3 Tips Meningkatkan Kinerja Karyawan dengan Social Media

Bagaimana dampak social media and HR terhadap dunia kerja memang patut dicermati oleh praktisi SDM mengingat sebagian besar karyawan mereka adalah generasi muda yang hampir semuanya adalah pengguna aktif social media.

“Bagaimana pun, social media telah banyak mengubah perilaku mereka, sehingga banyak kebijakan perusahaan yang harus diselaraskan dengan perilaku tersebut,” papar Nukman Lutfie, pakar online strategist yang juga founder of PortalHR..

Nukman lantas menjelaskan, social media seperti facebook yang telah menyedot jumlah pengguna terbesar di Indonesia, twitter yang meraih sekitar 20 juta pengguna, belum situs-situs forum, blog dan situs lainnya telah mempengaruhi karyawan sedemikian rupa. 

“Salah satu efeknya adalah semakin terbukanya informasi, baik mengenai diri karyawan sendiri, termasuk informasi penting tentang perusahaan. Sisi positifnya adalah praktisi HRD menjadi lebih mudah mengenali mereka,” katanya.

10 Smart Risks That Every Business Should Seek Out

Being a risk taker in business is not the same as being reckless. Nevertheless, the word “risk” has a negative connotation to most of us, implying danger and possible loss. For true entrepreneurs, risk is viewed as a positive, with its implied challenge to overcome the unknown and hitting the big return.

In fact, risk is an integral part of life, as well as every business, yet so few people learn to manage it properly, or even want to think about it. One way to learn is to understand better how successful entrepreneurs approach risk, and look at actual strategies they use for success.

I found a great summary of key strategies used, with life stories, in a book titled “The Risk Takers,” by Renee and Don Martin. Here is their list, with a little prioritizing and comments of my own:

Talent Shortage or Shortage of Creative Talent Strategies?

A lot of people are blaming the lack of talent on the “shortage of critical skills in the U.S.” I think most of the perceived shortage is based on a shortage of creative talent strategies.

In an era of high unemployment, many, employers expect immediate plug-and-play candidates, new employees who come prepared with the skills and training to be productive immediately upon entering the workplace.

Some employers blame the school systems for not educating students with the critical skills employers need. The employers that blame the lack of resources on the “talent shortage” might look in the mirror and ask, “What have I done lately to create a strategic talent pool for my organization?

Employers need to utilize creative talent strategies to grow their own talent pools. It is up to employers to build a creative talent pipeline.

10 Traits of High Performance Leaders

Achieving high performance in tough times is a serious challenge small business owners face.

The ultimate goal may be extraordinary business performance, but you can still get comfortable and slip into mediocrity.

To obliterate status quo, do you have what it takes to become a high-performance leader? Ten traits characterize the people who do.

Why Your Employees Are Leaving?

One day when I was out getting a coffee, I overheard a man talking on his cellphone.
“We need to be stricter with our hiring practices next year,” he said. “We want to keep them past a year.”

I wanted to turn around and tell him, “Maybe you don’t need to be stricter with your hiring practices. You can bring them in but you’re not keeping them. It could be your corporate culture.”

Is Your Smartphone Making You Less Productive?

Mobile devices have exacerbated an always-on work culture where employees work anytime, anywhere. They've contributed to the blurred distinction between when you're "on the clock" and when you're not. Service industry professionals are especially tethered to these devices.

There's an assumption that using smart devices boosts productivity, since they allow us to work constantly. But, we're also jeopardizing long-term productivity by eliminating predictable time off that ensures balance in our lives. Is the obsession of regularly checking email really helping anyone's bottom line? Are the unrealistic expectations these devices facilitate not setting staff up for burnout?

From my experience, this hyper-connectivity carries a cost to organizational productivity. Many months ago, in my Africa-based startup, my top managers decided to adopt a business engagement process where customers and staff could reach them 24/7.

There was a perception that if a customer or a colleague needed something and couldn't get it immediately, the firm would not be taken seriously. The staff was under intense pressure to be available whenever anyone called — it was simply expected. Six months later, we noticed that customer complaints were actually up, and team morale was down.

So, why were we spoiling dinner time for each other with calls that could have waited until the next business day?

In a forthcoming book, "Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24-7 Habit and Change the Way You Work," Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow provides insights on this fraught relationship with smart devices.

In an experiment that focused on mandating time off for consultants for at least one night per week, she noticed that — over time — their work lives improved, and they were largely more productive.

For the research subjects who followed her policy of disconnecting from work at night, 78% said that they "feel satisfied" with their jobs, compared to the group of people who ignored the policy, where only 49% noted the same sense of satisfaction.

Her results show that we're creating a self-perpetuating perception that working faster is better — even when speed may not be necessary.

The reality is that business processes have been changed by technology. Competition is now global and companies need to act fast to survive. Accordingly, we have institutionalized a system where customers and staff expect everyone to be always-connected.

And with that, 24/7 speed has become a key performance metric. The impetus to examine whether what we do requires 24/7 responsiveness is overlooked. We all work longer and harder, despite the possibility that we could work better. But since everyone is doing it, it's considered acceptable.

But, here's the thing: Business will not collapse if we don't respond to e-mail at 11 PM. Waiting until 9 AM has plenty of benefits that arguably outweigh the benefits of speed, such as giving ourselves an opportunity to think through the problem and provide a better idea that customers will appreciate.

Instead of acquiescing to the knee-jerk reflex of responding to every incoming message, we should put these devices in their place — that is, to serve us, and not the other way around.

Companies need to help employees unplug. (Of course, every business is unique, and must take its own processes into consideration. But for most companies, giving employees predictable time off will not hurt the bottom line.)

In my own firm, when we noticed that always-on was not producing better results, we phased it out of our culture.

A policy was instituted that encouraged everyone to respect time off, and discouraged people from sending unnecessary emails and making distracting calls after hours. It's a system that works if all of the team members commit to it.

Over time, we've seen a more motivated team that comes to work ready for business, and goes home to get rejuvenated. They work smarter, not blindly faster. And morale is higher.

Give it a try in your own company. As a trial, talk to your team and agree to shutdown tonight. I'm confident that you'll all feel the benefits in the morning.

Source

Ndubuisi Ekekwe is a founder of the non-profit African Institution of Technology. He recently edited Nanotechnology and Microelectronics: Global Diffusion, Economics, and Policy.

The Things Customers Can Do Better Than You

Many firms assume that customers can do just one thing of real significance: buy their products and services. It's time to seriously challenge that assumption, as many companies are doing by looking to customers to fuel their growth engines.

Facebook, for example, has close to 1 billion customers who don't pay a cent. Yet the company is receiving valuations of $50 billion and more — despite having just 3,000 or so employees — because of the extremely high-potential, non-purchasing value such customers provide. In a phrase, Facebook and other forward-thinking companies look to their customers to grow their businesses.

This isn't genius at work. In fact, entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, are simply recognizing — and acting upon — entirely obvious realities about customers and their desires and competencies, choosing to leverage these rather than fight against them, as so many firms do. Here are five examples:

Customers know more about each other than you know about them. That's the source of much of the stratospheric value placed on Facebook by investors. Imagine a traditional company that tried to generate the kind of information Facebook generates: real time data on what movies people are watching, where they travel, the books they're reading, the restaurants they've tried.

Facebook dispensed with all the research most companies would have tried to dig up, and instead focused on letting customers provide it. Westlaw, which provides legal research services for law firms, realized that its clients were interested in how they and the markets they serviced stacked up to other firms and markets.

So Westlaw created West PeerMonitor, which aggregates anonymized data on firms' financial and operational performance, collected from participating clients — which turned into a lucrative new business.

Customers are more credible than you are. That means they make better marketers for a firm than agencies or internal employees. SAS Canada, for example, had a serious customer retention issue several years ago — retention rates had declined from the high 90s to the mid 80s and were continuing to drop.

It was terribly frustrating to firm executives, because SAS software was doing an excellent job of keeping up with customer needs. The problem was, customers didn't realize this. A small group within SAS, led by Wally Thiessen, saw that it would be futile for SAS to keep trying to point this out, and instead built a team of 250 customer "champions" to do so.

With support from Thiessen and his team, SAS customer champions established regular events in more than 20 major cities, set the agendas, selected speakers (and made presentations, themselves) and stayed in touch afterwards in online forums and through e-newsletters. Result: retention rates rebounded back up to the high 90s.

Customers are more persuasive than you are. That means they make better sales people. Marc Benioff realized this in the early days of building Salesforce.com. Lacking the multi-million dollar budgets of competitors like Oracle and SAP, he relied instead on face-to-face meetings with prospects and customers in major city markets.

He found, to his surprise, that prospects at such events were much more interested in talking with SFDC customers than with him and his executive team, and found to his delight that 80% of prospects who attended the events wound up becoming customers themselves — an amazing close rate for any offering. And unlike sales people, SFDC's customer sales people didn't require a bit of training.

Customers often understand buyer needs better than you do. One of the great misconceptions still floating around is that customers can't articulate their needs, much less develop ideas for products to satisfy them.

A substantial body of well-established research has shown that many if not most successful innovations are customer-originated. In one compilation of studies of 1193 commercially successful innovations across nine industries by MIT's Eric von Hippel, 737 (60%) came from customers.

Companies who languish with poor success rates for their product development efforts should consider looking outside to customer innovators for this.

Based on such research conducted by von Hippel and others, 3M's Medical-Surgical Markets Division tried a last gasp project in the 1990s to kick-start its consistently poor innovation record. A team was formed to bypass the internal innovation process and search for breakthrough innovations being created by outside "lead users."

When the results were compared with ordinary product development projects at 3M, the differences were dramatic: Lead-user innovations achieved average revenue of $146 million dollars in their fifth year, compared with $18 million for internally generated innovations.

So the message has been clear for years. The remaining big challenge is getting more and more companies to recognize this and to create ways to capture this customer knowledge in their everyday operations.

Prospects in your market would rather affiliate with their peers (your customers) than with you. By nature, most all of us are open to creative new ways to affiliate with our friends and peers — the very foundation on which Facebook was originally built.

Companies are often uncertain about being able to create opportunities to affiliate that customers would embrace— but they can, as long as they avoid making the common mistake that customers want to affiliate with the company. They want to associate with their peers — meaning your customers, not you.

One example of this is Procter & Gamble's BeingGirl community for teen and pre-teen girls, which was formed initially to promote feminine hygiene products because TV and print ads made its young audience uncomfortable. P&G enlisted experts to provide content, which did little to build interest.

After that misstep, P&G created forums so that girls could talk to each other about the issues and challenges of growing into young womanhood. And with that the site took off, with girls from around the world eager to get into the conversation — and with P&G able to market its products more subtly and effectively than before.

Customers are often more apt to trust and be interested in information if it comes from a peer, rather than a company.

So remember, there are many things your customers can do better than you. How are you involving your customers to help grow your business?

Source

Bill Lee is president of the Lee Consulting Group, Executive Director of the Summit on Customer Engagement, and author of The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset (HBR Press, June 2012).

Fixing Salespeople's Biggest Complaint: My Territory is Too Small

If you spend much time around salespeople, it won't take long before you hear them griping about the issue that is the profession's biggest trouble spot: disagreement over the market potential of a group of accounts or a territory.

Consider just a few examples.

A regional sales director says: "The Pittsburgh territory is vacant again. This is the fifth vacancy in two years. In exit interviews, the people who leave imply they don't have enough market potential to succeed."

A salesperson says: "My quota is 10% higher than last year. I've already maxed out the potential within my accounts. How am I supposed to get the growth I'm expected to deliver?"

A district sales manager says: "These district sales rankings are unfair. My district's market potential is below average and is spread across a huge geography - how can I compete with districts in easier-to-cover, more lucrative markets?"

These concerns, and many others, can be moderated with actionable measures of account or territory market potential.

Consider how market potential estimates helped a business within GE that leases over-the-road trailers to trucking, retail, and manufacturing companies. The business had ambitious revenue growth goals, and sales leaders wanted to focus sales efforts on the most attractive opportunities.

By using customer profile characteristics (such as fleet size and composition, company size, and industry) to predict customer potential, the sales force experienced a 33% increase in qualified leads in one year. GE also used the information to redeploy several sales territories into more lucrative markets.

This allowed the business to grow sales productivity by 7 percent and give back a budgeted $2 million for additional headcount — the productivity improvements allowed the sales organization to meet growth goals without adding people.

Smart sales forces know that market potential is the keystone for both strategic and tactical sales force decision-making. Market potential adds insight to sales planning. For example:

•Sales force strategy and scale. If you know market potential by account segment, you can scale and deploy sales resources appropriately against opportunities and can develop segment-appropriate value propositions and sales processes.

•Sales force deployment. If you know potential geographically, you can decide where to add sales headcount to capture unrealized opportunity, and where to reduce headcount without sacrificing coverage. And you can create territories that give everyone fair opportunities to succeed. This keeps salespeople engaged and allows the company to hire and retain top sales talent.

Market potential also enables better tactical sales force decision-making. For example:

•Targeting. If salespeople know account potential, they can allocate their time to better leverage opportunities.

•Coaching and performance management. If sales managers know account potential, they can coach salespeople on the best strategies for driving revenue growth. And they can better assess salespeople's performance, provide appropriate feedback, and rank salespeople on metrics that depend on the salesperson, not the territory.

•Incentive compensation, goal setting, and recognition. If sales leaders know account potential, they can design incentive compensation plans that reward salespeople for true performance, rather than for a lucky territory. They can set territory sales goals that are challenging, attainable, and fair to all. And they can select the most deserving salespeople for award trips and recognitions.

Many sales forces do not have estimates of local market potential readily available, and developing them requires work and creativity. Some approaches include:

•Buy existing data. In some industries, such as airlines and pharmaceuticals, data companies sell information on sales of all competitive products by account or local market.

•Deduce the data. If you can't buy competitive sales data, you can likely buy or find data that is good market potential surrogate. A greeting card company used U.S. Census Bureau data to estimate the potential of each retail store nationwide by looking at population and average household income within a 3-mile radius. A company that sold insurance and financing as part of a bundled service offering on retail sales of motorcycles used customer demographics, competitors, the presence of local credit unions, and the onset of spring weather (which triggered an increase in motorcycle sales) to predict territory potential.

•Build the data. You can conduct primary market research to create market potential data. A seller of contact lenses surveyed ophthalmologists across the country to determine the size of their practices and their need for the company's products. You can ask the sales force to conduct market research. A medical imaging company asked its salespeople to collect data on the type, manufacturer, and acquisition date of installed equipment at every hospital and imaging center in their territory.

Knowing local market potential significantly improves sales force decision-making. And estimates of potential — even imperfect ones — are better than no estimates at all. Sales organizations that are willing to invest to develop measures of account or territory market potential will see pay offs through improvements in productivity and higher sales and profits.

Written by Andris A. Zoltners, PK Sinha, and Sally E. Lorimer

Source

Can You Fix My Employees With Training?

“Continual learning is essential for survival in the workplace-instruction in the form of training is not. For workers who are already able to do what is expected of them, but are not performing to expectations, training is not the answer.” Robert F Mager as quoted in the ASTD Handbook for Workplace Learning Professionals p. 173

How often we suppose that the lack of performance is related to training. It is this very assumption that continues to breed frustration in many organizations and certainly fails to result in improved performance despite the fact that is exactly what most parties involved want.  Instead what happens looks something like this:

Manager- “My employees just don’t get it. They need to be trained on how to…..”

HR Pro- “I can set up the training, but if manager doesn’t support it back on the job, it will be a waste of time.”

Employee- “Training on this again. Don’t they know I already know this. I could teach this stuff.”

Trainer/Facilitator-“I don’t know why I am up here wasting my time. This people clearly don’t want to be here.”

So how do you prevent this in your organization? According to the quoted author above, a proper analysis is required to ensure the performance intervention will be successful.  That is a simple enough step. So where is the breakdown in the above scenario?

Simple, responsibility. Who’s responsibility is it to conduct the analysis? The manager blames the trainer, the trainer blames the trainees and/the manager, HR blames the manager, and the employee blames everyone!  Blame gets you in this scenario.

If this is common in your organization, you can change it. Take responsibility to start the analysis and involve the others in the process.

Source

Sheri Mazurek is a training and human resource professional with over 15 years of management experience, and is skilled in all areas of employee management and human resource functions, with a specialty in learning and development.

Kepemimpinan 100% Indonesia

Diskusi tentang gaya kepemimpinan yang efektif, baik dalam ranah politik maupun bisnis mungkin tak kan pernah ada habisnya.

Mulai dari apakah ada keharusan bahwa suksesi kepemimpinan harus diambil dari keluarga pendiri perusahaan hingga seberapa besar kemungkinan keturunan pemimpin akan mengambil tongkat estafet kepemimpinan masa depan.

Meski pro-kontra terkait kepemimpinan masih mendominasi, ada satu persamaan pandangan yakni bahwa seorang pemangku jabatan wajib memahami filosofi seorang pemimpin. Tanpa adanya kemampuan ini niscaya ia tidak akan mampu membawa organisasi yang dipimpinnya berkembang di masa depan.

Allan Murray (2012) dalam sebuah artikelnya menjelaskan bahwa filosofi dasar dari kepemimpinan ada pada bagaimana seorang pemangku jabatan mampu mengeksplorasi gaya kepemimpinan pada organisasinya. Artinya ia harus mampu mengadaptasikan gaya kepemimpinan yang dimiliki dengan kondisi yang dihadapi.

Jika timbul tuntutan untuk bertindak tegas pada situasi yang chaos, maka gaya kepemimpinan semi-otoriter dimungkinkan lebih tepat diterapkan. Dengan demikian, terdapat peluang bahwa seorang pemimpin akan menerapkan gaya kepemimpinan yang berbeda sesuai situasi yang dihadapi.

Di Indonesia, filosofi gaya kepemimpinan yang adaptif sebenarnya sudah ada sejak dahulu kala.Anda mungkin masih ingat dengan salah satu nilai-nilai asli Indonesia karya Ki Hajar Dewantara yakni Tut Wuri Handayani. Filosofi ‘Ing ngarsa sung tuladha, Ing madya mangun karsa, tut wuri handayani’ pada dasarnya merupakan warisan besar budaya bangsa yang tak hanya ditujukan bagi guru, namun juga dalam hal kepemimpinan.

Tidak hanya memberikan arahan dalam memimpin,filosofi ini mampu memberikan panduan bagaimana seorang pemimpin harus bertumbuh menjadi 'servant leader’ (baca: pemimpin yang melayani).

Pada term pertama ‘ing ngarsa sung tuladha’, seorang pemimpin Indonesia dituntut untuk menjadi role model dengan menjadikan kehidupannya sebagai contoh. Mulai dari contoh berpikir, berkomitmen, bertindak tanduk hingga rela berkorban demi kepentingan bersama.

Dengan memberi contoh tersebut,diharapkan pola hidup seorang pemimpin akan mampu menginspirasi mereka yang dipimpinnya untuk berpikir dan berbuat lebih baik bagi kepentingan bersama.

Term kedua, ‘ing madya mangun karsa’, pemimpin dituntut untuk senantiasa memberi semangat, ide dan prakarsa pada mereka yang dipimpin.Dalam era saat ini pemimpin dapat menciptakan stimulus yang kreatif dan inovatif pada tim untuk menghasilkan prestasi lebih baik.

Dengan pengelolaan pola kompetisi internal yang efektif niscaya inisiasi sang pemimpin akan mampu membawa institusi menjadi organisasi pembelajar.

 Terakhir ‘tut wuri handayani’, di mana seorang pemimpin dituntut untuk tidak hanya memberikan dorongan namun juga penentu arah perjalanan organisasi. Pada fase ini misi dan visi organisasi hendaknya menjadi pedoman utama bagi pemimpin untuk menentukan arah perkembangan di masa depan.

Semangat ini terbukti telah mampu membawa Indonesia pada kemerdekaan. Maka filosofi yang sama juga akan mampu membawa dunia bisnis domestik dan kehidupan bangsa pada hari depan yang lebih cerah. Selamat berefleksi, sukses menyertai Anda!

Aries Heru Prasetyo
Ketua Program Sarjana PPM School of Management

Sumber: Harian Seputar Indonesia, 3 April 2012 

Company Reorganization: How to Stay Employed

Your company is restructuring and many roles and jobs are changing. The “new organization”;may make sense for the “new strategy” but where will it leave YOU?

Restructuring can affect everyone. Some people may change departments, others may change responsibilities, and yet others may be asked to relocate.

So does this mean good news or bad news for you? Will you end up with a job you don’t like or lose your job altogether? Or is this the opportunity you’ve been waiting for?

Understandably, you may not like having to re-interview for what feels like your old job or  the new job that will replace it.  But don’t take this personally. If your boss values you and the quality of your work, this can be a great chance to gain a challenging and interesting role in the new organization. The newly defined position may be better than your old one! Remember, you have the experience and qualifications to do this job. So grasp the opportunity and make the most of the situation!

Tips for Re-interviewing

1. Take this seriously.
You are not guaranteed to keep your job, so this isn’t simply a “rubber-stamping” exercise. This process is just as serious as applying for a different job with a different company. However, your preparation is different from interviewing for an outside job. And the interviewing approach can be different. You probably won’t be given that “getting to know you” easy warm-up at the start of the conversation. These interviews are usually hard-hitting from the start. You’re expected to know the job and you have to prove that you’re up to the challenge.

2. Analyze the job and the required competencies.
List the most important skills needed for the job. You probably have the ability to do the work, otherwise you might have been laid off in the initial rounds of restructuring. What personal areas of competence are rewarded, expected and talked about within the company? What have you done that you were given positive feedback?

3. Prepare examples.
The interviewer will look for proof that you can do the job well. Have examples of your work fresh in your mind (depending on the position, you may want to tangible evidence). Be ready to discuss five to seven examples of your skills and accomplishments. It’s best to have a good balance of examples showing technical skills (perhaps demonstrating how you did something) as well as personal competency (perhaps showing how you dealt with a difficult situation or person). Use these examples when you’re asked questions. Remember to concentrate on those areas that you’ve identified as critical to job success.

4. Provide supporting evidence.
Be ready to back up your claims. You can tell people that you’re great at organizing, but your statement carries more weight if you support it with solid data. How did you or your team contribute to the timeliness of the project? How much money and time did the company save because you prepared the project properly? Consider the following: Sales/revenue you generated. Positive feedback your clients gave you. Problems you solved.  Initiatives you took, etc.

5. Prove your enthusiasm.
Your attitude can be as important as your knowledge and skills. There may be many capable people out there who are interviewing for the same position. The reason for hiring often comes down to “will this person fit and do well?”  Interviewers want to know if you have passion for the work. Will you bring a positive energy to the team or will you bring it down?

Career Success Tip:

If you treat this interview with the same importance and significance as a regular job interview, you’ll increase your chances of being successful. Know what your skills are, know what you’ve already contributed to the company and know how much you’re worth. Your preparation will pay off!

Marcia Zidle, a certified career strategist and business coach, works with high potential, high impact executives, managers and professionals to advance their careers and grow their leadership capabilities.