NU 12 by KC - new paradigm

Hi Sir,

Here is my 6th NU 12 blog - changing the traditional "management style" in our office.

Thank you!

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Crisostomo, Kathleen Lizette C.

ENTREP

NU 12: New attitude / paradigm

How effective is it to use a non-bureaucratic system within your team when the entire company is in bureaucracy?

I've been managing my small operations group for only 2 years now.   Looking back, I had no idea on how to manage people when I accepted my promotion.  I tried applying the system I have been reading from my MBA books.  I learned that the trend nowadays in the workplace is having a leaner group with less decentralization, and that was what I did. 

No one in my team is allowed to call me "ma'am", "miss" or "boss".  They all call me on a first name basis.  I maintained a very lean group of 3 senior people and 1 assistant.  I allocated each one to be accountable and responsible of their own accounts and job orders to be filled.  They have to face the clients themselves, work on their own strategies and only report to me the details at the end of the day.  I let them take leaves when they wanted to and I encouraged them to always be open with their thoughts, no holds barred.  I was only looking at the macro perspective, which is meeting the team's annual revenue and reporting to our country manager and regional office for sales performance.  My team enjoyed the freedom and flexibility, but I made sure I get to hammer those who did not perform because they are accountable for their own decisions.  I was supposed to be the last resort for all decisions.  Outside the workplace, we became friends and even had personal conversations with each other.

After a few months on working on this paradigm of non-bureaucracy and a leaner environment, I noticed how my other colleagues reacted to my team's work ethics.  Other rank and file employees would call their bosses "sir", "miss" or "TL", and some only found out I am a manager because of my email signature.  They felt my team was disrespectful or that I was too casual towards my team.  Others had to really beg their bosses for approvals on leaves and would get turned down because of client demands, while they noticed one of my team members was out on a very long vacation.  They could not reach out directly to their clients because they bosses are the front liners while my team members made negotiations on their own.  My team can easily enter a company director's office without notice while others could not do just that.  In the end I realized I am the only one in the company who created this culture for my team, and that after all, we are still in the Philippines and we were raised to have a traditional, bureaucratic system.

To be very honest, I am not sure how long my work paradigm will be effective when the rest of the company is still in a traditional setting.  Even if I let my team take leaves as they please, it still needs to be approved by my Director and HR.  Even if I give them a flexible time schedule to follow a US-time client demand, office hours are still from 830 am to 530 pm.  The other managers should still be addressed with a "ma'am or a "sir" and those from other departments still call me "ma'am".  I've had a lot of people inquiring on how to move to my team but I also know a lot who would rather stick to their usual process.

I may be challenging the status quo here, but this is how I think an employee should be in the office: you know what to do, strategize how you should do it, take responsibility for your actions, then rest because tomorrow is another day.  I'm not always meeting my sales targets but I know I made a difference in some employee's life. 3.5

NU 12 - by KC, New Incentives for Perfomance

Hi Sir,

Here's my 5th NU 12 Blog-- changing our company's incentive scheme from monetary to non-monetary.

Thank you!

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Crisostomo, Kathleen Lizette C.

ENTREP

NU 12: New processes at work

Every time a candidate endorsed by a recruitment firm gets hired, companies pay the firms an amount based on the salary offered to the candidate.  This makes the recruitment industry sales-oriented and in turn employees are also rewarded based on the revenue they generate for the firm.  To date, my company, Manpower Philippines, is the most generous company within its industry to provide incentives to its employees.  The company entails individual rewards monthly, quarterly and annual.  The goal of these programs is to align the employee's needs with the organization's goals.

Current Incentive Program

The main incentive program of the company is the quarterly commission scheme where upon meeting the quarterly target a recruitment consultant receives 15% of his revenue while a business manager receives 5%.  Aside from this, monthly incentives are given every town hall during the first week of the month for each division's top recruitment consultant and business manager with the highest revenue based on the number of hires.  At the end of the first and second half of the year, the company provides an all-expense out of town vacation to all employees who have met their sales target.  At the end of the year, the top performing business manager and recruitment consultant across all divisions will receive a cash bonus from management.

The preset rewards system, despite being very lucrative, is not necessarily motivating employees in a manner which leads to organizational values.  As important as the bottom line is, employees must also generate a commitment within themselves that they are providing employment opportunities not only because they want to receive incentives.  My proposed change in the business process is to modify the rewards system from a definite monetary scheme to a holistic, non-monetary scheme which drives achievement and responsibility.  All monetary bonuses should be removed and replaced with a new system of incentives.

Proposed Incentive Program

An accumulative "point-system" must be created to make employees goal-oriented and to instill that it takes one step at a time to achieve goals.  For every PHP X thousand worth of revenue, a recruitment consultant or business manager is entitled to claim an item for a certain number of points received.  Points can be accumulated up to the end of the year or may be redeemed once the points are enough to qualify for an item.  For example, 10 points is equivalent to an iPod Nano, 200 points is worth of revenue is equivalent to a Nikon DSLR Camera, or 1000 points is equivalent to a trip to a 3-day 2-night trip to Boracay.  Instead of competing with each other on who should be the number one performer of the month, the individual competes only with himself and he makes the decision on which prize he wants to redeem.  There should also be a Manpower Values Award given every end of the year to all employees (business units and support units such as accounting and HR) who have exemplified characteristics of model employees.  Additional awards such as Perfect Attendance for the Month / Year will also be covered.

Possible Results / Interventions

Removing the commission scheme and replacing it with a different program will work against tradition and it is expected that employees will disapprove in the beginning.  A possible intervention for this change involves a program initiative from HR since this involves rewards management and employee relations.  Apart from management, there should also be informal change champions within the company to help redefine norms and persuade others to focus on recognition, achievement and fulfillment at work instead of monetary benefits. 3.5

NU 12 - What pisses you off at the mall? What do you suggest? KC

Hi Sir,

Here is my 3rd blog entry for NU 12.

Thank you!

--Kathleen Crisostomo

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Crisostomo, Kathleen Lizette C.

ENTREP

NU 12: What pisses you off at the mall?  What do you suggest?

DISCLAIMER: I know nothing about mall operations.  I'm just a customer. J

The urban Filipino's pastime is going to the mall.  I work along Ayala Avenue and Greenbelt 5 is just at the back of our building.  Whenever I get stressed, I just take a stroll until I reach The Landmark, Glorietta or even SM Makati.  Window shopping has been painful during economic struggles but has kept me dreaming on what to do with the spare money I have when I receive my next paycheck.

Instead of focusing on how a mall looks like, I picked out a particular mall and focused on their department store unit: The Landmark Makati.  My wallet develops an increased spending power here compared to its posh neighbors and can even compete with prices of those in Divisoria.  This however does not come without a price.  I started to wonder, is customer service indirectly proportional to prices in the mall?

An expatriate friend from the UK told me that whenever she buys shoes at the Landmark and asks for another size, she needs to wait for 30 minutes before she receives a response.  "There is a bigger chance you will not see the sales person ever again.  It's like they are just waiting for you to get tired of waiting and to leave", she said.  True enough, it does take long for us to wait to get some feedback considering the number of sales personnel.  If you make a follow-up with other sales personnel, they will tell you it is not under their jurisdiction and you should just wait for the one who looked for your pair of shoes.  This happened to me several times already and is the main reason why I don't buy shoes there no matter how dirt cheap they are.

With the number of trinkets being sold and left as is within the department store, it is very easy to shoplift in The Landmark.  Just to clarify-- no, I did not shoplift and I do not intend to.  I'm just wondering why only the south sea pearls are kept in glass shelves while the hair accessories and jewelries are displayed as is with few sales personnel monitoring the number of customers who try them on.  Unnoticed theft of these small items could probably sum up to the worth of the south sea pearls.  It made me wonder about their security system since it is easy to step out of the mall and move to the next establishment.  To get feedback from another mall, I have spoken with a saleslady from SM.  She told me that their branch's strategy to combat shoplifting is to hire tall sales personnel.  I was astounded.

The sales people need some serious customer service training.  Yes, the job is tiring and repetitive and they will need to encounter customer complaints.  I understand that the market being catered at The Landmark is not the same market being catered in Rustan's, and I also do not expect them to act posh.  However, they are still the front liners in the mall and this mall is still in Makati CBD.

On normal circumstances in the mall, the price of an item is indicated on a sticker/tag along with its bar code.  When you reach the counter, the cashier scans the barcode and the item details flash on the screen.  If there is a problem, the cashier requests assistance from someone who can get a similar item, looks for the item personally, or contacts her supervisor.  My biggest problem with The Landmark occurs just when I am about to pay for the item.  The manual encoding system of purchases has become a headache.  You cannot just get an item and pay in the nearest counter.  The sales person in charge needs to give you first a purchase slip which you have to present to the counter before you can pay for the item, or worse, before you retrieve your item from the sales person.  The sales transaction will not occur without this piece of paper.  The price is then encoded manually.  I bought a ribbon from the ground floor once but had to buy a lot of other items in the fourth floor.  When I reached the counter, they would not process the payment because I need to go back to the ground floor and to get the purchase slip from a missing sales person.  In the end, I no longer purchased the ribbon even if that was the reason why I went to the mall in the first place.

Proposed Solutions:

My biggest problem in Landmark is the easiest one I can find a solution to.  They just need to upgrade their POS (point of sale) system.  Similar to how manufacturing companies work, if they are able to scan the barcode of an item then it should automatically be deducted from the number of supplies listed.  This will make inventory management easier for all their vendors and will make the payment transaction process more efficient.  In a world turning paperless, the company should void away from using handwritten purchase slips.  If a purchase slip is still needed, it can be done electronically while cashiers receive the alert in their system.  POS systems maybe expensive but would add value in the long run.

In line with the POS system, with a more efficient DBMS (database management system), sales personnel should be able to check if there are still available stocks in the inventory.  This will cause them not to spend 30 minutes looking for a size 7 pair of black Janylin pointed pumps while another customer is requesting for a size 9 of the same product in green.

I trust that The Landmark's security system is better than what I have initially thought of but they do have to work on securing their items.  People shop like crazy at The Landmark weeks before the Christmas party season because of several items which can be used as gifts and all those pens, magnets, keychains and figurines are just spread out in a table.  They don't need to keep these items on a glass case like the south sea pearls but some form of rearrangement will do.

The biggest thing to change will be the intangible problems, such as culture.  As I learned in HUMRES, in order for you to change the culture, you have to change the artifacts.  The front liners should definitely be trained for better customer service orientation.  Now that The Landmark is going through renovation, this is a good time to also renovate the culture of their people.  This will make them more competitive as they will have low cost items with better service.

I have to admit that I have visited The Landmark Trinoma just once and realized it was quite different from the one in Makati.  I hope the culture there infects the renovation of their Makati branch. 4 < you can now run a dept store>