Human Resource
“No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.” – H. E. Luccock, Professor
The above quote aptly elaborates the importance of building a team with the right composition of required expertise. This stands true for not just music but all other aspects as well.
Your team is going to be the warrior for conquering the mammoth task of ERP implementation. So, you are required to put conscious efforts to build a solid team and strengthen the bond between your team members. A well trained and motivated team can do wonders.
Please refer to the following points that will help you manage your workforce effectively.
Vision & Mission of Company
Your relationship with the new joiner could begin on the transactional model. However, if you want to nurture this relationship to something deeper, where you expect an alignment with the company’s goals, you as a business leader will have to be more vocal and expressive about it. Do share what motivated you to form this company? And what change do you want to bring about by running it?
Team Building
There is a difference between colleagues working in the same office, and a team working towards a common goal, like a sports team. Do you colleagues have a sense of alignment as strong as a sports team? It takes additional effort to bring in that sense.
Common Chat Groups
At Frappe, we use Telegram for all the official updates, discussion business ideas, rejoicing collections from the customer’s, and also discussing some serious topics like slow growth rate. These common topics also give a team a sense of belongingness in a bigger group, more than their own deliverables.
Periodic Offsite
In a good team, each team member knows other teammates as a person. They are aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and accept them as a person. This requirement is spending time together, beyond the office structure and beyond the internal meet-ups. Offsite is the great way to enable this. If you want to organise one, refer to the blogs which describe how each team offsite has gone at Frappe. You will find some guaranteed drama in it.
Weekly Open Forums
This is also a good tool to break ice with your teammates and indulge in various activities for strengthening the bond between them. Knowing each other better will result in increased productivity. Open forums also provide a solid platform for the team to share their views on a wide range of topics from technology to current affairs. It ultimately helps in overall growth of the team.
Monthly Open Days
At Frappe, we have followed this for more than a decade now. Even though Frappe promotes freedom at the workplace, it comes with accountability. Open days are a great platform to showcase your accomplishments and highlight any bottlenecks. This monthly activity helps other teammates get the context on what different teams are up to in the organisation.
Transparency
Treating everyone equal can also bring in the feeling of belonging within the organisation. Hence, do ensure to provide a common platform where you encourage people to propose ideas to take the company to the next level. At Frappe, we use Gameplan as a tool to let everyone share their ideas.
Career Path
An individual joining your organisation has some career goals as well. He/she is looking for an answer if staying around in your company will help them achieve their career and personal goals or not.
You as a business owner will have to go step ahead and provide a model which helps your colleagues envision that if they stayed around in your company for longer, their career ambitions would be honoured as well.
If this clicks, you will automatically observe the reduction in the iteration rate. Here is the band's system being followed internally at Frappe.
Fair Pay
Pay is a touchy subject, and its discussion without the cabins is considered a taboo. It’s the elephant in the room! If you want to retain the best of your talent, and not lose to your competition or funded start-ups, there is no other option than offering a fair pay.
We have discovered partners paying as low as INR 12,000 to consultants and complaining about attrition rate. If you look closely, the pay itself is the answer to it.
We at the same time don’t recommend partners to invest more without projects. Be lean, but ensure your pay is on-par with the market standard. Only if you take a step to match, you can demand standard outcomes from them.
Performance Measurement
The clear expectation from the employee gives them direction. Do set a clear monthly and quarterly goal. Do leave some space to honour those impulsive ideas, so that you don’t miss the magic movement.
At Frappe, we follow open-days, GamePlan posts and Weekly 360 degree review as tools for the performance review. You can also opt for the KRA and KPI based approach, if that suits your culture and helps your team identify the specific deliverables.
If you are going this route, ensure to set output as (for example) Customer Rating, Go-live, % growth in website visit as a parameter. It’s different from the input measures like answering issues, doing implementations and doing SM posts. If you measure output, the team will be conscious of the quality aspect of the delivery as well.
Mental Health
We, the humans, are the most complex machines, and need to be handled very candidly. This is caused not just due to work pressure, but also external factors like loneliness, family issues, excessive screen time, disturbed sleep habits and what not. As we are saying that we are a team, it’s important we also do frequent health check-ups in this team, and help those in disturbed cycles come onto the right track.
You can get the pulse of mental health via polls. Frappe uses telegram chats for these polls. The company also organised group and individual sessions with the counsellors, so that we can help our teammates recover and deliver better to the team's goal.
Employee Training (Internal Or External)
The growth of your business will depend on the efforts taken by you to upskill them. We are living in the era of rapid technological advancements and innovative leadership methodologies. In order to establish a sustainable business, we have to make sure that we are not getting stagnant on the technical as well as managerial front.
At Frappe, we conduct monthly training programs on a wide range of topics for our employees through internal as well as external resources. The workshops conducted at Frappe on Leadership, Emotional Quotient, Communication Skills, Writing Skills etc had an overwhelming response.
Ensure that you are taking conscious efforts on employee training to make them feel part of the organisation's long term goal.
Breaks
It’s important for us to detach ourselves to see the bigger picture and get different ideas to address our problems. Ensure you offer these breaks in the following form, so that each teammate comes back fresh, energised to work.
Weekly offs: As per the standards in the services business, Saturday and Sunday are the weekly off. We empathise that you might be hand-to-might as an organisation to offer this luxury. Do initiate in some capacity like alternate sat off and keep pushing for all Saturday and Sunday off. Do remember that if you are facing an iteration of employees, getting work-done on Saturdays isn't paying off that well.
Yearly Leaves: Honour the leaves as offered by the rule of land, without the fear of leave cancellation and judgements. Trust building is like a hand-shake. If you want your teammate to work towards a common goal, you have to take the initiative by trusting them for leaves and small requests.
Checklist for HR
| Checklist | Description |
|---|---|
| Vision and Culture | * Update on the website |
* Have company wide session * Common chat and forums * Team building activities * Check pulse of engagement with anonymous / non-anonymous polls | | Pay | Review in the standard market, and compare with your pay. Ensure parity | | Break | Ensure weekly offs as per the industry standards | | Mental Health Check | Target 100% mental health stability. Helps employees understand the causes of disturbance and guide on following best practices | | Career Path | Develop a career path. Link it with performance and pay. |
