An internal study conducted by ADP, made the firm realize that a significant chunk of their employees were working remotely from home. In fact business research conducted by Staples Inc. revealed that nearly three-fourths of aspirants indicated that joining the firm would partly depend on work from home flexibility options. Such revelations have pushed organizations to develop more telecommuting friendly work practices. This also has benefits for respective firms. Due to spiraling costs of real estate, greater number of employees working from home enables reduction of office space cost. It also helps get the best out of creative personalities and thus aiding talent management. A lot of time that is spent of commuting gets saved. Parexel International Corp. is another such firm that has developed an intranet which company employees only can use from any location enabling a virtually connected workforce. This even helps in time sharing as different employee groups can work across separate time zones.

A number of large organizations including Fortune 500 ones have made news lately due to their decisions to scrap annual employee performance reviews. While some organizations have executed this change properly, many others have simply done an eyewash resulting in increased angst rather than decreased. As per a leadingbusiness consulting think-tank, a common error is that forms and systems have been eliminated entirely. Performance ranking has been removed, yet has not been adequately replaced. Finally some firms simply lack the internal motivation and require stringent reviews. Juniper is one prominent example of a firm that is executed elimination of performance reviews the right way. They have driven business innovation within the existing company culture. The performance management is now part of a more holistic approach and driven towards the final purpose. Juniper has implemented a ‘Conversation Day’, which encourages employees to speak out and this has proved tremendously effective. Juniper has devised a rating considered J Player against which all employees are judged and given percentage points. Finally employees are encouraged to collaborate and contribute simultaneously on individual basis. 

One of the reasons certain organizations have risen to the top of the pyramid in their respective industries is people and talent management. Somehow top firms manage to attract the best of the lot. We are presently going through what can be considered the ‘golden age’ of recruiting. This has been led by multiple forces driven by people, market and technology. The amount of information available today due to our online engagements is massive and this gives organizations a goldmine of data to dig before recruiting. Also due to the number of freelancers working across industries, the requirements are such that certain specialists need to be sourced at a particular time frame at a particular place. Millennials who are among the largest segment of those recruited happen to be extremely choosy over their jobs. Management consulting giant McKinsey predicts that business worth 2.7 trillion US $ can be concluded with better recruitment. Thus companies are tracking aspirants at various stages of their recruitment journey. This spans from awareness to consideration to preference and finally apply or hire phase. Engaged alumni are quite often the ideal speakers for the organization being a model workplace.

More and more products are nowadays being developed with microchips inbuilt to them. This is making the products smarter and easier for the manufacturers to track them and their rightful usage. Even mundane products like fizzy drinks and washing detergents are set to have microchips built in. In fact market research giant Gartner suggests that smart products will rise from the 5 billion of today to a staggering twenty one billion by the year 2020. Thus high end brands can vouch for their own authenticity. The post usage disposal can also be led by the product itself and billions can be recovered from supply chain losses. Yet more than such measures, there is something else which this revolution aims at and that is connecting to the final customers. This is something which retailers have done for decades but manufacturers have been left behind. Now a cultural change at workplace is needed with more IT professionals staffing them. Data management instead of getting outsourced to IT enablers, must now be done in house by full time employees who will crunch this useful data for business analysis purposes.

Most organizations would rather try to hire superstar employees and avoiding toxic workers. However, business research conducted clearly proves that instead of chasing the top performers, firms will be better served by converting the toxic workers into average performers. Around 5% of toxic workers even get terminated eventually. In cases where workers were lost due to toxicity, replacing the same and the opportunity cost of work days lost results in losses worth more than twelve thousand US dollars. On the other hand a figure of a mere five thousand odd dollars get saved when superstar employees get hired. Thus it is essential to hire the right candidates and screen them for toxicity during the interview process. Over-confidence and self regard are traits typically present among such candidates and they must be avoided for final selection.

Talent management teams are increasingly grappling with the oddity of reducing employee attrition across industries. For this a business research project was commissioned and executed by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to look into ways to improve the equation. It was found that contrary to popular perception, computers are better at hiring employees than humans. A sophisticated algorithm has been designed which judges applicants based on numerous parameters and ranks them. Indeed the ones adjudged to be better as per the algorithm proved better hires. This is especially true for low-skill jobs such as data entry or tele-calling.

Air Asia built its corporate strategy on the cornerstones of an open corporate culture, talent management and harnessing data. Tony Fernandes turned around a traditional, loss making airline by introducing a flat corporate culture and improving communication. He emphasized internal branding and creating an organization which the employees can identify with which will reflect in their dealings with the external world.  He believes that talented people are the best assets of a Company and looks for raw talent who can be polished to become their star employees. He encourages employees fulfill their dreams and aspirations which also ensures loyalty to Air Asia. Air Asia has extensively used data and technology to differentiate itself in the market and they believe it to be the airline’s future.  These are then the secrets behind the turnaround of Air Asia from a loss making small airline to the ‘best airline’ in Asia!