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Posts Tagged ‘business processes’

When “More” means “Less”

03 Mar

Let’s start this post by an example, how do you make mobile phone calls? Of course you are not an alien (unless you’re reading this blog from the outer space!!), I am sure you usually pick up the cell phone from your pocket if you’re a man, and from your purse if you’re a lady (or a man using a purse!!), and then you will be searching through your saved contact list, or you will be dailing the number directly from your memory (you lucky ….!!).

Now imagine that, for one reason or another, you are working for me now! I am your new boss and I am bothered by how you cannot compare your actual phone talking time with the monthly bill! Telecom companies could be ripping us off and we are not able to know about it, let alone prove it. So given that I am a brilliant manager, I am going to ask you to take some additional measures so we could compare your talk time to the phone bill. So you might think that I should come to you and discuss the new process with you, you are the one using the phone, right!! You’re wrong, I’m not going to consult one of my staff, I have big bosses of my own to consult and to be friendly with. I just said that I am brilliant and I have to prove it to my own bosses!!

Now check out these genius new procedures:

  • Every time you make a phone call, I want you to record the time you started the call and the time you finished. These records have to be repoerted on an Excel sheet.
  • I want you to always monitor your phone battery and recharge it whenever 25% is remaining of its charge. And do not forget to create a new Excel sheet to record when did you start the charge and when did you plug it off.
  • These sheets should be momentarily updated; whenever I need an update, it should be there!
  • I am not going to tell you what kind of reporting I might ask you to come up with form these sheets, but you have to be ready to prepare those reports on spot. I could ask you stuff like: ‘Who did you call the most during the past month? At which hour of the day do you usually make most of your calls? Do you make most of your calls standing up or laying down?’

So what have I done to you here, the main task is still the same, you are making phone calls, I’ve just added a punch of extra activities around it. The objective I am trying to pursue is somehow justified, but the way I am trying to do it is definitely debatable.

Trying to improve the work and the productivity of any organization are amongst the top responsibilities of any management. But doing that by adding extra practices, new processes, and more rules while keeping the resources the same is a killer move. And unfortunately it is a classical mistake across many managements and many organizations.

More tasks on the same number of staff, physical and financial resources, given that they are already utilized, means less productivity, less motivation, less loyalty, and eventually less profits!

That’s the classical mistake of asking for more and more, that will only lead to less and less!

 
2 Comments

Posted in General Management, Human Resources, Leadership

 

Safety Comes Last

11 Jan

Just about four months after a man deceased in a fire incident in one of the Saudi Electricity company’s gas turbines in Riyadh, another soul has just been lost in another incident, and where?! in the same location (here)!!!

It must be obvious to any observer that there is something wrong, something missing in the safety department, or in the whole understanding of the concept of safety. Opening this subject around here is like opening an infected wound that neither the Saudi companies nor government regulators would be so excited to look at.

It is not like most of them do not have safety sections or departments, the real problem is that most of them think their job stop at installing a number of fire extinguishers beside practicing a fire drill every 7 years!! I personally know a company that is renting an office in a big business building. One morning, the staff were surprised by a nice drawing hanging on the wall showing some nice arrows and remarks about emergency exists and assembly points. Also on that drawing was the name of one of their colleagues as the office coordinator whom everyone should be looking for in case of any emergency. So the staff were excitedly rushing to that staff to ask him about this new, and excellent, emergency plans. Once they stormed the poor soul office, they were faced with another surprise, the guy just did not know what they were talking about!!!

And hey, you should not be working in a construction company to know what I am talking about, I am sure there are a lot of constructions or roads excavations taking place along your daily commute. Just stop at any of those and have a close look at the poor workers in there!

Long story short, the company that respects its staff should educate them about safety, should train them, should provide them with the required tools to eliminate or, at the worst case, minimize those conditions, and it should enforce very strict safety rules and procedures.

In simpler words, it should look at its staff and treat them as human beings!

 
2 Comments

Posted in Culture, General Management, Saudi business

 

Want to Blog in Saudi?

03 Jan

I have to say that I have a lot of respect and admiration for Mr. Abdulaziz Khoja, our minister of culture and information, for the educated and the cultural figure he is. And I truly believe that the ministry has become more active on the public scene, as it should be, since he started his tenure.

But the new online publishing law … mmm … naaah … it could turn out to be a black mark on his records!!

I am not going to go through the articles of the law, Saudi Jeans has done a wonderful job in here, but as someone who has an interest in managerial practices, I have some comments of my own:

  • First on the regulation principle itself, I have never heard of any similar law that showed interest in regulating blogs, which is my main concern here, in any country around the world. You may want to exclude the Arabic countries from this generalization, because you know, media around here has many rules, regulations, and blurry explanations that no one understands anyway! The only tiniest closest resemblance to such blog regulating initiative might be coming from the American FCC when rumors started flying around that it might want to regulate paid advertisement reviews written in blogs because they might be misleading to the public. Also, there are some states’ taxation laws on money earned via online advertisements.  Needless to say, such laws are making a lot of fuss among bloggers in the states already!
  • Reading through the law you cannot help but feeling that you are travailing back into time and possibly you would start sneezing from the bureaucratic aroma that will fill your nostrils. For a moment there, I was skipping through lines to look where the infamous green manila folder and the 2 photos requirements will pop up!! I mean come on … this is a law that is intended to deal with Internet savvy users who managed to set up and run a website and you are asking them to provide a high school degree and a certificate of ‘good public behavior.’ (this is something similar to having clean records in the US, in other words, you have not been to jail before!)
  • Generally speaking, I do not mind having the government roaming around the Internet looking for those working in the dark and trying to hurt the country and its people. And I am sure all countries around the world are already doing this, duh!!! But that’s one thing and asking people to register their own online spaces and provide a valid email account is something else. Forcing the registration on blogs, which is not yet a mandatory, will be a disastrous decision by any means related to the freedom of speech!
  • Finally, because this post seems to be running long and I still have a lot of things to say, I would like to quickly touch on the way the law was presented to people, how it was marketed. I can safely assume that about 95% of those read the law were angry, of course after they finished laughing in disbelief! The law has been marketed throughout the months it was still being cooked by the ministry chefs as something that should be presented to make things right. So naturally, those affected by the law will respond defensively toward it, because they are not doing anything wrong that needs to be corrected at the first place! And that is a common mistake in most of bureaucratic organizations, which are the majority of Saudi and Arabic companies and government bodies unfortunately, they just like to throw laws and complicated processes around just to intimidate people! Just check how Asmaa described her reaction to the law in this post to get a glimpse of what I am talking about here.

 
3 Comments

Posted in Communication, General Management, Saudi business

 

How to Burn Your Staff?

21 Oct

If you are ‘that-kind-of-manager,’ then you will must enjoy the following tips on how to burn your staff. And you do not have to worry about what other people would say or think about that, they just do not understand your style and how you think you are driving your staff to be big performers. And hey, you are ‘The-Manager,’ people have no right to question your ways of conducting business … and from there we start:

  • Keep reminding your staff, and everyone around, that you are The Manager. If they are working as your subordinates, then they should better understand it very well because there are consequences (read the next tips). You can remind them of your superiority in various ways: in meetings (e.g. start the meeting with something like ‘as the manager, I have decided’), in phone calls (e.g. you can say something like ‘tell them to do it because the manager said so’), and in emails of course (e.g. send emails saying stuff like ‘I have noticed, as The Manager, that …’).
  • Try to integrate some military practices into your style. Your requests should be treated as orders; do-first-ask-later kind of why (on the long run, they should be trained not to ask at all!).
  • Do not share your strategy, your plans, or the company strategy with them. They do not have the mental capacity to deal with it.
  • Take away these words from your dictionary and pretend that you do not understand them: overloading, logical arguments, and work/life balance!!
  • Do not allow them to discuss or circulate modern management articles; this is a place of work, not a university. And they have to understand that your abilities and experience exceed all that academic mumbo-jumbo.
  • Do not care much about processes nor scope of work. Let there be processes, but they should know that you have the power to overrule them whenever you like.
  • From time to time, ask them to do illogical or irregular stuff. Lists of things nobody cares about, check ups that do not make sense and alike. By doing so you are training them on obedience. You do not have to explain yourself, remember the tip about military practices.
  • Always, and I mean, all the time, give them a very tight time limits to deliver your requirements. If a certain study normally takes 3 days to accomplish, come at the last minuet and ask them to finish it before the end of the day.
  • Keep the sense of urgency and every-thing-is-a-priority way of work. They should know that you do not care about them because there are always bigger picture that they do not, and cannot, see!

So … do you have any more tips to share with us?

 
2 Comments

Posted in General Management, Leadership

 

Let There Be Processes

04 Feb

I had the chance to be in a casual meeting with one of those big guys in one of Saudi companies. There came a discussion about companies’ strategic plans and work procedures. This gentleman said something that really startled me! Unfortunately, I did not have the chance to discuss that idea with him more throughly but to simply put his concept, it is something like : ‘let there be rules, respect them, but do not follow them!!’

Now in my humble understanding, whether it is Google, Apple, or Amazon, they all have some kind of business processes. There is no way a business would be able to conduct its daily activities or long term objectives without setting its work on a clear path … and that clear path is nothing but a group of processes.

However, processes should not be confused with bureaucratic-old-school kind of paper work and hundreds and hundreds of signatures. While such bureaucratic rules are always treated as if they are coming out of holy books, there is a room in modern processes to be flexible and they are always subject to modifications and enhancements.

In todays world, businesses are faced with tough challenges and frequently changing market rules. For that, it is necessary for organizations to have the ability to adapt, change course, and interact with their environment. This cannot be done by letting everybody working on his/her own without any kind of direction and guidance and, of course, it cannot happen by imposing rules that have been around for the past 50 years.

Even innovation and ‘thinking out of the box’ have their own rules that turn them into useful and practical models instead of wasted time, efforts, and resources.

I really hope that I misunderstood this big shot executive and hope that he really has some logical explanation to his strange idea, don’t you think?

 
3 Comments

Posted in General Management, Leadership, Saudi business