Productivity

A CV or A Resume

What format should a job seeker use? In North America, the resume is the common format job seeker use to tell about their job experience and education. The Resume usually dose not includes so much personal information as the CV does.

Being in India and in the Arab world for the last few months, I have seen many CVs per my job as development manager. What I really didn’t like about the CV format is the personal bio data, most of the CVs that I have read contain so much personal information, in one CV, the applicant included the name of her mother and father and their occupations in the CV and its not unusual to see the applicant passport number listed in the CV too.

I have always wondered as a manager, why do I need to know this much personal details of the applicant, my major concern is the applicant actual experience.

One of my employees asked me to review her CV, there was almost half page of information about her bio, so I told her, any busy manager will not be interested in your bio, he wants to know more about your job experience and if he needed more bio information, he will ask for it.

I don’t know if it’s a cultural issue or not, but mostly in the US, its almost illegal to ask so much bio data of your employees, but in this part of the world, privacy is still not a big issue.

HP learning center-free online classes

During my early days as on-site tech, I was giving access by HP to their Tech-zone area, an online resources for various type of training offered by HP. Now HP is making these online classes free for everyone. This online courses are great tool for continues education.

They have classes in:
Software and Technology
IT professional
Business skills

You can enroll in any of these classes online, and you will be sent weekly or b-weekly study materials via e-mails, you will have a class instructor and you will also have an option to download the full class content on PDF format.

These are some great classes that are useful for a wide range of professionals; you can see the full list of classes at:
http://h30187.www3.hp.com/all_courses.jsp

Finish what you have started

What is the distinguishing character of the most successful people? They finish what they have started.

Good business plans are only good if they are fully implemented. Many businesses started with great ideas only to see these businesses fail, they had a plan, they started to work on the plan, but they didn’t follow through.

When the management fails to emphasize the importance of following through, employees will not follow through on their job performance.

In the past few months, I had several incidents where I didn’t get excellent customer service support. In one of my international flights with a world class airlines, I had to change my destination after I checked in my luggage, only to find out later that my bags didn’t not arrive with me on the same flight. I have talked to the airlines customer agent and explained to him in full details about my intentions to change my flight routes and he re-assured me over and over that my checked in luggage will be with me on the same flight, but later on I found out that this agent didn’t not do his job thoroughly and he didn’t not rely the message to the ramp agent to pull the luggage from one flight and load into another.

In another incident, I had a tech support issue so I called the tech support line, only to talk with half trained technicians who kept giving me different answers for the same issue, a very simple problem that kept going on week after week which eventually took less than one minute to fix.

If these customer support representatives were told in their training that once they take an ownership of an issue, they must follow it through until it has been resolved, they would have paid better attention to the customer who is waiting on the other side of the line and they could have save their companies time and money.

Finish what you have started and follow through with your commitments and you will see how success will follow.

Poorly skilled worker will cost your company

No doubt every business in the world is trying to increase profit and cut costs. Cutting costs and improving productivity is what CEOs and managers get paid to do.

In my traveling and working with various businesses around the world, I have seen this killer mistake over and over again “Businesses hire low-skilled workers to save money.” In my current job, I am working in the country of Qatar, in the city of Doha; I am having some serious performance issues with some of my employees.

The policy of my company is to hire low skilled workers so the company doesn’t have to pay high salaries. This policy has no wisdom in it or any sign of long term planing. As a manager, I am trying to change this policy, which is not an easy task. My job is to work with more important issues than to tell my employees how to perform their day to day job, but some of my employees need constant supervision and I can not take the risk of them not doing their job well.

Living in this part of the world for almost a year now, I have noticed that it’s the general policy of most of the countries in this region to depend on low skilled workers for most of their labor needs. This policy led millions of talented workers to leave these countries and migrate looking for better wages which left these countries with a large pool of low skilled workers who actually don’t have the right skills and experience that these countries need for its ambitious development plans.

When you hire a new worker, look for quality of work first than look to save money, the quality work produced by competent worker will save you the money you will otherwise have to spend in training and supervising low skilled and low paid workers.

The fear of Technology

Have you ever faced with users or CEOs who are afraid of technology? What you do as an IT consultant when your plans for better systems for the company are faced by total resistance by the management?

In a real life example, I was updating all the systems for my company and we migrated from windows XP systems to Windows Vista, this migration caused few changes in how users would go by doing their daily tasks. The CEO of our company was in a business trip and when he got back and saw the new systems, he complained why his outlook express is not there anymore, he said he couldn’t use Microsoft outlook.

I tried to explain to him that outlook express is an old technology and Microsoft outlook is the closest e-mail client in features to his old outlook express. The CEO started to look for his Old IT guy who installed outlook express and wanted him to fix the problem he is having, this made me laugh.

Another example with my CEO, I wanted to have total online solutions for our banking needs where we can pay bills, issues checks and manage our accounts without going to the bank or using the phone and again he refused and said “ I don’t trust this online services, I want to write all my checks with my hands.”

The fear of change or the fear of the unknown is normal human behavior, but this can be a real problem when it stops you from completing your job or from giving the best consultations to your client.

How would you deal with clients who have fear of Technology? The best approach to use is to show them how much money they could save by having the latest technology and how employees’ productivity would improve.

Although I am facing resistance to change at my company, I managed to improve many business processes by using the right technology and the immediate reaction from the employees and clients was really encouraging

Stick to your company’s policy

One of the most important parts of successful management is knowing that your employees respect your company’s policy. The Management would get a great deal of respect and support from the staff members if it sticks to the company policy in a time of crisis.

I have worked at companies where the management would make frequent changes to the company’s policy; employees wouldn’t know what to expect if they violated the company’s policy.

Not having a clear policy and sticking to it will lead to:

1- Degrading job performance since employees will have no clear policy to guide them, they will not know how to re-act in certain situations.
2- Confused clients, not having clear policy in matter such as (invoicing, returns, due dates, etc.) will confuse the clients and it will lead to a poor relations with them
3- Legal complications since not having clear policy on various issues can be used against the company in a case of employee-management dispute
4- Bad publicity for the company, since not having clear policy will make the management and the company look as if they don’t know what they are doing

In my current job, I am facing this issue daily, our company still doesn’t have a clear policy regarding its various dealings, I am working on writing a clear and concise policy.

Not having clear policy is costing our company, on the few issues that I was able to come up with clear policy, performance and customer satisfaction really improved.

One of the fundamental parts of running a good business is to have a clear vision and a good company policy that support the vision.

Few bad habits that kill small business

After graduation from college, most of the jobs that I worked at were with small businesses. I believe I have learned most of my skills in management and organization form working with small businesses.

Almost at every small business I worked at, I noticed the following few bad habits, that in some instances led to the closing of the business:

1- To save money, most small businesses start with not well trained staff
2- Working at small business, some staff members don’t understand that the benefit system at the small business is not like the one they can find at large corporations and many small business owners fail to explain this to the new hires
3- Many small business owners based their business plans on hope more than on facts
4- In order for the small business to survive, each employee will have to do more than his/her share of work, sometimes employees have to go out of their way to make things happen, but some employees don’t understand that and only want to do what they were hired to do
5- Many small businesses were started by successful engineers, IT professionals, investors, etc, but these individuals were not successful at running a business and eventually the business went down

These are the few bad habits or bad signs that I have seen at few small businesses that I worked at.

You are fired

I think most of us have seen the TV show “The Apprentice”, at the end of almost each episode we hear the famous few words of Mr. Donald Trump “ you are fired.” What would you do if you have to fire an employee?

In my current position, I had to make a firing decision regarding an employee, his job performance was weak and he was not able to show any improvements even after repeated training and continues encouragement. He just didn’t want to be here. The firing decision came when he failed on his last job assignment and failed to give any logical explanation on why he failed.

I was faced with little ethical dilemma over the firing issue, after all this employee joined the company from day one nd I only joined the company three months ago. But one of my main job duties is to re-organize the company and make it more productive and one main element of over all productivity is “highly productive employees.”

I made it very clear to all my staff members that we value each of them as a great asset to the company, but at the same time I will not tolerate any weak performers, if anyone needed assistance, my door is always open for help, but there is no excuse not to perform.

Firing this employee was a message to all our employees that the company is very serious about performance.

Sometimes the decision is hard, but to save the whole, you have to let go of few elements.

Will talent crunch create reverse immigration?

With all the problems with the global economy and the soaring prices of commodities, I haven’t seen so much demand for talent as I see it now. Even countries like India, which is historically an exporter of talents, it facing its own problems with shortage of skilled workers.

I have seen this on my visit to India, I have seen it in the Arab world, in Saudi Arabia and In Dubai, and I have seen it in the United States.

Why there is so much demand for skilled labor and why supply is short. Globalization brought many services and products to the masses that once were only available to certain segments of the society, this in return created the need for skilled labor to serve the growing needs for all type of services. When I was in India, I used airlines extensively for my local travel, many new airlines sprung up in India in a quite short time, this created a huge demand for labor in the airlines industry. You can use the airlines industry example and apply it to many other industries that require constant supplies of labor, and the trend is not only in India, but also in many developing countries around the world.

I think this demand for labor and skills will create a reverse immigration in few countries, companies started to have global pay-scale, the pay is the same, doesn’t matter where you work, so now many employees are choosing to work in their home countries or going back to their home countries where they almost get the same pay as working abroad.

When communications fail

In line with my last post, Management and the fear of change, there is another area in the organizational structure where the resistance for change is profound.

The flow of clear communications between various parts of the organization is vital and the flow of clear communications between management in employee is even more important.

At my current company, I am working diligently to improve the flow and the quality of communications between the various departments and between the employees and the management.

When I joined the company, there was no central management, each department worked separately from the other department, the only thing that held the company together was the owner of the company, he made sure each department communicated directly with him. This lake of communication between various departments led to:

1- More than one department in the company contacting the same client with the same request.
2- Employees going on vacation without the rest of the company knowing about it.
3- The owner of the company and the general manager giving the same employees contradicting tasks
4- Huge decline in productivity since the lake of clear communications led to confusion on the part of the employees.
5- Clients not sure with department in the company to call when they have an issue.

At this moment, I am working hard to improve the flow of communications between the central management, the various department and the owner of the company.

Again I am facing the issue of “Management and the fear of change”, the owner of the company is feeling threatened by not having all employees communicate to him directly and the employees don’t have confidence in working on their day to day duties without going first to the owner.

Things are improving, but slowly each day we are moving ahead.