Employee Focus

By Samer Zein

Today’s management model is people focused. It is driven by customers and fueled by employees. The last in its role are the center of attractiveness. Loyal employees after getting well trained and compensated consider themselves the owners of the organization. Employees in such cases create customers loyalty.

When employees get satisfied they perform exactly the way they should to improve performance and influence consumers’ loyalty and leads to better financial return. Mangers should retain loyal employees and value them as assets of the organizations because they are in direct contact with customers and other stakeholders.

Layoffs of good people and loyal employees may help in cutting down costs and improvements in the financial performance of the organizations in the short run but it fires back on medium and long term bases. These loyal employees are the fuel of loyal customers they create the customer relation through their cooperation and the different skills they learned through experience and training programs.

Customer satisfaction is best achieved when relationships between customers and employees, managers and employees, and suppliers are achieved. That creates homogeneous atmosphere in the environment and make all satisfied and encourage them to perform in order to keep this valuable satisfaction in hand.


The interrelation between customer loyalty and the employee loyalty to the organization affect financial performance through:

• Work place culture and practices


• Employee loyalty.


• Customer loyalty.


• Work place loyalty.
  

Employees’ loyalty could be developed through plans and actions like employees’ involvement and rewards. Managers should also promote trust and respect and let employees get involve in the corporate strategy and implementation. They could discuss performance with subordinates and delegate authority to employees to have them responsible for their jobs.

MBA Recruiters Step Up When the Economy Steps Down

Companies get a jump on hiring top talent if they take the long view: Pounce when rivals are holding back
by Kevin P. Coyne and Jill R. Carty

Any good strategist knows the best time to pounce is when your adversary is reeling. With that in mind, the 2008-09 MBA recruiting season should be prime time for recruiters who have been frustrated by hot competition for top MBAs—if they are willing to be smart about it.

We all know the frustrations of "normal" companies trying to attract top-notch MBA talent that get outbid by the "body shops"—investment banks, consulting firms, and private equity outfits.

But here is 2009's open secret: Consulting firms and investment banks are cutting back their hiring plans. (Private equity already cut back last year.) According to Maryellen Lamb of Wharton's MBA Career Management Center, her office has already received calls from investment banks canceling this fall's interview schedules. The banks said some offers would be made, but they would be much harder to come by, since the banks and their ilk have already filled large portions of their downsized 2009 need with returning interns.

Furthermore, your other campus competition is also likely to pull back, if history is any guide. In the 2001-02 recession, the nationwide portion of MBAs with four or more offers fell from 28% to just 7%. And, the portion who received just one rose from 27% to 48%.

Look at the Whole Candidate
"True" you say, "but aren't you forgetting two things? First, there is a reason for that cutback. Other companies are suffering as well. This is the time we can least afford those expensive MBAs. And, second, MBAs are notorious for job-hopping. Won't they just leave us for their precious consulting firms as soon as the job market improves?"

Here's what I say: Recalculate the value of the positions you normally hire MBAs to fill. Let's assume that you have already correctly calculated their value in normal times—and frankly, the positions are simply not as valuable in a recession. Issue resolved, right? No. That calculation was myopic. It assumed that the only relevant skills that an MBA has are a subset of the skills you normally hire for. What about that MBA's other skills? What else have students learned that might be valuable to your company, even temporarily?

At Wharton, an MBA "major" consists of only five credit units beyond the core courses, out of a total of up to 21 course credit units. An MBA with a marketing "major" will have taken three courses in operations and information management, four in general management, and three in accounting. At Emory University's Goizueta Business School (where I teach), an MBA student can use as little as three of his or her elective courses to obtain a major— with the remaining 21 courses devoted to other areas of study. So, the thought process of a smart recruiter should be: "The MBA I normally hire is not worth the price if he or she only does the job I would normally hire for. So, how large is the value-to-price gap, and what else might I have him or her do temporarily that would fill that gap before we migrate him or her to the normal position?"

For example, could a new hire put operations learning to work, and improve the efficiency of the plant? Or use finance knowledge to take a fresh look at how your company handles the accounts receivables and payables? Frankly, most legal departments have never been examined with a strategic eye—might there be some dead wood there? Use your imagination. It should not be too hard to find areas where a good look can save the company $50,000 or $75,000—and that's enough to cover the cost of most MBAs for six months. Task the MBA with finding the money in three months, and congratulate yourself for making a profit.

Hopping Too Fast?

Will MBAs leave their first job when the economy turns around? Yes, probably half will, if past trends hold. But a smart recruiter knows to focus on finding the other half. Sound obvious? It isn't. Most don't. Few recruiters have a system for even attempting to sort "future leavers" from "long-term players." Go ask your human resource department what validated tools they have for predicting later turnover that you can use during the recruiting process. The tools exist. (And if your particular HR department is unaware of any, that suggests an addition to the MBA "special projects list" mentioned above.)

The average recruiter will follow a lemming strategy—hire more when the highest-paying firms are hiring most and pull back when they are pulling back. The smarter recruiters will look one level deeper, to see if a contrarian approach might yield better results.

And the smartest recruiters? They will look deeper, too. But, they will also have one more trick up their sleeve—the honors undergraduate students. McKinsey recruiter Bob Bonner said in a University of Pennsylvania student publication: "We can pay them less, they work harder, they got better grades in the same classes, and they're easier to mold."
So, don't just shut down recruiting like your adversaries. Think at a level deeper. That's what a good strategist would do.

Source: BusinessWeek

The New Management Model

By Samer Zein

A new management model has been emerging for about the last twenty years. It includes such familiar concepts as leadership, vision, mission, teams, empowerment and customer focus. They have been applied in bits and pieces, but this doesn't work well because there are still remnants of the old system actively undermining the new. The new management model has different key success elements such as:

• The transition from traditional management to newly system management must be leaded by senior executives of the firm.
• Knowing the customers and get introduced to there customs, behaviors and back ground to have the full knowledge about their needs and wants.
• Internalize and allocate the companies’ strategy to customer requirements.
• Empowerment and authority delegation to the employees.
• Customers and company requirements must be communicated by managers and supervisors.
• Organizations must value their human resources.
• Build mutual relationships with theirs stakeholders-customers and suppliers.
• Researches reports about customers’ satisfaction and requirements must be done on in a well designed process.
• Organizations should adapt to continue change in the environment.
• Organizations should shed lights on their external and internal environments and make the analysis needed to account for these diverse factors.

This produces a very flexible organization where people will accept and adapt to new ideas and changes through a shared vision. That highly depends on awareness, environment, leadership, empowerment and learning. All of these are the building blocks combine together and create a base line for the new management model. Senior mangers face problems in restructuring their organization and shift to the new management model because here they are dealing with people and changing factors in the environment. Mangers and leaders should run the spirit of shifted thinking and lead it to their employees to adapt to change and be more customer oriented rather than product oriented.

The integration of the overall organizational strategy with customer benefits and requirements and empowering employees create the pass through financial success. Today organizations should no longer focus on profitability and how to increase the dollar per share. However, it is critical to find ways through out which they could understand their environment and create customer relationships and stand back to daily demands in order to improve performance and lead their target segment.