The Hindu Business Line : A department for employee branding

When you ask a BPO employee in Wipro or EDS or Infosys who they work for, be ready to hear him or her say HP or Dell, AOL or Microsoft. The reason is that most employees, despite walking into an office with the company's brand name, relate themselves with the process they work for, explains a new book on the industry. As they keep switching jobs, the confusion gets even bigger, write V. Anandkumar and Subhasish Biswas in Business Process Outsourcing (www.sagepublications.com). "How do you build a brand and inculcate a value system in employees in this scenario?" the authors wonder.

Any differentiation, they suggest, can come only from the touch points in day-today activities. "Right from the time a person joins an organisation, the experiences he has is what makes him value the brand. Transparency in policies is the icing on the cake."Across levels, people want to look at role models who can inspire them, say Anandkumar and Biswas. "Role models are flagbearers of a company's ideology and its values. They are mentors and guides who can help people in their journey."

The authors bemoan that most companies confuse employee branding with fun and parties. "In a high-pressure work environment, fun is a necessity, but that is just one small element of employee branding." It may be a folly, again, to consider that employee branding is the responsibility of HR. The task demands "an eye for detail, a high sense of empathy, and the finishing touch," and "a dedicated department for employee branding that could work through all the functions to achieve this." Keenly insightful.

How to pay?

Not so many years ago, it was common to find HR performance specialists holding the view that pay was an irrelevancy when managing performance, observes Don McClune in one of the essays included in Top Pay and Performance: International and Strategic Approach edited by Shaun Tyson and Frank Bournois (www.elsevier.com). "That view is rarely held today, but many HR specialists and line managers do start with the people issues, possibly because they think they need a quick fix solution such as a new performance management scheme, or bonus system," he adds.

The argument should, however, start from the business perspective, suggests McClune, because improving business performance is the primary consideration. "In our contemporary society the corporate governance legislators require companies to become more transparent about how they justify their performance incentive practices and that this justification be made in business terms such as the returns to shareholders." Performance plans need a firm bedrock because mistakes in performance management can have a wide effect on the business, the author cautions. For a careful read.

SAP exam

If you are planning to take the SAP SD (sales and distribution) exam, here is a guide from Ashok Faujdar and Binny Kumari Choudhary: SAP Sales and Distribution Certification Guide (www.tatamcgrawhill.com). The exam focuses on the enabling configurations that are a pre-requisite to deliver the best practice functionalities to a business that runs on SAP, informs the introduction. The best way to get maximum marks is to be clear and thorough about basic concepts, the authors counsel.

Check, therefore, if you can answer the following questions from the book: Which is the highest organisational unit for SD: Company code, sales organisation, distribution channel, division, or plant? Creation of more than one invoice for one delivery document is called: Split invoice, collective invoice, complete invoice, invoice collection, or invoice split? Which of the following need to be identical for the delivery documents to be combined into one billing document: Payer, bill-to-party, billing date, or destination country? Focused presentation.

Become finance-friendly

To those IT people who don't like finance very much, Michael Blackstaff's Finance for IT Decision Makers, second edition (www.vivagroupindia.com) should appeal. Written as a practical handbook for buyers, sellers, and managers, the book sympathises with hassled IT professionals whose reactions to finance range from indifference to scorn. "This is because `finance' is the thing that has incomprehensible jargon, charges their budget with costs that they never incurred and kills their pet projects by shrinking the benefits but never the costs."

But not all jargon is bad, pleads Blackstaff. "If it were, then we IT people would be high on the list of culprits. Financial people use a few shorthand phrases." For instance, they use `future value' to mean the amount of cash receivable or payable in the future; and `present value' instead of the rather long-winded `what it would have been worth had it been received or paid today,' he explains. "And they would use the term `discount' to describe the process of taking a larger number and turning it into a smaller one." Good primer.

Turkeys and squirrels

Authors of Competence at Work (www.wileyindia. com) rue that many organisations select on the basis of surface knowledge and skill competencies (`we hire MBAs from good schools') and either assume that recruits have the underlying motive and trait competencies or that these can be instilled by good management.

The converse is probably more cost-effective, contend Lyle M. Spencer, Jr., and Signe M. Spencer. "Organisations should select for core motive and trait competencies and teach the knowledge and skills required to do specific jobs. Or as one personnel director put it, `You can teach a turkey to climb a tree, but it is easier to hire a squirrel.'" The book defines `competency' as an underlying characteristic of an individual that is causally related to criterion-referenced effective and/or superior performance in a job or situation. "Underlying characteristic means the competency is a fairly deep and enduring part of a person's personality and can predict behaviour in a wide variety of situations and job tasks." In complex jobs, competencies are relatively more important in predicting superior performance than are task-related skills, intelligence, or credentials, say the Spencers. This is due to a `restricted range effect,' they explain.

"In higher level technical, marketing, professional, and managerial jobs, almost everyone has an IQ of 120 or above and an advanced degree from a good university." What distinguish superior performance in these jobs are motivation, interpersonal skills, and political skills, all of which are competencies. Compelling exposition of critical concepts. Tailpiece "To arrest attrition, we renamed." "The company bus as an `air bus'?" "Plus, we began to call our canteen, `food

court'!" dmurali@thehindu.co.in