Shubham Shastri is a Mechanical Engineer who is the CEO of Craftertech Solutions Global Private Limited after having previous work experience in the Automobile Industry and Pre-engineered Building Industry. While working in the previous fields of work he realized that there is a huge gap in the Indian Industry in the domain of Advance Engineering Designing particularly in the AEC sector. To bridge the gap he founded Craftertech Solutions.
He also holds an interest in computer programming, electronics, 3D modeling, and printing as a devoted maker. Currently, he and his team are working on bringing their latest invention Negator Network to the market to fight the spread of Covid-19 like viruses. This start-up idea is also got selected in the top 100 worldwide ideas in Slingshot as well as in the top 8 in Ideathon 4 by Webel and BCC&I.
Here are his key experiences in the industry as the young founder of a new-age company in terms of managing his employees’ performance.
What, in your opinion, performance management actually is?
Well, though we think that performance management is a continuous process where we Plan, Monitor, and Review our company objectives and goals, so that we also can Reward our team members as per the goals achieved, in real life case scenario it is basically a practical system that helps an organisation to achieve higher operation efficiency through performance monitoring.
An organisation should have an organised operations and review system for smooth analysis of performances as well, along an organised team structure. That is what makes an organisation stay ‘organised’.
This also helps employees in an organisation to communicate better with different members of the projects in a very systematic and technical terms which at the end of the day brings rewards to the whole team.
How does Employee Performance Management actually help companies like yours?
In a company like Craftertech Solutions Global Pvt. Ltd. where we technically still consider our company a start-up, Employee Performance Management is a necessity to keep company’s basic propositions intact.
Predominantly performance management for employees or team members, that is what we like to call them, helps the project managers or co-team members in numerous ways. It helps the employees to take the actions required for a project and work-out through structured process to bring clarity on their performance targets. It evaluates the employee’s performance reasonably and accurately against the target performance and standards. It also helps to defuse most of the grievance among to team members and stake holders of a project or of a regular action. All this benefits of Employee Performance Management actually helps us to identify the under performer through performance reviews and we can take measures to raise their skills levels objectively. Moreover it quantitate the needs of learning through custom performance development programs.
What were the limitations you faced when you first started off your company, in managing employee’s performance and how did you overcome them? Any key gaps in the current industry practices in managing employee performance that you would like to share.
When we started off our company, initially we did not had the requirement of managing employee’s performance as the team we started with was a core team and very small. Gradually when we got little bit bigger as a team the realisation happened to us to monitor performance of employee’s as we could see that not having employee specific performance in an analytical format is hampering company’s strategies to achieve goals.
This brought us to implement the proven method of Employee Performance Management through cloud hosted Collaboration Platform with CRM, Task Scheduling and Management and OKR facilities. We also opted for a good feedback system for the employees that helped us in communicating better throughout any project or routine office work.
Tough these are systems that needs regular practise to make them a ‘good habit’, our team members easily adopted these systems in a short time as it resulted in lesser confusion and more productivity even through the course of the induction of these systems.
If you asking for gaps I only can share my example in this instance for my industry only. Most of the systems available that monitors or manages Employee Performance or tool which helps in Collaboration work within a Company are basically built specifically for IT companies as per the requirements of IT industry specific issues. The system or structure of the application they introduce for this purpose are not very suitable for Core Industries such as Mechanical, Construction, Manufacturing, Engineering Designing etc. Even not many custom solutions are available in the practise to address these gaps or not available with a single solution provider. Hope with more and more non-IT companies adapting systems to manage Employee Performance, these issues will be addressed with proper solutions.
How many employees are there in your organization & how are you currently managing your employee’s performance with any tools?
Right now we are a 15+ some team members running our organisation and right now we are using just one tool to manage our employee’s performance. What we believe as team members that simple and single umbrella solutions are most efficient to implement as well as to follow on regular basis without bulking out our routine tasks with tedious system formalities. Thus we chose Bitrix24 a while back as our only employee collaboration platform and communication tool that also supports many facilities for our Marketing, Sales and Project Management teams.
What makes a really effective Performance Management programme? Any best practices that you would like to share.
In simple words for me a really effective Performance Management Program is which is simple to implement yet have a level of customization depending on the needs of the tasks and types of teams. Both of these two factors make the team members or employees happy to opt for adaptation and continuation with the Performance Management system. And this makes it to an organizational habit for achieving higher targets with proper performance analysis.
We at Craftertech Solutions loves to develop ourselves time to time for the convenience of our future projects. Thereupon we review ourselves, including the directors to prepare and go through custom self-development plans, be it in Technical or Managemental domains. Our organization values continuous development to stay ahead in the process of business and technology. Subsequently it makes our Performance Management Program achieve the goals.