Co-existing with COVID19!



 

कारवाँ गुज़र गया, गुबार देखते रहे (Gopaldas, ’Neeraj’)

Yes the Virus is here, yes it is highly contagious and yes it is deadly!

So what do we do?

Fight, Freeze, or Flee?

I’m afraid to inform you ‘Fleeing’ is not an option. You gotta either confront the virus or hibernate into oblivion, perhaps for as long as you can count.

Q #1 - For how long should we let a microscopic pathogen dictate terms of our lives, determine the size of our aspiration, and deteriorate our collective determination? 

Q #2 - Why can’t we treat #COVID19 as one of the many other life-threatening challenges that we have come to live with? 

Q #3- Why should we submissively surrender?

(Before we go any further; I must mention in no uncertain terms that at NO time, should we ignore the warning or the guidelines issued by the competent Government authorities, pertaining but not limited to containment or treatment of the infected. Precaution, for now, is the cure, be smart, and comply.)

These questions are not coming from a place of ignorance or bravado. I am not an epidemiologist, or a virologist/immunologist or a healthcare professional with expertise in infectious disease, nor have I run or supervised public health response in a pandemic, ever. I’m one of you, the ordinary thinking citizen, who is learning a little about the virulence of our heartless invader from the newspaper, medical journal, research papers, and conversation with experts - every day! I am someone who decided to self-quarantine, in the last week of Feb this year (word of thanks and appreciation for my current employer who allowed me to do so, happily). So not in the line of fire just yet, but I do see, how lives of billions around the world are being altered, some more irreversibly then the others. The impact of the pandemic is ringing in all areas of our existence. Our enemy is using one of our key strengths and differentiators from other species: ‘Social connect’ against us, in plain sight. 

But, before we dive deep into to sludge of despair, allow me the liberty of bringing a few thoughts into your attention.

Q #1- Are we not better prepared to deal with anything of this magnitude now than any time in the entire history of humankind?

Q #2- Is it not a huge positive that we have tools like the ‘internet and the computer’ to run our lives despite restrictions that the virus harshly may impose on us?

Q #3- Isn’t medical science at its most advanced stage now than in the past?

Answer to all of the above is a resounding “YES” and therefore I say; if at all one of our fellow human beings could NOT have avoided eating BAT for dinner, then there wouldn’t have been a better time to do so than now. And, let me also put it out for your consumption that we are not required to be televangelical about the situation. False hope or needless motivation is not something that I’m trying to put forward here. I’m trying to place in our collective attention an alternative question to invite thoughts.

So, think of it as a grand brainstorming that I intend to do with all my regular and returning 10K readers.

(Pardon me for my inability to answer all of your emails but on this one, I’ll try to get to every one of your emails. When you write to me please have #Ask in your subject line, it will help me sort the questions)

Let’s wargame: What if the virus was to stay and never extinct? What if COVID19 turns out to be another cancer that humans do not know how to cure? (yes, pathology of both the ailments are different, but consider the only eventuality of both the conditions for this argument sake, thanks)

It is undeniably a scary proposition but as they say in the IAS academy (The Lal Bahadur Shastri National academy of Administration) when you are hit by a disaster plan for the worse, the absolute disastrous consequence that it can graduate to, and then solve for it. The idea is that size of the difficulty should always remain smaller than the spread of your preparation. And, so we are going by this ghastly hypothesis of the virus becoming a co-habitant of our planet. Let’s put time aside to think about the challenge exhaustively, from top to the bottom. The complete spectrum: from social, economic, psychological, national, cultural, religious, political to also those relating to foreign relations and domestic law and order. Please do not be superficial in your thought experiment or give in to the temptation of being narrow or being aggressively focused on self-interest, you’ve got to think deeply about it. All forecasters and economists are bringing in models that can send anyone in dizzy, let alone, those who survive on incremental gains from the capital (either of wealth or time and skill) that they employ to earn sustenance. No point denying that it is an unprecedented event and also a rare one, in which we find a great deal of convergence of views from noted thought leaders.

Now, let’s turn to the knowledge pool of history to find a few large scale disasters that humans have had to endure undesirably? Let’s say 

1. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.

2. The great economic depression of 1930.

3. The global meltdown of 2008. 

4. Throw in the mix, the likes of HIV, Ebola, MERS, and previous SARS outbreaks, too.

Why do I pick public health emergencies and economic crisis for study? Well, because it makes for a good headline to say that we are choosing ‘life over livelihood’ but the harsh reality of our times is that without steady economic activities sustaining the cost of life is nearly impossible.

Pause at this stage, because studying these events will take you about 10 days, that is if you dedicate 3-5 hours to it every day. When you’re done with it come back and continue with the rest of the article.

Here is how the cast looked like in all of these.

• Upon developing an understanding of the crisis, estimations were made.

• Fear of losing the ‘regular’ loomed large.

• The new normal emerged. 

• The old ways got forgotten and the new normal became the norm, the usual.

This virus is not whipping the human race from the face of this planet, that only an asteroid will do, whenever it does. So let us jump to step 3 because 1 and 2 have been completed in the last 5 months or so since we discovered the unwanted guest, the Corona Virus.

Finding the ‘new normal’

As sub-step 1, let’s accept the virus and respect it for what it is. 

Scientists around the world are working round the clock to understand the vulnerabilities of the virus and ways in which we can attempt to neutralize it. Till they succeed we know that ‘social distancing’ is the way to go, along with other protective and precautionary measures like the triple-layer face mask and sanitization, etc, you get the idea. Would it have not been worse if we knew no way around it? We know now that as long as we do not come in direct contact with the pestilence we are good to go. So with that intel can we not reimagine our world? Yes, we can! Yes, it is not going to be an easy assignment because we have been building infrastructure optimized for efficiencies and space and this new arrangement is in fierce conflict with both of it.

But, there is a way around it. 

There is no easy answer but it must be found anyway, because it matters!

Imagine if we were to spread the demand and supply to fit the linear scale of time accommodating the social distancing norm? Simply put, if you spread what you used to produce in 9 hours to 24 - you’d end up achieving previous levels of output without exposing yourself to irresponsible risks, of course at the cost of efficiency but is it not better than having zero output, or an output reduced greatly by the imposition of social distancing norms?

Let me give you a service scenario from the contact center industry.

Precondition

• Imagine you had 100,000 customers to support in a 24*7 support window, but the bulk of your support requests came between 7 AM to 8 PM. 

• You had a workforce of 30 people to support the load of the requests.

Pre COVID19

• On the known inflow distribution you plot available staff hours. It was simple and straight forward, the physical infra was also built for it.

COVID19 Challenge

• You’re required to maintain a certain distance between two people and are also required to avoid the clustering of humans in any setup. So what do you do? 

Approach

You can now schedule not just your support agents but also customers to maintain the same level of support. That is spread the customers evenly across the 24 hours too.

A. Divide your customer base into three categories, preferably the elderly in the first 8-hour block of the day, others in the other two. 

• Educate customers about the rationals of this distribution and make them aware of their slots.

   B. Divide your workforce in three-shift, so in a space built to support 30 (actually you only build for 80% of the strength), distributed in the bunches, each of size 10 agents are accommodated. Social distancing is honored.

All three sets of customers will get equal support and the service provider also gets to fit the staff within the same infra without compromising on the need for social distancing.

Ok, before you jump rightfully to claim that all industries and setups are not linear. For example in the food industry, support volumes follow eating cycles and can not be staggered evenly throughout the day. And I agree with you. The broader point that I’m trying to argue here is that we will need to ‘think’ of newer ways of dealing with the situation within the space that restrictions leave for us and yet create what we must, without letting the virus either kill us or our economic progress.

On the other side of the same example: 

For all things administrative and managerial, there is a need for us to understand that, if we invest our energies on replicating ‘old practices’ as is in the new set up; we will fail miserably. This challenge should force us to question everything that we did earlier to figure out if they must be continued in the future too and must they be done, what is a newer way of doing it. Perhaps, a digital way of executing it must be explored.

Business Travel is a classic example: People used to practically live inside suitcases, is it not? Ask them, are they traveling now, and why not? The answer is ‘because they simply can’t they do not’. And that is the very principle that needs to be applied religiously and homogeneously. What will be a better time to adopt technology? All of us have been paying for the hardware, network, and tools for a long time. It is time we start using them too as our sole way of conducting our affairs, both personal and professional.

Let me give you the SOP: “Question everything that you do”

Imagine a scenario, where your job requires you to keep a track of telephonic conversation between two sets of people. 

Question:

1. Why should the conversation be telephonic? 

2. Can it not be moved to a digital medium? Zoom or any other platform that facilitates internet based exchange? 

3. Can you not tie the conversation to an inexpensive dialler?

Of course, you can. One way or the other.

This ultra-simple scenario may not do justice to the complexity of your situation; but remember I’m not trying to solve your specific issue, here, but simply and solely trying to orient you to question your ways of conducting yourself. Because all answers will emerge from it like they always have in the past.

Let us not permit the virus to decimate our creative thinking and problem-solving ability, we have a fertile brain that is perfectly capable of devising the solution. Let’s give it a chance. Lest you forget, we have evolved into our present form from a single cell organism, in the last 4.3 billion years. There is always a way out, as long as you’re determined to find one. 

Digital transformation is no longer, the one more thing that leaders and organizations used to do to gain superiority over their competition, it is now a necessity, a question of survival - so get on with it.

I refuse to remain afraid of the virus and I implore you to shun fear too. 

Let’s rebuilt our lives again, together.

I’ve published various articles in the past expressing my views on digital transformation: you may want to check them, on the website. Linking two of them here, which I find most relevant. 

Title : TRANSFORM DIGITALLY, NOW!

URL : http://www.lavkush.co.in/2018/11/transform-digitally-now/

Title : BEFORE INNOVATION .

URL : http://www.lavkush.co.in/2018/09/before-innovation/

To end this I’d like to leave you with a song that Late Mega Star Rajesh Khanna danced to on the silver screen when in the background it was being sung by the immortal Kishore Da.

मौत आनी है

आएगी एक दिन

जान जानी है

जाएगी एक दिन

ऐसी बातों से क्या घबराना

यहाँ कल क्या हो किसने जाना

Until we meet again!

Outsourcing 2.0, the future!

It is impossible to attempt predicting the future without taking history into account; the posterior view of linear time. The history of outsourcing is intensely integrated into the history of the growth of the modern business enterprise, many believe that it rose in the second half of the 19th Century. Historians and economists in the past fifty years have helped us to understand this sudden and prominent phenomenon of growth, one such legend is Mr. Alfred D. Chandler, do read his work. Much has been said regarding outsourcing in the past couple of years. This business practice has suddenly grabbed center stage attention and is now the focus of politicians, the press, companies, and workers alike. Organizations in the outsourcing space are also constantly applying thought to understand how should they reinvent themselves to remain relevant, as they face their toughest challenge in the present era. A business that found its existing space between the value difference of a rupee and a dollar (speaking strictly in the Indian context) initially and in not too much time became a darling even on a transaction that was between the same currency, faces an existential challenge now. The rationale for the rupee to rupee transaction came from the differentiation of core and non-core tasks for an organization. Offshoring, mainly from stronger currencies to the weaker ones flourished for the first decade, almost fanatically. India gained immensely from this fad that was catching up. IT and ITES provided employment to over 3 hundred thousand people, major businesses,  houses came into being: Wipro, Infosys, Concentrix, HCL, Tech Mahindra, and many others. Companies in the western world saw value in saving money and at the same time dealing with a race that was hardworking, ambitious, hungry for growth, and also particularly skilled for doing the job just right.

The growth and meaning of outsourcing are increasingly getting flatlined; cost pressures are driving the value down, from the perspective of the service providers. The political scene around the world is not helping either, mass protests in favor of keeping the jobs onshore have become common. Major political events in the recent past have revolved around it, the rise of President Trump, the ill effects of Brexit; the mounting of obscurantists and protectionists ideologies around the world have hurt the prospects of the thriving outsourcing industry in our country. Both IT and ITES have suffered immensely, we do not see too many new players making a move. But thankfully, all is not lost. India is growing, one could argue that it could have grown faster had a few things not happened, but then those are hypothetical arguments; we remain among the fastest-growing economies in the world. A new breed of entrepreneurs have come into the fray and are solving real issues interestingly applying technologies that are now available at a much cheaper cost, than it would have been let's say a decade ago. The eco-system is ready. Would Ola or Flipkart have become such spectacular successes in 1980ties in India? The answer to that question is a clear no. Now is the time for it and it is a great thing to happen to us as a country, society, and also the economy.

If the political climate was unfavorable and stunting the growth of outsourcing agencies vigorously, the advent of technology: penetration of internet, the rise of automation, AI and ML are together making it almost impossible for small players to exist. Jobs that required humans back then are being done in a few taps a lot more satisfyingly and swiftly. ITES providers are dying a slow death, many are bleeding profusely with no real sight of a breakeven, let alone profit and prosperity. Many renowned businesses have done away with their domestic business or are in the process of walking out, Sutherland &  Mphasis are classic examples. More than 40% of small and medium domestic BPOs had to shut shop, in the last 6 yrs. The scene is not all that good for those who aren’t comfortable with being on their toes all the time, either. There are organizations like Aegis, Karvy DigiKonnect, connectQ, 1point1, Megus, etc who are trying to walk in the opposite direction of the wind and have created for themselves results that are not bad, if not all that encouraging, in all the quarters of the year. But there is hope. And that is exactly what we are trying to discuss here.

A workforce that began with handling transactions on prescribed SOPs have in these years become rich in experience and now have valuable insight into how various businesses are conducted, not only have they mastered their game of efficiency but have also educated and trained themselves on the craft to a degree that they now carry invaluable perspicacity into the world of the consumers and deep understanding of the technology that makes the customer experience come about. Cross-pollination of talent has graduated the industry into a formidable group, one that is capable of rewriting the rules of the game. This development is part evolutionary and part forced and therefore, not easy for everyone to get to.



The time has come for the outsourcing industry to shed its dead weight of unskilled manpower, onboard forward thinkers, and retain only high performers; the average and the below-average must go. This industry has to prepare itself to walk out of the shadow of the transaction and shine in the light of experience. It is apt for the service providers to fight for increasing their share of influence, the only way for them to exist is if they muster the courage to secure a seat at the thought leadership table. A transition from a low value, labor-based output to a high-value intellect based outcome will have to be made. Service providers will have to become providers of knowledge and acumen and not just efficiency.



Doing the job, quicker, better, and at low cost is no longer lucrative, there is a need to invent ways to do them differently, trying different business solutions. The construct of the ‘different’ is in making the delivery consultative, one in which the providers do not only bring manpower but also industry acumen, knowledge of framing service philosophies, the capability of defining experience, designing its machinery, and then delivering results which are second to none. Technology is here to stay, providers will have to befriend the trend, work towards creating the capabilities of automation in-house, start offering a data first, and voice second service offering. The conventional mode of isolated support on voice, data, and chat channels will have to be united into an omnichannel environment, flexible enough to extend the customers the choice to choose: voice or text, self-help or assisted guidance, with solid CRM integration, one that is capable of building context and providing for predictive customer behavior. Service providers will have to become solution architects. The change will have to be welcomed into the organization and the way of its inner working. If I may borrow from Robin Sharma;



All change is tough at the beginning, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end.



Here are a few things that service providers should do to transform.



De-age your leadership team - All of those 25 to 30 yrs + experience folks are good, they bring a lot of value but if they are made in charge of driving transformation, it wouldn't come about just as swiftly or effectively. You need to bring in a fresh perspective, bright and young people with the required skillset to populate your leadership team. Studies have shown that after a certain age and getting certain success in life the fire in the belly goes off for 98% of the people and that alone is a reason for you to look at your leadership team to see if you have such satisfied people around? If so, it's time for you to get people who relate to the change and have a better handle on contemporary settings and above all are willing to walk that extra mile and have the desire and the determination to make their mark.

Alter your service offering - Your service offering has to be a happy marriage between technology, business acumen, skilled manpower, and growth infrastructure. You’ll need to modify your solutions for them to make sense to the market and the customers that you wish to service. You need to be able to partner with the organization with which you are doing business with offerings, creating service strategy, forming the budget, laying the logical and physical service infrastructure, sourcing, training, execution - all of it. You need to take a leap from business process outsourcing into the realm of experience outsourcing.

Responsible billing model: Try to slowly move away from transaction billing to outcome-based invoicing. It is not going to be easy. Today you bill for transactions (calls/email/chat) you handle tomorrow you’ll charge on outcomes, let’s say a threshold of customer satisfaction, first, call resolution, churn %, repeat purchase, etc,  keeping the service cost below a certain limit for the exchange of x% of profit. I’m just saying. Commercial viability will have to be worked out but if service providers have to grow in the value chain they will need to value outcomes more than a transaction. And in the process will come into effect a high-performance culture because then the substandard outcome will mean substandard billing. Focus on performance will be much higher. And because it is a high-value job .. service providers will get to command much better prices.

Driving innovation as a core product: Organizations will have to increasingly invest in a thinking workforce, currently, the focus is only on doing (executing) which is why you have a mob of the unintelligent and the uninspiring, who are satisfied doing what they have always done, without thinking of finding different and better ways of solving the issue. Service providers will need to get creative, run of the mill thought processes will have to be now killed, deliberately. For the culture of ideation to thrive within the organization, leaders will have to reward thinkers, demonstrate a willingness to accept the nonnormal and above all, they will need to give the message that they value thinking as much as they value doing, if not more. Take up a few high-value high impact ambitious projects and run them so that the workforce has something to relate to.

Decentralize work (WFH): Cluttering the real state in today’s world is not only ineffective but also inefficient - the outsourcing industry will have to learn to ‘work from home’. A model that is a mixture of on-premise + Work from home has the capability of bringing the billing cost down with leaving larger room for service providers to expand profits, alongside creating a more independent, flexible, and happier workforce. I’m not even counting the environmental benefits of reduced vehicular traffic or saving of travel time, here. For far too long leaders have seen the outsourcing industry set up to be like manufacturing, that must change NOW!

Diversify into Tech Products: Voice can and should not be your only stream of revenue. You’ll need to create a 1st party tech platform/solution to survive.

Gartner says that by 2020 85% of the transaction will move to the unassisted category, the machine will take over man, we already see that reality manifesting itself in our day to day interaction with the world. If service providers do not invest in this critical adaptation now, they will soon be extinct.



On that note, I end this .. until we meet again.

 

Goodbye, Fear!

Fear is a primal human instinct, it has helped us survive the grey and grave threats of the cave life and generally caused our race to conceive and build secure places, plains, and things. We’ve come a long way though, the need to be watchful for constant threat is no longer a reality of modern life, a large part of civilization lives in responsibly put together safe surroundings. The evolutionary burden of finding fear and focusing on it, however, remains in our systems etched. As a result of which we crave for challenges and when threats do not actually exist, we invent them: loosely defining it for the sake of this article, and saying that psychological basis of over speeding, overeating, obsessive pursuit of various things can be in the crude form found in these instances. 

Like us humans and our ways of life, our understanding and relationship with fear has also undergone change, not calling it evolutionary as I continue to maintain that fear is one such part of our being which will go extinct or should get eliminated right at the cusp of the progressive change over, right on that point where the old changes into the new irreversibly and forever. So, humans learn to live without fear. Ohh, who am I kidding, let’s just accept that it is not going to happen, but we can certainly work towards making fearless existent, as we move along? For a moment let’s get wishful and re-imagine our lives without fear – think for a moment, experiments will become the way of life, people would hesitate lesser in trying out newer ways of doing old things? Is that imaginary plot liberating? Well, if that felt like scary, uncertain, unstable and in the borderline of being insane; well it is that primal instinct doing its job, put it aside and imagine again. Does it feel better? Let me move ahead with the assumption that it did. 

Physical and environmental threats and resulting fears have now got replaced with societal, professional, economical and even emotional fears. That is to say that we no longer fear about getting eaten by a lion but worry about missing a deadline, not succeeding at a project, not amassing enough wealth to support our ever-growing needs & desires, losing a friend, breaking up from what once felt like real relationship etc. How do we deal with this reality, we can find common ground in the fact that a scared mind is less likely to be home to thriving ideas. Unstable worried homes do not host pleasurable dinners when you are not in control, you do not create things that can take charge of situations, better, intuitively or make way for positive release if nothing else. 

Fact is, we all have fears and we all need to overcome them, at some point in our lives. One theory in the study of fear is that if you own something more than average people you know that your fear of losing it is more prominent in permanent ways. Fear can send you on an overdrive, make you reductionist of some sort too. These are cases when you avoid sharing your gifts and your goods with others naturally. You feel like protecting what you have tightly and passionately at all times, so much so, that in the place of growing what you own, you place most of your efforts towards protecting it from others to avoid the imminent possibility of losing it, not sure if it helps to secure it, but it certainly takes your attention off the need to nurture what you have and in absence of that what you possess grows weak to the point that it fails to retain the same size and stature, it degenerates and then de-grows to a point, where we see our worst fears materialize conclusively: loss of the prized.

I have my set of fears too, like any other regular person. Do I deal with them? well, I do not know but what I do know is that I try to organize my thoughts and beliefs in a manner that least possible attention is rendered to the dark side: the trepidation. Does it work as designed 100% of the times, well, I have to be honest with you, it does not, sometimes it falls flat on its face dragging me further away from my plan. But expeditions are necessary, you will need to undertake them to fortify your plans. Apprehension immobilizes constructive thoughts and submitting to it can leave you paralyzed. Is ignorance the key to the solution? Nope, ignoring doesn’t help .. it is a dumb idea. 

Freeze, flee or fight are three most common reaction to fear (Don’t agree with me, ask Robin Sharma, he says so in his recent book “The 5AM club); I dare you to choose the last one; You got to take it head-on. It can mean different things to different people. You are afraid of dark place .. try wrestling with a dark room in your home. Water puts you off the grid, try taking a swimming lesson. The idea of Public speaking leaves you all sweaty walk into a bar with an open mic, say what you have to and slip into the oblivion. These are simpler issues to deal with. What is slightly more complex and therefore interesting is creating fear free teams, workgroups & organizations. Before we go any further, let me say this is a fear-free organization doesn’t mean a place where accountability is not fashionable. It also not in any way is to be read as a group that is a target, aim or direction devoid. It is also not an absolute liberal hippy group which is never restrained: None of these.

Business leaders often make the mistake of believing that if they let it go easy, do not install a sense of fear among people who work for them, their workforce will become uncaring, unproductive and perhaps slow, derailing and delaying their ambitious growth plans. Some also hold that their group will become a depiction of the three situations that we have just stated. In fact, many believe fear is an effective tool for exercising control. “If you do not do this or achieve that: I will fire you”, you know that school of management? Let me say it is not completely useless a technique .. people do respond to these fears positively in the near term, the problem is that progressively, its impact keeps going down. In the sense that people develop resistance, you yell .. and then you yell harder and then you will need a mic and then a powerful loudspeaker or an amplifier etc. to express how concerned you are: this model with all its benefits is not a sustainable one. Exercised in long terms is largely ineffective as people no longer get moved by it as much as they did the first couple of times they were subjected to it.

There is no denying the fact that, there is a scarcity of aptly skilled people on top of it if you were to look at skillful and sincere people in large numbers, you are really in for a treasure hunt. Let’s just agree that there aren’t so many radially available and therefore business leaders are forced to rely on creating an atmosphere of fear to get lazy, insincere, semiskilled and unambitious people to move. And at some level, I empathize with them. You gotta admit that one person has put all his hard earned money and all his ‘time’, the time that he/she is never going to get back in building something that he/she is trying to put forward & when they see people play around .. picking fear comes naturally and it is not always a bad tool to choose it can be damaging if one chooses it more often than not.

In an organizational set up: constant anxiety cause these common behaviors

1)   Wild spread coverup 

2)   An unending stream of lies 

3)   Mistrust and politicking  

4)   The high rate of attrition 

5)   The difficulty of hiring fresh talent.

We can all agree that these can never do any good.

So what is that we should then do? We certainly can’t let the place run unregulated. It will be stupid to let the unproductive continue unchecked. What is not working must be brought to an end and it is ok if the end is unemotional. What is however not essential that it will all get done in an environment of dread, worry, horror and phobia. You can be nice and decisive at the same time. It is not an either-or situation, for things to work in an organization it will require to be both at all times. In the process of being nice, you essentially will have to work towards creating a culture of transparency, a workplace that thrives on information and data and not perception and opinions. One that values and respects the need to maintain civility in all exchanges, written, verbal and even non-verbal without ceasing to be objective & descriptive, when needed.   

Ditching fear will enable you to reap the benefits of positive psychology. Behavioral studies conducted in last two decades have all proven the fact that a happy mind is more creative, more focused, more responsible, more attentive and more WORKING then a mind cluttered with doubt, one that works overtime to avoid unpleasant situations. The behavior of the business leader or the organization should at no time be prohibitive. One simple test for that is. 

Do your people come on their own to honestly explain to you that they have faulted, that they failed, that they are responsible? Or for fixing accountability do you have to push people across the corner? If pushing is that you find yourself doing then .. you have work to do. But if people come up on their own to admit; congratulations, you’ve created not just a happy and responsible organization but also a productive one.. because no time is now required to be wasted in fixing accountability and finding the responsible, the one at fault and you can quickly pick whatever went wrong and make progress from there.

The fear free atmosphere is GOLD!

And as far as productivity is concerns that is straight forward.

1)   Give data validated meaningful targets to people 

a.   Give them time to study, research and come back with different views

b.   Hear them out 

c.    Get buy-in for the target 

2)   Review performance 

a.   Periodically

b.   Objectively 

c.    Data-driven 

3)   Call non-conformance out

a.   Define tolerance 

                                               i.     How many chances should you give?

4)   Take process driven action   

a.   Date driven 

b.   Free of bias

c.    Heartless, if that is what is needed.

With that, I end this first article of Jan 2019. I hope and pray that all fears in your life evaporate when you put the conscious effort to create resolves & results in your life.

Until next time, bye-bye!