10 Career & Business Life

Five Ways To...

THE ECONOMIC TIMES | MUMBAI | TUESDAY | 13 DECEMBER 2011

Make Top Performers Feel Valued

IIT-B Graduates Get A Safety Net

A WARM PLACE: Graduates floating start-ups rather than take a job to

My First Year at Work

Rajeev Chopra
CEO & MD, Philips Electronics India

be offered another shot at campus placement if their ventures fail

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IIT BOMBAY to allow deferred placements to those students whose ventures do not take flight in the two years TO NURTURE entrepreneurs, a panel of industry experts and faculty will be created who will select the students, go through their ideas and help them get seed funding as well DEFERRED PLACEMENT is an option where a student who had opted out of the placement process is allowed to sit for interviews after a stipulated number of years MANAGEMENT INSTITUTES like IIM-Bangalore started deferred placements from 2010-2011 onwards
Students at IIT Bombay discuss a cracking idea DEVINA SENGUPTA
BANGALORE
BHARAT CHANDA

Mix Seriousness with Some Practicality

The brief I was given and what I did
I JOINED as a management trainee in 1988 with Reckitt and Coleman in the sales and marketing division. At that stage, you are trying to make a mark. I was posted in Bikaner and responsible for over 20 markets in that region. The good thing was, I got to see small towns in Rajasthan that most people would not have heard of, leave alone seen. I lost nearly 15 kg in the first 25 days as the role required a lot of running around.

My biggest innovation
NONE WORTH mentioning. But I was very focused on my role and did my best to learn about distribution

TO RETAIN TOP performers in a tough business environment is a challenge. There are many approaches that can help, but all of them focus on driving one key message: make top performers feel valued even when the business is facing tough times. Shreya Biswas suggests ways to do that.

The worst mistake I made

I HANDLED a category that had some issues and in my overenthusiasm, I ended up earning the wrath of some unscrupulous elements, which forced me to flee the town. However, my distributor later made peace with them. Through this, I learnt a lesson that while it is good to be serious about your job, you need to be practical too.

1Think Long Term

The best leadership lesson I learnt

I LEARNT that if you manage your role and deliverables you can do well. Another important attribute I learnt was that to be effective you need to be on the wavelength of people you are working for or with.

During a bad market, companies tend to save cash as there is a huge strain on liquidity. In such a scenario, some often tried and tested tools like long-term incentives come in handy. Stock options, deferred payouts or phased bonuses are the best options. It hedges the company from the current drain on resources and retains those valuable to the organisation, says Anita Belani, country manager, Russell Reynolds Associates, India.

2Reward the Best

In a year when the business environment is negative, differentiate more aggressively on pay and rewards. So while the overall pay levels come down on an average for all employees in bad years, the gap between the best and the rest tends to widen. This ensures that top performers are ring fenced and drives home the message that the company values them, says Animesh Kumar, group head HR & corporate communication, IDFC.

Give Other Benefits

Use an array of non-monetary levers such as exposure to senior management through shadow boards, involvement in key projects, global assignments and cross-functional mobility to recognise top performers. That way, in a tough business environment, good employers are able to create a win-win situation for both the employee and themselves by testing and building the talent pipeline without incurring significant costs, says Kumar.

ly or fail those were the only consequences for Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay students who took the entrepreneurial plunge after graduating. There was no safety net to fall back on if their start-up ideas failed. Such failures are not uncommon and, in these cases, IIT graduates were left to fend for themselves. That was a huge deterrent to entrepreneurs being birthed in the campus. But now, select graduates are being given the option of taking a shot at a start-up idea, with the assurance they can come back for campus placements two years later if the idea fails. This is a first-of-itskind initiative in any IIT. The Mumbai-based engineering institute is also creating a panel of faculty members and industry experts who will select the students, go through their ideas and help them get seed funding as well. The institute is planning to put the panel in place early 2012, but since the final placements have already started for the Class of 2012, the panel and deferred placements will be effective next year. An advisory board will act as a reference point to get the initial investment as well. If I knew that a student has been men-

tored by an expert it will become easier to do the first round of seed funding, says Kanwaljit Singh, senior MD at Helion Advisors. For Singh, advisory bodies like this will also provide an ecosystem that is otherwise underdeveloped in India. The move is both an incentive for entrepreneurship and some sort of an insurance against failure in it; is aimed at creating and nurturing more entrepreneurs from the campus. This has been done after students requested they be given an The move is option similar to that in both an some of the Indian Instiincentive and tutes of Management, an insurance says Ravi Sinha, placeagainst ment head for IIT Bombay . failure Till now the institutes graduates whose ventures failed did not get a second chance at placement which is about to change, says the placement head. Deferred placement is an option where a student who had opted out of the process is allowed to sit for interviews after a stipulated number of years. At IIM Bangalore, for example, this is granted when the entrepreneurial venture does not take off. The management institute provided this choice from 2010-2011 onwards. The panel being set up at IIT Bombay will also have representatives from Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, a busi-

ness incubation centre at IIT Bombay that promotes entrepreneurship where even the alumni pitch in. SINE will help to make the ideas concrete and convert them into ventures, says Poyni Bhatt, chief administrative officer of SINE. It may be a while before the other IITs adopt a similar method. This will significantly increase the number of entrepreneurs as students will have the confidence of something to fall back on, says LS Ganesh, dean of students for IIT Madras and in charge of Cell for Technology Innovation, Development and Entrepreneurship Support. Ganesh has seen a huge increase in curiosity about the entrepreneurial world but, because of the risk involved, many opt out. The Chennai-based engineering institute as of now has no plan to offer deferred placements to its students, says Ramesh Babu, Advisor for training and placement for IIT Madras. For IIT alumni who became entrepreneurs, such choices would have helped them as well. One gets a first hand experience early on how entrepreneurial venture works out in the long run and the growth opportunities along with the challenges, says Mukesh Bansal, CEO of online retail store Myntra and an IIT Kanpur alumnus.
devina .sengupta@timesgroup.com

How I managed my work-life balance

I HAD made an agreement with my boss that I would work non-stop for 25-26 days at a stretch, including on weekends and then for four days, I would take a break and come to Delhi. Sreeradha D Basu

The best friend I made on the job

I WORKED with lots of people & made friends with most of them.

MOSTLY GOOD; SOME PLAY SAFE

Bonus Payouts a Mixed Bag in 2011

MAHIMA PURI & SHREYA BISWAS
NEW DELHI

Blow Hot, Blow Cold

Range of Variable Payouts Likely in 2011

Take a Shot at Game Theory

B-school selections: A prof and his students suggest Game Theory can offer solutions
A recent study reports that more than half of fresh MBA graduates leave the job they have bagged from B-schools within a year or two of their joining. While critics may lament the self-defeating restlessness of todays youth, the problem may be deeper. Companies are driving the process of placement with an aim of getting candidates they prize the most. They are completely ignoring the fact that they also need to pick up candidates who prefer them the most. This article suggests an alternative approach based on the celebrated Gale-Shapley algorithm from Game Theory. At present, the process starts with students ranking the companies coming to campus. Based on the individual ranking, a collective raking is derived. While the process of coming up with the collective ranking is not fully transparent, it would definitely involve some rule-based aggregation of individual ranks combined with some discretionary modification based on companies relationships with the B-school. The collective ranking is used to schedule the visit of companies to campus during placement days. The earlier a company is scheduled to visit, the greater its chances of snapping up prize picks from the batch. At the same time, companies publish job profiles for which students apply The entire process takes three to four . days. The companies shortlist the applications and if a company does not want to risk losing him/her to another company a , spot offer is made. Other than spot offers, a company publishes a list of offers for selected and waitlisted students at the end of its selection process. Candidates are bound by the B-schools rules to accept the offer and sign out of the process. While companies who are high up in the collective rank appear to meet their short-term objective of getting prize candidates, there are several shortcomings in the process. Students typically apply to some dream companies, some satisfactory ones and some safe bets. The satisfaction of the student with the company depends upon his/her ranking over the companies he/she has applied for, being the same as the collective ranking. As the number of students increases, the divergence between individual and group ranks is likely to increase. As per Arrows Impossibility Theorem, Game all voting schemes are theorists Gale subject to inconsistenand Shapley cies. As an example, suphave come up pose the ranks assigned with an to a company are added algorithm up to arrive at its final that yields a matching that score, then if a company originally on the list deis stable and cides not to come, the proof against ranking over the remainattrition ing companies may change. Further, the possible modification of the collective ranks based on the B-schools discretion may further skew the individual and group rank. A candidate whose family is based in Mumbai and wants to join JP Morgan may have to accept a spot offer from Goldman Sachs in Bangalore, leading to high possibility of attrition. This kind of possibility may induce students to manipulate their preferences over companies, thus further distorting the collective ranking. Companies which are scheduled later in the process may also suffer: they lose out on candidates who like them better than the companies they are forced to accept. This is a classic problem of what is called unstable matching in game theory. Two celebrated game theorists, Gale and Shapley, have come up with an algorithm that yields a matching that is stable and proof against attrition: if a candidate likes another company better than the company they have been paired with, it must be the case that the preferred company likes their own assigned candidate better. That algorithm is based on the rankings of companies over applicants, and applicants over companies. A computer program simulates an iterative procedure of students making proposals to join to their top ranked companies in turn, and companies keeping the top offers with themselves till a better offer comes along. Importantly, it has the desirable property of inducing truthful revelation of preferences on the part of students. It is possible that all companies are vying for the same set of students and hence the others do not get placed, and companies who are less preferred by the chosen few students, do not get candidates. In order to mitigate this problem we suggest, running the stable matching algorithm on a daily basis. This would remove students from the process, and allow the remaining students to apply to the remaining companies and for both companies and students to assess each other realistically in the light of the students who have already got placed.
Rohit Prasad, faculty at MDI Gurgaon, and students Darshan Mehta and Rahul Aggarwal

Enhance Skills
Business downturns are the best time to invest in enhancing the skill base of your talent pool. Most people like to learn, grow and improve their marketability. A short training abroad or an annual workshop in a top school can be limited to fewer people, thus saving cost while keeping people motivated, says Belani of Russell Reynolds.

5Use Soft Rewards

Rewards and recognition do not necessarily have to be tangible. Softer rewards can have great impact too. For instance, recognising individual/team performance for innovative ideas, efficient use of resources or coming up with a breakthrough in a difficult project can be appreciated publicly in town halls and open houses with a certificate or a trophy, says Belani. This will also inspire others to work harder and on similar lines.

Management Tip
By Harvard Business Review

BONUS payouts for this year are expected to be a mixed bag, with some businesses growing and others reeling under the impact of the global market turmoil. While sectors like consumer durables, FMCG and pharma will continue to offer good bonuses, information technology and IT enabled services (ITeS) may offer moderate to good doles, and others like financial services and automobiles are likely to pay tepid bonuses. According to Sridhar Ganesan, managing consultant, rewards practice leader at Hay Group India, companies have already started adopting a conservative approach towards both hiring and payouts, as a result of which, there could be a 10-15% deviation from last years payouts. Although we dont foresee any drastic changes, corporates are becoming cautious due to several reasons, including the euro crisis. He added that variable payouts at the senior management level are likely to be hit harder than the others due to their direct impact on business outcome. Companies in the consumer durables segment like LG and Samsung have done good business during the festive season and are likely to stick to similar bonus payouts like last year. LG, for instance, offered a 100% bonus of basic monthly salary to its employees in November, both this year and in the previous year. This payout was based on its sales during the Diwali season, a time when consumers are likely to spend on electronics appliance and gadgets. Although sales do slow down once the festive season ends, LG is hopeful that a good harvest will perk up sales in December. LGs next payouts are due in January , which will be based on its Novem-

LG

Samsung
Up to 200% of monthly basic salary

200-700%
of monthly basic salary

MTS
Up to 100% annual variable salary

Lupin

10-12%
of existing payscales

HCL Technologies

HCL BPO

100%
variable pay

100%
variable pay

ber-December sales. Things will be much clearer only after December 10. If sales remain satisfactory , we will offer 200-700% of monthly basic salary to employees as bonus this year as well, said LG Electronics COO, YV Verma. Food and beverages giant PepsiCo India is also optimistic on its payout. The companys chief people officer Samik Basu said it has achieved its sales targets for this year and is doing better business than last year in the country The . bonuses will be decided only after the year ends. The payouts will be made around March. The story is, however, different in automobiles. Maruti Suzuki, which saw declining revenues and labour unrest in the past few months, did not dole out any payout during this festive season. The company typically gives out variable pay around Diwali and in April/May On the other hand, . Honda says its sales are expected to grow and the company is likely to stick to its quarterly payouts to employees, even in December.
mahima.puri@timesgroup.com

Prioritize Value over Volume

RESEARCH HAS SHOWN that multitasking results in mediocre outcomes. By putting too little attention on too many things, you fail to do anything well. However, the answer isnt single-tasking either. Singletasking is far too slow to help you succeed in todays fast-paced world. Instead, identify the tasks that will create the most value and focus on those. By prioritizing value over volume and sharpening your focus on tasks that truly matter, youll increase the quality of your work and, ultimately, the value you provide. What to do with all those tasks that didnt make the high-value list? Put them on a do later list. If they continually fail to make it to the high-value list, ask yourself: why do them at all?

Dont Let the New Year Catch you Napping

RAVI SUBRAMANIAN

NEXT TIP: Sell Yourself The Right Way

ome December, everyone gets busy with planning for Christmas parties; on how to spend unspent leave which cannot be carried forward into the new year; for the dress to be worn on the new years eve party; for that last small family vacation for the year; and if one is an NRI, then for those return trips to India to meet their relatives and so on. But one thing, which is not on anyones calendar for December, is planning for the year ahead. In particular, it is an issue for MNCs, which normally work on a January-December calendar.

Have you ever walked into my office in December? asks Prem Jumani, HR head of an MNC. You would wonder where half the office has disappeared. The silence is at times deafening, he laments. This is true of almost all MNCs in India. Almost 35% of the staff goes on leave, primarily with intent to exhaust unspent leave, which cannot be carried forward to the next year. And this is not without ramifications. Almost everyone who goes on leave in December returns in the new year. The first few days go in getting into the groove. And even before you realise it, January is gone. 10% of the New Year is already past us, without us even beginning to work towards delivering on our goals, says Neeraj Mathur, a business leader with a foreign bank. True winners do things quite differently. In the last month of the year, they tighten their nuts and bolts, fine tune their processes, strategise for the new

year, make hiring decisions so that all critical positions are fully staffed, build momentum and energy in their sales teams and when the clock turns over on December 31 and the new year quietly slips in, they hit the road running real hard. This gives them an advantage of not only stealing a march over competition but also within the organisation, and they have a good story to tell at the end of January The positive energy that . this could drive in the team can become a tool to be leveraged to your advantage in the balance 11 months of the year. Contrast this with a situation where you let December pass off as a semivacation and start preparing in January you are sure to miss your January targets. You will also be playing a catch up game throughout the year. And explaining the shortfall to plan, month after month can be frustrating and draining. If you want your team to be efficient

and effective and harness any aspirations of building a positive halo around your performance, what better time than the new year. Start working on it now. Make sure your teams are not on long leave at this time of the year. Remember the team wants to succeed as much as you do. And most importantly, if you are planning a vacation this December, cancel it and set and example for your team. While I admit that planning for parties is important , you need to sit down with your team and talk about how it is performing, what your plans are for the next year and what you need to be doing now to prepare for success. Else, same time next year, you will be sitting with your team and ruing missed opportunities. You would rather do the former than the latter.
The writer is author of The Incredible Banker

ARINDAM