improving productivity 2

Many of them may wonder how the recruitment process can have an impact on the overall productivity of the firm... the answer is understood in the following paragraphs..

What does turnover of research scientists, for instance, cost in lost productivity and higher search expenses? How do low utilization rates among call-center employees hurt earnings? While the connections can seem explicit, they must often be tested. Retail stores that can remove barriers to the hiring of more knowledgeable and courteous staff, for example, can probably raise their sales—but which barriers should go, and at what cost?

During our research we interviewed, among other people, senior logistics and transportation executives who claimed to be carrying out workforce planning. When we asked what financial metrics guided their human-capital choices—deciding, say, whether to hire full- or part-time drivers—few had any answer. These executives had drawn no connection between workforce planning and financial performance and were therefore flying blind.

To trace the bottom-line impact of higher workforce productivity, a company must identify the barriers to it and model their cost. Consider a corporate-law firm that has a lackluster development or retention strategy and high levels of attrition among its lawyers. The firm has determined that a 10 percent fall in attrition could raise billable utilization rates by 2 percent. To find out how to cut attrition, the firm could use software to track work patterns; it might find, for instance, that junior lawyers working with a particular combination of senior partners were twice as likely to quit as their peers. It could then respond by adjusting the way cases were assigned. For a law firm with annual billings of $100 million, a 2 percent increase in billable utilization rates would far outweigh the cost of installing software to target the sources of attrition.

human capital technologies 2

As i had promised the final category of emerging human capital technologies is explained here...workforce-planning tools bring together internal forecasts and external trend analyses to reduce the time needed to staff and start up businesses and to integrate recruitment with training-and-development plans. Restaurant chains, for instance, could use these tools to avoid a recurring problem: building many new restaurants only to find that too few people have been hired to operate them.

In the near future, companies will be able not only to prevent such problems but also to go one step further: they will have the tools to create a sophisticated forecast of their workforce needs by integrating macroeconomic forecasts—dozens of market variables—into their staffing plans. Although such tools could not have predicted the recent technology meltdown and will never anticipate serious swings in economic activity, they can refine a company's workforce plans—for example, by smoothing out moderate expansions and contractions.

While a fair number of software firms offer customized solutions for the problems of managing a workforce, many such applications are not yet commercially available in off-the-shelf configurations. That should change within 12 to 18 months. So far, niche players and providers of customized services have successfully targeted specific industries and functions—training and development, the staffing of projects, and retention planning. But i believe that the larger enterprise resource providers might be better placed to develop or acquire applications for human-capital management.

human capital technologies

Todays concepts in management is a little different from the traditional approach..At this point, managers can assess the growing number of customized software solutions for resolving specific workforce problems. The tools, which can be integrated into a company's underlying IT infrastructure, fall into several categories.But briefly three categories are now explained for the purpose of our understanding.

Deployment tools help a company manage its cost structure by improving its utilization rates and making the most of differences in skills to match workers with jobs. These tools, which integrate staffing algorithms with project-management software, can be used in applications that range from the staffing of retail or call centers to the resolution of service-industry challenges. Consider the way a traditional call center functions: all operators work set shifts, calls are routed to the first available operator, and all customers are treated more or less alike. Today, new software can route the most important customers to the most experienced and highly rated operators and adjust staffing in 15-minute intervals through the real-time analysis of call volumes.

The second category of promising human-capital-management technologies consists of workforce-development tools, which can increase productivity by enabling managers to match skills to positions, by helping companies to retain their best and most talented employees, and by charting succession planning deep within the organization. A retail grocery company, for instance, could find its next division president from among the top ten vice presidents and its next customer service manager from among all of its top checkers. 

The final category will be posted in the next post. So keep reading this blog to know more on this!

improving worker productivity

What does a firm do to improve its productivity?? 

This is the question that i find very disturbing. It is only when we consider our firm as an outsider will this question arise. It is necessary for a company to identify its important workers first of all...Once a company has identified its pivotal workers, it can start to think about improving their productivity, not just once but continually. The trick is to map the biggest productivity challenges that occur as workers move through the stages of their life cycle at the company, but few businesses bother to do so. Moreover, interviews with more than 50 senior managers from a range of industries indicate that while some challenges are common to all segments of the workforce, others emerge only after a company has thought through the evolution of each employee's career in the context of its business model.Systematically scanning the employee life cycle is the only way to uncover the most intense productivity pressure points that a company and its employees face. The process starts well before people are taken on. To know what kind of prospects to hire, how many, and when, for instance, managers should turn to workforce forecasting, which is essential to reduce labor shortages or surpluses and to boost utilization (something that can be complicated if demand varies by season or attrition rates fluctuate).

solution 4

In addition to my previous posts on solutions to the problems of recruitment the following strategies would be considered apt..if you are looking to bring some innovation to your firm

Checking the basics

Before a company can exploit the new technology, it must identify its pivotal workers, know how to improve their productivity, and understand the connection between them and its financial performance.

Who is really pivotal?

The crucial first step is to identify your pivotal workers. In most businesses, not all employees are created equal—a subset, which can vary across business units and may change as a company evolves, always plays a disproportionate role in creating value. Our experience suggests that workforces fall into six segments: top executives, knowledge workers, middle management, skilled workers, less-skilled workers, and bureaucrats. Depending on the industry, any of these groups can emerge as the most pivotal.

To identify the crucial group, consider your business model. If innovation and intangible assets generate a company's competitive advantage, for example, top management and knowledge workers are essential; clearly, a pharmaceutical company depends on the ability of its research scientists to develop new drugs. But where costs and services differentiate competitors, skilled and semiskilled workers might play a pivotal role. So if the strategy of a national restaurant chain rests on superior customer service, the organization must develop its less-skilled employees.

turning to the technology solutions 3

A leading provider of data storage used one such software tool to examine a competitive product-development bid that had previously been running significantly behind schedule. Among other things, the tool helped the company anticipate when management intervention would be required, thus all but eliminating the frequent and time-consuming scramble to get management to sign off on major decisions. Indeed, it speeded up the company's bidding process so much that the prototype was delivered on time, ahead of those from competitors, which were forced to drop out of the running for a $300 million contract.

In my experience, the use of these tools for managing human capital can give companies a clear performance advantage, whether they compete in knowledge-intensive industries such as software and biotechnology or in traditional industries such as manufacturing and retailing. The tools provide value through cost savings from increased utilization and lower turnover and through higher productivity—the result of improved training, more effective deployment, and targeted incentives that reward and promote the most productive employees.

turning to the technology solution 2

 In continuation of my previous post on technology solutions today i opine this..

In the case of the grocery chain, software tools could improve the recruitment and integration of newly hired employees by developing profiles based on their background and recruitment source. Such profiles would help the chain predict turnover rates and devise customized training programs to reduce them. (It might, for example, turn out that employees hired through word of mouth rather than job fairs tend to stay longer but need more training.) If turnover falls, other software tools can adjust hiring forecasts.

As for the IT firm, it could benefit from an emerging class of analytical tools that use complex algorithms and artificial-intelligence techniques to shorten project completion times. By sifting through a database of employee skill sets, the tools generate staffing solutions to meet current demand and to anticipate priorities for emerging projects. The deployment of these solutions at a technology-consulting firm has cut project completion times by 10 to 40 percent and overall resource requirements by 25 to 40 percent. The following illustration in my next post would explain this...

the challenge of organising a work force

To gauge the scope of the opportunity, consider the challenges facing a grocery chain and an IT-consulting firm. The grocery chain's pivotal employees are the low-wage baggers, checkers, and in-store managers who deal with customers, as well as the distribution clerks and shelf stockers. These two groups account for 60 percent of the labor costs of typical grocery stores, which therefore try to minimize employee turnover. Nonetheless, turnover rates at US grocery stores exceed 30 percent a year. High turnover makes it necessary to spend more money—perhaps $200,000 per store a year, or 40 percent of an average chain store's net income—on recruitment, training, and overtime. Even more important to the chain as a whole, perhaps, are the indirect costs: poor customer-satisfaction rates and low employee morale.

The IT-consulting firm, by contrast, employs mainly knowledge workers, who at any one time are allocated among several projects, many with shifting and competing time lines. The firm creates value by moving each employee to the most suitable project in the appropriate sequence. Its challenge—maintaining high levels of employee utilization and completing projects on or ahead of schedule while creating a lively work environment that brings its best to each engagement—is more complicated than the grocery chain's. Better workforce management provides the direct benefit of improved performance and lower labor costs as well as the less tangible benefits of establishing a reputation for reliable, innovative problem solving.

Unbound

As I read through Gurcharan Das’ "UNBOUND” I was reminded of poem by H.L.V Derozio-My Native land.

My country! In thy day of glory past
A beauteous halo circled round thy brow,
And worshipped as a deity thou wast.
Where is that glory, where that reverence now?
Thy eagle pinion is chained down at last,
And grovelling in the lowly dust art thou:
Thy minstrel hath no wreath to weave for thee
Save the sad story of thy misery!
Well – let me dive into the depths of time,
And bring from out the ages that have rolled
A few small fragments of those wrecks sublime,
Which human eyes may never more behold;
And let the guerdon of my labour be
My fallen country! One kind wish from thee!

- Henry Louis Vivian Derozio


Through the poem Derozio reminds the reader of India’s glorious past hopes to inspire Indians to fight for their freedom, their political freedom. Gurcharan Das is a modern day Derozio whose cause is not the political freedom but the Economic freedom of the largest democracy of the world. He too like Derozio expresses his emotions through his book. Derozio felt pain; Gurcharan Das expresses anger at the Nehruvian socialism which he blames for the bad shape of the country today. Both of them marvel at the glorious past of India and wish for it back.

Matching people and jobs

One of the most important problems a management personnel faces is to recruit the correct persons in the correct job.Sooner or later, every executive faces a similar people problem: as part of a large corporation, you may oversee, say, ten regional vice presidents, store managers, or unit heads and must assign them effectively. You know that the adroit management of small variations in their preferences and skills can make a marked difference in their productivity—and in your company's earnings. Sorting out the possibilities for those ten managers confronts you with 3.6 million permutations (Exhibit 1). Multiply the challenge as you move down to your managers' direct reports and to their direct reports, and the complexity of the task becomes truly mind-boggling.

              Faced with so many possibilities, most companies abandon the attempt to make rational choices and instead merely guess how best to assign employees to jobs. By treating people with diverse skills as an undifferentiated resource, these companies forfeit the chance to make substantial gains in productivity, profitability, and personnel development. Moreover, deploying employees more effectively is only the start. A manager who wants the best people to do their best work must anticipate the company's workforce requirements, provide training tailored to individual goals, and reward employees for hard-to-measure contributions such as coaching. It is thus no surprise that a systematic and continuous approach to fitting the right person to the right job at the right time has long been the Holy Grail of workforce organization. But most managers, search as they might, come up empty-handed. Few companies understand which employees are essential or how best to structure their workforce. As a result, human capital—the skills and knowledge of employees—too often remains an untapped performance lever. This is all going to change now!! want to know how? keep reading my blog!!