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Effective Employee Collaboration Platforms

July 27th, 2010 by Bharath Lanka

In today’s business climate, many companies have employees scattered across many states and time zones. Keeping employees informed and engaged even though they are geographically distant can bring increased employee performance and innovation to your company.

Businesses can implement effective employee collaboration platforms with the many online tools available. Some examples are internal blogs, software that encourages real-time status updates for specific departments, knowledge management documents, podcasts, RSS feeds, communication facilitation and professional networking opportunities.

Recruiting, training and retaining quality employees entails development of an effective employee “lifecycle” which spans the entirety of an employee’s time with your business.

Oftentimes, finding new employees can be accomplished through the networking ability and referral of contacts from current employees. Using these resources can cut the time and cost of finding new talent that may better match your current corporate culture.

“Onboarding” is a relatively new term that defines the process for incorporating new hires into the company quickly and effectively. A successful onboarding program can help to reduce employee turnover and increase new hire success. Onboarding includes automated information routing, new hire information, new employee development plans, effective communication of company goals and expectations, and onboarding process tracking.

Employee networking is an important benefit for the company and for the employees. Although companies spend a large part of their training budget on formal training programs, the greatest amount of information sharing is usually much more informal between employees. Companies will realize a greater return on their training dollars when they help to facilitate ways for employees to network internally and exchange ideas.

Developing employee profiles help to foster a sense of community among your employees, whether they share a physical location or are separated by wide geographical distances. This workplace community in turn fosters increased communication, a sense of shared corporate memory, and a way to form partnerships through internal social networks.

One of the most valuable assets a company possesses is its human capital: its employees. The success of a business depends on the success of its employees, and businesses are increasing realizing the value of “talent management”. Successful businesses implement platforms that tie their training programs to the goals of their organizations and design ways for their business units to meet their performance goals. Human resource departments realize that they should address the issues of their Generation Y employees as well as those employees who are nearing retirement. Employees value being offered effective career development plans; businesses benefit by identifying those employees who can be positioned for future leadership roles.

With today’s online hosted conferencing solutions and communications platforms, companies can provide all of the benefits of personalized training and seminars while simultaneously reducing travel time and expenses. Real-time training sessions and business unit collaboration meetings can be supplied to specified groups of users based on employee position, department location or communication needs. These same sessions can be recorded for access at any time with permission-based applications.

With effective and ongoing employee collaboration practices, business performance can be tracked and enhanced throughout all areas of a company in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner. Employee collaboration service providers design and implement unique approaches that are flexible and match your companies current workflow and business process and practices.

Business Process Outsourcing

July 5th, 2010 by Bharath Lanka

Outsourcing for enterprise organizations comes in many forms. Many people first think of outsourcing in terms of IT third-party service providers, but another type of outsourcing is becoming more and more common.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) entails hiring another company to handle specific types of business activities for your company. BPO can consist of payroll services, employee benefits management, call center services, customer services activities, human resources, accounting, and other “non-core” functions.

Depending on the strategic business plan and the size of the company, BPO contracts can run for multiple years and cost millions of dollars. But companies utilizing BPO also can realize savings in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over the life of the contract through savings over implementing the outsourced activities in-house.

The typical traditional corporate structure in the last half of the twentieth century was to build companies as large as possible with all business functions kept within the company. The bigger, the better. Today, however, “lean and mean” is more of the norm, and taking advantage of service providers that specialize in certain business functions often makes better sense for many corporations; helping companies of all sizes stay more competitive in the present business environment. When deciding whether or not outsourcing is right for your company, however, means taking the time necessary to ask the right questions and putting the right internal processes in place first.

Michael Motonen, a vice-president at the Gartner Consulting Sourcing Team, and the BPO lead principal, offers several tips:

Develop an outsourcing life-cycle model and strategy first. Garter has four phases.

1. The sourcing strategy phase considers questions such as: “What are the risks for our company?” “Why are we considering outsourcing?” “What kind of relationship are we looking for with our service provider?” “Will the resulting partnership be enhancing our current processes, or will it be transformative–helping our company change by driving cost savings or increasing revenue?”

2. Selection phase: Evaluate several prospective companies and make the final selection.

3. Contract phase: Develop and finalize the contract.

4. Sourcing Management phase: Included here is the service level agreement (SLA) for milestone benchmarks and other mutual assessment tools.

Take into consideration all aspects of contract duration. BPO contracts are often long-term for a reason. Strategic changes in business functions and relationships with BPO providers take time. A balance is needed between the short-term assessment of results and long enough to meet the stated goals. Most BPO contracts last for three to five years or more. Montonen recommends shorter contracts that allow for periodic reviews and renewals rather than tying yourself into long-term contracts with ten year time frames. It is also recommended that you include in the contract policies and procedures for bringing the business activities back in-house if necessary.

Identify, assess and evaluate any potential risks.

1. Ensure that your vendor is actually able to provide the services within your contract and SLA, and

2. Retain a certain amount of control and internal oversight for the entire process and project.

Ensure that compliance procedures are stipulated in the contract. Your service provider should be able to prove that what compliance regulations apply to your company can be applied to the entire project.

Keep the lines of communication open. On-going and open communication is important for the success of the BPO relationship; not only with your vendor, but also internally with everyone concerned in your own company. Outside vendors often make employees nervous. Proper management of all types of external and internal changes is critical to the overall success of the project and overall company morale.

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