Article: How to motivate your internal customers?

Compensation & Benefits

How to motivate your internal customers?

Suryanarayana K, Google and Preeti Gupta, Aditya Birla Group gave very important insights on how to motivate your internal customers in your organization through marketing and reward lens respectively.
How to motivate your internal customers?

Organizational culture plays an essential role in running an organization as well as the management. It can be defined as an integrated system of values, norms and assumptions which is manifested and carried forward by the employees of the organization. 

Talking in more details of organizational culture is Suryanarayana Kodukulia, Google and Preeti Gupta, Aditya Birla Group. 

Google: Google is one of the top class and most admired companies around the world, so much so that “googling” is the term which many people use to refer to searching for information on the Web. But Google’s culture can be highly attributed to their culture. Google focuses mainly on employee happiness and thus maianitig productivity.

So can Google’s culture teach us anything?

Yes.

Most companies operate under a context and Google as a company has some major principles which are Mission, Culture, Transparency and Voice.

Google as a company believes in internal transparency and communication plays an important part. There needs a transparent flow of information from senior leaders to the employees. Other part of transparency is giving people their voice. It is very important to enable people to speak their mind, getting their voice back to their system in the form of feedbacks. This gives people a chance to speak and what they care about and feel heard. This finally drives a lot of culture and behaviour.

As Kodukulia commented,

People join company mainly because of culture of the company and not because of great benefits program. Thus there is s need to define culture in an organization.”

Google bases nearly everything off data. So it should come as no surprise that Google uses all sorts of data to gauge employees and improve their productivity. At Google, we try to bring into the questions we answer is we try to bring in data which helps us decide if we doing the right thing for example are managers doing what they are supposed to do, are we able to work on the feedbacks being received said Kodukulia.

The other most important component which defines culture is how to get the right talent in an organization. A lot of company’s culture is fabricated by hiring the right talent as eventually it forms an essential component of culture. 

“At Google, hiring is everybody’s job and not only HR’s job.”

As we get talent, employees need to think how to get better people in their team. Also when hiring, various factors are to be kept in mind such as mobility, diversity as it is hiring of Google and not for a particular team. 

The last thing which defines Google is having a great manager. A great manager will help lower attrition rates, increase engagement and productivity. After culture people look for a company to work with a hope to work with a good manager.

“Great manager is one who is a great coach”.

A great manager is the one who teach better and do not micromanage and gives complete freedom to work.

Coming to total rewards, one of the core elements of total rewards is communicating it effectively to the employees. And at Google the ownership of communication decisions such as promotions, compensation which is a major part of it is communicated by the manager. 

His session ended with a very interesting question i.e., What does people rate Google for as a great place to work?

Culture: Of course as discussed above, culture plays an important role in rating Google as a great place to work as people feels included, they feel heard and thus helps in shaping their decision in joining Google and also recommending it to their peers.

Peers: Who do I want to work with? This drives a major part of decision making in joining a company which comes from the basic concept of hiring the right people for your organization.

The last and the most important factor which drives people to join Google are good managers. At Google, managers are an important asset and are equipped and empowered which eventually helps in driving business and increasing the productivity of the company. 

Aditya Birla Group: Preeti Gupta of Aditya Birla Group also presented her perspective of one of the important component of rewards strategy which is mainly communication. If an organization has a strategically designed rewards program but is not communicated to its employees leads to a loop hole in the program.  One of the modes of communication can be to use multiple channels. When developing a total rewards strategy, a key to its success is to ensure that it is widely communicated to all employees. The information needs to percolate from top line managers to the members of their respective teams. This will also help go a long way in helping employees understand why the organization has customized total rewards to meet different groups’ needs. Eventually this will be one of the driving factors of designing and implementing a successful total rewards program. 

(This article has been curated from the session ‘Motivating your internal customers’ at the Total Rewards Conclave 2017 organized by People Matters.)

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Topics: Compensation & Benefits, Benefits & Rewards, #TotalRewards

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