Anything HR by Ed

A Dream Training Project

2012-05-26T17:54:00.000+08:00

To my regular readers, I apologize for shamelessly advertising my public seminars lately. I do hope that my advertorials also helped you in some way appreciate the roles you play as leader, HR practitioner or any professional in charge of delivering results. I'd like to do another one now and I hope you would read on just to find out what I have in mind.

I'm running the Manager's Toolbox Training with two other seasoned training professionals, Boom San Agustin and Eric Monte. This program is a product of a long time of thinking how ExeQserve can make a difference and add value to learners who purchase a seat in our training programs, so you can say that this is a dream training project. I wanted the learners to come from the program, not only inspired or motivated but have something practical to take home and use when they go back to work. I don't think a lot of public seminars do that anymore. I see a lot of people take the stage and get away with being funny and have something witty to say. As a result, participants go home entertained and not much more.

My goal for this program is a lot more than that. I want my learners to go home with a full realization that they need to build their teams, that there is a way for proper planning, that there is a method for dealing with different types of leadership situations and that there are specific ways to instill positive discipline in the workplace and there are ways to do these things. My goal is to let the participants take home a starter kit of tools that they can work with and improve on until it becomes more useful in their pursuit of management and leadership success. Again, my favorite metaphor, this program is a bicycle training wheel that will allow them to take their new found learning for a spin. When they get used to doing what they need to be doing, they can remove the training will and make their own improvisations.

Towards the end of the program, we will ask the participants to embark on a challenge of applying what they learned by starting some leadership and management projects and join a network of learners who are willing to exchange information about their experiences and learning so that learning goes on even after the program.

My co-trainers are the same ones I invite to run our No-Frills Training because I believe they share this desire to truly equip learners with the needed tools for the job. This program is No-Frills Training, only bigger and more comprehensive. Join us on June 19 to 20. Invite others too! Manager's Toolbox Workshop

Team Bonding

2012-05-06T17:17:00.001+08:00

I had an epiphany!!!

Once in a while I receive requests for "easy" team building activities. Ones where there's not a lot of processing, not a lot of outputs. They say, they just want to bond, do something together, nothing heavy, no rules of engagement, no forward agenda. As a facilitator of "team building interventions," I balk at this idea, or at least the idea of calling an event like this team building. Purist much? maybe. But I'd like to think that I am transformed, rehabilitated and changed.

What changed? I used to think that while I acceed to some of those requests just for kicks, I thought they don't do much. I now fervently believe that those "team building activities" really do make a difference. And here's exactly what I think.

I continue to believe that team building interventions in order to expedite the process of improving team performance need to be deliberate, strategized and structured. I continue to believe that clear goals, team buy-in, rules of engagements together with leadership that is thoroughly interested in building a team seals the deal. I mean if you want to build team fast, there's a way. Now, in order to take care of team relationship which is essential to teamwork, there's another way. I'd like to call them "team bonding" activities. What exactly do they do? They give teams a chance to. well, bond. Bonding times are times away from work, away from the pressures of deadlines, the office politics and the stress. I have two important criteria for team bonding activities; one is that it is away from work, the other one is that team members get a chance to do things together. I mean a company outing cannot count as a bonding activity, if they just go together in a resort and chill out individually. They must do something together. There are a number of other things that I believe work to bond a team like tree planting, cleaning a river together, putting up a program for street children, work on a Gawad Kalinga or Habitat for Humanity, a sports fest, a Christmas party (the project of putting it together and the actual event).

Team bonding, what it does is help team members know each other better without the aid of personal profiling tool, sort each other out in a way and find out (or in some cases, not) that they can actually do something together. Do these things really translate to better working relationship? I'm going on faith here that if it is done often enough and with care to get the needed dynamics, it will eventually lead them working better together and if you are lucky, towards a common goal.

Trainers' Training by Ed and Pat

2012-05-03T18:57:00.000+08:00

Pat Pascua and I are facilitating a once-a-week, four session training that will start on June 27 and I invite everyone who are starting a career in Training or those who are aspiring to be trainers to attend. I am writing this blog to further explain some of the reasons why you should join this training that the marketing material may not be able to explain.

1. I am teaming up with Pat Pascua, a seasoned training professional and Toastmaster who has considerable training experience behind her that she will be sharing in this training. My training experience is nothing compared to this fine lady! We are team-training here. We're sharing the stage. You'll have two facilitators working with you all the time!

2. Here's what we intend to do; you come in with a training idea, you come out with complete training design. That is, of course, if you are as committed as we need you to be in engaging yourself in this learning experience.

3. You come in once a week so you have time to work on your assignments. Yes, there's homework! After day one, you will be asked to apply what you learned by coming up with a design, after day two, you'll have two assignments; one is to start working on your lesson plan and the other one is a five-minute presentation to help us assess your platform skills. On the last day, you will be expected to present a completed training program design, with lesson plan, presentation materials, etc.

4. We are adopting a show-tell-let-do, let-do-strategy to make sure that you are not just knowing but applying what we are sharing.

5. We are also covering workplace learning of performance or WLP because this is an important role trainers must play in their organization and we'll be remiss not to include some of the strategies we know on how you can help your learners become accountable for applying their learning in the workplace.

Download the course outline and registration form below if you want to enroll. If you have questions, call me.

ExeQserve Trainers Training Registration

Team Building is Leadership Training In Disguise

2012-04-24T19:11:00.002+08:00

It's true and it is one of the most important trainings that Leaders must undertake.

Many leaders think of team building events as attitude adjusting interventions for their employees. They are hoping that activities like these would wake people up to the reality that they need to work as a team and that they embrace team player attitudes. What they often don't realize is that the team members will only learn and apply what they learn if the leaders apply their own learning.

I always make it clear to leaders who request for us to facilitate their team building program that 80% (maybe more?) of what needs to be learned in a team building program is for them. And that the leaders are the ones building the team not the facilitators. We are just there to guide the process. Leaders must take ownership of the process and take personal accountability for its success or failure. Here are a few things that leaders must learn through this program:

Know your team, understand the diversity that goes into your team and capitalize on it. By knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your team, you will know which roles to give and which tasks they will need help with.

Build trust. It is most crucial that the team members trust their leader. By trust I mean, trust the leader enough to express themselves honestly, speak up when they have ideas and opinions and listen to what the Leader is saying because they trust that the leader has their (the team's) best interest in mind.

Learn to collaborate, cooperate and co-create. Leaders who are able to build enough confidence in themselves and their team must know that they don't have the monopoly on best ideas. They seek people's ideas and opinions, listen and consider them in decision making. They set goals with their team and co-create strategies so that people have buy-in and clarity on goals and strategies that lead to commitment in execution.

Following Through. This, I believe is the most powerful quality that a leader must have. You can have the best intentions, you can have the best ideas and you can say the nices, most inspiring things but if you can't follow through, you haven't arrived as a leader. My measurement of leadership effectiveness from those group's I facilitated team building for is the abilty of their leaders to sit down with the team after a team building workshop and start work on making all the commitments made a reality.

I have made it a point to sit down with leaders of teams before we hold team building workshops. If there are 10 department heads in a company-wide team building workshop, I will meet with them and explain to them how they can grow from this experience and also how others in the team will start to grow after the leaders take the lead.

Let me know if you want my help in learning how to build your own team.

Sustaining Teamwork

2012-04-09T13:28:00.001+08:00

In my mind's eye, the picture above depicts all the necessary elements to sustained teamwork.

It all starts with an effort to build trust. There are three causal elements necessary to make this happen; a willingness to trust, having the right communication mindset and using dialogues to clarify expectations and solidify norms. All these three elements simultaneously build trust and lead to the development of the other fundamental elements in the team building process. This causal loop rarely happens spontaneously. If you want to have it, you have to be deliberate about it. In fact, I believe that team builders must focus on this first if they want to build a strong team. Half of my two-day team building workshop is spent jumpstarting this process with the goal of giving the participants confidence to continue when they go back to the workplace.

My recent attendance to a training program opened my eyes to the idea of using the term dialogue instead of debate or argument as a label for team communication. This to me is an important paradigm shift and I am humbled by the fact that I've openly embraced productive conflict to thresh out solutions to team problems when a more collaborative, less combative and more generative language can encourage the right mindset in team communication. I have recently turned a new leaf and have introduced this in my team building workshops. I promise to write a separate article to highlight the impact of this awakening soon.

Dialogues are important, because they encourage inquiry, generation of ideas, strategies and clarification of roles. Because people see themselves as party to a creative process, buy-in is much easier and roles are clarified faster. This builds sense of ownership which leads to commitment and accountability.

When teams are able to solidify rules of engagement, they find a way to execute better or continually improve the way they execute. Team members who are accountable and committed quickly identify areas for improvement and engage each other in a dialogue to act on the team's needs. This, I believe can only lead to better performance. Better performance means better results, which leads to higher personal and interpersonal confidence leading to stronger trust base. We already know how trust paves the way to better communication that eventually leads to better communication which is the requirement for continuing teamwork.

Learn How You Can Use Toastmasters for People Development

2012-03-30T15:53:00.000+08:00

Your company’s success depends in large part on how well your employees communicate – with each other as well as with customers. The effects of a poorly run meeting or an ineffective sales presentation are lasting and expensive.
How well do your employees convey their expertise to potential customers? Can they lead meetings efficiently? Can they offer constructive feedback and diplomatically deal with a wide range of people?

Good communicators tend to be good leaders, and every company needs employees with leadership potential. This is where Toastmasters can help. Think of it as an onsite training class for busy professionals where employees meet once a week to sharpen their communication and leadership skills in a supportive setting with their coworkers. The cost is minimal and the benefits long-lasting.

Toastmasters training will teach your employees to:

• Develop their leadership potential • Hone their management skills
• Listen better • Offer constructive criticism
• Organize productive teams • Conduct meetings
• Present ideas more effectively • Give better sales presentations

The effectiveness of the Toastmasters’ educational program is evidenced by more than 6,000 organizations worldwide that sponsor in-house Toastmasters clubs as communication and leadership training for their employees.

To give you a better picture of the Toastmasters benefits in the Philippine setting, we invite you to the following affair –

The 1st Philippine Toastmasters Corporate Summit
19 April 2012, Thursday, 1:00 -5:00 pm
Asian Institute of Management Conference Center
Makati City

Learn how competence builds confidence and listen to the success stories of two well-known companies.

Grab this opportunity and bring more value to your corporate trainings. Registration fee is P500 only.

Why All HR Professionals Should Learn Job Analysis

2012-03-15T10:13:00.000+08:00

Job Analysis, I believe is one of the basic skills all HR generalists must have. There's just too much HR related work connected to it that cannot be done effectively and efficiently without doing a proper job analysis. For example:

Job Description Writing
a poorly written job description also communicates job expectations poorly. This means wrong premise for hiring, training and performance management. Job analysis helps the JD writer all the job dimensions and decribe the properly.

Recruitment
A properly done job analysis helps us determine not just the tasks undertaken by an incumbent but also the needed skills/competencies needed to succeed in the job. The information gathered from job analysis can help recruiters search for the right talents or screen candidates against known standards

Training Needs Analysis
Job analysis can lead to TNA where learning managers can look for gaps between what the job demands and what the incumbents can offer. The identified gaps are information needed by those in training to design an intervention.

Performance Management
a properly done job analysis disects a job by key result areas, establishes the time spent for each, the expected results and the needed competencies to carry out the job effectively. These are all expectations that are best communicated via a performance management system.

Compensation Strategy
The information you gather from job analysis, can be used for job evaluation and then for coming up with a salary structure and a compensation strategy. The activity can help you determine the relative worth of a job as compared to other jobs. It can help you in considering internal equity when planning your compensation program.

If you carry out the task of doing a job analysis and use the information to align your HR activities, you will be able to communicate expectations clearly, thoroughly and consistently from hiring to training, to managing employee performance. Designing or acquiring tools that get you the information you need is crucial to making all these happen.

It is unfortunate that not a lot of HR professionals are able to do this. It is fortunate, however, that ExeQserve offer a No Frills Training on this. If you are an HR Manager, I strongly recommend that you send all your staff to this training and let them do this activity to align or realign your HR Activities in the Work Place.

Job Analysis Workshop - No Frills Training from ExeQserve

Operationalizing Your Strategic Plan

2012-03-12T10:00:00.008+08:00

I've facilitated a few dozen strategic and annual business planning sessions. I've seen how some of them work and how a lot of them fail.

There are so many extraneous reasons why a plan would fail but today, I'd like to talk about a few things that are within control and how managers like you and me can do something about them.

Drilling Down to Departmental Action Plans
Many Management Teams like to talk high level. Sure, they like to distribute goals to departmental levels and maybe go as far as identifying departmental initiatives so that managers of these departments are made accountable for their goals and their commitments. When it comes to coming up with action plans that detail initiatives into monitor-able set of milestones, they don't want to hear about it. There's probably a host of reason why they don't want it. They want flexibility. There are so many things happening everyday that they need to respond to so, they want to have the freedom to deal with the details of their plans if and when they can. The fact that our daily work can overwhelm us is exactly the reason why planning should go down to the details of actions and not just initiatives.

Monitoring Your Plan
For many companies, the second time the whole management team hears the plan is the next planning session, when they are reviewing last year's plan in preparation for the next year's plan. This is poor practice. When planning is complete, initiatives are broken down to action steps with time frames and are therefore track-able. I recommend regular monitoring of not just key indicators but also action plan milestones. This will help the company figure out if initiatives are being carried out as planned and if they are being effective, well ahead of the next planning session. If we know how our plan is working, it gives us the impetus to move ahead or rethink our initiatives. It helps us to be more flexible.

Establishing Key Performance Indicators and Targets
Plans are means to certain ends. It is important to identify the needed change in performance, when and how they are expected to happen. By creating a scoreboard and naming the people for keeping the numbers up, we see a direct connection between people, performance and plans. As they say, what gets measured, gets managed. What gets rewarded, gets done.

I believe every manager should be trained on how to do this. ExeQserve is running a workshop on Departmental Planning. I strongly suggest that you send your managers to this training and help them plan their departmental activities in a way that aligns and contributes to organizational goals and strategies.

Workshop on How to Prepare a Departmental Plan - ExeQserve

No Frills Training For April

2012-03-05T14:47:00.000+08:00

ExeQserve is running FIVE "No Frills" Training workshops in April and I invite you to send participants. Facilitators like myself, Patricia Pascua and Boom San Agustin will be running these workshops. Please see the details below.

No Frills Training for April

Vision, Mission and Values Alignment

2012-03-05T11:14:00.000+08:00

I've been doing this a lot lately and have also learned a lot from it. Let me tell you how I do it and what I learned in the process.

First thing is to understand the company's VMV and then work with management on a desired outcome.

I prefer managers cascading... well, not just cascading but being personally responsible for their groups alignment. This is important because it makes a world of difference versus making it the sole responsibility of HR to, well, cascade.

In order to ensure managers are equipped, they need to go through a workshop that helps them appreciate and learn the following:

The mutuality of Company and employee symbiosis.
The factors that contribute to alignment and commitment
Understanding the concept of values
Acknowledging their own values and determining if they themselves are aligned with the organization's values(this is an important "go-no-go" step in the process)
Develop a strategy for communicating the company values in the context their direct reports will understand and appreciate (not in generalities that we in HR usually communicate them)
Clarify the concept of mission
Understand the company's mission statement and how it is being operationalized.
Coming up with strategies to demonstrate more consistency with the company's mission.
Understand the concept of vision
Appreciate the company's vision statement and create a road map for pursuing it.
Come up with an Action Plan not only for cascading but for living by the company's core philosophies.

What I learned is that this process should start from the very top and then move level by level, downwards.

I read from the book "Human Sigma" that all cultures are local. The managers and supervisors create that culture. Whether advertently or inadvertently, they create that culture. If you want organization-wide alignment, you need organizational leaders from the top the frontline to speak the same organizational language, and have fully bought in, mind, heart and spirit on the organization's purpose and desired culture.

Please let me know if you need my help.

Why Disciplining Should Really Be a Line Function

2012-03-04T11:51:00.000+08:00

I conducted a "No Frills" Training Last February. The topic of the learning session was "Handling Discipline and Due Process Issues." I realize now that I should have added "for Line Managers in the title because I was hoping to get them to attend this seminar.

What I got instead are mostly HR practitioners who are still mainly responsible for policing and ensuring employees' compliance with company policies. Again, I heard stories of an Employee Relation Officer issuing an average of 200 memos per month, an HR Manager who cannot fully implement a suspension because the line manager won't approve of it due to some production needs and another one who think it is her job to do it so that the line supervisors and managers can focus on doing their job... But their job it is (the line managers/supervisors) to ensure employees are aligned, behaving and performing according to the company's values and are compliant to company rules and regulations!

There are so many reasons why line managers see discipline as an important responsibility. Here are a few:

They have a direct working relationship with the people they work with. What they say (and demonstrate) goes. If a manager says, she values professionalism and it is demonstrated through punctuality and delivering on commitments. If the manager says it and models it and make people accountable for following her lead, it becomes a much stronger message than an HR orientation that is harriedly done at the onset of employment.

Only line managers can effectively implement positive disciplining. This means communicating the importance of compliance, demonstrating it through action, constantly reminding employees to align themselves and coaching or counseling employees who may be getting themselves derailed once in a while. HR can't do it or at least not as effectively as a line manager. If you have a line manager who has complete disregard for company policies, HR will be facing a dilemma of employees getting confused with what HR says and what their immediate supervisor is demonstrating.

Lastly, handling discipline issues if done skillfully and with care can improve relationship between managers and their direct reports. Imagine this; a manager sees and employee violate a company policy, instead of calling the person's attention and addressing the issue, the manager goes to HR and asks HR to give employee a memo. What message does it convey? To me it's poor communication, absence of trust and punitive rather than corrective. You can say this is protocol in your company but to me, it does not make sense. If Manager and employee is to build a strong working and trusting relationship, issues like this should be addressed by no other than them. This builds mutual commitment and accountability, specially if the genuine purpose is behavior or performance improvement.

What is HR to do? Be the internal consultant that we are, be the support unit that we truly are. How? By keeping policies relevant in partnership with all stakeholders. By, giving sound advice to managers who need to carryout some disciplining tasks. By helping equip managers do their job (maintaining discipline that is) more effectively.

Large Group Team Building with Energy Development Corporation PGS Team

2012-02-12T16:59:00.001+08:00

This team building event happened on February 6 and 7, 2012. I'd like to thank Ana Candelaria of PGS team for sharing the video with me.It was a combination of Indoor and outdoor team building activities. If you wish to have something like this for your company, you know who to call :)

Can Your Recruitment Staff Headhunt?

2012-01-05T10:58:00.002+08:00

We all know good talents are hard to come by these days. You post an ad in the papers and in the Internet and then you get a lot of practically useless resumes and close to no one is good enough for the job. Is there really no available talents out there? There are great talents out there. The best of them are gainfully and happily employed and may not even be looking at news papers or online job boards for opportunities. It takes a deliberate and creative effort to find them and takes a little bit more to reel them in.

Are you wondering why your recruiters go back to you empty-handed? Maybe this answers your question; if all they do is advertise, chances are they won't find what you want them to find.

As a manager of a company that does a lot of headhunting, I've interviewed recruitment specialists from various organizations and this is what I've come to figure. Most of them are trained to post vacancies and screen candidates, not to source and much less attract good candidates by pitching or selling the company's employer brand.

Nowadays when companies are battling to attract and retain candidates, isn't important for your recruitment frontliners to hunt good candidates and be capable of reeling them in? I believe it is.

I am running a half-day learning session on this topic on February 16. And for 1,500 (plus VAT) I will share some headhunting secrets with the participants. I invite you to invest that amount for your recruitment staff to learn some new tactics in sourcing and getting candidates to explore. I believe any beginner in the recruitment practice and those who feel they are stuck in the old ways of hiring will benefit from this learning session.

Here's a disclaimer - inviting candidates and getting them to explore your company is one thing, getting them to sign up is another. It is dependent on the employer value you are offering which should be part of your elaborate employer branding strategy. Let me talk about that next time. :)

Check out the details of that seminar below:

Headhunting 101 - February

Equipping Your Line Managers/Supervisors to Handle Disciplinary Issues

2012-01-02T15:13:00.002+08:00

Discipline is a line responsibility. This is not always how it is understood in many organizations. Often, people think that it is the sole responsibility of HR to discipline people. In fact, many managers' send their erring employees to HR for disciplining instead of acting on the issue themselves. Even HR sometimes do not understand the division of responsibility between them and the managers when it comes to dealing with erring employees. This is why many HR practitioners in the Philippines act like school principals, looking over people's shoulders and acting like the corporate cop they think they out to be. This is incorrect and ineffective for several reasons; If disciplining is relegated to HR alone, no body will know the company policy except for HR (which is true in many companies). Companies do not have enough HR staff to play this cop/school principal role. Line managers when fully equipped can do a better job of discouraging people from violating company policies, call their attention or apply disciplinary action if they err, better appreciation of policies will help them make recommendations on how they can be improved and implemented.

In order for company policies to be effectively implemented, line managers or supervisors must understand their role in maintaining discipline in the workplace. They should also learn how due process works and what role they play in ensuring fairness when investigating possible violation of company policies. Most importantly, managers should be capable of handing out discipline when necessary with their minds set on improving performance more than just punishing employees for their wrong-doing.

The organization's culture is shaped by its managers. There is so much that managers can do to ensure that what is written on paper is consistent with what is happening on the floor. When people know that their managers fully appreciate the company's policies and will have no qualms about addressing misalignment, they take the company's policy more seriously.

A manager is well equipped when one is capable of preventing deviations from policies, know when an employee is deviating, can go through the proper procedure of applying due process, hand down disciplinary action in a way that does not expose the company to legal liabilities and is also able to maintain the employees self esteem and the relationship as a disciplinary action is handed down.

If you need help in transitioning your managers towards becoming actively engaged in preventing and addressing disciplinary issues, I encourage you to attend our 4-hour no frills training on the subject matter on February 8, 2012. Details are stated below. If you want a customized "Maintaining Discipline in the Workplace" Workshop for your company, please contact me and I'll be happy to work out a plan with you.

andling Discipline Issues and Due Process - February

Do Your Managers Know How to Interview Candidates?

2011-12-29T10:23:00.001+08:00

If you are in charge of or a participant in the recruitment process, you know very well this is an important question.

A lot of recruitment efforts go to waste because Managers take their part in the process for granted. They don't prepare for interviews, don't know which questions to ask and don't know what to make of candidates' responses to their questions. A lot of managers go by their gut feel when deciding who to hire. While I continue to believe that instinct should have considerable weight in hiring decision making, it should not be the sole basis for it. A lot of expensive hiring mistakes are made when managers fail to account for the necessary competencies when making hiring decisions.

As I have mentioned in my previous post, hiring is everything. A wrong hire is difficult if not impossible to correct with training and did I also mention expensive? If you agree with me on this, you must also agree that managers need to learn how to conduct better job interviews. There has to be a deliberate effort for them to find out what kind of preparations are needed so that people involved in the hiring process know what they are looking for. They need to know how to prepare for a screening process. They need understand all those reports you as a recruitment/HR person (if you are this person) are preparing to aid them in interviewing and sorting out candidates.They need to learn how to formulate questions that will help determine if these candidates have what it takes to succeed in the job. They need learn all these things whether by reading a book or attending a training. By whatever means they need to recognize the importance of opening the organization's gates only to those who have the best chance of succeeding in it.

HR as a strategic partner needs to look at the manner by which managers choose their people and see where they can improve. This idea is easy to sell. Just analyze the effectiveness of your hiring mechanism in choosing people for the job in terms of the new employees' ability to succeed or fail in the job and you will be able to easily see if your selection process needs improving. A failure to hire is caused by poor recruitment strategy, a failure to hire the right person, I believe is a failure to establish an effective screening mechanism where interviewing is an important part thereof.

I invite you to send your managers to ExeQserve's No Frills Training Workshop in February on Effective Interviewing Techniques. Let me know if you have questions about this program and I will be more than happy to address them for you. In the mean time, please check the workshop details below.

Effective Interviewing Technique- February

ExeQserve Launches No Frills Training

2011-12-26T11:24:00.002+08:00

I'm interrupting regular blog programming to share with you some information about the training product we are launching at ExeQserve.

We are formally launching No Frills Training in February and the first three workshops are; Job Interviewing, Handling Disciplinary issues and Headhunting 101. We will add more titles as we develop new courses that follow the program pattern. I'd like to share with you the thoughts behind this plan, my motivation and why I think this idea works most for the learners.

Here are a number of realities that we in the business of running public seminars must contend with:

People's learning habits are changing. The over abundance of information is causing us to have shorter memory and attention span. Accommodating information in our head is too much of a burden so we tend to intentionally forget them because we know they can be accessed again through various means.
There are other ways to learn. You probably notice that you are engaging Google, Wikipedia and YouTube for your learning needs more often now. The new members of the workforce and the ones who will join us in the future will be so accustomed to it they will have less use for traditional training approaches to learn new things. There are various materials that can be downloaded from the Internet. In fact, with some materials, enough courage and a little "googling," you can build your own home-made rocket. For more than a dozen times, I looked at YouTube to learn how to cook certain dishes. The only problem with self-paced learning methods like this is that they don't have features that tell you if you are doing it right. A good training program that teaches skills should be able to do that for you.
Not everything is useful. Many trainers tell participants that attending a seminar is like going to a buffet with lots of food offered on the table. You get what you want and what you need and you consume them. you leave out those thing you don't need. Well, apparently, Buffet is not the best metaphor for public seminars, They're more like plated dinners with dishes served one by one. If you don't like what is being served now, you'll have to wait for the next round. It's a waste of your time and that of the resource person. What if you paid for the whole course but you are really just interested in one particular dish?

These inspired me to come up with the concept that will offer training programs that are so focused, they answer questions you typically type in your Google searches like, "how to write a job description," or "how to give constructive feedback to employees with performance issues," or "how to write a business plan." No Frills Training will not give you a buffet or a lengthy string of plated options. Our facilitators will offer you a tool and strive towards helping you learn how to use it. This is where No Frills Training is better than YouTube. When you attend our programs, you will have coaches who will allow you to try out the skill and give you feedback that will help you develop the confidence in applying it when you return to the workplace.

As I have mentioned in the video, No Frills training will give you:

Exactly the skill you want to learn, no beating around the bush, no wasting of your time
Soft copies of tools and templates that you can use immediately after the session.
A working knowledge of how to do it, not just appreciation of the concept
LOW PRICED, HIGH VALUE TRAINING!

Am I saying that No Frills Training is now the only way to go and that there is no more use for standard training approaches? My answer is a big fat NO. No Frills Training is a hot dog or a shawarma stand or any of those food stands that offer one product each as compared to standard training that can be compared to full service restaurants. There are programs that cannot fit the No Frills Model. How do you, for example train people how to conduct effective presentations in four hours? You can't! That's why ExeQserve will continue to offer regular training programs but in-house and as public training programs.

Please see a partial list of our February program below and watch out for more training programs coming out of our No Frills Training Program.

No Frills Training for February

Talent Management: Making Sense of the Grissoms and the Ecklies of the World.

2011-12-22T10:37:00.002+08:00

I must admit that I am a late blooming fan of that spectacular TV Series, CSI. I spent the past few weeks devouring seasons 1 to 8 and is looking forward to seeing the rest of series soon. As much if not more than the mind blowing crime scene investigations, I got very interested in the dynamics of the CSI workplace. The HR man in me kicked in as I observed the characters' jobs and realized that they are in their right positions in the organization even if at times, it seems that they shouldn't be so. Grissom, the night shift supervisor and Ecklie, former day time supervisor and now Grissom's boss are a perfect study in talent placement.

For the non-CSI fans, let me tell a bit about the situation here. Between the two, it would appear that Grissom is the better scientist and the only reason why Ecklie edged him to that higher position is because he plays the politics card which to my eyes look like organization savvy.

If you sit through those many episodes and seasons, it is hard not to be blown away by the Grissom genius. You'll be so much of a fan that you know he should be a shoo-in for promotion. I felt the pain (his pain?) when they promoted Ecklie instead of him because just like everyone else, I want the good guys to get rewarded with plump promotion.

In hindsight though, I realize why Ecklie's perfect for his job and there is nothing better for Grissom than to continue to show his brilliance where he is. Know why? If you are a fan like me, you can probably see how Grissom will suck in a job where he does not look at DB's (dead bodies) anymore and instead work his way through the bureaucracy to get things done. Ecklie is so much better in doing the latter than the former. Grissom is at his best when he works closest to the ground while Ecklie is best at making sense of the administrative bureaucracy and using the same to get things and people aligned. There are very few scenes where Ecklie is given a chance to see some redeeming factors and that's probably because Americans like to 'stick it to the man.' i do hope to see some of it in the episodes I haven't seen.

What's the point, you may ask. Placement of people in roles where they can be at their best is crucial to organizational success. Many organizations however, follow the Peter Principle. People expect promotion for the prestige and additional salary and perks it brings. This is why we have a lot of supervisors who are still possessive of their old skills and choose to "do the job" instead of delegating it. That's because they can't let go of things they find most enjoyable to do... And they don't enjoy the supervisory stuff as much.

I can go on and on with examples of popular people who are better coaches than players or better players than coaches. Think Freddie Roach, Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan, Manny Pacquiao, etc.
We are not learning. We designed our organizations where people can't be stuck to being great players and people who have better potential at strategizing and leading are overshadowed by star players.

How do you change this situation? I believe it requires a great deal of paradigm shift (ah, paradigm shift, I just have to put that favorite HR word in!). We need to build a culture where staying in a position where you obviously can do better than leading a bunch of folks can be more rewarding both financially and emotionally. We need to design two career tracks (or more?) where the technical track go as high as the managerial track and therefore can be as rewarding. If we do this, we can only get people to take on leadership or management roles for the sheer joy of doing it and not just for the perks. We also need to take a closer look at people's competencies in order to better match them with jobs. HR needs to get into this competency modeling business and learn how to put the models to good use in hiring and placing people. This is of course not to say that great players cannot be great managers. Of course, they can but not all of them, just some. I mean, how many Clint Eastwoods are out there? Know what I mean? Some people should stay as actors and forget about being directors. Doing it and making others do it require different sets of competencies.

Check out ExeQserve's Competency Modeling Proposal:
ExeQserve Competency Mapping Project

Empowering Employees to Make Decision

2011-12-17T21:08:00.000+08:00

On several occasions, I'm asked to emphasize decision making in my supervisory and management skills workshop, which actually is needless to say because decision-making is in deed an important part of it. The reason for this "special request" is that managers think their employees can't or don't have the skill to make sound decisions.

More often than not, they are right about their employees' inability to decide but wrong about the lack of skill. As a matter of fact, the right decisions are often just hanging there not being taken because those who are expected to make decisions do not have the... (drum roll please) needed empowerment to make them!

Employees' inability to decide is a good indicator of no empowerment. It's not a matter of "can't" but more a matter of 'Won't!' They won't because of the risk involved in making decisions which include blame, punishment and loss of trust. Imagined or not, this barrier to decision making are not without reason. Legacy events normally cause people to sort of learn from those experiences and try not to make the same mistakes again. When I say mistake I mean the mistake of taking it upon themselves to decide.

Failure to empower is caused by managers' inability to apply the right directing styles in given situations. These errors are costly in the manager-employee relationship because they cause failed expectations on both sides. I believe that if managers want their employees to be accustomed to making decisions, they need to get them ready for it and then help them develop more confidence not only in their ability to decide but confidence in the relationship. Yes my friends, empowerment is not just a leadership issue, it's a team building issue. If your managers don't know how to lead and how to build teamwork, it will be fairly difficult to get people to make decisions where and when it counts.

Four factors are necessary for people to become empowered to make sound decisions, first they have to be in the job they are good at. This means hiring the right person for the job. Second, they need to develop the necessary skills to do their job. This means training. Third, they need to develop confidence in making decisions that matter. This means coaching and mentoring. Fourth, they need to know the boundaries of their decision making power. Being unclear about the boundaries is just like being in a really dark cave. you won't move a muscle because you don't know what you'll be stepping into next.

Check out this course if you wish to train your managers about delegation and empowerment.

Ed Ebreo - Applying Situational Leadership Workshop

Who Builds Your Team?

2011-12-06T07:49:00.001+08:00

If you are the leader of a team, then it is you. The success or failure of any team building effort depends on your ability and willingness to make things happen. Leaders lead, followers follow.

At exeQserve, our team building facilitators make it a point to lay this down clearly. I talk to whoever is the leader of a requesting organization and clarify both his/her role and ours as workshop facilitators.

If it is an organization-wide team building, we talk to all the managers and let them in on the strategy and tell them what role they will be playing during the workshop and then more importantly, after. This way, we already have them as ally or co-facilitators right at the start of the workshop.

I personally believe that more than the other members, leaders must approach a team building effort with the right mindset. In fact, I would go on to propose that in order to get maximum result from a team building effort, leaders should go through a leadership workshop that has a proper focus on building and managing teams. They need to understand that it is a process and not a one time event. Teams don't get built over night, much less over a day or a few hours. The purpose of facilitating team building workshop is to jumpstart the process. Effective leaders use the momentum to push their agenda for strengthening teamwork in the group.

Speaking of mindset, here is what I believe leaders must be able to do in order to strengthen their teams; if they want to build trust, they must encourage it, if they want to improve communication, they must open all possible channels, if they want commitment, accountability and focus on results, they must model them. Yes, talk is cheap action speaks louder than words. A leader must be clear about this and then some, before she goes to a team building event with her team. When leaders fail to follow through on their team building commitments, teams go to a worse shape than before. Hence, it is critical for leaders to take their role in this process seriously and passionately.

If you feel you need help facilitating a team building workshop for your group, call us at exeQserve and let us show you how you as a leader can succeed in building your team. Check out my download page to see exeqserve's various team building related programs.

13th Month Pay Questions and Answers

2011-11-14T09:26:00.003+08:00

November is the month all these questions land in my inbox that I answer one by one. Each time, I have to do some researching of my own to validate my own understanding of how it works because I've not done HR admin work for quite a while. I decided that now may be the best time to talk about it and share some informational resources as you compute for 13th month pay both as an employer or employee. If you are paying for the first time, this post may be helpful as you don't want to start a wrong practice that you will have to change later. If you pay more than you have to now and then realize you're doing it all wrong, you will have a problem changing it back to normal due to the non-dimunition clause indicated in the law.

Please note that I am neither a lawyer nor an expert on the law, so if you find some of the information here as wrong or outdated, please let me know as I would gladly change it if there is a good basis. Let's get started.

What is the 13th Month Pay?

The 13th Month pay by definition according to the labor code means one twelfth (1/12) of the basic salary of an employee within a calendar year. Please take note of the because it has something to do with how you compute for it. The 13th month pay is mandated under Presidential Decree No. 851 by former President Ferdinand Marcos. Some changes were made in the revised guidelines issued during the time of President Corazon Aquino. Check the links for details on this law.

What is basic salary in the context of 13th Month Payment?
Again according to the labor code, basic salary include all remunerations or earnings paid by an employer to an employee for services rendered but may not include allowances or monetary benefits which are not considered or integrated as part of the regular or basic salary. Examples of these are cash equivalent of unused leave credits, overtime, premium, night differential and holiday pay. The only reasons why these should be included in the computation is if there is an internal arrangement or collective bargaining agreement to do so.

Who are entitled?
All rank and file employees who have worked in the company for at least a month is entitled to a prorate 13th month pay. I will show you the computation later. By law paying managerial employees 13th month pay is an employer prerogative. Government workers, house hold workers (although this may change soon as a bill is already filed in congress entitling them to it.), those who are paid on purely commission, boundary, or task basis, and those who are paid a fixed amount for performing a specific work, irrespective of the time consumed in the performance thereof, except where the workers are paid on piece-rate basis in which case they are entitled.

How do we compute the 13th month pay?
The revised guideline says that "The "basic salary" of an employee for the purpose of computing the 13th month pay shall include all remunerations or earning paid by this employer for services rendered but does not include allowances and monetary benefits which are not considered or integrated as part of the regular or basic salary, such as the cash equivalent of unused vacation and sick leave credits, overtime, premium, night differential and holiday pay, and cost-of-living allowances. However, these salary-related benefits should be included as part of the basic salary in the computation of the 13th month pay if by individual or collective agreement, company practice or policy, the same are treated as part of the basic salary of the employees." take note of the line I highlighted. It says all earning paid for services rendered. Does it mean absences without pay and deductions due to tardiness and undertime should be removed from the annual basic salary paid? I believe so but this is where I see companies differ in the way they compute for 13th month pay. If you follow this computation literally, the computation should look like this:

daily wage X number of paid days = basic salary within a calendar year
basic salary within a calendar year/ 12 = 13th month pay

and the way to compute for a prorated 13th month pay if you only work several months(let's say 3) should look like this:

basic salary paid for 3 months/ 12 = prorated 13th month pay

If this is not how you compute for prorated 13th month pay, it is likely that you will pay higher than necessary. I've been trying to find a formula for computing 13th month pay for piece-rate workers but I couldn't find any. if you know the formula, please share here.

When must it be paid?
Law says it shall be paid not later than the 24th of December of each year. An employer may also choose to divide payment by paying the first half midyear and the rest on or before the prescribed date.

Is 13th month pay taxable?
If together with other financial benefits the total do not exceed P30,000.00, then it isn't taxable. If it exceeds the said limit, the amount in excess shall be taxable.

Other Considerations
What I discussed here are the minimum requirements of the law. If you choose to be competitive and want to give more than what is required as a matter of strategy, then you should be congratulated. Please note however that what you do as a practice becomes nature of the benefit, meaning that if you reduce it reflect the minimum requirement of the law, you may be violating this provision:

Prohibitions against reduction or elimination of benefits

Nothing herein shall be construed to authorize any employer to eliminate, or diminish in any way, supplements, or other employee benefits or favorable practice being enjoyed by the employee at the time of promulgation of this issuance.

HR Philippines is Conducting a Fundamental Supervisory Skills Workshop

2011-11-08T20:17:00.000+08:00

Send your supervisors to this rare training opportunity. I am running a workshop with some of the well respected training professionals in the industry like Jet Nera, Sonnie Santos and Raffy Perfecto on December 5 and 6, 2011. If you wish to know more about the program, download the document here:

HR Philippines Fundamental Supervisory Skills Workshop

The Importance of Having a Management Development Strategy

2011-11-02T09:47:00.000+08:00

I sometimes wonder how we are more careful of hiring an entry-level employee than promoting a person to a supervisory or managerial person. The damage of wrong hire have already been talked about and estimated but many of us continue to take unnecessary risk in raising people to what the Peter Principle points out as their level of incompetence.

A managerial or supervisory role is so important and dealing with having the wrong person in place is so messy that I believe organizations need to have a strategy for selecting candidates for these roles, prepare them and then continue to develop them. If John Maxwell is to be believed, everything rises and falls on them. As usual, I have some recommendations.

Use a Competency Model
Mapping the ideal competencies for important positions in your organization is very useful. It can be used to objectively assess your candidates' readiness to take on the role. It can also be used determine the needed developmental interventions for employees who are not yet ready but have the potential.

Check out exeQserve's Competency Mapping service offering here.

Consider Performance But...
We all heard this familiar horror story. A company needed a manager, promoted the best worker to a supervisory role and then ended up having a lousy one and losing a great worker. Was Phil Jackson a great basketball player? Was Freddie Roach a great boxer? I don't think so! They were above average at best. And then I've heard of really great players who made lousy coaches. There, I rest my case.

Again, Hire for Attitude, Train for Skills
This is true for recruitment as it is for promoting people to key positions. Get people who have sound attitude about leading and management because they respond well to leadership and management development interventions. It's as common a sense as having someone who really loves math take up a major in math as opposed to someone who doesn't care about it except for counting money like myself.

Have a Way Out
Sometimes, what looks good on paper do not translate as well in real life. With all your best effort and intentions, you will realize that no management development strategy have rocket science accuracy. Your policy should enable you to recall appointment by offering the person his old position back or let the person move on. Messy, I know. This, however is so much better than enduring a deadwood manager or supervisor.

Clarify Expectations
my benchmark of a good supervisor or manager is someone who will approach me as her superior and lay down her proposals even before I figure out my own expectations. That does not always happen, so be ready to crystalize your expectations to that person so she can act on it. Preventing them from guessing what looks good to you and what's not will save you a great deal of waiting time.

Empower
People throw away what they learned from training because they feel that they don't have the power to apply the recommended changes in the workplace. This is also because they are not made accountable for making changes happen in the workplace. I have heard people dismiss the training as ineffective when they see no changes, when the real reason is that they did not empower the person to apply what they learned. Okay, let me step back a bit and define my own understanding of empowerment. It is the appointment of responsibility with commensurate amount of authority and accountability to a person. Empowering a person, therefore means giving the person clear descriptions of his responsibility, limits of authority and accountability for performance and behavior at work. Making this clear to a person and then connecting the purpose of training to these responsibilities and paving the way for change to happen, makes change happen. If training is likened to learning to ride a bicycle, empowering employees is giving them the bicycle.

This blog article is inspired by recent experiences running leadership and management workshops for several government agencies and private companies. Those experiences cemented my belief that training must be anchored on a sound employee development strategy that is linked to an organizational development strategy, that is of course, also linked to organizational direction and strategies. I believe that a reasonably sized organization should have this. Put bells and whistles if you mus,t but to me what's important is having a logically framed strategy that selects, trains and empowers people to be at their best as supervisors and managers.

If establishing a Management Development Program is a challenge for you, maybe I can help. Check this out:

ExeQserve Training Consultancy Service Program

Some Thoughts on Maintaining Discipline in the Workplace

2011-10-28T10:00:00.011+08:00

These last few days gave me several opportunities to talk about and listen to what other people say regarding discipline in the work place. I will not try to relate all of them together, instead, I am writing them here as bits of pieces of ideas that you may pick up in case you are interested. Here goes...

Clarifying HR and Line Management Roles in Maintaining Discipline
Who hires and fires? If you answered HR, then you are wrong. HR is instrumental to it but it should never be HR's call to hire and fire unless they are hiring a person for the department. Hiring, discipling and firing is a line responsibility. Line managers must be equipped to do it. HR on the other hand must be equipped to help but not take away that responsibility from a line manager. Why? Because line managers must take responsibility for the choices they make. In one BPO company where I worked. I told managers, they will have to fire the people they hire if those people fail to meet performance expectations. If they don't like firing people, they should do two things. Hire the best candidate and equip them so they can achieve their performance objectives.

Invest in Values Clarification and you'll spend less time policing.
Someone said (or at least this is how I remembered it) that maintaining discipline is largely a function of leadership. If organizational and individual values are clear then there won't be much need for so much code of discipline and schedule of disciplinary action. I totally agree and I hope that in the future there really won't be much need for them. While we can't prove yet that they are not necessary, let's keep them handy for the mean time :)

Start at Hiring the Right Person for the Job
Somebody asked "what should I give more weight in hiring, skill or attitude?" I answered most people get fired due to their attitude rather than their skills. The best answer should be both but more often, hiring managers get attracted to experience and skills because they are more visible and easier to distinguish. Attitude on the other hand, specially the bad ones are masked to the candidates best ability. For this reason, those who make hiring decisions must be fully equipped to make more informed decisions rather than rely solely on their guts. What I mean is train your managers to read all those psychometric reports and then help them learn to ask more than the traditional questions that we often hear like "tell me about yourself" etc.

Sing the Same Song
Workplace Discipline is achieved through a collaborative effort and commitment of all managing parties. Often we see inconsistencies between what HR says during employee orientation and what managers and supervisors say or allow on the floor. This causes ambiguity and lack of commitment among workers. I also notice that those who look the other way when employees violate rules tend to get more popular than those who enforce the rules. No wonder many managers choose to look the other way. In some companies, this has become so prevalent that there's already a valley of gap between what is written and what is practiced. Don't let this happen to your company. Gather the bosses and talk about how all of you can be consistent in your message of maintaining discipline in the workplace.

I conduct workshops on maintaining discipline in the workplace. Contact me if you wish to have one for your company or see my typical course outline below.

Ed Ebreo - Maintaining Discipline in the Workplace Workshop

On Becoming an HR Leader

2011-10-24T09:32:00.009+08:00

If you are an HR professional and you are experiencing the following, you are likely suffering from a lack of credibility;

People not taking the performance management system you launched seriously;
Not much happens after you launch a training and development program;
Your HR programs die a natural death;
People do not appreciate the fact that you are spending most of your waking hours working for them; and
People still call your department "Personnel" and think that all you do is keep time, arrange Christmas Parties and company outings.

The problem with HR in many Philippine organizations is not that the expectations are too high but that the expectations are too low. It is not only due to the lack of management appreciation of what HR can do but the lack of appreciation of the HR professionals themselves. Many of us think that our role as a support unit is to wait for orders, coordinate and implement rather than lead or take initiative. This has got to change.

Dave Ulrich and his Associates released in 2007 the result of a study called the Human Resource Competency Study that serves as a good guide for HR professionals who want to bring their organizational contribution to the next level. I'd like to talk about my take on these competencies in the next few outings. For now, I'd like to focus on one very important and sorely lacking competency- on becoming a Credible HR Activist.

Here are a few bullet points to describe the behavioral attributes of this competency:

Delivering results with integrity.
Sharing information.
Building relationships of trust.
Doing HR with an attitude (taking appropriate risks, providing candid observations, influencing others).

What do the attributes tell you? To me it says leadership, it says taking a position and influencing others to share one's desire for better human resource development and management. To take a position is one thing, to be listened to and believed is a whole other ball game. And to be that HR professional requires a great deal of work. Work that I wish all Filipino HR professionals are willing to do. What do I mean?

I mean deliberately and passionately understanding all HR-related works in relation to their business applications. To be able to sell a performance management system, HR must be able to distinguish a system that works and one that doesn't and be able to choose and champion ones that work. There are just too many HR strategies out there that people don't buy into because we fail to sell the connection between the system and the business. A good credible HR activist to me is someone who looks at recruitment, training, compensation and benefits and others not as tasks but strategies that have a great deal of impact on the business. He steps up to the platform and explains to his stakeholders the importance of partnership and taking a strategic approach to human resource management.

Aside from having a respectable amount of knowledge and skills in applying the HR tools, this competency requires that we as HR professionals must learn to effectively communicate both in writing and orally. We must learn the importance of ethos, logos and pathos in getting others to embrace our cause.

All the HR and communication skills are worthless of course, if we cannot muster the courage to stand up and find our voice a midst the drowning exchanges among other managers about market and product development, cost management, increasing net profit, production, etc.

Here's my call to action - Have passion, deliberately make an effort to sharpen your skills in your craft, and developing both assertive and persuasive communication skills. Most importantly be brave, have courage and find your voice.

Others will not change the way they look at HR unless we in HR change the way we look at ourselves.

Internal Corporate Social Responsibility - Charity Begins at Home

2011-07-13T11:12:00.001+08:00

I sat down in one lecture on CSR where I gained some insights on best practices in the Philippines and abroad. What caught my fancy is the idea of doing it internally. This makes a lot of sense to me because I too believe that charity should begin at "home". I learned that so much can be done to initiate an internal CSR and it starts with paying the right taxes, giving what your employees are due them in terms of compensation and benefits which I believe is a moral obligation as much as a legal one. There are a number of things too that we can do that go beyond the basics and give back to the country/society by starting with our very own employees. Here are some ideas.

When I was with SPI Technologies, I got an educational loan that I used to enroll in a web design course in Informatics. It helped me in marketing my freelance consulting services after my stint with the company. Without my former employers knowledge, they were able to contribute in preparing a future entrepeneur and employer get started in the business. Others who took similar loans got a shot in fulfilling their life goals and that company made it happen. I will forever be thankful to my former employer for that act of kindness.

Here's another idea, if you have employees whose spouses just stay at home and often experience some financial problems because there is only one income earner in the family, how about providing livelihood training for these spouses and facilitate the establishment of a livelihood coop for them? You can go further by providing some seed money for this project. There is so much benefit to having a successful program like this. Employees won't have to worry as much about money so they can concentrate on doing work and by doing this, you enhance your relationship with your employees.

If you are ready to earmark some money for charitable contribution, why not start with the children of the poorest of your employees? Need I say more?

Lastly, I believe that any serious focus on people development is one big social contribution. We are a country of millions of unemployed and underemployed people because they don't have the ability to fill some desirable but hard-to-fill positions. Companies that establish themselves as training grounds for future contributors to the Country's productivity and economy get my most heartfelt admiration. Most companies just want to buy highly skilled talents often jacking up the market rate of these people, while other companies take the painstaking route of hiring green horns and shaping them into the professionals that they need to be. If all companies do this, we will have enough capable people to go around and churn our economic machinery.

Oh, by the way, I heard ( I have not confirmed this) that CSR expenses can earn you some tax credits. I wonder if investing in people's training will earn you the same. Somebody in the know, please enlighten us on this.