How Workplace Culture Can Make or Break Your Employer Brand!

The one word that’s been trending in the corporate world and for all good reasons is “workplace culture”. Latest corporate researches uncover the fact that culture, employee retention and engagement are the top most challenges faced by business leaders.

 

But why?

 

Answer is quite simple! With global economy picking up fast, power is getting shifted from job creators to job seekers. Talented candidates get the power to select from multiple options available. So to be in the good books of these candidates, companies need to strengthen their employment brand and assure them that they are a great place to work at. Thus, now simply the job seekers are more interested in knowing what culture a company has, how happy employees and what steps they take to keep employees engaged instead of focusing on what the job description is.

 

Every company from a start-up to big conglomerate, are scratching heads to find out ways to prevent top talent from leaving. They are getting culture-driven and even realizing that focusing on this aspect gives significant payoffs!

Now the office spaces are becoming the vital part of making a great workplace culture. Mention of office space reminds me of the movie “Office Space” where the employees of an IT firm were disgruntled and repeatedly maltreated by the management. The real picture was quite true a decade back, but now businesses have started to believe that office culture and how management treats the employees, has a direct impact on overall company performance and productivity. To make a positive impact on these performance indicators, companies are increasingly taking the initiative to get more flexible, offer entertainment and lively office interiors for employees to help them release their stress and work more productively.

 

But, what culture actually means?

Is it the entire fun n frolic at the workplace?

Certainly not! It’s not always the fun activities going all around; it is also what happens at the floors when no one’s watching. It is set of behaviors, employee mind sets, values and how they feel about being a part of the company. Culture can also be demonstrated when everybody is on their desks and busy in their tasks. The very vibe of that place speaks loudly of its culture. The time at which employees get in and get out also explain the culture to a great extent.

The question is…How to achieve such culture at the workplace?

It is solely in the hands of the leaders. Their leadership demonstrates the culture. If you have a great bunch of true leaders, then it goes without saying that you have a great culture. If any discrepancy is there, work more on the leaders as leadership is the only driver of workplace culture.

With more tools available to engage employees, you can get on to the nerve of the matters that may affect the culture or put negative impact on employees. You need to understand that people are not motivated by perks or a good compensation only, it’s the passion, interest and zeal that brings them to work. So keep your employees happy and motivated!

Redefining The Traditional Team Model

(By : Prateek Sharma)

From our childhood days, we have been taught to adapt synergism at all stages; sometimes with mutual agreement and sometimes forced, but we all have that spirit running in our veins. 

Being a part of team boosts an individual’s potential to foster a meaningful and fulfilling way of working together. Engaged with a group of people having a common goal, on a worthwhile activity, can prove to be one of the most enjoyable and rewarding aspects of work. 

But what if the team model we knew from all these years is broken? 

By employing clever behavioral economics and considerable motivation factors, a team successfully works together and every member contributes his/her part to the fullest. But it’s not compulsory that each of the member shares great camaraderie with everyone or, say, “were friends”.

For instance, take the technology industry for consideration, where team structure has been given an entire new meaning with the introduction of agile methodology, regular scrum meetings and iterative development. This, along with social media communities, groups, lists and circles, minimized the need for fixed working routines, forced organizational charts and pre-defined seating plans, for the teams to perform better. 

As a consequence, the team rules have been rewritten and member roles are seeing major shift from a fixed to fluid deployment. 

Now is the era of teams who assemble for a fixed purpose, work according to common vision, analyze, plan, build, test, fix, release and then disassemble and perform the same cycle somewhere else and with someone else. 

Withal, being friends with team members could be difficult in this kind of working environment as people are rapidly moved to various teams as per requirements. However, it is quite possible that if any individual don’t feel comfortable in other teams then his/her performance might degrade considerably.

Thus, the need of the hour is that employees sideline their emotions at workplace to successfully adapt to the current culture. However, the sense of teamwork should definitely exist but it must not be confined to just one team. “Comradeship isn’t de rigueur in team for assured success; the team’s success depends on how its members perform together and arrive at their destined goal.”

Prateek Sharma is the Product Owner @TeamWise ( All in one HRMS Solution ), where he is responsible for technically administering and handling all products and features. With over 6 years of experience in software industry, Sharma is a master in applying product development technologies and devising innovative business strategies.

Managing Employee Life Cycle Through The Finest HRMS Solution - TeamWise

 A lot of balls juggle at the same time when it comes to HR activities or managing your organizational workforce. To keep your business’s head above water, HR need to create transparency in communication, handle remunerations, manage time and labor for optimized performance, administer company benefits and track employee skills to predict and manage future needs.


Current era marks as the new additions in HRMS, unlike before when it was meant only for hiring and payment. Thus to drive your business strategy in the right direction, utilizing a great HRMS solution is a must. Generally, HR time is mostly taken up by administrative works, leaving minimum time for analysis, planning and improvement. TeamWise is all set to balance this dissimilarity and will equip your HR Team to work smart.


“Take care of your employees and leave all HR activities to TeamWise – Your One Stop Solution for effective Human Resource Management.”

With TeamWise You Can:

Perform hassle-free recruitment.

Automate and accelerate all on-boarding activities to ensure a perfect start for an employee to the corporate journey. Our recruitment solution helps in ensuring complete transparency and control throughout the hiring process right from initiating resource request to joining of the employee. This not only quickens up the administrative processes, but at the same time makes the candidate evaluation process easier.


Analyze individual’s performance.
It enables you to identify and analyze employee performance through reports based on monthly performance tracking defining their contribution towards the organization. This further helps the employers to take crucial decisions best suited for fulfilling organizational goals and make future arrangements.


Track employee in-out timings.

A fully automated system for recording and managing employee attendance which can be seamlessly integrated with any time tracking devices such as Card swipe systems, Biometric readings, etc. The employee in and out timings are properly monitored to analyze the employee productive hours which eventually helps in generating the remunerations according to that.


Manage leaves and leave requests.

Our leave management system helps employees send leave requests and get approvals without any hassles. On the other hand, employers are provided with the ability of tracking the applied leaves and get the necessary reports as and when required.


Have a smart compensation management system.

With the payroll system provided in our HRMS, it is extremely easy to manage employee payrolls and other financial accounts without any errors. The hectic job of calculating various taxes can be easily performed in a single click with utmost accuracy and 100% precision keeping the attendance calculation in account.

 Identify and retain top talent

This system provides you the enterprise-wide visibility of your workforce so you can easily identify successive employees for key future positions. It simplifies this complex task by reviewing monthly performances and ensures success and growth of your organization. The top talent identified, then can be retained by providing training for their overall development thereby nurturing company’s benefits.


Handle employee grievances.

The grievance handling system makes sure that employees’ problems are handled before they are escalated and employees develop a sense of trust in the organization and its policies. The process includes assigning of complaints and monitoring its status until it is completely resolved.


Have employees give and take feedbacks.

Feedback system is extremely important in making your employees realize their performance and growth. This system sets a platform to give and receive feedbacks from subordinates, managers and supervisors on a regular basis based on the individual’s performance.

Carry out the overall workforce management with auditable records.

The dashboard provides a bird-eye view of the overall insight of workforce potential. It enables HR managers and senior executives to analyze HRM practices, employee statistics, organizational success, reports and any upcoming tasks. Along with this, employers can identify their competitive advantages and the areas where special attention is required.

Experience the ultimate TeamWise Advantage

TeamWise caters the HR executives with the most powerful system that will help them in improving recruitment and selection costs, reducing administrative burden, deliver organizational benefits with improved profitability, enhance the quality of day-to-day management, create a best-fit workplace environment and most importantly build a better workforce culture.

Dropping Employee Performance: Whose Fault Is It?

Has it ever happened that you are so contended with your great hiring and just waiting for the teams to thank you with positive feedback that you acquired a wonderful resource, but to your surprise, you get negative feedback from the team and the performance of that candidate is in negative numbers. 

Alas! Bad luck…But this might have happened to every one of you once in your career. You get to regret your decisions some time later, even being cent percent sure about the respective candidate at the time of joining. 

Though, underperformers are everywhere, but the worst case scenario is when smart candidates start to underperform. There are many reasons that contribute in deteriorated performance of these individuals.

 Some of the major contributing factors are listed here:

Unclear Goals or Deliverables: Many employees struggle so hard, but still fail to clearly understand what is expected of them. This cannot be completely their fault as their managers may give them vague or incomplete description of what exactly they want from these individuals.

Mistakenly Misjudged: Famous saying, ‘don’t judge someone through the cover’, same applies here. Sometimes, hiring managers just judge the candidate through the skills and qualifications written on the resume. They might overlook the other skills gap in front of the confidence shown by the candidate. 

Not the Right Fit: “Fit” is the keyword for today’s dynamic corporate scenario. It is probably most difficult to determine if a job candidate will be the right fit for the organization or not. Moreover, the success (or failure) of an individual very much depends on how he/she gels with company interests, goals and objectives.

Unhealthy Relations with Manager: This is the number one reason for any employee to underperform. Usually, managers fail to understand that their approach “one size fits all” does not work while managing different individuals.  Poor rapport with the supervisor or manager generally lowers down employee morale and will to perform. 

Being Underpaid: While many believe they don’t, but, compensations DO matter! Every employee wishes to be fairly and competitively paid. While an employee is in his/her learning phase, he/she may work being less paid, but a good performer cannot work in considerably less salary as per industry standards.

These are the major reasons why smart Employees underperform. To have a consistently higher performance from employees, organizations need to put some hard efforts in these areas and try to keep the zeal and enthusiasm intact within the employees. 

Is Your Talent Falling Prey To Biased Opinions?

HR professionals are keeping quite busy in compiling talent pool in their organizations! 

Companies are always looking out to identify, nurture, engage and retain employees who have the capability and potential to add real value to the organization, and thus HR teams always have their antennae out to identify those individuals. 

But, what you need to beware of is the single handed opinion of the line managers…

Your process of finding the best one may fall prey to a single biased opinion and that may lead to losing out on a potential candidate. Usually, HR’s have the tendency to take employee feedback from their immediate heads or seniors or line managers. These feedbacks, at times, could be a reflection of the inter-personal relation between the single individual and the manager. This could be quite different from the original one. 

For instance, if you take an individuals’ rating from his current manager, you can get a complete idea of what level of performer he/she is. In many cases, this could be true, but if you take his/her colleagues, team members and clients’ ratings as well, you never know you could have got a completely different rating! 

Thus, to overcome this bias, what you can do is trying using a well-planned talent-identification process where you can involve other colleagues, team members and customers to take an individual’s overall feedback. This should not be taken as an offensive practice, but can be used to identify the blind spots (if any) while judging an individual’s abilities. 

Therefore, HR people must try focusing on using the right data and analytics while making decisions as biased or partial opinions may make you miss out on some hidden internal talent. Talent Management System can be a solution, where employees can showcase their contribution, while their supervisors can rate them on the basis of what they have accomplished and not according to their personal opinions.