Archive for Management

Management Series – Your Employees are Your Assets

Superior and SubordianteHow many times have you heard the line, “Your employees are your company’s assets“? Practically every leadership course you attend, every motivation course and every team building event keep reminding you that your employees are your assets.

But is the statement true? Does this apply to companies or corporations throughout the world? From my perspective, I would say, it depends. It depends on the nature of the business you are in.

If your business is centered largely on manufacturing, look into automation. Machines can jolly do a lot of things and can easily replace human beings at the factory floor. Yes, I do agree that certain level of human resources are required to run the business but can these people be easily substituted? For example, in a manufacturing environment, the HR manager may be be concerned of products produced by the business but rather she is more concerned of the staffing levels, unions, payroll, etc; essentially making her easily substituted.

Unlike a manufacturing business, the service industry such as IT, BPOs, Auditing and Accounting are extremely dependable on their employees. In these businesses, your products are actually the expertise of your employees. These are your assets. The more you grow them , the more they increase their ability and capabilities; they more money they make you.

In short, depending on the organisation and business you are in, employees play certain level of importance and therefore differing values to the management.

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Management Series – Fate? Is This for Real?

Female Management GuruI was texting with my colleague on MSN Messenger earlier today about glitches in a project when our “conversation” argument was abruptly terminated. Since both of us had Yahoo Messenger, we continued our conversation debate there. At the heat of our discussion, our conversation was again terminated due to unknown reasons.
Mumbling to self: must be that nutty IT Engineer we recently engaged.

My colleague then sent me a SMS saying that we were fated not to have a conversation about the project glitches. I was taken aback by that statement. At this day and age, how can we still believe in fate? Come on, get real. I have a saying, “You won’t strike a lottery if you had not bought a ticket”. I proceeded to SMS him back with the following message:

Phone SMS

Hehe.. I’m a philosopher now. But that’s how I really feel, With all due respect to the various religions and beliefs. I have always believed that if you put effort into whatever you are doing, you are bound to have some results regardless if it’s a success or failure.

My hypothesis or philosophy “Your destiny is the result of your actions which is also partially influenced by others” supports other thoughts theories as well:

  • For every action, there is a reaction ~ Newton’s Third Law
  • God helps those who help themselves ~ Anonymous or rather unknown

If you do not lift a finger, don’t expect success to come your way. However, there are also elements of the unknown or variables that may alter your destiny. For example, you intend to buy some groceries at Tesco and was happily driving along when your mobile phone rang. On the other line was your old friend inviting you out for tea. You may:

  1. Join your friend for tea
  2. Decline the invitation and continue to run your errand

If you chose to join your friend for tea, your destiny to guy groceries at Tesco was a failure because your actions have been influenced by your old friend. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you should not have tea with friends. This is just an example.

Hope you enjoyed this post.

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Management Series – Work More with Less

Female Management GuruAfter a long short thought, I’ve decided to blog about the management experiences that I have gone through and provide some insights to the dos, don’ts and how-tos. There will be many who may dispute or agree with my posts but at the end of the day, the advise I gave is what worked for me.

This will be my first posting about “Doing more work with Less People”. How many times are you bogged down with ad hoc instructions from bosses? How often do you face huge work with short deadlines? There was once where I was required to massage an enormous amount of data in order summarise into 2 reports. The data needed to be sifted by humans as the computer system was unable to cater for the requirements. To make matters worse, by boss gave me an 8.5 hours duration.

I started by getting one single person to download all the information into Excel format. While that task was going on, I gather the rest of my team members (10 of them) and gave instructions on what is required and how we’re going to do it. Everyone nodded in agreement and was a sign they understood what was at stake and what need to be done.

1 hour passed and data from Excel was distributed to all the team members to work on. By the time 2 hours passed, a check revealed that every member was doing their own style and method. Knowing that this wasn’t going anywhere, I re-strategised and got only 2 team members to re-do the whole thing. A quick instruction was given, a quick reiteration of what needs to be done and within a total elapsed time of 8 hours, the 2 reports were completed, checked and verified. Phew!

Moral of the story: It’s not necessarily true that adding more people resources into a task will shorten the time to complete it. In reality, this may prove the opposite. Everyone has a different level of comprehension, creativity and initiative. Hence, on important tasks, choose a few effective personnel and let them handle the task.

Oh! Don’t forget to give them that carrot at the end of the stick.

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