Today there seems to be a mismatch between the talent in the market, their aspirations and the opportunities. The millennials of today are not keen on a 9 to 5 job. They want to pursue their passion cutting across organisational boundaries. While organisations may offer routine jobs, their aspirations may never be met.

What do we do in such a divergent environment ? While opportunities in the environment may change as per demands of the industry and the market, the aspirations of the next generation needs to be understood to be met.

Permanent employees may be a thing of the past in industry. We are moving towards a gig economy. This means jobs may be split and people may be available part time to share their knowledge and skills on a contractual basis. There will be neither permanent jobs nor permanent people in organisations.

Everything will be in a state of flux and change. While jobs will appear and disappear at frequent intervals, people may also keep changing their jobs and organisations as per their current aspirational needs. Thus aspirations will also keep changing with time. Nobody is going to stick to a particular organisation or profession for life.

A friend of mine was sharing with me that post his retirement after a long and illustrious career he was pursuing painting as his hobby. A few months later he informed me that painting was passé and now he was writing a novel. The aspirations of the millennials of tomorrow will be somewhat similar. It may change many times a year rather than even once in a few years.

Organisations have to redefine jobs to match these transcending aspirations. There has to be a market place for opportunities and aspirations to match. The cycle time for change will be frequent. This has to be managed through automation and artificial intelligence. It looks like there will be nothing permanent in life.

Even the personal lives of the future talent will be different. Family and marriage as institutions may fade away. The boundaries of a nuclear family may give way to living in partnerships as per mutual convenience. Marriage may no longer be a social pre requisite to have children and hence may disappear.

Organisations have to spend a lot of time and money to understand the aspirations of this generation. Sociologists and Anthropologists may play an active role in redefining roles and matching aspirations of the future talent. Thus organisational boundaries may fade away. Talent may work in multiple organisations as per their interests and time availability.

The talents today are like the balloons in the photo above.  Multi varied and with different and needs.  We need to create an environment where every talent blooms.

A new era where there will seem a dynamic relationship between opportunities, aspirations and availability of talent. Organisations which are flexible enough to match these changing trends will be successful in the market place. Organisations which continue with rigid job definitions may fade sooner than realise.

Flexibility may be the key to success.

S Ramesh Shankar

9th September 2018

Our Customer pays our salary – every employee needs to understand this reality. This a bitter truth that many of us do not realise as the organisation grows and our brand matures in the market. We had a similar experience and hence launched a Customer first programme in our organisation. The objective of the programme was to keep our “Customers” in the centre of everything we do within the organisation.

We evolved five modules in this organisational intervention. They were Customer Intimacy, Customer First Culture, Reliable Execution, Service Excellence & Lean Processes. Each of the modules was led by a leadership team member and supported by a team. This led to our Customer Engagement scores more than trebling in 3 years. We focussed back on the customer within the organisation.

Now that the customer centricity was established, we shifted our focus to employees. We realised that while it is critical to focus on customers, it is equally important to keep employees highly engaged. It is true that if we treat employees well, they in turn would ensure that customers are happy always.

We launched an intervention and called it “People Matter”. We had a long tradition of training and certifying our project managers using global processes and standards. We took a leaf out of this experience and decided that we will train all our people managers and then certify them through a three stage process.

We identified a professional external partner and then trained more than 800 people managers and certified them. All of them went through a two day class room training. They they had to work out an action plan in three people management areas impacting their team and submit it. Then they had to implement their ideas and a feedback was taken from their team on their leadership style. This was followed by implementation and a follow up feedback from their team members to measure impact of their actions.

We found a cultural transformation permeating the entire organisation. I got phone calls, emails and personal feedback whenever I visited locations from team members. Many of them were positively surprised at the changes in their manager’s behaviour. It appeared that the program was making a impact in changing leadership behaviours.

We shared the best practices of various people managers across the organisation through newsletters and other communication channels. We invited the best people managers, who scored the highest to our annual business conference and enabled them to share their experience with the rest of the people managers.

The journey has just begun. We have supported this initiative by empowering people managers to decide the increments and promotions of their team members. We encouraged them to reward and recognise their team members in innovative ways. All new initiatives in the organisation were channelled through these people managers.

Great companies  believe that if they take care of their employees, they will take care of their customers as in the photo above.

Hence, customer first, employee always.

S Ramesh Shankar

25th August 2018

Most of us have been following many rituals from our childhood without even knowing the reasons for following them. We follow rituals because our forefathers handed them over to our parents or elders and we inherited them.

A ritual is an action determined by tradition more than any other reason. It may or may not have any religious connotation. It could be like fasting during solar or lunar eclipses or even during certain festivals amongst some religious groups. Rituals go beyond religion too.

I am aware of some rituals, which are followed by individuals cutting across different faiths in India. It is like determining the auspicious time to inaugurate a new venture. Even the date and time to admit a child to a school. This gets more entrenched as it turns out to be lucky for some in their actions.

I have nothing against rituals. In my view it is each individual’s personal preference. What I am against is when a society tries to impose its rituals on everyone irrespective of their personal preferences. We recently had some controversies when the highest court of the land ordered that men and women have equal right to visit religious places. I fully support this view.

I cannot understand how religion can prevent a man or a woman to visit a religious place of his or her choice. I am aware that some religions prohibit women to enter religious places. I am against such religious dictates too. No religion should prevent a human being to enter a religious place of their choice.

I do agree that sometimes rituals were designed to discipline human beings. For eg., washing of hands before having a meal may be considered a ritual but it is more for hygiene rather than a ritual. Similarly washing of legs before entering a place of worship may have been prescribed more for hygiene than for ritualistic belief.

On the other hand, women not being allowed to a funeral ground to pay their last respects to their elders may be a ritual with no scientific basis. I am not even questioning anyone’s right to follow a ritual. What I am against is making it compulsory for someone against their wishes.

Every ritual will have a story. Many of the rituals may also have a scientific reason behind it. So, it may be unfair to say that all rituals are blind faith. My belief is that every human being is capable of making a choice. If the individual chooses to follow a ritual, so be it. If they do not want to follow it, let us respect that too.

As in the photo above, I learnt pranayama almost five decades back, but considered it a ritual those days as a child, while now I think it is a good breathing exercise for my wellness.

Every one of us learn rituals from our family, friends or society. Even organisations have rituals, which get embedded in the minds of their employees over time. Let us allow the individual to have the liberty to choose their rituals. No individual, family, community or organisation has a right to impose it on the individual.

Let human beings individually choose their rituals and not the other way around.

S Ramesh Shankar

1st September 2018