The Official Blog of Benifys HR Solutions

Hectic month here at Benifys, like really hectic! Hence the late update, but then, work does come before anything else… not to say that we don’t like you, of course we do – that’s precisely why we spend so much time and effort making sure that if it is about HR, you hear it first from us!

Talking about things happening at work, our CEO, Mr. Ajay Chowdhury, recently conceptualized a new HR product made specifically for schools keeping in mind their peculiar needs and requirements, you can read more about the product here, and download the product brochure from here. The content for training and intervention for these programs is never a limiting factor for us because we apply a modular approach to content creation besides creating customized content on demand. Going with the theme of the name of our newsletter HR@Work, we have named this product HR@Schools, and are currently conducting market research in the NCR region on the Supply vs. Demand gap in the corporate services available to schools.

Since our organization’s formation in January 2009, we have been able to map the Human Resources Outsourcing market to a reasonable amount of success, we now know that the three most ‘in demand’ services in the National Capital Region are – recruitment outsourcing, payroll outsourcing and training and development. So we have been indeed lucky as far as start-up stories go, by no means have we reached where we want to be… but we have all the fun and learning typically associated with a start-up without actually having to go through the many toils and struggles. Silicon, Sushi King, RBS, iSango, Slideshare, Vinsol, Rabyte, and Vestige are some of the clients that we are currently catering to and there are many more in the pipleline.

There is a lot of activity happening in the online space too…

1. It is now possible for readers to subscribe to concise but powerful ‘mobile’ career tips by registering on our Blog (service powered by http://www.alertrix.com).
2. If you look closely on the left sidebar, you will find that there is now an option to subscribe to our articles and blog updates though e-mail now, and yes, we hate spam and unsolicited mail as much as you do!
3. The new Carnival of HR is up and running at the HR maven blog! Deirdre has an excellent post on her hands with some amazing submissions from thought leaders in the HR sphere. Our submission for the carnival was the article – If employees could fly; just some good humored stereotyping of people at work
4. Please do join our Facebook community of forward looking professionals at http://www.facebook.com/benifys, we pick the best of the web and post it there regularly, delivered in your Facebook Homepage.
5. 7600 followers at http://www.twitter.cm/benifys, we must be doing something right! From our twitter profile you will receive career and HR related updates on an hourly basis, did you know you could also subscribe to these updates in your reader via an RSS feed?
6. We have some amazing collection of articles, guest posts, links, resources and news coming up in this the October edition of HR@Work, to which you can subscribe here.

And besides work…

Sometime during the beginning of this month, we all went to Bar-be-que Nation for lunch to celebrate; it wasn’t quite clear to me what we were celebrating! Maybe it was a pre party for Rahul’s on coming birthday, maybe it was the fact that Ajay bought a beauty of a car, maybe it was the amazing feedback Ankita received from our clients, or maybe it was that the fact that I won an iPod nano from Channel [V] (no wait, we got the last news while we were having lunch!)

Anyway leaving you here with a collage of pictures from the lunch, find out more about all of us here. Till the next time this space is updated… keep doing what you love

“The impact of one perceived strength moves leaders to the top 64% in effectiveness, three strengths puts them in the top 26% of the effectiveness.”

~ Zenger and Folkman

The Dilemma of Mr. Just Promoted

Meet Mr. Just Promoted, as the name implies he was just promoted to a leadership position within his firm. He was an executive and he did his work well; that is before he was promoted to a position he had no clue what to do in.

I guess everyone has to reach their respective levels of incompetence according to the Peter Principle. It happens everywhere time and time again, competent people are promoted to positions they don’t have the requisite skill sets for (e.g. A programmer promoted to a Team Leader and expected to be good with MIS and presentation skills), and then asked why they can’t continue their streak of success?

Well the management should really know better than doing that, because not only are you at the risk of dealing with a potentially incompetent leader that you just ‘made’, but you also lose a very efficient employee! Leading requires a number of skills – some you know as a regular employee, others have to acquired, hence the need for Leadership Training Programs.

We rely on what we like to call the “Sphere of Influence” when we need to device a Leadership Development/ Executive Coaching Program. It encompasses an entire set of attributes required by a leader at any particular level of ‘influence’.

The Sphere of Influence

The Skills under the Sphere of Influence

Wait, so what does it all mean – will Mr. Just Promoted get out of this mess?

Of course yes, that’s the entire point of this conversation, isn’t it? But don’t expect anything magical to happen all by itself, this is not an incompetency that he can snap out of, it’s a role he has to grow into in a phased manner.

Alright, so I just copy and paste this stuff here and then make a program – right? Thanks you so much!

A good idea at the surface, but aren’t you making the same mistake again? Half baked information and subsequently bad delivery does more damage than good – while you are right in assuming that these are the basic constructs of a successful program, and you will find a lot others out there as well, but can you deliver it so that it has the maximum possible impact?

OK, so tell me how do you do it?

This may come across as hard selling, but please recognize that the reason we do this is that there are so many ill designed programs made every second – that are made without any thought to structure, delivery or method. This is important. Take this information, contact us if you want further clarification – even make your own program if you feel up to it. But if you’re going to do it, do it right! Following is our methodology for this exercise.

Our Methodology

Training Needs Identification

Through our proprietary needs identification methodology, we carry out a multi-respondent activity which enables us to identify the exact training need for your organization, or the population in your organization that we’re dealing with.


Customized Content Development

Our content developers understand the art of focused content development. We don’t throw the book at the participants, there is enough space for collaborative content development as the delivery happens, and yet there is enough structure that the Benifys content provides for the learning to remain focused and to-the-point. This, of course, may not be true for certain programmes, especially skill development related, where there are validated learning templates that are imparted directly.


Learning Delivery

Delivery takes place in an environment conducive to learning – collaborative content creation (emerging trends for discussion as the workshop progresses), interactive sessions (enabling participants to share their experiences, viewpoints and observations, thereby adding to the overall learning for the group), and learning exercises (role plays, case studies, fillers with hidden learning, etc.) are all an integral part of the delivery methodology.


Reinforcement

We understand that the learning during a workshop, however interactive it is, begins to wear off after the participants are re-exposed to the working environment. For this, special care is taken to enroll the participants on an on-going process that fosters application of skills or learning at their workplace. With the client organizations actively supporting the post-workshop learning agenda, this exercise has shown dramatic results in enabling retention amongst the participants.


Assessment

In order to assess the effectiveness of training, a customized ‘pre’ and ‘post’ training assessment is carried out on a 360 degree basis.

Benifys on Learning and Development

We take L&D seriously. The entire Benifys learning methodology is centered around retention of knowledge and applicability of skills to the work place. Through an extensive exercise of needs identification, customized course and content development, learning delivery, reinforcement and assessment, we ensure that the learning remains embedded in your organizational DNA.

The month is almost about to end, and we are just gearing up for the finalization and distribution of the Fourth Edition of our in-house Newsletter HR@Work for which we have been consistently getting great feedback; well, this issue is extra special then… why you ask? That’s because the newsletter now has a completely revamped look and let us tell you we just absolutely love it, and know that you will too! So here come the updates:


When we conceptualized HR@Work, we were not sure how it would be taken and whether we would be able to pull it off to any degree of success, now fourth month into it’s run, it now has a circulation of around 2000! The primary target audience and majority of the opt-ins that we get are from people working in the HR leadership domain in India with the occasional sign-up from professionals overseas who happened to stumble upon the Blog.


As I said earlier, the Newsletter has a complete new look and will have a guest column starting this month. We plan to use this space to not only get experts to talk on varied aspects of business like management, motivation, workforce management, people issues, organizational climate and the likes, but also as a space where our clients and partners can talk about the challenges they face in their day-to-day business affairs and what is it that keeps them going.


We love experimenting with Web 2.0 and believe there is a vast latent potential to it, once the targeted users reach a critical mass; taking action on that thought we are now on Facebook and Twitter (and are about to cross 4000 followers on the latter!). Eventually, we also plan to open a support group on LinkedIn where business professionals and budding entrepreneurs can discuss the problems they face while implementing their HR, or the lack of it.


This update is rather special, thanks to Shauna Moerke of the HR Maven Blog, we are now participating members of the “Carnival of HR” community and besides being featured in that space, we will be hosting it on our Blog on the 14th of April, 2010! Check out the latest carnival post hosted by Effortless HR Blog here.


A little late in the day to mention, but we signed a content partnership with HRguru (Part of the Monster.com Worldwide Company) for syndication of our articles on their website. HRGuru is an online community dedicated to advancement of current and future human resources professionals and of the improvement of HR as a whole. We plan to help each other in our online promotion efforts besides content sharing.


Lots of birthdays this month in our team, three to be precise and what fun it was! We wanted to share the photos but then someone suggested (smart thinking indeed) that posting our cake covered faces all over the internet might not be a very good idea and it for sure wouldn’t do any wonders for our branding effort! So I guess we wait until we can get some no ‘cake on the face’ photographs of us, fat chance of that I think! You can check more information about our team here, for once we have clean, bright faces .

Welcome to the first edition of our monthly newsletter HR@Work. This is no ordinary newsletter – we will endeavour to provide to you content that you will find useful, interesting, and worth commenting on. Our aim is to bring to fore issues that are topical and, in some way or the other, impact our professional lives.
You are receiving this newsletter because you know someone in the Benifys team, or because we have come in contact with you over the last couple of months.


So, let’s begin with the most topical of issues for us folks in India – the IPL action is back again, and what drama preceded arguably the world’s most awaited cricketing event! There will be opinions this way and that, but what comes to mind is the extent that outsourcing has become a part of life. Imagine, India – our India, where cricket vies for the top spot in people’s mind with religion, outsourcing the biggest extravaganza that we could throw up in the money-spinning game of cricket.


How long can people turn their eyes away from the benefits of outsourcing, how long will it take for them to realise that the world today is (once again) that of ‘comparative advantage’, how long does it take for us to overcome the roadblocks that prevent us from harnessing the full potential of the Human Resources function, how long…


The questions are many, the answers lie somewhere within us…
We hope that you enjoy this journey with us, and forward this newsletter to as many people in your circle as you can. We’re building an HR community, the beneficiaries of which will not be restricted to people pursuing HR as a profession, but everyone for whom an integral function in her organisation matters.
Wish everyone a good going…