Employees’ relationship with their supervisors is key factor in engagement

Employers must manage multiple priorities—often on a limited budget. So it can be easy to overlook a “soft” topic, such as making sure supervisors and managers demonstrate care for employees and build positive relationships with them.

However, a recent survey found that having a “caring” manager is a crucial factor in whether employees are engaged. Employers who recognize that, and take steps to educate supervisors and managers about it, can help drive employee engagement and their organization’s success.

The Dale Carnegie Training® survey identified employees’ relationships with their supervisors as a key factor in engagement. The survey found that if employees are “dissatisfied with their immediate supervisor, there is an 80 percent chance that they are disengaged” and that “having a ‘caring’ manager is one of the key elements to a positive and successful employee engagement strategy.”

Belief in senior leadership and pride in working for their company are also key factors that drive engagement, according to the survey of 1,500 employees conducted in February 2012 and April 2012.

In light of the survey findings, Dale Carnegie Training says it is important for supervisors and managers to make their employees feel valued and to demonstrate an interest in their personal lives, health, and well-being. “Employee engagement rates are directly tied to feelings about interaction with their immediate supervisor,” Dale Carnegie Training reports. In fact, nearly half of employees who reported being satisfied with their direct manager were engaged. Meanwhile, 80 percent of those who indicated they were very dissatisfied with their immediate supervisor were disengaged.

In addition, the survey found that disengaged employees are more likely to leave the company for a pay raise than are engaged employees. For example, 26 percent of engaged employees indicated that they would be willing to leave their current position for a 5 percent pay raise, compared to 46 percent of partially engaged employees and 69 percent of disengaged employees, according to the survey.

Fifty-four percent of employees are engaged when they are under the impression that their manager cares about their personal lives, compared to only 17 percent of employees being engaged when they feel otherwise, the survey found.

What is the takeaway? During supervisory training, share statistics to demonstrate the importance of supervisors building a good rapport with their subordinates and provide specific examples on how to accomplish that within your organization.

Google, McKinsey, Apple & Amazon Top List Of Most Desirable Employers For MBAs

Google hasn't lost its mojo--not with MBAs at least.

For the seventh year in a row, Google topped the list of the most desirable MBA employers, according to a newly published survey of MBA opinions by research firm Universum USA. One in every four students–exactly 23.4% of the 3,739 responding MBAs–surveyed at 135 top business schools placed the search firm among its top five. At Google, MBAs work in a wide variety of functions, from product management and sales to finance, marketing and operations.

The annual survey--something of a popularity contest for companies with the MBA crowd--found that McKinsey & Co., which recruits the largest number of top MBAs in any year, was second behind Google, with 16.6% of those polled placing the prestige consulting firm among their top five potential employers. Rounding out the top five were No. 3 Apple, No. 4 Amazon, and No. 5 Boston Consulting Group.

Universum's opinion poll--with had responses from 1,622 women and 2,097 men who were studying for their MBA degrees in the U.S. between the months of December 2012 and March 2013. Students were asked to choose the five companies they would most like to work for from a list of over 175 companies. They also have the opportunity to write-in the name of a company if it was not included in the list. The rankings are based on how many times the company was selected as one of five ideal employers.

The 2013 version of the survey showed gains by such Top 25 companies as Amazon, Nike, Walt Disney, Deloitte, Microsoft, Starbucks, IBM, LVMH, 3M, and the U.S. Department of State (see table on following page of the top 25 companies). Losing ground in the Top 25 were Bain & Co., Goldman Sachs, Facebook, J.P. Morgan, Johnson & Johnson, Blackstone Group, and General Electric.

Some very well-known companies dropped off the Top 100 list entirely. Salesforce.com, which had been ranked 54th last year, disappeared off the list. So did UBS (73), Harrah’s Entertainment (77), Groupon (82), Zynga (85), HSBC (88), Hewlett-Packard (89), Monitor Group (91), Daimler/Mercedes-Benz (94), Colgate-Palmolive (98), National Security Agency (99), and Oracle (100).

They were nudged off the list by No. 30 Nordstrom, No. 54 Estee Lauder, No. 66 H&M, No. 69 GlaxoSmithKline, No. 86 MGM Resorts, No. 92 Northrop Grumman, No. 94 General Motors, No. 95 Intuit, No. 97 Novartis, No. 98 Merck, and No. 99 E&J Gallo.

This year's biggest gainer--other than the newcomers to the most popular list--was Hilton Hotels, which jumped 34 places in a single year to finish 44th. Other companies that have gained significant popularity among the MBAs surveyed tended to be in the healthcare arena. No. 37 eBay rose 24 places, No. 42 Genentech was up 21 spots, No. 65 Pfizer (up 21), and No. 77 Abbot Laboratories (up 20).

This year's biggest loser--other than the companies that did a disappearing act in the Top 100--was Credit Suisse, which fell a remarkable 37 places to a rank of 71 from 34 in 2012. Not far behind among the companies that lost the most popularity were No. 79 Deutsche Bank (down 32 places), No. 89 Siemens (down 29 spots), No. 63 Barclays (down 24), No. 68 Kraft Foods Group (down 22), No. 82 KPMG (down 22), and No. No. 87 Wells Fargo (down 20).

Poor pay for contract labourers and inequality seen as an important trigger for violence

July's violence at Maruti Suzuki's Manesar plantclaimed the life of a general manager, cost hundreds of workers their jobs and caused the company a production loss of close to a quarter of a billion dollars.

It also threw lighton the disproportionately high use of contract workers by India's manufacturing companies, a practice that helps them manoeuvre around the country's rigid labour rules.

Contract labourers have been found to be often poorly paid in comparison to permanent workers. And the visible inequality that this arrangement spews is seen as an important trigger for violence.

Sure enough, in the aftermath of the violence, Maruti has decided to bid goodbye to the contract labour system. It might be on the back-foot for the time being in India, but in Europe, things are only getting more attractive for contract or temporary labour.

Brian Wilkinson, executive board member of the over 16 billion HR solutions company Randstad Holding, points to "a kind of convergence happening toward the freeing up of the labour markets" in those parts.

Policymakers everywhere confront seemingly conflicting pressures from two important constituencies: industry, which wants liberal labour laws, and workers, who want more protection. The European convergence that Wilkinson is referring to addresses them both.

One aspect of it is the easing of barriers to flexible working. There have been rules, particularly in southern Europe, regarding where temporary staff can be used and for how long.

A convention of the International Labour Organization, the UN agency looking at labour issues, is aimed at doing away with such restrictions. "India isn't a signatory but that's something the Indian Staffing Federation is pushing for, because there's a clear correlation between labour market flexibility and employment generation."

The temporary workers have something to look forward to as well. "There's an equally-strong move toward greater security for temporary workers," he says. That will come in the form of equal pay (parity with permanent employees). Two years ago, UK made it possible for temps to qualify for equal pay after being in an assignment for 13 weeks. Germany has now passed a similar law, he says.

"The removal of restrictions opens up the market. And the extension of greater protection to temporary staff also increases the availability of candidates," Wilkinson says. "You create a virtuous circle, where everyone has more flexibility and are able to respond to lifestyle circumstances and production needs."

That's a path India may want to think of in future, says Wilkinson. "When I started out in the UK 30 years ago, it was like this (India). It was poorly regulated." Not any more.

Clearly, the contract worker system is in its nascent stages in countries such as India and China. And it shows. Wilkinson talks about there being "a marked difference between the more mature markets and emerging ones" when it comes to use of contract workers.

The difference is as basic as why they are being used in the first place. In India, he says, the driver is the lower labour cost. "And that's driven by regulation. What Indian employers lack is the ability to flex their workforce."

B-schools including IIMs reviewing human resource curriculum after Maruti's Manesar violence

A month after labour unrest and violence erupted at Maruti Suzuki's Manesar factory, the reverberations are now being felt at some of India's top business schools. Many of them, including at least two IIMs, are reviewing their human resource curriculum to re-include industrial relations. Companies are also pushing B-schools to rebalance human resource (HR) courses to ensure that industrial relations (IR) skills aren't ignored. 

Post-liberalisation, with the growth of the services sector over the past two decades, HR management issues such as employee engagement, talent acquisition, compensation and organisation development have edged out 'personnel management' inB-school curriculum. Industrial relations gave way to strategic HR. But clashes at Maruti Suzuki are forcing a rethink. 

IIM-Ranchi, the only IIM that has a dedicated two-year programme on HR management, will soon roll out a full-time course on industrial relations, apart from increasing the IR component in its HRM course. 

IIM-Ahmedabad, which scrapped a planned executive course on industrial relations a couple of years ago due to lack of corporate nominations, is holding such a programme in October, indicating renewed demand. 

"Everyone is concerned about the situation. Suddenly, IR is becoming important, particularly in manufacturing, though it could spread to the services sector as well," says MJ Xavier, director, IIM-Ranchi. The institute is organising a two-day conclave on September 21-22, where the Manesar turmoil will be the major theme. 

NEED TO LOOK INTO LABOUR RELATIONS 

"Business schools should refocus their curriculum. The events at Manesar were due to various specific causes but point out a need to look into labour relations and how we can unleash the potential of workers to create a competitive, fair and inclusive workplace," says Rajeev Dubey, president (group HR, corporate services and after-market), Mahindra & Mahindra. 

The curriculum of B-schools was one of the issues discussed when industry bodies met recently to explore the way forward to create conditions where workplaces can be free from violence. "We have B-schools curriculum on our radar. We will see how to bring it up with the institutes," says Dubey. 

Ninety-nine per cent of summer internships are projects on strategic HR, says A Sudhakar, HR head of Dabur India, pointing to the inadequate weightage given to personnel management. "We are talking to Symbiosis in Pune to start orienting students to IR issues. We have asked them to ensure that each student goes through at least one practical factory situation," he adds. 

IIM-Calcutta is also closely tracking the events at Manesar. "We need to rebalance the emphasis on IR...While some faculty is following the events at Maruti's Manesar factory, we need to study this more before taking a call on realignment of our syllabus," says Amit Dhiman, assistant professor of HR at the institute. 

Top management institutes such as the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and XLRI, Jamshedpur - which are among the handful in the country that offer a range of compulsory courses on personnel management, IR and labour law - are also tracking the incidents to incorporate the emerging trends while revising their curriculum. "Our business schools should lay emphasis on industrial relations," says Bino Paul, professor of labour economics and chairperson of the Centre for HRM and Labour Relations at TISS. 

ISB is exploring the need for a separate programme on IR. "This is a hot topic," says Deepak Chandra, deputy dean, ISB. "It will be discussed in our quarterly meeting on product ideas." 

"IR courses in top B-schools in core programmes and executive programmes had almost disappeared post-liberalisation in the absence of takers," says Biju Varkkey, professor of personnel and industrial relations at IIM-A. "Only a limited number of text books on IR have been published in the past few years, whereas the number of books on HRM has been phenomenal," he adds. 

Academicians such as Paul from TISS feel the conflict is not confined to the manufacturing sector and could soon explode in the services sector too. This is where the education institutions have a crucial role to play in training future managers and help create a communication channel between the white-collared and blue-collared employees, he says. 

"Manesar is not an isolated example," says Varkkey of IIM-A. "There has been a trend in these violent incidents over the past couple of years... the contractualisation of labour force is pushing people to periphery." He goes on to argue that both trade unions and managements have lost the people skills needed to deal with this. 

"Years ago, working in a manufacturing set-up was one of the most fundamental experiences of an HR manager; you did not get a ticket to rise otherwise," says Yashwant Mahadik, VP (HR), Indian subcontinent, Philips. "But for youngsters now, working in corporate offices is far more attractive. If things continue like this, we will lose our skills and competence in that area," he adds. 

Only a few companies such as HUL, ITC and Philips emphasise on building IR strengths in their management trainees. "It is made attractive for them (trainees), and that's what needs to be done," he says, adding companies that don't focus properly on IR are more susceptible to agitation and low productivity. 

Manesar has provoked Indian academia to don their thinking caps to bring back the lost focus on IR, and to try and wipe out the dichotomy between the white-collared and blue-collared workforce. 

India Inc gets lessons from sports legends, including Martina Navratilova, Narain Karthikeyan and Anil Kumble

What do Martina Navratilova, Narain Karthikeyan, Viren Wilfred Rasquinha, Venkatesh Prasad and Anil Kumblehave in common? All these sporting stalwarts have turned coaches for India Inc executives and employees. Companies across sectors are getting them to help employees beat stress, push performance, handle anxiety or even learn the difficult art of clinching a deal. 

When technology company SAP Labs India decided to make its managers learn the art of turnaround, they turned to Shah Rukh Khan-owned Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR). Team director Joy Bhattacharjya will conduct sessions with 40 managers of the tech giant on how to shortlist the right talent for their groups to facilitate turnaround. 

The method of training will be similar to how the players are selected in IPL. In an Indian Premier League auction, every team is given a certain number of players and it bids for the rest by gauging a player's record. A similar mock auction will be conducted at the firm's Bangalore office since no manager has the luxury of starting a team from the scratch and has to work around members he already has along with only a few additions. 
Bhattacharjya will help them spot talent that makes a squad win. "We chose Kolkata Knight Riders because after a dreary performance in the first three IPL seasons, the team qualified till play-offs in the fourth and won the championship in the fifth season," said Bhuvaneswar Naik, HR vice-president at SAP Labs India. "The process of building a team can get jaded, both in sports as well as management. The managers need to see winning qualities in members and bring in team members, according to the team's requirement," Bhattacharjya added. 

There are enough eager takers for lessons from these sporting legends on topics like ways of managing a team, competitiveness, team spirit and handling stress. "Achievers associated with IPL and Olympics will strike a greater chord than a regular coach or consultant," says Atanu Ghosh who teaches strategy and leadership at IIT-Bombay's Shailesh J Mehta School of Management. 

At a session with IBM India's clients and employees in October, 18-times Grand Slam winner Martina Navratilova said,"What it takes to be successful in tennis and business is not very different. The mark of a champion is how good you are at your worst." Navratilova session was on how to cope up with change and she explained it through examples of how she had to start playing with metal rackets during French Open after using wooden ones for years. IBM's software group holds these townhalls where around 1,500 employees and clients participate. 

Formula One racer Narain Karthikeyan is holding a similar session this week. These talks are motivational and are applicable to corporate life. Says Anil Menon, director, marketing for general business and geo expansion for IBM software group, "Sports is just like the national flag that immediately gets young India connected." 

Sports seem to have a more universal connect in the Indian branch than its global counterparts. In other IBM offices, authors as coaches are more popular for conducting learning sessions, but back home sports stalwarts are a better bet, said Menon.

Indian IT's HR headache: 1 in 5 CVs fake

Last month, R Nandan, a 33-year-old employee of IBM, was discovered to have used his wife's academic credentials to get his Rs 24-lakh-a-year job, putting the spotlight on rampant resume fraud faced by India's $100-billion information technology services sector.

Had it not been for falling out with his wife, Nandan's fraud may never have been exposed. Every year, despite the IT industry's stated resolve to stamp out the problem of applicants lying about their academic qualifications and work experience, thousands like Nandan manage to sneak in. This is raising questions about whether companies are serious about tackling an issue which has the potential to harm India's reputation as the world's preferred location for outsourcing technology services.

One in every five CVs floating in the Indian IT industry is suspect, industry insiders and hiring experts say.

"At any given point in time, up to 10 per cent of the existing workforce in companies would be caught for fabricating or exaggerating their qualifications if verification tests are conducted," said Aditya Mishra, head of staffing business at Ma Foi Randstad, a leading HR services company in India.

HR experts say that the issue of resume fraud is very closely related to the integrity of the employees and their employer, and such instances would definitely have an impact on India's image.

"If companies don't get their act together on this, their reputation will be impacted. It speaks about their integrity," said Ganesh Shermon, partner and country head for human capital advisory services at KPMG.

The industry's inability to stop candidates who seek to game the system has partly got to do with lack of firm commitment from companies to follow uniform practices across the industry. "Honestly, most IT firms don't care; they just terminate these employees and forget about it. Unless employees, who fake their credentials, are taken to the police, this issue will never come to an end," a senior executive of another Bangalore-based IT company said, on condition of anonymity.

Continued high prevalence of resume fraud also raises questions about the efficacy of National Skills Registry, an initiative that industry body Nasscom started over five years ago as a long-term solution to the problem. As many as 118 large companies are members of the registry, which currently has a database of 1.1 million candidates, according to Nasscom. Of this, nearly 8 million candidate profiles have been vetted, so far, with the help of some 17 third-party background verification agencies.

"When hiring and employee churn happens at such a large scale, some of these fraudsters manage to sneak in and that is bound to happen where things happen at this scale," said Nasscom president Som Mittal, who did not think that resume fraud has reached a proportion where it threatens India's image as preferred offshore location. "Of course it is best if we can eliminate the problem. We will crack this." The industry body expects it would take another 18 months before the registry would achieve critical mass of candidates and becomes a de facto choice for companies.

Meanwhile companies claim that they have deployed checks and balances to ensure that bad apples don't sneak in and create a stink risking the entire firm's reputation.

Wipro said typically 20 per cent or one in every five resumes in the industry is fake or has forged information. Wipro has deployed an e-Recruitment system, which brings down the fake resume rate to less than 1 per cent of the total active applications, the company said.

Infosys said that it conducts several rounds of interviews before making an offer but still comes across cases of fraud. "We conduct a verification of credentials given by the candidate, mainly education and previous employment record. We do get occasional cases of fraud which we deal with strictly as per our code of conduct," an Infosys spokeswoman said in an email response.

Most large IT companies also outsource some of the background verification to third-party agencies such as Authbridge, Pinkerton, and Crederity.

Once university databases becomes accessible online and electronic marksheets are available, companies will likely have better chance at catching the black sheep, but till then the industry will have to rely on eternal vigil by hiring agencies and HR managers to ensure that the sector's reputation is not affected.

Uninor to cut 2,000 jobs in 4 circles

Telecom service provider Uninor is scaling down operations in four circles and laying off 2,000 workforce from those four circles — Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Orissa. But the company has adopted a unique human resource model where it is inviting its competitors to come and hire from its retrenched staff.

"Around 2,000 people are affected due to this scaling down of operations, of which 400 are direct employees . There are total 17,500 employees in Uninor. We have appointed an outsourcing agency to help them (retrenched employees ) find employment outside . We have been in touch with the HR departments of our competitors and all have expressed interest," Sigve Brekke, managing director , Uninor said here on Tuesday. They are trying to absorb some of the employees in other circles.

A help desk will also be set up within Uninor to facilitate the process, he said. Although the company is yet to analyse the number of employees that it is going to reinstate. "Mapping in this regard is on," a company official said.

Uninor, is a joint venture between Norwegian telecom major Telenor and Indian realty biggie Unitech . The Telenor Group holds 67.25% in Uninor. It is present in 21 circles across the country, out which it was strong in 13 circles.

At present, Telenor and Unitech are engaged in a legal battle and plans to part ways