Saturday November 7, 02:24 AM

Source: Indian Express Finance

Business revival on the cards

By Ganesh Shermon
Don t re-strategise, instead focus on base level strategy. Look at its relevance and tweak it to ensure that you have adequately customised to a changed economic circumstance. Ensure that your business heads are equally in agreement with your assessment of the market and the economic realities that govern your business today. Don t lose the line of sight that demonstrates that the revived organisation is looking long-term in their management of performance, cash, profitability and growth. Demonstrate that business ratios reflect learning s from the last many years and particularly the down turn. Organisations frequently survive the people who establish them or the strategy they establish. Don t restructure in a hurry. Structure your organisation to suit a strategy that you have outlined in this new environment. Don t forget to redefine roles, KPI s and accountability matrix to reflect the changed environment. Ensure that strategies and not people remain the focal point on structural change. Don t rush to hire. The temptation to bring people you have always wanted to have but could not or did not for valid reasons should be curtailed. This new environment needs a new breed of managers who can manage growth and profitability under changed conditions. And for which you should let people take up additional responsibilities, stretch and do more than what they are used. Don t jump to pay hikes. HR consulting firms have commenced telling you that planned or unplanned pay hikes are in the region of 10 X% to 20 X % and so on. Listen to such predictions and take your own commercial view on what works best for you. For which you should ask people to stop predicting pay hikes and to focus on performing. Ensure that your compensation strategy is significantly skewed in favor of variable pay and bonuses with a linear linkage to targets and milestones. Don t tell people, we are back in business because in reality we are not as much back into a high performing business as much as we have survived to be in business. Organisations that are not high performing can never be back in business. Only figuratively are they back. And for which you need to let people focus on their continued energy to get the company back into a better shape than ever before. Don t forget short term. Transformation is substantively difficult unless people are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices. Kotter states that, employees will not make sacrifices even if they are unhappy with the status quo, unless they believe that useful change is possible. Don t let go people. Retention is a key task confronting managements now. Some organisations have not displayed best of values, sensitivity in their management of the down turn and employees, whose memories are long, are waiting to leave. It is important to bring a healing touch to the pain and trauma people experienced the last 18 months. Connecting with people, and exhorting them back to business are key as a retention strategy. Don t stop asking for performance. Demand performance on a top down basis. Let staff at lower levels understand that the pressure is back on their leaders. And make business heads and those with clear lines of accountability stick to their tasks. Build planning, forecasting accuracy, scorecards, business processes, budgetary controls, cash management, risk processes etc. Ensure people are now rejigged to see the new way of doing things and go back to fundamentals of building businesses, sans, the hype. Companies that are changing their culture to meet with new demands have to drasticallychange their management style. The author is partner & country head of the people & change advisory practice at KPMG