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In today's marketplace, outsourcing organizations compete not just on productivity, but on knowledge, service, and organizational responsiveness. To survive, they need to be “fast, flexible, focused, friendly and smart. Creating such an environment requires the know-how to create an organizational culture that brings out the best in people. The longevity & enthusiasm of a trained human resource impacts efficiencies and service quality. This ensures that training investments yield more value to the outsourcing company’s customers. All high performance organizations recognize that their culture is their “secret weapon” - the fertile soil from which excellence naturally grows.
To establish and nurture an environment that rewards both adherence to demanding performance metrics and strong, shared organizational values, we have to hire, develop, retain, and utilize not just our best and brightest employees, but all our employees. Competitive advantage depends far more on the knowledge, capabilities, and commitment of people throughout the organization — not only top managers or star performers. “Our people are our most important assets” isn't an assertion to be put in an annual report or a CEO’s speech, but a bottom line business reality. Organizations cannot provide exceptional service, achieve innovative breakthroughs, or respond rapidly to marketplace changes with an unmotivated, overwhelmed, or burned out workforce.
Creating this high performance environment where people feel challenged, excited and trusted, are able and willing to take risks and are rewarded for improvements, and know that results are celebrated, often requires flexibility within established working practices and behavioral changes. We can initiate this process by adhering to a few basic steps:
- Make our organization worthy of pride and passion by our employees based on what we do and, more importantly, how we do it
- Treat employees like valuable players - involve them, give them power and the information to be actively involved in making a difference to the organization
- Let employees specifically understand what is expected of them, what equals a job well done and how they should contribute and create value. Facilitate a culture of learning and innovation
- Provide them with regular and periodic feedback on how they are doing rather than only at the time of their performance appraisal. Consolidate talent and create in-house leaders
- Reward employees for the value they create and not just for being there. Provide them opportunity for career growth and skill enhancement
- Build an emotionally safe organizational climate, so that employees are stress free. Ensure that they have an adequate balance between their personal and professional lives
- Above all, treat the employees the way we want them to treat our company's customers
Creation of this corporate environment will ensure that the employees are full of enthusiasm & creative energy. They will want to do well; they will want to excel; and they will be delighted to “go the extra mile” for the company and its customers.
Dr. Nirja Sharma
The
author is the Director of Human Resources
at Motif, Inc., a specialized BPO (Business Process Outsourcing)
company providing back office transaction processing
services
which require decision making and personalized email response services to Fortune 500 clients with a five plus year track record of 100% client retention. Motif was ranked amongst the 'Top 10 BPO companies to work for in India' by IDC-DATAQUEST in their Employee Satisfaction survey, for the years 2004 and 2005.
(www.motifinc.com)
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