Today the organizations are facing challenges on different fronts than ever before, due to the advent of technology, demographic spread, linked economies and changing lifestyles. Due to the advent of World Wide Web and the increased mobility of people, the focus has shifted from nation states and societies, to the communities and more importantly to the individual itself.
The most vital asset of an organization is its people, since it’s they who convert low yielding resources to high yielding ones, thus creating the customer perceived value. In this context every employee counts, since they determine the future of organization. There comes the thought, how to create a high performance organization? In an economy filled with knowledge workers, the freedom, flexibility and mobility of employees are the key to enable volunteerism, thus extracting higher productivity. This is a challenge to the existing management theories and structures, which advocates employee supervision to extract employee productivity and accountability. Here is where the disruptive social networking technologies like web2 becomes handy, to achieve the best of both the worlds with employee- customer centricity.
Performance management is one of the core functions which facilitate organizational productivity. The existing performance management systems follow the assumptions and organizational hierarchy, based on employee super vision model. This impedes the creativity and volunteerism required, especially in the development sector. On the other side, the development sector also requires high accountability in terms of efforts, funds deployed and the resultant social impact. Businesses are a set of processes that are interconnected. In other words processes cannot stand alone, if we were to optimize them. When we address performance management process, we need to address the immediate interconnected processes such as competency, recruitment, training, leave management, payroll, benefits administration etc. Hence a sound performance management system is a sub set of a people management system.
In development sector, the action is always on the ground, on a far of geography, usually a remote rural landscape. To create high social impact, the employees in this sector requires to be volunteers, for that they need freedom, flexibility, mobility and information connectivity. This calls for a paradigm shift from centralized to a non centralized style of operation, more precisely a project based style of working. How can we balance this with the requirements of development sector, like high accountability in terms of efforts, funds deployed, social impact etc. The information and feedback loop arising out of disruptive social networking technologies can bring the required productivity, transparency, accountability and focus to the development sector.
In 21st century, the employees are no longer going to be inside office; they are getting deployed outside office, with almost zero personal super vision. The employees and offices are going to exist online, in the lap of disruptive social networking technologies. With the help of
social networking technologies, we can embrace the new paradigm in people management, without compromising the benefits of old paradigm. This is an endeavor to create the peoples system for the 21st century. The core components of the envisaged people management system are shown in the figure below:
An organization is a bundle of projects and resources. Optimal use of resources can achieve the project goals and thus organizational objectives. The configurability of resources based on project requirements (like lego-bricks) is an ideal state for achieving project goals. When the competency dictionary is well defined; as soon as a new project is registered, the system throws up the project competency requirements and resources with matching competencies as well as their slack time. Thus resources are configured to projects in real time.
The impact of the projects is measured through feedbacks from all project stakeholders. The social networking technologies connecting hand held devices (like mobile phones, which have a high market penetration) with the web, opens a new feedback channel for true customer centric measurements of social impacts. These measurements can become the back bone of performance management. The project impact and people performance are rated, these ratings are collated for each project, to a centralized repository. Thus every employee has rating scores for all the projects during the year, which can be used for the performance appraisal. The social web architecture also provides a convenient platform for 360 degree feedback mechanism.
The project competency requirements and feedback mechanisms, provides the input for training & development as well as recruitment processes. The employees have the facility to use employee directory to network with any other employee; which facilitates collaboration, knowledge sharing, socialization etc in the best interest of the organization. The employee efforts are captured online. The employee efforts are logged against the projects (the employee is involved), which provides the input to leave management process. The leave management and the performance management processes give the input to payroll and benefits administration process.
The distinguishing feature of this people management system is the application of web2 social networking features and technology. This provides the freedom, flexibility, mobility for employees to be highly productive, thus creating a high performance organization.
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