Flatness at the cost of sustainability: Good leadership ?

Organization at large or small scale are increasingly becoming variants on exactly the same basic elements : Individuals, Teams, Businesses, and Corporations : all interact on the basis of flatness, fluidity, and trust. The connectivity, strength of these elements depends on the information flow capabilities through the structural web reflected through f/f/t. If information is symmetric, trust substitutes for control. Delegation or power controls are superficial. The more symmetric the information, or the more it can be replicated and predicted for decisions and actions, the better it can integrate and strengthen the web.

Often, poor integration between jobs, added by deformities in organisation structure from job designs, evaluations and its administration distort that symmetry. Even excessive influence of Hays points ( often used just for salary review ) leads to a patchy and isolated lumps of jobs, poorly connected for building any effective career paths. This over a period affects elevation of organisation structure; at times leading to an absence of a good bench strength for a predictive succession planning strategy. Attrition rates in such functional areas gets into a positive correlation with hiring costs. Consequently over a couple of business cycles, leadership controls errode for any strategic initiative. This will be very clearly visible in functionalities holding pivotal commercial roles in the business value chain.

Salary Confidentiality : best practice?

Often organisations prefer to keep individual salaries under wraps and perspires to ensure that employees too maintain it; on paper at least. So there is a confidentiality clause with all salary payouts that the contents should not be disclosed to anyone. At the same time companies themselves disclose these details to consultancies to participate in market surveys etc. Compliance becomes one sided. Also external auditors or government or statutory agencies hardly buy the argument for confidentiality. Pay disparity is a hot area for Courts. Companies instead of cleansing the system with transparency prefer to bury its head, believe that it as a best practice for employee relations. On the contrary, in fact it is a litmus test for health,quality check. HR managers struggle to justify the policy on 'salary confidentiality'. The reason stems from somewhere else. Poor performance management practices makes it difficult for C&B guys to differentiate. To hide their inability the confidentaility clause becomes necessary. Also having components within pay packet that are based on 'non performance' or 'non job' or based on extraneous, maybe unethical factors, can also force the need for confidentiality. Especially if such components gets excess or undeserving weightages within overall quantum. Another major reason could be organisations often gets derailed from relatvity indices in pay factors over a period of time. With passage of more time this risk of the relativity-knots getting tighter grows to scary proportions. It may be challenging to stop this quality erosion and reverse the down hill trend. Business gains are immense for those who have the guts. But yes, this will not get support from Compensation consultants. They will still say 'confidentiality' is the 'best practice'. Why not, they survive on that.!!

resource value management for organisation effectiveness

one of the main scale for measuring organisation effectiveness, by shareholders or consumers alike, is how judiciously it manages the value of its resources and enhances it for community needs. To directly (besides indirect modes like Work Contracts ) capitalise labour potential, financial resource is used through two channels in most organisations. 1. Salary and monetary benefits 2. Facilities -non monetary. While both needs to be controlled, the pay outs under these heads need to be established as well for various requirements. It could be to make employees realise their value to the organisation as the compnay perceives. or it could be to measure value for which organisation has to make pay outs to government or tax authorities. To value CTC , salary and monetary benefits can easily be quantified. but valuation of facilities often needs to be negotiated and established. Items like house,utilities,car, etc are well settled items. However non monetary facilities like eg notional lease value of office space or valuation of certain perks like business entertainment or value of ESOP is not easy. Often these need to be justified and negotiated to reach an agreed value. Given the complexity and /or overlapping nature it is not easy to identify a controllable accouting head that reflects the performance (or how well?) the capitalisation is taking place. Normally , manpower budget is taken up to control and monitor. but then it leaves out significant items outside it as Non manpower budget items . or some times as purely part of business expenditure. At times such expenditures gets passed over to customers or third parties with the result ,over time or business cycles, companies take a passive stance to such expenditure. Its accuracy or need to segregate and control often takes a back seat, till someone wakes up to its need. It has corrossive qualities over organisation effectivess.