Ram has refined his company's services to HR strategy and transformation, employee relations, talent management, human resource information systems, training and development and learning management. All these categories are also further sub-divided. Ram believes there is value in the virtual organisation. "We are able to pull the resources together, depending on the needs of the client. It morphs, depending on the client's needs. We don't sell the cookie-cutter approach, which the larger clients do. They would tend to have a group of consultants. Most of consultants specialise in one area.
The Business Guardian asked Ram a few questions about HR issues which are relevant and topical in today's globally competitive and dynamic environment.
Below are his responses:
Q: What do you think is the main human resource challenge organisations are facing today?
A: Competition has never been so fierce. The rate of change never so high and morale is plummeting as people struggle to find solid ground.
With all this upheaval, people no longer have a sense of loyalty to their companies. They lack connection to their work. Too many men and women fail to attach meaning to what they do and that has led to lack of fulfilment in their lives and, because of this, I see employee engagement as the key HR challenge in today's organisations.
Q: How does STEP plan on helping organisations with this particular HR challenge?
A:STEP takes a systems view to most HR and organisational challenges. We help organisations take a holistic view to their HR and organisational challenges and, therefore, the solutions are multifaceted.
Leadership is always a key issue in employee engagement. We also look at the organisational systems, such as compensation, performance management, training and development, etc.
It is our view that most current organisational interventions are only addressing employees' lower order needs or, what Maslow calls the "deficiency needs."
We encourage and assist management in reviewing current organisational systems to address employees' "being needs" or self- actualisation needs.
We complement this with helping employees take charge of their own destiny, of living their highest self, to be excellent, regardless of the circumstances around and outside of them.
One of our programmes to help in this is self-leadership. An organisation of self-actualised people is unbeatable.
Q: What is the concept of self-leadership?
A: Self-leadership is the foundation of any type of leadership. The most important thing any leader could to do to improve his organisation is to first improve himself and self-leadership is one of the most neglected disciplines by leaders.
Self-leadership starts with creating a vision for your life and your organisation, a worthy vision, one that captures the hearts and minds of people.
In our self-leadership programme, we explore the skills of a self-leader, develop the five disciplines of the self-leader, create rituals which ensure the self-leaderships skills are honed and practiced everyday.
Participants learn strategic time blocking skills, which are not the traditional time management skills. Self-leaders need to be emotionally intelligent and we spend a great deal of time in understanding and building emotional intelligence.
More importantly, we believe that a one -or two-day programme won't necessarily bring permanent behaviour change, so we provide coaching to ensure the self-leadership competencies are put into practice.