QCL Articles

How do you tell the people who hired you to find the problem and recommend a solution, that they are the problem – or at least, a large part of it, and, therefore, a large part of the solution? This is the dilemma that some of us face as management consultants: how to speak truth to power – and still get paid.

In the economic circumstances that we find ourselves, the knee-jerk response of most companies is to cut their largest expenditure; and, invariably, the largest expenditure is labour and its associated costs like recruitment, compensation and training. But it is precisely an organization’s people - its human capital – that can help it survive the dreaded “R” word.

Do you know what your employees are thinking? About your organization? About their co-workers? About management? About you? Should you care? Yes, you should! Because what people think influences how they act. And what your employees think – their attitudes, opinions, views, perceptions, likes and dislikes – influences how they behave and perform in the workplace, and ultimately impacts your organization’s effectiveness, efficiency and bottom line. Therefore, it is in an organization’s interest to find out what its employees are thinking, what’s making them tick and what’s not, what they’re happy about and what they’re not happy about; because it could make the difference between a successful organization and a not so successful one. How Do You Know What Your People Are Thinking?

What does it take to “win in the marketplace” in today’s competitive environment? According to former CEO of Campbell Soup and New York Times bestselling author, Doug Conant, “to win in the marketplace, you have to win in the workplace.”

“Employee engagement” is the new buzzword in management-speak today. No management journal, website, blog, newspaper article or magazine, (including this one) is without something on the topic. But is it just the latest HR “flavour of the month”? Or does it have some traction? Does employee engagement really make a difference in today’s business environment?What is Employee Engagement Anyway?There are probably as many definitions of employee engagement as there are people talking about it. We define it in terms of four Ss: three Ss we have borrowed from the international consulting firm Aon Hewitt, and one S we’ve added. Before they were acquired by Aon plc, Hewitt Associates, an American consulting firm, defined employee engagement in the following terms:

Employees first, customers second? That’s the title of a book by Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies, an Indian-owned US$2.7 billion IT services company with more than 60,000 employees operating in 26 different countries. The actual title of the book is Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down (Harvard Business Press, 2010). In his book, Nayar tells the story of a company that, in 2005, was losing market share, mind share, talent share. From the time he took over as CEO in 2005, Nayar began to promote his idea of "Employees first. Customers second." It is a practice that seems to be working for the company, as it has seen its revenues grow from US$762 million in 2005 to US$2.7 billion in 2010. What did Nayar do? He began by asking four fundamental questions abut the business:

For the past ten years, Quality Consultants Limited has been conducting employee surveys in organizations in the region, both in the public and private sectors, and the results come back consistently: poor communication, poor management/employee relations, poor leadership, poor human resource management practices. You get the impression from employees that work would be a better place – if it wasn’t for management.