce their ability and opportunity to gain new knowledge.
The sooner industry starts thinking of this, the better for our society.To understand and appreciate this problem deeply, it requires, that we synthesize this view properly.There is a segment of our society and a substantial one – that has fewer and fewer opportunities to evolve and get more skilled.The have and have nots divide grows larger and larger – it is being witnessed today.Robotizing a human comes with its own side effects on individual’s psyche – pertaining to mental and emotional health.It is quite irresponsible for a society to keep a large segment of her population from growing their cognitive prowess.It is evident – that we do need to do something about it – and as we look deeply, these jobs more than anywhere else are also a window to a great opportunity for personal and social transformation.
At one of my previous assignments where the organization had presence in close to 150 countries across the world, the think tank of HR came up that the single biggest problem statement that needs to be addressed was to provide a unified employee experience.
We worked tirelessly evaluating the design, partnering with HR stakeholders to create the right scope and the appropriate user journey etc.This got launched successfully and employees started using it wholeheartedly.
Analytics showed uptake month on month and there were discussions on how to enhance the product scope further.And then Covid happened….…Business saw a substantial decline with the leadership proposing a series of cost saving measures to ensure business stability and survival… What ensued was a series of discussions which finally led to the decision that the HR chatbot services would no longer be required.
What we as a project team realized that there were no concrete metrics where we had been able to quantify the benefit this virtual cognitive employee (HR chatbot) was delivering to our business.Gartner* describes Employee Experience asEmployees’ perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with their employer’s customers, leaders, teams, processes, policies, tools and work environment.What is employee experience?These employee experience factors needs to be measured objectively and its ROI arrived it to ensure its sustenance and survival in a world where each dollar spent needs to be justified.This leads to the classical dilemma of the HR function?How do HR functions continue with their focus on delivering value to the employee while keeping cost constraints in mind?Even as organizations are forced to shed jobs and dramatically tighten their purses, what initiatives can help retain and drive performance and productivity in their employees while delivering a superlative employee experience?The solution is to measure and portray the value – visible and clearly linked to business impacts.
The four key employee experience metrics which HR and digital teams could track is:Employee Effort ScoreEmployee Immersion scoreEmployee Net Promoter® Score (eNPS)Let’s take an example of how we can quantify one of these metrics say the Employee Effort score.Creating an employee experience is the first step towards delivering a customer experience that is both profitable and sustainable.
One of the main pillars defining employee experience is the effort they need to put in.Here we are not talking about the effort that the employee puts into his or her work every day- those are actually his deliverables.
In this blog, we will discuss the effects of SKU proliferation and its toll on the triple bottom gains for the organization.The problem of SKU proliferationVarious research has proved that an organization can raise its overall market share by expanding its product selection and, thereby, appealing to a wider set of customers.
These costs can be broadly categorized into the following:Manpower cost – additional workforce required to manage complex warehouse and supply chainProduct stockouts – wider product range makes it harder to precisely forecast demand, resulting in mismatches between product supply and demandOperational performance – SKU proliferation can compromise operational performanceHow should organizations then balance the objectives of capturing the market share by expanding the product lines without hurting the triple benefits?Attributes based demand planningAttributes are the unique characteristics of a product, process, service, or resource to highlight value or compliance to a customer’s need.
For instance, consider Diamond, where the buying decisions are based on carat, color, clarity, cut.
Whether a customer prefers to buy a diamond of high carat or the one with better clarity, one comes up with the best combination which he perceives to provide the best value for money.
From a demand planning perspective, the right combination of the attributes, namely, carat, color, clarity, and cut must be considered and made available at the point of sales.
In conventional forecasting, data is organized in a strict hierarchy in traditional dimensions, such as region and product, with a fixed sequence of levels.
Peer to peer trust is a key ingredient to activate self-managed teams in organizations.
Team members cite existence of peer to peer trust as a top reason for higher team performance.
Creating and fostering a climate of peer to peer trust needs focus from the organization.Why peer trust is important?The future of work involves setting up self-managed teams which result in faster execution with minimum governance.
As we look into the future, we firmly believe that self-managed are the way forward to create an agile organization and solving business-critical problems to sustain the competitive advantage.
Research has proven that building trusted relationships between employees leads to greater predictability of their words and action, leading to lower governance and supervision.
Peer-to-peer trust facilitates the flow of information through formal and informal networks leading to faster decision making.
It may be assumed safely, therefore, that nature has designed humans to learn.However, modern systems that have evolved in the last few centuries have done a lot of injustice to learning ability of humans – in regimenting them to a sequential program and treating humans as sort of a pseudo-machine to deliver industrial rather than “industrious” work.
Is not a workplace about task completion in the most effective manner – and in that sense the focus being on productivity and availability of right resources at the right time.
Then on a second look, we find that industry had the biggest influence on education system in the first place – wanting silos, specialization, and limited abilities to carry out the rhythmic industrial tasks.
That is another story, that on the other side of the value chain, we also want the same people to be equally robotic in consuming.
While this had benefits in standards of living, it certainly is also devastating at the same time for human agency.
Now, there apparently are three issues involved in upgrading skills in a workplace – one, unlearning the previous way of working, sometimes something that is deeply institutionalized – in the name of process, efficiency, and productivity.
Often people get locked into such routines – of tasks, meetings, and activities.
This was a certainly a jolt – creating a lot of challenge for people, particularly those working at the bottom of the pyramid.
Jolted to consciousness – even though momentarily.
Contribute to best of their abilities – and engage in socially beneficial activities and utilizing their skills and resources for the benefit of others.In such a sense, would it not be wonderful, if people just stay that way?
Serving and helping their fellow beings.And at work – is there a learning we may draw?
And then routines become the end, rather than the means, that they are designed for.
Many companies are wondering how to build a successful self-managed team organization.
This type of organization can be more productive and cost-effective for some businesses.
This is done by developing a mission statement that everyone can agree on.
Once that has been determined, it’s important to hire people who are committed to the company’s shared values and focus on finding those who are willing to be flexible when adapting strategy.
Employees should also give feedback and ask questions if they are unclear about what is required of them.
Establish a series of metrics and track progress towards those metricsA goal-oriented campaign needs to be planned carefully.
The Idea Of MindfulnessThe emergence of the concept of mindfulness is often traced as far as 2500 years back.
Mindfulness is generally understood as a form of sustained present-moment awareness of oneself, others and the environment.
This metacognitive dimension is what separates and accentuates the experience of mindfulness, and leads individuals to make better choices.
Instead of constantly feeling dissatisfied with our lives, mindfulness allows us to experience all aspects of life with warmth and uncensored curiosity.Mindfulness At Workplace The work environment has become highly disintegrated over the last two years with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing employees globally to work from home.
In addition, the programme was also was found to enhance interpersonal sensitivity, adaption of coping strategies and an increased level of self-compassion.Higher emotional intelligence and good work relationshipsResearch suggests that people who are stronger in self-management competencies on an average add 78% more profits than those who lack in these.
Mindfulness research suggests that those who practice mindfulness are shown to have higher levels of self-regulation and emotional intelligence.
In my previous blog, I had provided a framework for an organization to adopt a systematic planning process for their supply Chain (S and S) and get all the data on a unified platform.
We observed that many of our clients are using spreadsheet modelling for their supply chain planning and have been asking us “why do we need dedicated software when we can manage with simple spreadsheets?” Let me attempt to show what are the undesirable business effects, which are invisible, because of the prevalent usage of spreadsheets for planning.
Let us first examine why, to begin with, organizations use spreadsheets.
When the organization is building any new planning system and trying to understand the data, a spreadsheet provides a very cost-effective platform to carry out iterations and build models and scenarios.
We have put together 5 challenges; organizations typically face with spreadsheets.Complexity – Generally, spreadsheets are used for Demand Planning, Sales and Operations Planning, Inventory Planning, or any other type of planning that one can think of.
Dynamism – By nature, the spreadsheets are static, and hence its ability to create a dynamic response, continuous re-forecasting, and simulating the alternative scenarios is very limited or absent.
The pace of change in the business environment is prompting organization to continuously innovate to stay ahead of the competition and retain their competitive advantage.
In such a scenario we are making a case for making teams autonomous or self-managed which will lead to greater execution and lesser management or governance.Autonomous teams and key characteristicsThe concept of autonomous teams is not new.
In fact, it’s more than six decades it was first introduced, primarily in the manufacturing sector and later saw adoption in service sector as well.
Few of the characteristics of autonomous teams are:Effective communication and independent decision-making.High employee involvement leading to trust, which positively contributes towards intrinsic motivation.Frequent feedback to enhance work quality and better engagement.Provide a sense of ownership amongst team membersGreater flexibility, faster coordination and access to informationWhy autonomous teams are the way forward?Increased competition has led organizations to continuously innovate to retain their competitive advantage.
A paradigm shift in the perceived notions about work, workplace and workforce has been observed in the past few years accelerated by technology integration, fragmentation of work and increased agility and dynamism on the business environment.
The teams are assigned decision-making authority for timely diagnosis of problems and implementation of solutions.
But low-wage jobs, mostly low-skilled repetitive jobs will also rise.
The fourth industrial revolution is doing that even more and at a faster pace.
This post by Axios – talks about warehouse workers of the big retail giants.
Even Axios presents some interesting statistics on the job growth in this sector and predictions over next decade.In my view, robotizing human effort, even though for low skilled jobs is an immense disrespect of human ability and spirit.
How could we have a menial workforce engaged in activities, that takes away bulk of their daily time in repetitive tasks – that further reduce their ability and opportunity to gain new knowledge.
The sooner industry starts thinking of this, the better for our society.To understand and appreciate this problem deeply, it requires, that we synthesize this view properly.There is a segment of our society and a substantial one – that has fewer and fewer opportunities to evolve and get more skilled.The have and have nots divide grows larger and larger – it is being witnessed today.Robotizing a human comes with its own side effects on individual’s psyche – pertaining to mental and emotional health.It is quite irresponsible for a society to keep a large segment of her population from growing their cognitive prowess.It is evident – that we do need to do something about it – and as we look deeply, these jobs more than anywhere else are also a window to a great opportunity for personal and social transformation.