Hacking Culture

How do you ‘hack culture’? You might first ask me what ‘hacking culture’ means.

 

Well! It’s about creating a significantly different, and not an incremental, vision of culture – and finding non-traditional ways to move towards that vision.

 

Now, let’s get back to ‘how’ question.

 

You could use 2 different approaches to ‘hack culture’.

 

On one hand, you could get a large group of diverse people in a room – and ask them to throw caution to wind and come up with innovative ideas. In this approach, you are providing no structure/tools to think innovatively.

 

On other hand, you could provide people in room some structure/tools to help them start thinking differently.

 

First approach may work in a situation where team itself brings very diverse perspectives to table –probably because of their diverse backgrounds. Secondly team members are accustomed to a lot of change – and hence will not be too wedded on to the current culture.

 

Second approach may work in a situation where people in room might have very similar thoughts/ideas - probably because of similar backgrounds. Secondly team members might have a seen a long period of certainty – and so are probably emotionally attached to the current culture.

 

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Sourav

Build or Buy?

Well! I am back to blogging.

And this time I want to share some posts I have been writing pro-bono for small MFIs who are trying to strengthen their HR processes. Here’s the first of these posts. You will find me sharing more of these posts from now on.

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You have realized that you have a personnel 'vacancy' that you need to fill.

 

Do you hire from external market (buy) or do you hire internally (a cross-functional move, role enrichment, promotion)?

 

Both of have their pros and cons and choice is probably context specific.

Buy

Pros -

·        A better fit for the role and so probably quicker time to performance,

·        An external candidate might bring in a fresh perspective.

Cons

·        Higher cost of hiring and possibly higher payroll costs

·        Cultural misfits might lead to periods of instability/conflict within team.

Build

Pros

·        Brings down cost of hiring and payroll costs.

·        Cultural fit will be ensured

Cons

·        Maybe will require more time to ramp up or more involvement from manager in ensuring ramp up.

·        No fresh thinking might flow into the team.

What will you prefer - build or buy- and for what kind of situations/positions?

Add one more to the options of Build or Buy.

You could also 'hire' services of a skill from market for a temporary period, e.g. - hiring services of a professional agency.

So choices you have are 'Build, Buy, or Hire'.

 

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Sourav

 

Setting up Teams

Well! I've been part of setting up of a completely new team this year. 

 

The team members are going to be spread across atleast 3 countries and time zones. Most of them are new to company. There will be little overlap in working hours of this regional team and parent organization (in India). 

 

We have managed to get the first set of employees onboard.  Upcoming challenge is to build a team from a set of employees spread out geographically.  So what should be next steps?

 

We obviously need common goal/s- something to which people can relate and rally around. We do have common goals. We need to ensure that employees understands and acts on those goals.

 

We need enough team members to connect regularly with each other.  So necessity to set up regular team meetings. Given that it is a high context culture, face to face presence might be more beneficial. Possibly technology- webex, etc - can play a role here. We also need to have an agreement on frequency at which this team gets together.

 

We have a manager, new to company. We need to hand hold manager  for atleast one annual cycle. We also need to involve other managers in organization in setting him up for success.

 

We need to be able to integrate this team in existing regional offices where their members are based out of. Ensuring alignment of policies to regional practices is minimum requirement. We already have ensured this. Ensuring connects with key stakeholders is another requirement. We have initiated this. But what more?

 

We also need to be able to integrate team into parent organization (based out of India). Visits of team members to parent organization, sync with key stakeholders, and including them in key conversations in parent organizations are first steps we have taken. But what more?

 

These are some of the things that we need to work on in next few months as we go about trying to build a team from geographically spread out and remote team members.

 

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Sourav