Visit to Thailand.

Just came back from Bangkok, my first business visit outside India.

I was suprised when I entered the Thai Airways when I was greeted with a warm "Namaste" in the most traditional way, hands together, head towards the floor. It was later I came to know that the Thai population is predominantly Buddhist by religion. My fellow traveller happened to be a project leader in Accenture and we started talking on the Thai culture. He told me that he was really impressed with the Thai etiquette, the thai people showed immense respect even to the vendors (Accenture was the service provider). He told that he was working in a project for Toyota and that before any meeting, even the difficult meeting, the thai managers would do a proper namaste in all sincerity and then be tough during the discussion, and then again do a proper namaste before closing the meeting. This is in TRUE SENSE practising respect.

In my HR team, we had one HR Manager from China and one from Belgium. The chinese HR Manager, she made me feel like a criminal when I smoked. The Asian girls have the same value!! One thing I noticed about the employees from Belgium was that they accepted disagreements and adverse situation as "part of life", extremely similar to our Indian belief, "Whatever happens happens for good and it serves us"

I was advised by my many friends in India, to try the Thai massage. I believe the Thai massage is not really a massage, it includes lot of other services. ;-) Did not get the opportunity to experience it, I know it must be disappointing to many of my friends.

During the dinner, I joined the largest group of employees, most of them from Belgium, few from Hong Kong and fewer from India, France, China. It was during the dinner I started chatting about family, kids, places of interest with my neighbour. We discussed for almost 45 minutes. The lady shared about her family, her children and the problems she was facing with the daughter in law. ( I am now convinced that Saas Bahu conflict is a global issue). It was only during the end of the discussion I came to know that she was the wife of our super Boss. All along I was thinking she was an employee.

My meetings went well, but the learning that came from interacting with different people, different culture was unparalleled.
I managed to grab some gift for my family before I caught my flight back to India.

I shall miss Satyam...

For every Satyamite, January 7th, the day when Raju sent his confession letter of the fraud, will be a date that would be more important than 26/11, 11/9 , since it directly impacted the lives of 53k employees. We were all shocked and were frozen for few days, such an incident was unprecendented in Corporate India, the government stepped in and now Tech Mahindra has now taken over Satyam.

Last thursday was my last working day in Satyam, and when I look back, I get a sad feeling of having to leave Satyam and particularly my associates, my leaders, and my HR fraternity.

On the last day when my manager sent a mail communication to All associates in IES about my exit, I immediately got a call, one of my associate called me and asked me when would be my last working day. When I told him that it was the same day, he immediately came outside my cabin, and since my cabin was full with my team members, I went outside to meet him. With tears in his eyes, and emotions in his voice, he told me that " I will miss you Sir". I had no words to utter, I was sad, I was sad to leave my associates.


Satyam has given me so much, I am greatful to Satyam for the learning I had and the friends I made. I am confident that Satyam will bounce back with even higher profitability and market share. As I look forward to the new challenges in my life, I shall always have a soft corner for my Satyamites.

Saas Bahu and Recession.

Managing a recession begins much before the recession. There are several macro-economic indicators that hint on the imminent recession. Overheating of the economy is one of the early signs of the imminent delcine in growth. The govt steps in with monetary policy to reduce inflation. (or induce recession?)

The first signs of recession are the declining sales pipelines across the industries. ( real state,and Finance sectors normally lead the recession). Instead of tightening the receivables, companies offer credit breaks to their customers. Only when the recession has been declared, and the sales/ business has dipped, the companies sit up and take notice of the problem. The layoffs are initiated. Layoffs of operations team indicate low sales, but layoff of sales force normally indicate lower sales effort. The hiring is frozen, attrition is at an all time low, the expenditures wrt R&D, trainings are put on hold, and lot of analysis is done on innovative ways to reduce the cost.

Once the economic recovery is initiated, ( keep a close watch on the monetary policy and the supply of money), the first indication would be coming from the interest sensitive sectors, the sales starts to increase, the attrition starts increasing and innovative policies and internal communication must be initiated to increase retention. The production / service capability will now need to be increased and this would involve additional expenditure, hence with increasing sales, there would be increasing pressure on the cash position of the company. So the daunting task for HR is to identify the trends from the economy, proactively take steps to engage and retain the existing dissatisfied employees, look for labour supply to meet the increasing demand for resources, leverage on the KM processes innovatively to meet the increasing business demand.

Like sales is during recession, profitability is during economic boom. :-) During the boom, it is easy for the sales team to decrease the profit margin on the product /service provided, in order to win larger volumes of business. Simlarly for the HR there is a tendency to hire associates at the fourth quartiles of the exisiting salary ranges. A boom period is the time to increase the profitability, build cash reserve and plan to take strategic advantage during recession.

There was a movie that had been released recently, Saas Bahu aur sensex, a hilarious title. This title reflects the ups and downs in a relationship, and truly this cycle is an integral part of our lives. For me the Saas bahu serials that I have to watch is more torturous than the recession itself. We are all aware and confident that the good days are not far away. :-)

This is one of the good ppt on how to tackle recession. http://www.slideshare.net/indusnet/strategies-for-tackling-recession?type=presentation

Attrition and Economy

Over the years, attrition is one of the metrics I have closely monitored for my business. I have observed that Attrition is linked to the economic enviornment and the Growth of the business unit. i.e.

Attrition = f (Economic Enviornment)+f (Growth of the business unit).

I have observed in my business units, that in a booming economy, high growth business units would have lower attrition than the low growth business unit. In a recessionary economy, exactly the opposite happens, the high growth business units experience higher attrition in comparison to low growth units. There are several reasons why this may probably happen. Additionaly, attrition tends to be higher in a booming economy than in a recessionary economy.

Yesterday when I was in a MBA college for a workshop, I met a professor who was doing research on Attrition. When we started discussing on Attrition, I shared my observation and she had observed something similar.

Let me know your observations on this.

When the spirits rises and commands, the gods are ready to obey

You will be what you WILL to be ... let failure find its false content.
This video is really inspiring...

Value of Rs 500....

I was deeply moved after seeing this video.. A must watch for all.

Curves in Shape? (Normalization)

“I found that my rating has been reduced post Normalization. When I spoke to my manager, he told me that he had to do it since he needs to meet the curve. Pls help me”

This is a frequent cyclical interaction, I have encountered every year, post the normalized ratings are out. I can safely assert, after having interacted with the HR fraternity in other companies, that such situations are not uncommon in companies that follow any form of normalization or forced ranking as part of the appraisal process. Normalization or forced ranking is one of the ways of ‘differentiation in people management’.

There are many types of differentiation in people management. Companies can differentiate on input parameters on which the differentiation is based and / or in terms of the output parameters or ways in which differentiation is implemented. For e.g. differentiation can be based on performance, potential, criticality / impact of the role, tenure, job level, job family or a combination of the above. Similarly differentiation could be implemented in terms of compensation, benefits, recognition, career progression, development opportunities or a combination of them.

I shall be focusing on the “Normalization” a relative differentiation based on Individual Performance. The need for “higher reward for higher performance” makes the case strongly in favor of Normalization. Forced ranking combats artificially inflated performance appraisal ratings and forces the truth into performance management. All the large companies with the exception of few government organizations have differential rewards based on the normalized performance on Individual. Some companies choose to be transparent by sharing the normalized rating with the employees, many don’t.

The two central criteria on which associates are normalized in any organization are i) Contribution / Value addition to the Units business ii) Probable contribution/ value addition to the Units business in future. All the other criteria on which associates are relatively compared are sub sets of these two important criteria. The challenge for the management here is to track / measure / assess the relative “contribution / value add to the organization” to the satisfaction of everyone. As you can imagine it is a complex and a lengthy process.

The issue occurs when the leader, in order to maintain relationship with the team members, refuses to take the responsibility of the normalization process. However, when the normalization process is backed with data, and the improvement areas are identified for team members, it is mutually beneficially for the organization and the associate. The other issues that normally occur are that the associate is not able to differentiate between the absolute performance and relative performance. On an absolute basis the individual performance is assessed against the target set for him, whereas on a relative basis his performance is compared against the others in the team.

Coming back to the associate in the beginning of the blog, the issue the associate is facing is clearly that of communication and is normally resolved through an open discussion between the Reviewer, the appraiser and the associate. At the organizational level Assessor training for handling appraisals is a must.

I have just managed to scratch the surface of “Normalization” as a process. I will conclude by saying that Normalization is a reality in the IT Industry and I believe it brings the truth out and helps us stretch ourselves to become better professionals.

So how many standard deviations are you from the mean :-)