When I was a student, I wanted to be a teacher. Because, I always had many ideas to make teaching better, to improve students performance and to teach life lessons to them. I got this opportunity for a short while after college. I feel very content with the way I taught. Mainly, because my class not only loved me, but I earned respect from them. I am not saying this to just appreciate myself, but students have shared these feelings. Best proof is, even after more than five years they are in touch and ask my opinion in making choices. Class's overall passing percentage was more than 80% (without any outside coaching). Same class had 20 -30% success rate in other subjects. This was a great feeling of content. I think my, childhood lessons paid an important role in being successful as teacher. I hope to teach sometime again in my life.
After teaching, I have been working as software engineer for many years now. Have got chance to work with both big giants and small start ups. While working, I always dream about how will my own company (one day) look like. Here are my thoughts:
* No one in my dream company will work for more than eight hours a day. That includes lunch and tea breaks. Along with that will ensure that no one actually works less than seven hours a day. I have spent 12 hours at office. But never any good came out of that. Mostly, the time I spent beyond normal hours deteriorated the quality. Forced me to work more the next day to fix the mistakes I did, when I was tired. Needless to say, demotivated me and increased my frustration.
* Working hours will be 9-5, 10-6 or 11-7. That will give people flexibility of time, but they will still have common hours to work with each other.
* Saturdays will be the optional holidays. Employee can either take off on Saturday or on any other week day. This will give employees more time to finish their chores. As most of the businesses are close on official weekends.
* This is difficult to implement but my favorite. From my personal experience, there have been times, when I had no work to do. but could not leave office before 6 PM. You all know why. In my dream company, it will be target based. Any one who accomplishes his tasks/targets on time can leave for the day without any guilt. Of course, its not straight forward to implement. But its achievable. Just need to take care of many other factors before implementing this. Like ensuring that everyone has enough work in front of them before start of day and every one is self motivated and have the feeling of ownership.
* Each employee will have 1-1 session with their mentors at least once in a month(Not managers). This solves two purposes. First, the mentor feels powerful as he gets a chance to lecture some one (everyone loves that). Second, this helps in understanding the employees expectations and provides a platform to motivate him and explain him the common motives of company. Usually, company's have annual reviews. But those reviews are used as means of promoting or firing employees. All through the year, employee never gets to know about his weaknesses or strengths. This not only demotivates but also adds frustration.
* To accomplish above, One important aspect needs to be taken care. Give mentors authority to make decisions. This is more essential from the juniors point view of whom the mentor is grooming. This imparts confidence in them, that if they share some thing with their mentor, he will take care of it. And obviously, it imparts motivation and ownership in mentors.
----Contd
Many of these points are sheer common sense, but still not found commonly.
