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

Diversity and Inclusion

Mid-year is a good time to pause and reflect on progress made and what to do ahead.

 

My blogs this month will be reflect this theme.

 

Diversity and inclusion (D&I) is one space I have been working on.

 

First and foremost you need to be able to assess comprehensively as-is phase and to track progress. Hence necessity for creating and putting a calendar/rhythm around a reporting mechanism. 

I have managed to get buy in for such a reporting mechanism. I have created sustainable reporting structure.

The next steps are to ensure timely report preparation and using the reports to drive relevant conversations.

 

Second you need to be able to introduce D&I conversations in every HR process.

This is something I feel I have made decent progress in.  I have managed to introduce D&I conversation in almost every HR process. Different stakeholders (business and HR) are increasingly getting bought in to the idea of having these conversations too.

But then progress has mostly in space of representation in all HR processes. Either we are ensuring fair representation or keeping visibility on representation.

Next steps are in sustaining D&I conversations in HR processes and steering conversations towards inclusion too.

 

A related point is leadership and managerial buy in for D&I. We have kept conversation going in space of what’s and how’s in D&I.

Going ahead we need to surface and discuss the why with the leadership and managerial team. The discussion needs to also include an exploration of their beliefs/values around this space.

 

We are in process of setting up a D&I committee. This committee will consist of members across organization and is another step in integrating D&I into fabric of organization.  Getting this committee to action on D&I agenda will be another goal. Hence need to see them through to norming and performing stage within a month? We usually use the term onboarding for a new joiner – getting an individual employee ramped up quickly enough to do his/her job independently. In this case I have to ensure onboarding for a team.

 

Fourth, we need to have clarity on priority action areas in D&I. I think we treaded right path in using analytics/data to identify possible action/outcome areas. We now have clarity on priority areas. Next steps are how and when.

 

A few further related thoughts.

We already have a community where 'diversity' employees come together.  These employees do feel a sense of identification with this community. How can we leverage this group better to execute D&I initiatives?

I also feel that we can do more work in space of inclusion. We can look at beliefs behind our actions and how or actions can be inclusive/non-inclusive.   As shared earlier, we need to work with leaders and managers. But we also need to work with other employees/peers.

 

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Sourav

An Inclusive Difficult Conversation!

How do we handle difficult conversations? How do they make us feel? Do we as HR/Managers unintentionally make a conversation tougher than it usually should be?

I had written a post exploring some of the question above. The post was published last week by Kaleel Jamison Consulting on their blog site. Do give it a read and share your thoughts.

(http://blog.kjcg.com/index.php/2012/09/an-inclusive-difficult-conversation)

 

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Sourav

Being Big!

A post i have written for Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group.

My attempts at intentionally transferring some of my learnings from a workshop to workplace.

http://blog.kjcg.com/?p=273

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Sourav

Inclusion!

Inclusion at the workplace has been one of my recent interests.  It is nice to say 'we value diversity'. It is more difficult to ensure that employees ensure that everyone feels welcome and comfortable to contribute. 'Meetings' are a significant mechanism through which which employees can be made to feel included/excluded.

A blog post i have written about how to ensure 'inclusive' meetings was recently published by Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group on their official blog. Here's the link to the article.

http://blog.kjcg.com/index.php/2012/02/meeting-norms-that-make-us-big/

Do you agree/disagree with observations. How would you go about ensuring 'meetings' are inclusive?

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Sourav