THAT GREAT MANAGER 

Best workplaces

BY Prasenjit Bhattacharya

In this column previously, we have explored the past and present, and what the best workplaces are doing differently. The future brings its own challenges and the key areas for the best workplaces to watch out for will be as follows.

BUSINESS MODEL Get your business model right. No matter what business you’re in, at this very moment someone is trying to disrupt it. Gone are the days when one business model works for a long time. If you’re struggling to get your business model right, you will find that your organisation will no longer be a great place to work.

TRANSPARENCY SAP Labs is a great place to work; it has an interesting practice called ‘speed mentoring’ where mentoring takes place in 15 minutes! Like everything else that SAP Labs does, it seeks feedback on the mentors themselves. Currently, it is running at a 95 percent advocacy rating – i.e. 95 percent of its people who have experienced this form of mentoring will recommend it to their friends.

LEADERSHIP No longer can leaders say the right things at the right time to the right people – today, you have to say the right things all the time to all the people! Saying and doing what you say has always been a leadership trait, and a leader must live out what he or she says… 24/7!

“Can’t I be myself at work?” asked a CEO with a degree of exasperation. “You can be your best self at work,” was my reply. Leadership has become a spiritual journey of self-development. Those who occupy positions of leadership only due to the lure of power and money will fall by the wayside.

I know a CEO who commissioned a feedback survey but was too afraid to disclose the results to his colleagues! Sadly for him, his colleagues didn’t need such a report because they already knew this!

So while you can stop your HR function from taking feedback from employees or edit uncomfortable areas in the feedback tool, you can’t stop people from posting their experiences on social media.

BEST WORKPLACE Companies like Salesforce are taking a stand. One of their core values is equality and Salesforce will not limit itself to doing this only within the organisation. When it comes to equal opportunity, equal rights, equal pay and equal access to education, Salesforce will mobilise public opinion, lobby and do what it can to create an equal world.

The great workplaces of the future will use their high trust and high-performance culture to bring about social change quicker than in the past.

To create a great workplace for all, we have to reach the last basic unit that impacts employee experience – the manager! If you’re a senior executive who is only concerned about protecting your employer’s brand, you may have missed the fact that people are already talking about you… not only your organisation.

Are you a great people manager? This information too will be soon available to everyone.