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Engage Employees Part 1: Why engage employees? Just stay focussed on business.

I have been seeing significant discussion on employee engagement and the futility of it. I completely agree with all those who think we should not engage employees and instead stay focussed on business. I recall meeting the Managing Director of a large cement manufacturing company during my consulting days, who told me that cement was produced by kilns and not people. He told me that investing in employee engagement was good for businesses where factor of production was  people- typically service industry. I told him that I completely agreed with him and requested him to educate me if he had patented kilns that his competitors did not have access to. I further asked him if that was the reason- his company was making huge profits while the others were not. He went on to explain to me that the kilns were manufactured by four companies in the world and all the cement manufacturers had similar kilns. He further explained that kilns ran on their own for 300 days and at that level of p
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Business and HR Part 2: Never have a PMS process for people

Performance Management System or PMS is believed to be an HR process to evaluate people’s performance in order to reward people, decide on increments, variable pay and promotions.    Therefore,    line managers see it as additional work.    One hears a usual rhetoric, “Should I do my business or should I spend time on completing PMS on the HRMS or discuss performance with team”.  I would strongly suggest that line managers should not waste time if PMS is for people.    They should stay focused on business.   However, imagine a situation where an organization employs 5000 people.  Can a CEO do everything to achieve his Objectives?  Or can the ten people in the leadership team do everything to achieve their or CEO’s objectives?  On the contrary while the leadership can provide direction, the real work is done by 4500 people at the bottom of the pyramid – salesmen, production engineer, maintenance engineer, bank teller etc.  Unless their objectives are aligned with objectives of the
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Business and HR Part 1: Is "Corporate Socialism" killing businesses?

Most Indian organizations and foreign companies operating in India could have done better than what they are doing. There are many reasons for suboptimal performance of organizations, across business, Government and NGOs. These are lack of appropriate capabilities, lack of training and development, lack of leadership, improper risk assessment, inappropriate strategy or business model. Different companies are plagued with some or a combination of these issues. All of us know that even if strategy or business model is slightly defective or if the risk was not properly assessed, the key to success is excellent execution. However, most companies demonstrate lack of excellence in execution. What is the root cause? The primary reason for lack of excellence in execution is "Socialism at Work", which cuts across most companies in almost all sectors in Asia and especially in India. If the organizations reward the high performer and low performer similarly, what is the incentive to
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