Social responsibility - Give it a human touch

Recently, while I was sucked deep into the team management activities I did miss one of my favorite pass times – speaking my mind out through blogging. Such are the occasions when some light is thrown on things like job satisfaction. Most motivation factors for a job leads to monetary benefits through various means such as salary fitment, role change, promotion, recognition and awards. But for me, it was to reach a healthy state of affairs. Health, as defined by WHO, is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Similarly in the corporate world, healthy work can be defined as one that gives physical (title change with remuneration, added responsibilities and authority) growth in the company, mental satisfaction for your daily chores and that also provides opportunities to contribute to a better cause for the society. The latter is what I would stress in this blog.

Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR in short, in these days is a very integral part of the business model and a responsibility recognized for acting in a socially responsible manner. However, the question still lies whether these responsibilities are merely window-dressing and whether it reaches the public sphere or is it an attempt to pre-empt the watch dogs over the corporate. I say this because many companies compete within their respective industries in the implementation and effectiveness of CSR policy but most often forget the objective - the impact of those policies on society and the environment, and how customers perceive, in this run. A decade ago, a global survey by Ernst & Young, revealed that 94 percent of companies believed in the development of a CSR strategy to deliver real business benefits. However, ‘m not sure how many corporates would have made significant progress in implementing the strategy since then.

Most companies define their CSR activities by linking their ethical values, legal compliance, and respect for people, community, and environment. A more common approach of CSR is philanthropy, monetary donations and aid given to local organizations and impoverished communities. I personally do not vouch for this approach since it lacks the human touch as it does not help build on the skills of the corporate. For eg: The IT industry should put its knowledge wealth to supplement the formal education and technological advancement for improving interactive teaching tools to the best use. Use of such skills along with people interaction in a community-based development generally leads to more sustainable development.

Through CSR companies can move closer towards people by treating employees fairly, operate in ethical manner in all its business dealings with customers, suppliers, lenders, and others, respect human beings and sustain the environment for future generations. It also urges its employees to be a responsible neighbor in the community and a good ‘corporate citizen’.

But is this urge heard by us? How can we be responsible corporate citizens? What is our contribution to the social cause? These are the thoughts that are currently ringing in my mind. I have decided to contribute to this cause by volunteering for a programme for the under privileged children in the age group of 10 to 12 years currently run by the company I work for. The programme is to educate kids on English through non curricular subjects that emphasize on appreciating nature, health, culture, patriotism, the well being of the community and understanding the fundamental rights while stressing the importance on their curriculum.

It is my wish that my family, friends and colleagues will stand up along with me and help me with their support as they always have. Together let us add the human touch!

Whose Line is it Anyway – PM Vs HRM in organizational initiatives

Accountabilities and responsibilities go hand in hand. However, I think that there is a fine line of distinction between the two. Accountabilities are the tasks performed by a person out of his job profile, and responsibilities are obligations for which he is accountable. This distinct line of difference is experienced between Project Management and Human Resource Management roles too.

Project Management includes developing a vision, taking proactive decisions and understanding the diversity in training. Project management is a discipline of planning, organizing, securing and managing resources for a specific task and brings about its completion with Excellency, while human resources management concentrates on integrating decisions about people with decisions about the results an organization is trying to obtain. HR’s primary roles have been to ensure compliance with laws, rules, and regulations. Although this is still, and will always be, a necessary function, many recent developments have led to a strong emphasis on results. Even the organizational initiatives these days demonstrate the value of human resources management

With the trend of more and more HR executives beginning to earn a seat at the management table, HR is becoming more of counseling and involved in day-to-day management activities. Nevertheless, there is still a long way to go if HR is to become a strategic partner at all levels.

Lack of strategic partnerships is one of the reasons why so many organizational development initiatives fail. Through organizational initiatives, HR tries building its own internal competencies to deal with organizational issues, educate itself on program missions, and find ways to offer creative and innovative solutions to organization wide issues, than going on a standard approach of executing their responsibilities.

In the rush for creativity and innovation, the most critical piece, to take into account how change affects the organization's people, is often forgotten. Studies show that nearly 75 percent of all organizational change programmes fail because they don't create the necessary grounds well of support among employees.

Most often, the change brought in by the initiatives, is not welcomed immediately. Processes, Technology and People are the 3 key elements which drive and are affected by the initiatives. People are the most important of these elements, as change distracts and disturbs the balance of human brains. From the outset of any initiative, people must recognise and buy into the need for change. This is where HRM should take help of the Project Management Leaders and recognize that an organization cannot successfully adopt change unless these leaders understand, support the reasons for creating the change, align their people to create a compelling vision of the future state and continually communicate it.

While implementing the changes, HRM can also borrow a leaf from Project management, to identify and engage the resources for executing the change. A strategy should be developed in conjunction with the people who are impacted and the ones who will be executing it. This will enable the work force to be well prepared to participate in the development and implementation of new processes and technology, and the implementation should essentially be a monitoring activity for leaders.

However, most organizations spend the majority of their time in mandating the implementation of the change and don't adequately address their people's role in change. In such instances, successful change adoption rarely occurs. Project managers, functional and non-functional should be held responsible for reiterating the change mission through ongoing communications. Management should also use E-mails, project milestone commemorations, conversations and other channels consistently to remind people why they are expending their hard work on implementing a change.

Idealness in IT: Perfection, the need of the hour

As everyone else, the Information Technology (IT) world too thinks of idealness, something that is perfect or closest to perfection, as something that exists only as a concept. Idealness in IT is highly desirable but isn't it possible for us to achieve? World, life, power, knowledge and everything in life are essential and are capable of perfection.

It does not matter what we do and how many things we are involved in, what matters is how PERFECT we are in even one of them. Perfection in any one of the skills or capacities we possess will help us cross the border. We can see ourselves in the next zone if we take one thing at a time and perfect it. It enables one to see the result, gives self-confidence, gives birth to optimism and eventually to a different individual.

Every time I performed an activity, I conceived that it requires energy, interest, skill, attention, concentration, experience and perfection. When all of these aggregate, the result is always good. Even small perfection can bring great results. Flawlessness in any work is a common expectation across any duty performed in this world. I believe that perfecting a work down to the minutest details attracts positive life response. When the goal is high accomplishment, the very best method is to make every small act as perfect as possible. It is a method that brings a much greater result, much sooner.

Perfection comes with practice. For example, punctuality is perfection in time, which is practiced and measured over a period. The majority of perfection is attained in the first 70-80% of completing the task. The remaining 20-30% percent is achieved through what one thinks as improvement. But certainly it is the latter that makes a great difference.

Perfection can be achieved in three steps. The first step is to start with the right plans. Just as we build a building or make a car, we need to have a good set of plans. They must be accurate, easy for the workforce to understand and easy to repeat. Repeatability and reproducibility is another aspect of perfection in IT. The third step in perfection is to correct the previous mistakes and prevent defects from occurring again. Mistakes are common but repeated mistakes are a sin. No present work will move even an inch if past lapses are left uncorrected. This is similar to Deming / Shewhart Cycle or PDCA (Plan, Do it, Check and Act) cycle.

It may sound fancy, but it is very true that Six Sigma is nothing more than a measure of quality that strives for near perfection. It is a disciplined, data-driven approach to eliminate defects and rework in any process. The aim is to reduce defects, or errors, to no more than six standard deviations from the mean. To put numbers to it, in order to achieve Six Sigma-level quality, a process will have no more than 3.4 defects per million. Like wise, other quality processes such as Quality Circles, TQM and Kaizen work towards perfection by concentrating on Team based process improvements. Process Capability and Design of Experiments (DOE) have come to the fore in Six Sigma. Combining Control charts, Value Analysis and ISO/QS9000 techniques with Six Sigma can be a more powerful process perfection methodology.

Idealness can be attained with well defined quality processes. To me, Quality, especially in reference to IT, is to express the real ideas of the business in the act or work. It is only when something is rubbish, of poor quality and not worth its value, stakeholders take notice, start to complain, and all attention is drawn towards the mediocrity of the service or product. Often my requirements for quality fall on deaf ears; projects get revised and rewritten many times before they meet my exacting standards. People have even blamed me for having high expectations and termed as not a team man. Such people never had the visibility of the burned hours of top management time in the review and revision process – time that could have been used to lead the company.

The biggest key to succeed upon idealness is having the support of upper management. If they don't think it is necessary to perfect processes to achieve idealness, the initiative will fail. Next is to engage the right people in the process. If we don't have buy-in from the people who actually touch the process, it will be harder to get them to accept the changes proposed. It is also important to practice with smaller achievable projects to build the momentum. It's much easier to perfect a small job and get some quick success than to try to fix a huge process all at once. Together, we got to keep up the enthusiasm and optimism for idealness to be successful in the long run.