Showing posts with label Learning and Development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Learning and Development. Show all posts

Saturday, 23 June 2012

High Performing Abundant Organisations


I woke up in the morning, dragging my feet, trying to settle things and making my way to office. My friend, however, is fresh and full of energy. He thinks of what change is he going to bring today and how many lives will he be impacting by his work. Which one are you? How do you relate yourself to the larger organisational goals?

Organisations these days have set up high performance work culture wherein, they have linked their performance management, compensation and people strategy to enhance the employee effectiveness. They are working for the development of their employees to survive the competition. However, if we look at the abundant organisations (Dave Ulrich – The why of work) they are adding value and meaning to the life of its employees and working for the customers and the society at large. With the diversity and community services paving its way in the corporate policy and organisational budget, organisations are trying to do their bit to benefit the society, however, somewhere they are missing the employee’s why of work.

They have made their corporate policies more employee friendly, investing more in learning and development of the employees but still the turnover remains the biggest concern, which is always remarkably high. Why is that citizens of the organisation (Henceforth referred to as Empizen) are still not empowered and they keep on looking out?

Our empizen keep on exploring better opportunities as is the case with GenMe and Gen Y looking for better roles and career development. The GenMe and Gen Y always look out for empowerment in the role and better and bigger decision making ability. They just don’t fall flat for a bigger pay package. Our empizens want the meaning of work in their lives. They want to know and understand the value they are giving to the organisation through their work, which is missing in our HR strategy. Many a times, it has been seen that as part of our HR strategy, flow of people and flow of information is missing.

There should be a proper and continuous flow of information from the top management till all the empizen at the grass root level are empowered. They should know what their small action will be converted into at the larger level.  Simply investing in L&D will not suffice, it should be properly synced with the career aspiration of the empizen and the organisational strategy. This can be achieved only when our leadership is aware of this and know how to tackle these challenges. The empizen look onto the leaders and want to be one of them. Our leaders should be able to coach and mentor our empizens so that they consider themselves as part of the family and come to work every day with full passion. When the employee feels he/she is the empizen of the organisation, he will be more engaged, productive and would serve our customers better. Hence, empizen would understand the value he/she brings to the organisation through the work and would result in better financial numbers. 
    
So, are you going to add value and meaning to your/someone’s work tomorrow?  

Sunday, 26 June 2011

Social Media: A new training tool at the workplace

Social media, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, is gaining popularity among the employees especially the generation Y and generation Z who are now entering the workforce. This is impacting the learning and development tools being adopted by the organisations, forcing the organisations to have a proper social media policy in the workplace and also educating the workforce about the do’s and don’ts of the proper usage of the social media at the workplace.

It is an enhancement to the traditional learning processes at the organisations. What it used to maybe a full day dedicated for training, wherein, a trainer would be called for giving specialised lectures on a particular topic evolved into e-learning. The advent of IT impacted a lot the way learning was done in the organisations. E-learning revolutionized the skills addition for the employees and it also cut down the costs involved in the training with the availability of training software at a comparatively reduced price rather than arranging the training programs again and again.

Chat? Text? Status Update? Blog? Tweet? The new in-thing for the employees. The organisations are exploring ways to create new social media strategy for their businesses. There is a large Corporation with its new Social Media Guidelines. As per Digital Strategist at this MNC, the social media policies does not necessary means that the employees will just understand the policies and incorporate them in their daily work life. However, it is to train the employees to use them effectively and efficiently to reach towards the organisation’s business goals and also to participate in the social media.

As per the latest report from Awareness, Inc. more than 75% of the employees are now using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for businesses purposes, which is up from 15 percent in 2007. Informal learning is becoming a key part of learning and development in the organisations.

Now the employees can share the problem within the company on an internal sharing website and multiple minds can be put to work and a more optimum solution can be found to the problem.  The employees can look into as what was the diagnosis to a similar problem and take help from that. This is learning without borders in a global environment. One such example of this learning environment is a database at one of the largest corporations which consists of over 15000 articles from employees defining, collaborating and documenting their part of the organisation workspace.

Some upcoming social media programs are like ‘Tweet like you mean it’, ‘Importance of Brand equity in social media’ and ‘Mobile marketing’. With increased competitiveness and dynamic business environment, the organisations are compelled towards creating a dynamic learning mindset. Within no time there would soon be ‘Chief Learning Officer’ who would put emphasis on rapid, collaborative and self directed learning. The new social learning can help people to become more informed, gain a wider perspective and to be able to make better decisions by engaging with others.    

Reference: : http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/02/intels_social_media_employee_t.html