Gautam Ghosh
Over Communicating to Employees and Living without Email
This interesting post Technology’s Unintended Consequence: The Elusive Worker spells out the challenges that employees are facing in this new world:
Making matters more complicated, workers are processing more messages than ever before. Messages are bombarding workers via email, phone, instant message, Facebook, Twitter and Yammer, among other — not to mention standard face-to-face interactions and ambient office chatter. An incomplete tally of my own direct, inbound messages in the past 24 hours registered at over 500. Not 500 ambient messages, but 500 messages specifically intended to receive my full attention. I’m not sure how I do it.
Mailtoday article on Sex, Work and Career Success
Neha Tara Mehta of Mailtoday asked me for my views on a US survey that shows that women who sleep with their bosses gain career success.
The article can be read here
SLEEPING WITH BOSS CAN BOOST CAREER
By Neha Tara Mehta in New Delhi
US survey says 37% of office workers believe that having an affair with the boss helps in growth at work. Is it any different in India?
ITS THE most politically incorrect admission to make in the modern workplace, but a US survey has revealed that sleeping with their boss does help women climb several notches up the corporate ladder.
The New York- based Centre for Work- Life Policy has found that 37 per cent office workers said that from their experience those who slept with their superiors were rewarded with a career boost.
Whats more, no matter how high achieving the woman is, she will not reach the very top of her profession unless she finds a sponsor — read a sugar daddy who is almost always married.
In the West, the Indian publishing industrys one- time poster boy, the sacked Penguin Canada CEO and President David Davidar was led by his “ consensual flirtation” to give a $ 10,000 ( ` 4.6 lakh) raise to former colleague Lisa Rundle and the fancy title of director of digital publishing and foreign rights. When the relationship soured, Rundle filed a suit against Davidar — costing him his job.
Cases from India Inc, though, hardly ever come to light, and are discussed only around coffee machines. Says adman Prahlad Kakkar — one of the few who are willing to come on record on how between- the- sheets liaisons can have a bearing on ones raise: “ We all know that when there is some degree of smoke there has to be some fire.
When a woman sleeps with her boss, she is called a whore. When a man sleeps around, he is called a careerist.” Adds Gautam Ghosh, the HR consultant whose blog GautamGhosh.net has been ranked as one of the top 25 HR blogs by HRWorld: “ As a society, we are non- confrontationist. We would rather speak about something in hushed tones or gossip about an affair involving a celebrity.” In the West, politicians are much more flamboyant than their Indian counterparts about their peccadilloes with women who are then rewarded with plum positions.
In 2009, Italian premier Silvio Berlusconis wife Veronica Lario wrote an open letter condemning her husband for his choice of young inexperienced candidates to represent his party.
And in France, young female ministers picked by Nicolas Sarkozy go by the name Sarkozettes. Its not very different back home. Political greenhorns have made it to the Rajya Sabha, become chief ministers and even proxy- chief ministers through their liaisons with powerful men, but remain a subject to be discussed only in hushed tones.
The US survey has further revealed that 34 per cent women in executive positions said they knew of female colleagues who had slept with the boss, and even at the director level, 15 per cent of the women admitted to having had a fling.
Writer and former hotelier Advaita Kala points out that the findings could be explained by the the emergence of the raunch culture, as described by Ariel Levy in her 2005 book Female Chauvinist Pigs . Levy has written about the rejection of feminist principles and the unabashed use of sexuality to get ahead. “ There is some truth to women not being apologetic about being viewed as the fairer sex now. But in many cases, people talking about a female colleague sleeping with the boss is just misogynistic gossip.” The phenomenon has begun to make its way into popular literature and films as well. Soap queen Ektaa Kapoors former scriptwriter Smita Jains first book, Kkrishnaas Konfessions , featured as its protagonist Krrishnaa, an ambitious scriptwriter who isnt opposed to using her sexuality to forge ahead in her career.
“ Sleeping with the boss is an extreme form of tying yourself with the right person to make progress. Men can rely on their alumni and boys clubs, but most women cant. So a lot of women seek mentors in powerful people, sometimes by using sexual favours,” Jain says.
Filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar has in two of his films shown women using sexuality to climb the ladder. In a real life twist, Bhandarkar was accused of running a casting couch in 2004, when Preeti Jain filed a case against him stating that she slept with him in exchange for roles in his movies.
In 2005, actors Aman Verma and Shakti Kapoor were caught in sting operations, where they were shown seeking sexual favours from aspiring starlets.
Giving the example of a beauty queen- turned- Bollywood actress, who skipped sleeping with producers and directors but dived into bed with a top Bollywood actor, Kakkar says, “ Its important to sleep with the right person.” A smart employee, he says, wont actually sleep with the boss – but be permanently on the verge of it. “ Sleeping around is the clincher, but not the meat. You have to be really competent to rise ahead,” Kakkar adds.
Author Anuja Chauhan, vicepresident and executive creative director of J. Walter Thompson, agrees sleeping around alone doesnt help in making it to the top. “ Sex may be the way up to middle management, but not to the top,” she says.
HR expert Anil Sachdev believes people using carnal means to get a career jump points to the larger issue of the lack of ethics in organisations.
“ These cases take place in organisations where leaders pay attention only to the financial aspect of success, and turn a blind eye to other attributes,” says Sachdev. “ Enlightened organisations now base 50 per cent of their performance appraisal on key result areas and the other 50 per cent to the means used to achieve the targets,” he points out.
Sleeping around to get to the top often borders on sexual harassment – something that many organisations arent equipped to deal with. “ Most HR managers arent equipped to have such conversations.They come from generic skills of recruitment and performance management,” point out Ghosh. HR heads, moreover, are often associated with business leaders, making it an intimidating task for a woman to file a complaint in quid pro quo cases.
Offices transforming into hotbeds of intrigue over suspected affairs — even when none exist — make it hard for meritorious employees to function. The US survey showed that 65 per cent of female executives suspect that salary hikes and plum assignments are being traded for sexual favours. Some 48 per cent of the men and 56 per cent of the women feel animosity towards the involved couple, leading to a drastic decline in office productivity.
This, says Sujata K, who works with the HR department of a Mumbai- based MNC, is an unfair assumption. She says, “ Im not denying that certain women do exchange favours with their bosses, but even if a woman does not do that and is successful, she is accused of having slept her way to the top.” Call it the new unwritten workplace code.
( With inputs from Sunaina Kumar in Mumbai)
What do you think?
Another post I wrote about sex and the workplace was when I was on CNN-IBN’s program Y-Not
Enterprise 2.0 news: Yammer takes on Jive, Socialtext
The new Yammer will essentially turn the microblogging application into a full fledged social network. Yammer plans to add a number of applications to its platform that will increase its functionality beyond just a communications platform. An events application will allow you to invite co-workers to company or group events and track responses. Attendees can also download the event into their calendar.
An ideas application will help employees and administrators create, find and categorize the best ideas within a company. Employees can rank ideas through voting, and ideas can be created separately or can be promoted from existing conversations on Yammer.
Training and Learning using Social Technologies
Read the full interview here
Who Else Wants to Take Training & Development to “The Next Level” Like Dell?
Q. What are your thoughts on “online learning communities,” especially when proposed as a solution?
The potential is very high to capitalize on social networking. Online learning communities formalize the informal information pipeline that goes on in an organization but I have only seen aspects of these communities in action.
For example, I have seen in companies that employees share ideas and solutions to problems by blogging, Skyping, and texting. Online training, through synchronous web meetings, provided opportunities for networking, problem-solving, and collaboration that transfer back to the workplace.
Benefits of Social Sharing in Organizations 2.0
However people always ask “why should people share within the enterprise?”. Here’s an interesting post I came across that shows how this behaviour is a generational change and how people using these technologies think differently about work and the hows and whys of work.
Andrew McAfee blogs on the HBR site on How Millennials’ Sharing Habits Can Benefit Organizations
Matt Gallivan, a senior research analyst for NPR, who said “Sharing is not ‘the new black,’ it is the new normal. There are too many benefits to living with a certain degree of openness for Digital Natives to ‘grow out of it.’ Job opportunities, new personal connections, professional collaboration, learning from others’ experiences, etc., are all very powerful benefits to engaging openly with others online, and this is something that Gen Y understands intuitively.”
Older generations of knowledge worker, including mine, don’t share this intuition. We basically work in private, or in small groups of close colleagues, and only share our output — papers, reports, plans, presentations, analyses, and so on — once we consider it done.
Why Growing Talent is Better than Hiring it
Some excerpts from the article
In his new book, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance, Groysberg studies a group of professionals renowned for the portability of their talent — Wall Street research analysts. Analysts are a hybrid of researchers and pundits; they study public companies and write recommendations about whether to buy or sell their stocks.
So what happened? Groysberg reports, “Star equity analysts who switched employers paid a high price for jumping ship. Overall, their job performance plunged sharply and continued to suffer for at least five years after moving to a new firm.” Worse, switching firms doubled the chance that an analyst would fall off the rankings entirely (32% versus 16%).
Atlassian overhauls the traditional performance review system
Atlassian’s Big Experiment with Performance Reviews
For years, Atlassian’s performance review model was in line with ‘HR Best Practice’. Twice a year, people would review themselves and their peers via 360-degree reviews. Managers would review their team members and determine their final performance rating on a simple 5-point scale that determined their bonus. I believe it’s a similar model to that of many other tech companies like Google and Salesforce.
So, what was the problem? In short, twice a year the model did exactly the opposite to what we wanted to accomplish. Instead of an inspiring discussion about how to enhance people’s performance, the reviews caused disruptions, anxiety and de-motivated team members and managers. Also, even though our model was extremely lean and simple, the time investment was significant.
The Trial
For 12 months, we will trial a new review methodology. We’ll make iterative improvements along the way. What’s more, we’ll blog everything here
My views on Personal Branding in the Outlook Money story on Marketing Yourself
Constantly evaluate yourself. “Prepare your personal balance sheet; find out what is working and what isn’t,” says Merchant. Figure out what areas of expertise you require to add to your portfolio. “The idea is to build T-shaped expertise, broad expertise of an area and deep expertise of one specific niche,” says Gautam Ghosh, who blogs on HR, social media and personal branding. But there’s no short cut.
Invest time. Learn from every possible opportunity. Attend workshops, seminars and training programmes. There’s lots to learn out there.
Learn from people. Have a wide range of people on your contact list—coaches, mentors, industry leaders, trendsetters and opinion makers. Ask them the right questions. Get their perspective. Follow up.
3 of the 6 fundamental shifts in the way we work
The collaboration curve supplants the experience curve. We may, for the first time, have an opportunity to turn diminishing returns performance improvement into increasing returns.
As it becomes increasingly possible to scale the number of connections and interactions between participants in a given environment, however, a new kind of performance curve is emerging: the collaboration curve. This is characterized by increasing returns: the more participants — and interactions between those participants — you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement accelerates.
Keeping policies simple and simpler
I have always believed that organiztional processes and policies are needlessly complex – and in a self-organizing system (which is better to deal with complexity in the outside environment) people should know at the maximum three rules – and interpret the rest on their own or as a collective entity.
This policy also fits in with creating a Results Only Work Environment. What is puzzling is why organizations create layers of management people and waste time managing issues that employees could sort on their own, letting them focus on results and performance.
At Netflix, the vacation policy is audaciously simple and simply audacious. Salaried employees can take as much time off as they’d like, whenever they want to take it. Nobody – not employees themselves, not managers – tracks vacation days.
Moving from Social Media Marketing to building a Social Business
As more and more Indians are accessing the internet and as broadband speeds are picking up, some savvy marketers are looking more and more at the fast growing social networks like Facebook, Orkut and Twitter to become additional channels to communicate their messages and market to their demographic.
Organizations in India that have tested the social media waters include firms like lifestyle marketer Fastrack to Non-Profit firms like Pratham Books to technology companies like Dell and Microsoft to banking companies like HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank and telecom firms Airtel, Vodafone and Aircel to dotcoms like Makemytrip.com, Naukri.com to auto firm Mitsubishi. Media firms in India from Hindustan Times, NDTV, Network 18 , Outlook Group and Open Media are also embracing “social” in varying degrees.
The examples of these companies are spurring many other firms to set up Facebook pages, Orkut communities and Twitter accounts. Many marketers do not really know how to do everything – and neither do their traditional agencies, so a niche group of service providers have come up which encompass the technology skill and the business knowledge to try and provide the help.
Innovation and HR’s quest to be strategic
Peter Drucker is famously quoted for two statements which distill the basic purpose of businesses.
One says that There are two functions of business – innovation and marketing.
The other says The purpose of a business is to create a customer.
If you search for the phrase “HR seat at the table” on a search engine like Google you’ll get lots and lots of results.
However it is not possible for any function to be considered strategic unless it impacts directly either of these two outcomes – innovation or creation of a customer.
Traditionally the domain of marketing and creating new customers has been the forte of Sales and Marketing.
And Innovation has been the preserve of the R&D group. In certain organizations that innovation is not about the product but a business model – like doing the things faster, better and cheaper than the product innovator.
So if HR really wants to be strategic – either it should wait for a business leader who believes that the “culture is the brand” or else go and do stuff that will impact the ability of the organization to either innovate or create new customers.
How the world of work will undergo 10 changes in 10 years
Gartner Says the World of Work Will Witness 10 Changes During the Next 10 Years
“Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, ‘swarming’ and more,” said Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner fellow. By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be ‘non-routine’, up from 25 percent in 2010. “People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization,” he added. “In addition, simulation, visualisation and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.”
Organizations will need to determine which of the 10 key changes in the nature of work will affect them, and consider whether radically different technology governance models will be required.
1. De-routinization of Work
The core value that people add is not in the processes that can be automated, but in non-routine processes, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that result in words such as discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning. Non-routine skills are those we cannot automate. For example, we cannot automate the process of selling a life insurance policy to a skeptical buyer, but we can use automation tools to augment the selling process.
Unilever India Chief says industry being held back by lack of Human Capital
According to a report by consultancy company McKinsey & Co, India would need to upgrade the skill sets of around 500 million people by 2020 to meet its growth requirements. At current capacities, however, the country can train barely 50 million. Yet another consulting firm Boston Consulting Group has said that, of the 89 million people expected to join the workforce from 2009-13, over 47 million would be school dropouts.
“Corporates must actively commit resources — time, money and people — to innovatively collaborate with educational institutions so that academic curriculum is tuned to changing needs of the industry.” Manwani said.
In my view, students need to be counselled on their careers and what they have an aptitude for. Currently, everyone who does a basic graduation aspires aspires for a white collar job. Whereas the reality is – we need vocational training at the undergraduate level – skilled workforce to build the industry. In fact, Rashmi Bansal said it best in her blog post. Go read it.
Jobseekers don’t want employers to check their social profiles, says study
So job seekers don’t really have to be alarmed in the way this article proposes, keep privacy filters on and don’t indulge in hate-mongering on the web are the two aspects I’d suggest.
Here’s the article excerpt:
Job seekers wary of social media
Job seekers are aware that bosses are using social media as part of the recruitment process but don’t think it’s entirely appropriate, according to a new survey.
The Hays online survey of 885 people found that 38 percent of respondents believe employers use social networking profiles to help vet applications, but should not do so.
