Paperless Organisation or Less Paper Organisation

Recently when I was giving seminar on “Paperless Organisation” to mixed group of senior managers and general managers from Cement Industry and Government Institutions, I have been discussed about vision towards paperless organisation, implementation methodology, tools & techniques and migration strategies. Few of the audience raised concern about possibilities of a paperless organisation, indeed which is true and in point of fact “Paperless Organisation” should be called as “Less Paper Organisation” and one of my slides in presentation is focused on “Without paper in an Organisation” which is summarised as Following:

 

Always paperless or digitisation, automation applies only to internal communication and not any outside communication, which may include communication with vendors, customers and institutions for statutory requirements. Even though most of the ERP’s made available with customer and vendor management functionalities through their online portals, still communication through paper media cannot be avoidable but it can be minimised.

Educate and support, train the people to "use monitors and avoid using paper who have problems like eye sight and aged, accustomed to read paper". Also organisation should provide better resolution or compatible screens for the people who have eye sight problems. Educate people to avoid taking prints in case of draft reading, printing of landscape pages or large width pages. Education and usage of system is the major risk to implement a document management system or collaboration system, automation system in any organisation.

New policies have adapted in an organisation on addressing the availability of papers at centralised location and non availability of paper in printers which can be accessed only after prior approval. Organisation is fully educated on when to use paper and measure the usage of paper.  Also Organisation should be completely aware of policies and domestic laws to use Information act and authenticity of electronic & digital signatures effectively.

Even after considering and implementing all the above options still there will be many areas where paper cannot be avoided for our current environment and statutory requirements at least as on today.

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Interactive appraisal meetings

A process of appraisals is like a double edged sword for an organisation; even thought it has good or bad impact on performance of organisation or employee. The positive appraisals contribute to employee satisfaction, which in turn leads to improved performance and sometimes bias in the appraisals can also worsen the situation whereas employee may feel that, s/he is not important to their organisation.  Consequently performance appraisals can have high impact on the organizations both positively and negatively, therefore it should be managed carefully with knowledge and experience.

The key objective of the performance appraisal is to agree on goals for the following year and such goals doesn’t have any commitment, if employer not understood the employee's point of view. For that reason performance appraisal meetings should be interactive, where the manager doesn't simply relay on his or her own appraisal of the employee's performance, but also listens to the employee's viewpoint. Other way around the interactive appraisal meetings provide an opportunity to employees to receive feedback regarding their performance which leads to increased productivity.

Interactive appraisal meetings provides an opportunity for discussions which includes objectives, aligning goals, identifying training/other needs, career and skills development  where employee benefits from fair, and valid recognition results employee satisfactory which will have very high impact on the organisation goals and performance.

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Can a boss say just like that “you are fired”?

When I closely look at not only proprietary based or small companies, most of the employees are being an at-will employee. That is, the employer does not have to have good cause to terminate an employment and employers will take advantage of this protection.  Unless employee signed some sort of employment contract that states you cannot be terminated without good cause, which is usually not happening in most of the companies.

Usually an employee will have an employment contract in written (some times does’t exist) or oral and some times employment is depends on the discretion of an employer and not on the policies and terms. For example an employer walk up to an at-will employee and say, "I don't like your favourite color.  So you won’t get the promotion” or walk up to a sales man and say "Your performance is very poor because you did’t clean kitchen” or walk up to a programmer and say “you did’t not know how to repair a computer, so you are not eligible for increment” or an at-will employee will receive a mail saying that “You extended your sick leave, so you are fired”. Very few remedies for an at-will employee unless employer did something wrong to violate your employee rights or broke labor laws.

Fair and Faith

Usually employer will pledge many, and many of these promises can occur in all sorts of circumstances, such as during a casual conversation with an employee or as part of a discussion in an employee handbook. No matter how the promise occurs in all fairness employer should have commitment and first step before taking any decision is to learn the reasons and figure out whether employer have an employment contract with an employee. Occasionally, this will be as simple as opening the employee's personnel file and seeing a document labelled "employment contract." If terms are not included in the employment contract, then need to check employment policies before taking any decision.

Regardless of what type of contract you have with the employee, that contract will obligate employer to treat an employee fairly. This obligation is called the covenant of good faith and fair dealing.

Best Way

If you want give appraisal or want to fire, document the course of events to prove you had AT LEAST one conversation with this person. In case of firing give him or her at least one opportunity to correct the problem BEFORE firing. When you finally make the decision you should be clear and should have a proper stand and should not be personal.

Some of the preventive measures

·    Be clear about duties when an employee is hired. Provide a job description the employee signs off on to prove he or she understood the duties s/he was taking on.

·    Be sure of your standing. Unless you are the company owner, know your employer's rules about firing someone, as there may be specific steps you are required to take in order to actually fire someone - even if the employee is not doing the job.

·    Act quickly when problems are noticed. Be sure to communicate performance problems as soon as you are aware of them, and coach staffers on how to improve. It's best to communicate this over email (ask them all who receive it to reply so that you know they have received and understood) so that there is some record of this communication. When you counsel an employee, focus on behaviour. "You have failed to meet deadlines on eleven out of the past sixteen assignments" is appropriate. "You're slacking off" is not appropriate.

·    Give benchmarks to meet. You can't expect all problems to be solved immediately, so giving a timeline and some improvements attached to deadlines will help show improvement (or not). If the employee continues to underperform, be sure he or she understands that improvements must match benchmarks or the employee will fail to meet expectations and be terminated.

·    Document everything, Record all the conversation, employee behaviour, work performance and what not. 

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Pay as you go model for SME’s.

Even the hosting services exists from many years, Grid computing and HPC(High performance Computing) has changed face of the cloud computing and the way business applications are created and run.  The major layers in the cloud computing are IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service). 

Pay-as-you-go model for SME’S.

Always building and managing in-house infrastructure and platform has always been complex, expensive, and risky and also the total cost for evaluating, buying, configuring and managing all the hardware and software required for business application is very high.

The cloud computing or PaaS and pay-as-you-go model can add up greater ROI, reduce deployment cycles, better in-house software alternative, pay based on usage and CAPEX becomes OPEX as high up-front investments are spread out.

Benefits

• Low Hardware cost.
• Low Software licensing cost.
• Low Facilities cost.
• Low Managing Services cost.
• Low development cost.
• Simplified Deployment.
• High availability at low cost.
• Zero up-gradation cost.

As SME's are small and medium enterprises, the major advantage of cloud computing or PaaS for SME's is that someone else is responsible for making your apps secure, constantly available, and accessible in the event of a disaster.

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Employee Tracking using Passive RFID

When it comes to employee tracking, first thing comes in the mind is employee time and attendance tracking. If it comes to security and safety, there are many solutions have been implemented using CCTV cameras in such environments like production units, warehouse’s, manufacturing plants and etc., But CCTV and attendance systems do not addresses the following challenges except evidence, crime deterrent and attendance.

• Right people have the access to the right places.  
• Track the staff no matter where they are.
• Unauthorized access to restricted areas.
• Enhance staff safety through the location knowledge.
• Keeping track of work hours VS actual worked hours.
• Compare and manage staff performance using hours spend at work location.
• Monitoring number of visits by supervisors or managers.
• In case of emergency availability of critical information of the employee including blood group, address and etc.
• Single identity for attendance, self-service, access card, cash-less cards in canteen and etc.,
• Track movement of the personnel in the interest of security or for billing purposes.
• Real time visibility of employees.

A low cost Passive RFID based solution provides real-time and automated recording of personnel movements within an organization's premises or in selective/critical areas within the premises. A typical RFID based employee tracking solution will have following major components:

RFID Tag

Carrying RFID tags by employees will be tracked automatically as they enter and exit entryways and as they move within work areas, zones and controlled areas. The RFID tags will be issued to each and every employee as an identity card.

RFID Reader or Pedestal

RFID pedestal or readers installed at each and every key entry and exit points and at locations within the work area/zone/block and at the security post and connected to server to provide instant visibility as individuals enter and leave.

When any personnel with an RFID tag passes through the pedestal reader the system will capture identity of tag and alerts late entry, Un-authorized entry, time spent within the work area or zone or block, time left.

RFID Software Solution

The RFID software solution integrates data from RFID Readers, Tags, sensors and other real-time data sources. The software solution enables enterprises the ability to view up-to-date status of employee’s movement, critical security alerts, attendance, and employee performance from anywhere. Further RFID Software solutions have the capabilities of integrating with existing applications and data repositories.

With passive RFID technology the employee tracking solution gives real time updates of any event or activity recording an accurate audit trail of attendance, lateness, and unauthorized absence, providing proof of presence and that required duties have been carried out. It is not only solution to above challenges and saving valuable time, the safety and proactively being managed with peace of mind.

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IE 9 Beta... Is technology never satisfies?

When I heard that Microsoft plans to launch the Internet Explorer 9 browser with multiple improvements in features, user interface, speed acceleration, security and many more, I got really excited and downloaded IE9 PP5. And I am not alone in this browser war because there are already in excess of 2.5 million downloads of the IE9 Beta browser when it was in developer preview mode, namely not really a full browser.

After trying IE9 PP5 I found following features at a glance.

• It is very fast startup and shutdown to allow more browsing time.
• Quick navigation to favorite sites from the Windows 7 taskbar i.e. Site Pinning and not required to launch IE9. Instead, specific websites can be pinned to the taskbar just as any other application in Windows 7.
• Resumes incomplete download after restarting feature which is already available in FireFox.
• Popular sites list similar to Chrome.
• Web address is integrated with search similar to Chrome.
• Simplified menu with neat and clean UI just like Chrome.
• Enhanced Back button, the Address Bar and the default search field.
• Tested Speed Reading demo application and the results really awesome. It took 48ms in IE 9 and 988ms in Chrome.
• Tested Videos from MSNBC and it was amazingly fast compare to Chrome and FireFox.
• New alert system to manage performance of the browser.
• Book mark all the current open tabs to favorites.

In addition to the above Microsoft is claiming following features and many more in their blogs and sites.

• IE9 offers consistent, fully hardware-accelerated text, graphics, and media, both audio and video.
• Test your site in IE9 Standards Mode. This mode provides the best performance and interoperability and will offer additional benefits in the IE9.
• Take advantage of HTML5, CSS3, SVG, DOM, ES5, improved JavaScript engine, and more.
• Windows integration, with this integration spans from under-the-hood security mitigations such as the UAC and hardware acceleration through DirectX 11 APIs, favorite websites will be launched straight from the Windows Taskbar.

Notably, IE9 is amazingly fast compared to its previous versions of Internet Explorer and they always seemed slow when compared to Google's Chrome. My first look at IE9 shows better than the Google Chrome (habitually I used).

Whoever the browser market leader between Microsoft IE, Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome, when technology not satisfies then evaluation takes place and war continues.

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