People at Work & Play

With both spouses working in many houses these days, dividing the household chores can become an issue. Who is to do what and when?

Household chores rank up there with money (and shoot way past sex) when it comes to sources of marital rancour.

Good news for those who share household chores comes from a recent report from the Pew Research Centre. Gratitude for helping with the household chores seems to be a positive plus for a harmonious relationship.

In a 2007 World Values Survey sharing household chores ranked number three, behind faithfulness and a happy sexual relationship, on a list of what makes a marriage work.

Interesting article in today’s Times of India about how emoticons” the smiling, winking and frowning faces that inhabit the computer keyboard” have become part of our lives.

I am not even going to the ” Advanced” category because the “Beginner” and “Intermediate” themselves were fairly new to me!!!

Beginner Stuff:
tongue sticking out
laughing
;^) smirking
I-O bored and yawning
:-/ skeptical

Intermediate
I annoyed
shocked
:-C very sad
<:- dumb
%-( confused

Interesting again to know that the first attempt to use emoticons goes way back to 1982 when Scott Fahlman in Carnegie Mellon University created the original ASCII emoticons and :-(, with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion.

Last month, I spent time with a young man who plans to, like many of us did , strike out on his own. He was gushing about the opportunities the market presented and was eager to share his vision for the future of his firm.

I asked him when he had last done a SWOT analysis and was shocked to find that he was ready to launch without having done one.

Strong planning and preparation is half the battle won. I urged him to take a few steps back and reflect on his strenghts and weaknesses. Also on the opportunities and threats that he would have to encounter.

A personal SWOT is not restricted to those who are starting out on their own. It is advisable that every executive does it before a major career event such as taking up a new assignment, higher responsibilities etc.

However, doing a proper SWOT calls for time and effort. You can’t say you did one just now and the next is due after lunch!

It’s true. Body language counts. Even in the US Presidential elections.

CNN writes of the “for the first time ever debates” held recently on YouTube . This was to help viewers decide their choice for the Democratic Party’s candidate for the US Presidential election.

Sen. Hillary Clinton was said to have made the most positive impression based on her body language.

Many years ago, as a kid, I read about the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960. There was no TV in India then. We read that one of the most important reasons for Kennedy’s winning was his positive use of body language. He came out as being confident of the future and a go-getter. He demonstrated this when he was elected the President soon after. Nixon came out to be more cagey, which was proved by subsequent events when he became the President many years later.

For quite some time now, I have thinking that posts which are not strictly in the genre of “People at Work & Play” have crept in to this blog.

This is after all, in a sense, my blog as a professional and an independent consultant. Posts about rain saving the Lord’s Test really shouldn’t be here, should they?

I have decided to use another blog to capture my thoughts and observations on life as it passes by! It’s called “Looking at Life” and is available at WordPress.

As I mentioned there, this will be a free wheeling blog covering all aspects of life including politics, sports, my hobbies and interests and yes, as I grow older- my reminiscences.

Some one called me today. I would like to work with you, he said. Went on to say that we could do well together based on my contacts !

Networking means much more than having contacts. What matters is not the number of people you know but how well you know them…the relationship that you enjoy with them.

Both on LinkedIn and Ryze, I have been - if anything- conservative. I connect only to those I know and know well. Networks like these are prone to be misused so one can only be careful. How can you endorse a person whom you scarecely know?

I am not sold on the idea that that the more number of contacts you have, the better it is. LinkedIn is said to have more than 12 million registered users as on July 2007. Ryze has about 4.5 million users in 200 countries. If you want to know many in these lists, if not all, you have a long, long way to go!

A report of the Society for Human Resource Management report following its June 24 annual conference and exposition in Las Vegas shows up interesting data.

HR professionals rate relationships with managers higher in determining a worker’s job satisfaction than employees themselves do. Compensation and benefits are the factors that most heavily influence whether someone likes his or her job—and 79 percent of the respondents in SHRM’s 2007 Job Satisfaction survey are happy at work.

The top five issues rated as “very important” by employees are compensation, benefits, job security, work/life balance and communication between them and management. HR staff, meanwhile, rated their top five as relationship with immediate supervisor, compensation/pay, management recognition of employee job performance, benefits and senior management-employee communications.

Employees ranked management recognition of their performance and their relationship with their immediate supervisor as the seventh and eighth most important influences on job satisfaction.

Placing too high a value on how employees and managers interact may be outmoded thinking.
“HR professionals’ response suggest that their perceptions of employee happiness reflect traditional thinking in the HR literature regarding employee needs for communication and recognition,” the report states. “While HR professionals are in sync with the attributes most important to employees—benefits and compensation—they consistently allow these factors to be overshadowed by issues that are not among the most relevant to employee job satisfaction.”

What is key is the package of benefits, which did not make the top five in HR’s ranking as recently as 2002. “These data illustrate that benefits, along with compensation, are of utmost importance to employees, and this trend is likely to continue,” the report states.
Even though HR was correct in perceiving that pay and benefits are important to employees, it has not done a good enough job explaining to workers the details of their remuneration at a time when many people feel that pay is not keeping up with the cost of living.

Overall, HR overrated 14 dimensions of job satisfaction. There were four areas that employees valued more than HR anticipated: feeling safe in the work environment, meaningfulness of the job, the work itself and the variety of work.

Despite the growing emphasis on talent management, employees placed career development, their contribution to business goals, and training and tuition reimbursement in the bottom half of the 22 job satisfaction factors the poll measured.

Only a few months ago, we spoke of 1 USD equalling Rs. 46. Today’s price is Rs. 40.22, the highest in nine years .

The newspapers are full of how the rupee appreciation could/would affect the fortunes of India’s predominant industry the IT industry.

Tighter margins will affect profitability of our export oriented industries particularly those which have a strong dependence on the US market.

Organizations are calling for a variety of measures ranging from having longer work hours including working on Saturdays to having lower compensation increases. We will see a stronger trend of linking compensation increases to performance reflected in the only increase being in the variable component of the compensation package. The ratio of freshers to experienced, which is already skewed, will be further accentuated as organizations work towards holding costs.

As widely reported, these measures will make an already tough life tougher for many!

A combination of M S Dhoni and the rain deprived England from a win in the first Test at Lords which ended yesterday.

This Test was yet another example of how the Indians manage to get themselves into tight corners. Sunil Gavaskar once said we are famous for “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory”. Yesterday, the kindness of the Rain Gods helped us snatch a draw from the jaws of defeat.

With No. 11 Sree Santh and Dhoni playing for the last wicket and more than two hours to go, it seemed just a matter of time for the end. Poor light and the subsequent rain helped us escape defeat.

Let’s hope in the next Test we play much better cricket especially the much vaunted batsmen. Before the Test began, everyone was praising the strong batting line up. We hoped the relatively weaker bowling line up would not let us down. In this Test the bowlers actually did far better than the batsmen. The Big 3 of Dravid, Tendulkar and Ganguly did not perform as well as Rudra Pratap Singh, Sree Santh and Zaheer Khan did.

It makes us proud as parents to see our children do well.

My son, Nitin, featured in a write up in the Times of India of July 16.

He has been selected as a candidate for StartingBloc Fellowship and is now in London attending the Global Institute for Social Innovation at London Business School.