Abhijit Bhaduri’s Blog
I write about careers, skills and the world of work. The cartoons and sketches are mine.
Designing Onboarding Experiences
If you want to recast the whole onboarding process, a good place to start with is to examine what are the assumptions that have been the underpinnings of your onboarding process design. Each assumption results in the kind of process that the new hires experience. The onboarding process has two stages - start off by questioning both:
Bunty Aur Babli in the Corporation
The workplace has always been a safe haven. This had always been a place where the regular folks came to work. They all spoke English with the same fake accents and chewed gum while moving their jaws sideways and wore their underwear like a fashion statement. They all used "kewl" and not just a simple "Yass" like the wannabes. The regular folks all had been to similar schools and had seen similar films and read the same set of books while growing up. It was not surprising that their world view was also the same.
Managing a Multi-Generational Workforce
I remember going to visit my grandparents in Calcutta - it was not called Kolkata then. The grandparents, my parents, their siblings and their kids and eventually the kids of the erstwhile kids. Everyone came together under one roof for the two summer months, turning four nuclear families into one joint family. Chaotic and unruly at times, but definitely a lot of fun. That was my first taste of a joint family. The summer months had the same predictable pattern. My grandma was an avid story teller. My cousins and I would sit around and listen to the same stories every year... fascinated. Then we became teenagers. The stories seemed repetitive. We wanted to do cool stuff or else we would be awfully bored. So my grandparents took on the responsibility of taking us to see some English film about Tarzan. My cousins and I rummaged through the old Tarzan comics in anticipation. I don't remember the name of the film, but in this film Tarzan was spending disproportionate amount of time coochie-cooing with Jane than the apes. My grandparents shunted us out of the movie within the first ten minutes so as to prevent us teenagers from being corrupted by such films. We were all disappointed because we were just beginning to be curious about such stuff and welcomed any knowledge updates. Four generations of people living under the same roof was chaotic. Everything got amplified. The fights were louder. We had to share everything - from the books to the goodies. Most of the fights were around the question of who was getting all the privileges. Despite the chaos it was a lot of fun. The adventures got more daring every year. After a few weeks of this chaotic loud living, summer would come to an end and with the first spray of the monsoons, I would return back to Delhi and settle down to a quieter life. The cousins wrote letters to each other. The letters were all about how we would be spending the next summer. Despite the chaos, we all missed being together and waited impatiently for the year to go by. We would make notes of stories we would need to share with the cousins when we would meet. By the time we did, those stories seemed meaningless. Then one day, it all started to change. Grandma passed away and then grandpa followed. Then some aunts. The cousins moved out to different countries as they went to college and started to work. And then the other day, there was feeling of deja vu. I knew I had seen it all before. Except that this time it was multiple generations in the workplace.
Madhukar Shukla on Social Entrepreneurship
Madhukar ShuklaProfessor Madhukar Shukla has been part of the faculty of XLRI, India's premier Business School, since 1990 where he teaches Organizational Behavior. He has worked with the National Productivity Council and Administrative Staff College of India, Hyderabad and served as Visiting Professor at ESADE (Barcelona), Spain during 1993-94. His fields of special interest include Organizational Design, Organizational Change and Development, Learning Organizations and Management of Creativity. His books: “Designing Organizations” and “Competing through Knowledge” remain relevant and well thumbed through. For the past few years it is his passion for Social Entrepreneurship (read his article in Wall Street Journal here) that consumes him.Madhukar gets the kind of adulation from his students that only rock stars and film stars get from the paparazzi. You have to visit the Madhukar Shukla Fan Club on Facebook to understand the kind of hysteria he generates among his students and XLRI Alumni across the world - many of them got re-connected to their alma mater after Madhukar set up his unofficial version of Alumni networks across the years. Since the time he joined XL and we met - he has been a friend ever since. Full disclosure, I am a fan too.Says Prem Rao ('74 batch alum) about Mad Shuks as his students call him, "Madhukar has done more than anyone else has ever done to bring together the alum of XL- across generations!". Madhukar was in Bangalore for about 10 days, giving us enough time to talk about books, music, people, films, poetry and of course his all consuming passion for building social entrepreneurs at XLRI. Here are excerpts: