HCL has a $1Bn Quarter, celebrates it with Free equity to Employees!

Even as IT companies in India are reporting mixed results with a few companies beating industry estimates and few faring poorly, HCL Technologies has hit a home run in its latest quarterly results.

To get a better sense of HCL Technologies achievement, a comparison with the same quarter in 2008 reveals that the company has doubled its quarterly revenue in 3 years. It is noteworthy that majority of IT companies are battling a tough environment as the economy in the US and Europe continues to be shaky.

HCL Technologies has chosen to celebrate its billion dollar quarter in a rather special way. The company has declared a ‘Milestone Share Program’ for its employees which essentially is HCL’s way of sharing the spoils of a stupendous quarter. HCL shared the details about the ‘Milestone Sharing’ program in an official press release,

Employees who are on the company’s rolls as on Oct 14th, 2011 will receive a minimum amount equivalent of 5 shares* and a maximum amount equivalent of 10 shares based on years of tenure at HCL. The company has budgeted an amount of Rs 25 crores for this initiative.

Now, employees being awarded company stock is not entirely new and Infosys did a similar exercise on completing its 30 years and gifted its employees company stock.

What is interesting and commendable about HCL Technologies program is that it has chosen to do the same centered around quarterly performance. Some way to hold on to the bold ‘Employees First’ image the company has chosen to build its brand on.

What are your thoughts on HCL’s gesture to celebrate a blockbuster quarter by rewarding its employees?

Track.in

20 Calls to Change Your Attitude

Most sourcers would rather admit their mothers wear Army boots than admit they’re afraid of the phone. This reluctance to own up to the real matter at hand only makes things worse. Admitting we’re all human is the first step in getting the help so many of us need.

You may have surmised at this point that you’re not alone. Just about every sourcer I know (including me) has dealt with these issues.

So, the very first thing you have to do is get over it. So get over it.

Next be willing to admit that you’d like to fix this troubled aspect of your existence.

The final step is to do something about it, and we’re about to embark on that process.

Realizing that everyone deals with the same simple realities of being human and that it’s really not that big of a deal and really only warrants laughing at ourselves, allows us to proceed.

The root cause of your fear, in most instances, is placing your own destiny into the hands of others. It’s allowing stinkin’ thinkin’ into your game — that conversation that reroutes itself constantly through your head that tells yourself you’re a loser.

This causes the next effect of not wanting to hear the mantra from others. This, in turn, causes you to hang back in your efforts to win the prize, whatever that prize may be.

It causes you to shrink back. You allow the thought that you’ll screw things up or, worse yet, others will think less of you. Allowing this to happen stops you from achieving your goals.

Here’s the mindset you’ve got to get into: Who cares? Who cares if the Gatekeeper turns you away? She’s only one of many. It’s a good bet the next one is going to receive you warmly and help you. Stop focusing on the one who wouldn’t let you through — even she can be sidelined. There’s always a way into a company, no matter the ferociousness of the Gatekeeper. One of the signs of a great phone sourcer is this ability to go immediately around frontal resistance. You can do it and it’s not a fluke when you do!

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received online was someone who commented in a string that the word “should” should never be used (except in this instance, of course). That commenter was eminently right. “Should” thinking leads to guilt and frustration. When we think we “should” be one way or another, that we “should” do something rather than not, that another person “should” or “shouldn’t” do this or that, we set ourselves up for immense disappointment and ultimate failure.

Stop beating up on yourself. The only “should” you should be considering is that you should be kinder and gentler towards yourself. Placing too much importance on what others (may) think about us is one activity that should be jettisoned out of your backpack as soon as possible.

Here’s an exercise for getting it done. Do this today, tomorrow, or the next day, but do it soon! Make a list of 20 companies where you know the people you need to hire are already working. List out their vital info including their main phone numbers. Don’t forget to include a little preliminary research like three to five people on the inside of the company you can offer up to the Gatekeeper if she tells you she needs a name to transfer you (and some will). When the Gatekeeper answers and she tells you her name (and most of them will), repeat her name and say this:

“Hi, _________. My name is _____________. I’m trying to reach the quality department. Can you transfer me?”

See what she says/does.

If she says she needs a name, give her one and then ask her for that person’s extension so next time you don’t have to bother her. If she moves to transfer you, see if you can’t quickly subtract a little more info out of her before she sends you packing.

“Before you transfer me, can you tell me who you’re transferring me to?”

Sometimes she will tell you, and it’s usually either the administrative assistant for the department or the head of the department. Try not to sound too interested. Press a little more out of her. “In case I get disconnected can you tell me the extension?”

If you do as I said above I guarantee you about one third of your Gatekeepers will transfer you to the department after your first inquiry to be transferred. About one half will ask you for a name and transfer you to one of the names you give her. The few remaining — you won’t be able to get past on this, your first call, no matter what song and dance you offer.

While you’re doing exactly as I’ve asked you to do above, don’t sweat what you have to do next. For now, just concentrate on talking to that Gatekeeper. Don’t veer from what I said above. To say more is to say too much. To say less is to not say enough.

Concentrate on the baby steps. Ask one question at a time and answer only one question at a time. Learn what it feels like to act and succeed with my suggestion above and bask in the glory of your success.

We need to stop idling and wondering about our own right to be in a room. We need to begin acting boldly, to stride purposely up to the first person standing nearby, stick out our hands, and say, “Hi, my name is Maureen Sharib. What’s yours?” and allow that to be your calling card, your entrance ticket to the party of all parties: LIFE.

- Viral Thaker.

Every one want's to be preped up.. motivated...

... The question is: how do you motivate yourself? Here are several tips I've tested and tried to find them effective for self motivation:

1. Have a cause

I can't think of a more powerful source of motivation than a cause you care about. Such cause can inspire you to give your best even in the face of difficulties. It can make you do the seemingly impossible things.

While other causes could inspire you temporarily, a cause that matters to you can inspire you indefinitely. It's a spring of motivation that will never dry. Whenever you think that you run out of motivation, you can always come to your cause to get a fresh dose of motivation.

2. Have a dream. A big dream.

"Only as high as I reach can I grow, only as far as I seek can I go, only as deep as I look can I see, only as much as I dream can I be."

Your cause is a powerful source of motivation but it's still abstract in nature. You need to make it concrete in the form of a dream. Imagine how the world will be in the future. Imagine how people will live and work.

Having a dream is important because it's difficult to be motivated if you don't have anything to shoot for. Just think about people who play basketball. Will they be motivated to play if there is no basket to aim at? I don't think so. They need a goal. You need a goal. That's what your dream is for.

But just having a dream is insufficient. Your dream must be big enough to inspire you. It must be realistic but challenging. It must stretch your ability beyond your comfort zone.

3. Be hungry

"Wanting something is not enough. You must hunger for it. Your motivation must be absolutely compelling in order to overcome the obstacles that will invariably come your way."

To be truly motivated, you need to have hunger and not just desire. Having mere desire won't take you through difficult times since you don't want things badly enough. In many cases, hunger makes the difference between the best performers and the mediocre ones.

How can you have hunger? Your cause and your dream play a big role here. If you have a cause you care about and a big dream related to it, you should have the hunger inside of you. If you think that you are losing hunger, all you need to do is to connect again to your cause and dream. Let them inspire you and bring the hunger back.

4. Run your own race

"I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself."

Comparing yourself with others is an effective way to demotivate yourself. Even if you start with enthusiasm, you will soon lose your energy when you compare yourself with others.

Don't let that happen to you. You have your own race so how other people perform is irrelevant. Comparing yourself with others is like comparing the performance of a swimmer with a runner using the same time standard. They are different so how can you compare one with the other?

The only competitor you have is yourself. The only one you need to beat is you. Have you become the best you can be?

5. Take one more step

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."

When you meet obstacles along the way, there could be the tendency to quit. You may think that it's too difficult to move on. You may think that your dream is impossible to achieve. But this is where you can see the difference between winners and losers. Though both of them face the same difficulties, there is one thing that makes the winners different: the courage to continue.

In difficult situations, just focus on taking one more step forward. Don't think about how to complete the race. Don't think about how many more obstacles are waiting for you. Just focus on taking the next step.

6. Let go of the past

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could."

Believe it or not, one of the best demotivators is your past. Your past can drag you down before you realize it. Your past can give you a heavy burden on your shoulders.

The good news is it's a burden you don't have to carry. Take it off your shoulder and leave it. You might make mistakes in the past. You might disappoint others with what you did. But it's over. It's already in the past and there's nothing you can do about it.

Today is a new day and you have the chance to start again. No matter how bad your past might be, you still have a bright future ahead waiting for you. Just don't let the burden of the past stop you.

***

Don't settle for mediocrity. Let your self motivation take you to excellence.

Perpendicular People, Jobs and Recruiting

Recruiting is about to be forced to start looking for people and assessing them in very different ways than they have.

The nature of organizations is transforming right under our noses, but most of us are too deep in the forest to see what is happening. Over the past 100 years business owners and human resources folks created the concept of a job as a way of looking at and doing work. We define a job as a set of skills, experiences, and activities that a single person does. We record that set of skills, experiences, and activities in a document we call a job description. The idea is that many people, each doing a little thing, will produce something larger and more complex than they could have produced themselves.

Recruiters and hiring managers look for the people who are very good at doing the "little thing." Recruiters and hiring managers use the lists of skills and experiences to search for people and assess them by looking for the ones that match the defined requirements.

This worked fairly well in the mechanistic, industrial world where there was some correlation between experience, training, and performance. In those kinds of organizations, it may still work well. But fewer and fewer organizations do this kind of work. Instead they need people who can do much bigger things and think more broadly. They are looking for out-of-the-box ideas and disruptive solutions to create innovative products and services and meet the far-more-complex needs of their clients and customers. They need people who are willing to experiment and take risks to find a disruptive solution. The old idea of cataloguing the required skills, experience, and activities runs out of gas. We don't know what these skills, experiences, and activities are; they change constantly and they are interdependent on others in our team.

Many recruiters to my knowledge already know this in their gut, but have trouble expressing it or explaining it.

They know that work is more cross-functional, requires more collaboration and sharing, and relies less on how things were done in the past. Jobs today are harder and harder to define as they are constantly morphing around us. Nothing remains constant for very long. Part of the reason we have lost 14 million "jobs" since the start of the recession is because of this confusion. The "work" these people were doing, for the most part, has not gone away. It has been diffused into the organization or been transformed into technology. In some cases it may have been sent somewhere else, but this is temporary until a way to automate or eliminate the need for it is found.

New jobs will have an expectation of scope, responsibility, and effectiveness that we have primarily only seen in law firms and consulting companies until now. These new jobs will not be static and will require an eclectic set of skills. For example, a very successful WordPress template creator, who works for himself, started out as a computer science major. He then moved to engineering and after a brief stint as a computer engineer became a graphic designer and typographer. This then led him to start a business writing code to create beautiful templates noted for their outstanding focus on fonts and colors. He combined several "jobs" into one, but had to start his own business to earn money doing it.

I believe that we will evolve to focus on roles people can take on, rather than on specific skills and experience. We will look for people who have the ability and the mindset to find where they can add value on their own. And people who can move from technical to soft areas with ease will be in high demand. Many companies are experimenting with putting people into role-based work. Google, for example, often assigns engineers to a team where they work out, with the team members, the role they will play. The same happens routinely at IDEO, the well-known design firm in Palo Alto, California.

Organizations are realizing that when people are assigned to or choose roles to play in an organization they are often more creative and efficient than when they are confined to the duties prescribed by a title or position.

I just happened to read an amazingly thought-provoking blog written by IDEO CEO Tim Brown. In it he talks about IDEO's quest for Perpendicular (T-shaped) people, who he believes are the engine of IDEO's creativity and success. He describes these people this way: the vertical shaft of the "T" represents the depth of expertise/skill that a person exhibits, while the crossbar of the "T" represents the amount they are willing and able to collaborate. People who are T-shaped are well-rounded and versatile. They are better able to contribute their ideas to a discussion and are able to take on a variety of roles. It's no wonder that IDEO is one of the firms pioneering the change to formalize role-based work and reduce the work that is based on position or title.

We have a ways to go to fully realize the potential of role-based work, as we are caught in a web that pays and promotes people based on such criteria as degrees, years of experience, time in the current position, and so forth. T-shaped people, free to take on different roles as work changes, are far more valuable than those trapped in rigid silos of scope and responsibility.

However, Baby Boomer/hiring manager attitudes about work, laws, and policies will have to change, and there will need to be sweeping changes in how human resources thinks about compensation, promotion, and development to fully transform organizations.

------------------
Viral Thaker.

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Pranav Mistry - 6th Sense Computing (2/2)

Pranav Mistry - 6th Sense Computing (1/2)

Implementing an Agile Methordology on Talent Management Strategy

In case you haven’t noticed, the economy has changed (Yes, I said “changed” - Not ruined! It’s recovering at a steady pace; but it’s definitely not like what it used to be).

It’s been up and down like a yo-yo for the last decade, a fact that led Time to declare the first decade of the new century “the decade from hell” in a recent cover story. If you work in talent acquisition, talent management or HR, this yo-yo pattern certainly isn’t news to you. Surprisingly enough, it’s times like these that present the best opportunity to become more strategic as more managers open their minds to alternative solutions to improve productivity, save money, and move their organizations forward.

With this blog post I intended to get you to rethink your current talent management strategy and to change it so that it better fits turbulent economic conditions and trends that are most likely to stick around for awhile.

Times Change; Strategy Isn’t What it Used to Be

As a seasoned recruitment professional and a HR Consultant to more than a dozen brands, I must remain knowledgeable on economic trends and the strategies organizations can leverage to survive and, in many cases, thrive during various economic situations. While some might argue that a PhD is needed to understand the complexities of the global economy, it is my opinion that it doesn’t take a great deal of education to realize that for as long as man has recorded details on trade, there have been oscillating cycles of growth and decline.

Let’s go back in history & you might remember (or read about) the recessions of 1970, 1975, and 1983, followed by growth spurts in 1977 and 1984. Despite blips here and there, the U.S. economy and the Western economies (Indian and Chinese in particular) have grown at a relatively stable rate for some time.

However, if you look at the deviations in growth, you would note that since 1983, the cycles of economic growth and decline have become much shorter and for the most part less severe.

The economy of today is turbulent, and will continue to be for sometime as more and more feedback becomes available in real-time enabling organizations (including governments and corporations) to adjust their economic activities more quickly. Instead of investing in growth for three years and containing costs for four, organizations will more likely find themselves growing for one quarter, contracting for two, growing for three, contracting for one, etc.

Prior to 1983 (I hope my study on the statistical data was more or less accurate), developing an effective HR strategy wasn’t easy, but economic conditions did allow for making plans three, five, and in some really rare cases 10 years out. There was no need to change the HR or talent management strategy. All you needed was a strategy with three modes: a growth mode, a “freeze” mode, and a layoff mode to match the three corresponding economic cycles. Organizations were much less complex decades ago, often operating in narrowly defined regions and businesses with similar cycles. When economic decline occurred, it hit the entire organization uniformly, meaning that if pay cuts were called for, everyone was impacted. Economic trends have changed, organizations have changed, and how organizations develop talent management strategy must change too.

Thriving on Chaos

Economists prefer to label this new turbulent economic environment as a “dynamic economy,” but the old Tom Peters catchphrase, “thriving on chaos,” might be a better description.

No matter what you call it, leaders are beginning to realize that the speed of change is increasing at a breathtaking rate. Products that used to have a lifecycle of five years might now only be viable for a few months. New ideas, products, or benchmark business processes that in the past could be protected for decades, are now copied, stolen, and possibly even rendered obsolete within weeks.

Workers who used to be loyal and want to work at a company for life have been replaced with a new generation that might consider three years at a single firm to be the equivalent of a lifetime commitment.

Some areas of knowledge are doubling in a year, rendering many skilled workers struggling to remain relevant or become obsolete within years of being educated. It may not sound like reality, but if you step back and take all the change around you, you would realize very quickly that the old way of doing talent management no longer fits.

Characteristics of a Chaotic Business and Economic Environment

This dynamic business and economic environment has four defining characteristics:

• A blinding speed of change: everything changes so fast that the things that worked well last year will not work at all next year.
• Dynamic of almost-impossible-to-predict change: rather than things evolving in a predictable way, so many options are now available in nearly every aspect of being that the direction of change has become irregular and almost impossible to predict. Plans or forecasts that deal with cycles greater than 18 months have no chance of being accurate.
• Inconsistent/non-uniform change: rather than things changing in the same way at the same time across the entire organization, some parts of the business and some regions are going up while others are going down.
• Obsolescence demands complete replacement: while in the past we could often refine or update existing products and processes to keep them viable, the new environment requires that most be shelved and completely replaced with a different approach. Routinely making obsolete your own products requires a level of innovation and speed that that must be classified as several levels above the historical continuous improvement model. Can you imagine one of your teenage children even considering using a perfectly operational reconditioned mobile phone that is two years old? In this new world, we don’t fix things. We replace them with the latest model.

Six Capabilities of Any Agile Strategy or Approach

Whenever you’re faced with a situation where the speed of change makes accurate forecasting and planning virtually impossible, there is only one feasible approach that can guarantee success. That approach is known as agility or Agile Project Management Methodology. Agility is a term that has been used by CEOs for years, but it’s now time that we embrace it in talent management and HR.

Agility calls for six major capabilities, including:

1. Moving fast: reacting almost immediately to problems and opportunities.
2. Accurate movement: moving fast isn’t enough; you also have to routinely hit your target while moving fast.
3. Simultaneous movement: rather than waiting for one action to be completed before starting another, many actions must occur simultaneously (multitasking).
4. Many directions: rather than moving in a single direction, agility means moving in many directions, probably at the same time.
5. This and that: traditionally if you aimed for one goal (i.e. low costs) you would assume that another “counter goal” (i.e. high quality) would have to be sacrificed. When you are agile, you expect to reach both goals, even though they might be on opposite ends of what was traditionally considered to be possible.
6. No new resources: traditionally, in order to do more, you needed more resources, but agility calls for using your resources more effectively with less waste and idle time. Minimum Inputs to get Maximum Output = Maximum Efficiency.

In fact, much like playing the carnival game “whack-a-mole,” being agile means more than just moving fast. It means in order to be successful, you must move fast, hit hard and accurately, but also while dealing with lots of uncertainty!

The Definition of an Agile Talent Management Strategy

An agile talent management strategy is a strategy that is designed to increase the overall productivity and capabilities of the workforce by rapidly shifting, in a coordinated manner, talent management approaches, tools, and resources in response to the dynamic economy, a changing talent marketplace, and the changing needs of your major business units.

It abandons an emphasis on the one-size-fits-all model in use by many organizations in favor of a one-size-fits-one model. It generally requires a significant increase in the use of contingent workers and alternative labor types. In executing an agile talent management strategy, organizations will need to be prepared to rapidly shift resources between talent management processes including recruiting, retention, training & development, redeployment and releasing “surplus” talent (Benched Resources or Talent), as business needs fluctuate.