What is in the Name? Well, Everything!

A young girl, new job and it’s her first day in office - all on her own after a week’s induction program. Smartly dressed in her well ironed formals, here she enters with a confident smile to deliver her best. I am the HR business ‘partner’ and 'we' will deliver our best, she tells herself with all the excitement. 

(We – here refers to business and support together and there is a reason why this has been kept in bold, will be clearer to you as we move along)

Take 1 – Time-Camera-Action!

Here she opens the laptop and the first mail that she sees reads something like this –

“Hope you are fully into action now. I want to get this report in 2 days’ time as I can’t let my business suffer! You guys need to gear up quick please”

‘My business’? She repeats…..n whoosh goes her “We” perception and now it becomes ‘they v/s us’!

Take 2 – Time – Camera – Action!

Tring Tring…rings her landline and with all the excitement she picks it up “Hello Good morning!”
The other side speaks “O hello Good morning and welcome to the team. I am your business head and have been looking forward to meet you. I have many pain areas to share with you and I am sure we will partner well to overcome those! Welcome to the team, also tomorrow is our business review – do join even if you don’t understand everything at the first place”

“O well thanks a lot! Look forward to see you!”

Hell yes! I have a job to do now! She beams

Both the above scenes are just a 2 minute takes and will never get noticed in our fast paced office lives but do you notice the impact it can have on the minds of young people/ new joiners in any organization? And that builds into forming the culture.

On one hand when we are stressing so much on mental harmony that organic food is becoming part of our lives and Yoga is being recognized as International Yoga Day, does our adult working group really need the fancy ad-hoc outings, dinners, team building meetings to deliver common results? I wonder, and this thought somewhere gets deeper seeped in when I talk to my colleagues, friends and acquaintances.

We really don’t need to spend so much of money and time in organizing big events to get people out of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. (The prisoner's dilemma is a canonical example of a game analysed in game theory that shows why two purely "rational" individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so). We need simple interventions on the floor that can work magic.

ü  Learning from schools, may be the trick our teachers would play with tired kids on middle of the day. Sit/Stand/Sit/Sit/Stand! And kids would burst out laughing. Also, making two extremely opposite kids sit together so that they can build tolerance if not friendship. What is so scientific about it?

ü  Let’s push back a little more into history. We have heard about big battles with huge armies on either side. What led to the strong mind-set that people from all the teams (archers, shooters, and wrestlers) would get ready to lay lives for the king? Was there any team building intervention? I feel it was more the feeling of oneness with the goal and oneness with the spirit to achieve that. It was not ‘you v/s me’ but ‘us v/s they’. How did that get developed? By walking together along the tough terrains, by helping each other out in camping, cooking and by fighting enemies. That would gradually develop into a trust that one will be taken care of by the team members if injured/ even dead.

Simple daily chores can bring in such sense of connectedness, and then why not apply it in day to day corporate lives?

Discover and experiment in on the Spot Employee Engagement with your teams and see the change.

The Idea is, that when a sales department hears about ‘Human Resource’, it doesn’t feel it’s yet another enabling department (and needs to be pointed out for all wrong doings). It is the scenario when one department doesn’t simply nullify the contribution other department has to make and acknowledges to the quees What is the name (of department)? Well, Everything!