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Owing to Covid-19, businesses had to reshuffle and restructure their processes to adapt to the new circumstances. Goal setting is one of the significant aspects that were vulnerable to change for almost every organization. To sustain employee productivity and meet the client demands, the restructuring was very much needed, and businesses, especially SMEs, have to plan according to the fluctuating times.
To discuss this, we were joined by Mr. Srinath Gururajarao, who has a vast experience of handling various HR functions for many renowned organizations. In the conversation with Anjali Bhole Desai, and Sanjay Devudu, Srinath shared his expertise and advice that SMEs can learn.
Businesses Are Innovating Themselves
“Since the commute and challenges of availability are nullified, we amended the allowances to suit the current times. We redirected the allowances to giving outcome-based and result-oriented benefit structure,” said Srinath. He added that this step was very well received by their employees and motivated them to contribute more, resulting in increased engagement and productivity by 25%. Talking about the manufacturing industry Srinath told that most of the businesses tried innovating themselves.
“Some manufactured products did not make relevance in the context of Covid-19 owing to low consumption. So, they innovated and rehashed their way of manufacturing the outcomes to a different product altogether to serve the demand.” He refers to P&G as a classic example which saw the opportunity to focus on making hand sanitizers during the lockdown.
Re-Routing The Compensation Structure For Motivating Employees
Answering Sanjay’s question on Nexval’s employees’ goal-setting Srinath has said that they did not change or dilute any of the employees’ goals instead re-routed the compensation structure in a way that it motivates employees to do more. With enough time available in their hands, employees can take the liberty to take up the extra tasks and get rewarded for the same. Adding to that Srinath said with this initiative, they could attain more democratic willingness to add the discrete energy and increased contribution.
Shaping The Culture Of Volunteering
Srinath quoted that objectives are to be married with results; if not, then they are silos. To match them, we communicated our managers to define the model they wanted to add that has changed due to the current scenario. As commute is totally reduced and there is a lot of time in their hands, employees didn’t know how much to engage apart from defined work.
The fear of job loss has shadowed our employees as well, and they were voluntarily coming forward to get new assignments said Srinath. He further elaborated that the culture of coming along has been built over time, but made sure that they are not stressed much. “We had tools that trigger alerts for employees who are working past the defined hours,” told Srinath.
Top Question – Q&A Session
Q: “How do you setup the OKR model itself and make managers understand this?”
Srinath addresses the query by referring to a Sales analogy, “The period between the lead generation to contracting can take around 1-2 months or more depending on the industry. Depending on the sales cycle, you can re-align yourselves to how far can this period be adjusted which is attainable” said Srinath.
Objectives need to be simple in terms of communicating expectations and results from the resource. Also, there should be a direction given when it comes to results, and the direction is to be guarded by the philosophy of the measure you take. All the objectives cannot be represented mathematically, such as culture and engagement. Trying to describe each objective, mathematically helps in reducing the ambiguity. Srinath further suggested that for hard aspects, there should be certain objectives defined as small as five and give the direction of what the expected result is. The vital part of any goal setting or exercise is to have a handshake in full and cannot be thrust upon as it causes misalignment, which affects engagement and results.
To learn more insights, practical examples and Q&A session make sure to watch the whole session below. Also, follow us on social media for updates on upcoming sessions for SMEs.
