Posted by RK Prasad on Tuesday, December 30, 2008 @ 04:09 AM
The media is full of news about downsizing and layoffs across the world, especially in USA, Europe and recently in Japan. It is disconcerting, to say the least. Losing one’s job is something which nightmares are made of. From a company’s point of view also it a question of survival.
What about a small Indian company, like CommLab, most of whose customers are in these countries? How do we plan to cope or coping, for that matter?
For us, downsizing is never an option because we consider sacking our employees to cut down costs akin to a family asking some of its members to leave home because there isn’t much on the table! We are conservative and cautious when we take in a person or create a position. Once a person is taken in, he is with us in good times and bad times.
How do we then meet our expenses if the business starts drying up? Well, I remember a scion of a huge conglomerate saying that if we don’t have enough money, we don’t cook costly dishes but subsist on staples. We can have everything we need, if we accept that there are always alternatives. The resistance is therefore more mental and psychological. A manager always traveling first class finds it very difficult to travel second class; but he can, till the company tides over. When the company doesn’t raise the bogey of retrenchment or cuts in salaries, usually the employees show their appreciation by working harder and spending lesser of company’s resources. We can survive longer, if we decide to.
Recession is the best time for a company to get new business because your customers are also looking for ways and means of reducing their expenses. We offer our services at much lesser price than usual because we know that our customers will appreciate it and make good in the days to come. Will you not, if you are in their place?
This is also the best time to do some serious housekeeping – evaluating existing systems and procedures, training employees and a host of other “maintenance” activities which are “important but not urgent”. This is the best time to “sharpen our axes” and be ready for the slump to come to an end.
Business cycles are natural and inevitable. If we accept this fact, our brains can come up with numerous creative ways to survive and subsist during tough times. So recession is good news at CommLab.
Posted by Ayesha Habeeb Omer on Friday, December 19, 2008 @ 09:48 AM
As you are aware CommLab India has been providing eLearning and Custom Courseware solutions to a wide variety of organizations worldwide?
We also practice what we preach, so to speak! We use eLearning very extensively for our employee training. We believe that eLearning is an effective tool that saves time and cost. Best tool to update employees on new technologies and policies.
Most of our technical, product and procedural training happen online. We have a New Employee Experience Course, which is used as induction training for new employees at CommLab India.
Know Your CommLab
We use eLearning for all our technical product training. We train our employees on using Lectora and Flash by creating self-paced Elearning courses.
Our employees are given product/ software training on all the products of MS Office Suite through eLearning mode. Our Instructional designers learn how to create storyboards in Word and PowerPoint and Excel through this medium.
Employees are trained and tested using our Learning management System, which we have customized using open source SCORM/ AICC LMS, Moodle. We have a dedicated Training Manager who monitors and administers learning to all our employees.
We believe that eLearning is very effective even for small companies like ours and also for our clients who are Fortune and Global Fortune Companies that in different industry segments.
eLearning is a very effective tool to manage your scarce resources – people, time and cost. Use it extensively for all your training needs.
Posted by Ayesha Habeeb Omer on Tuesday, December 16, 2008 @ 08:27 AM
At CommLab we all are eager to come to office because the first thing we do is play. All of us including the CEO assemble on the terrace of our office at 9.00 sharp and have a small fun activity for 20 minutes. All these activities are conducted by our employees. This activity unites us all and we are full of energy to start our day. By the end of the activity we all charged to start the day in a positive, energetic manner. It helps us clear the cobwebs of the earlier night and reach an empowered state.
Watch us in action!
Once we finish this game, we all sing a powerful incantation and affirmation in a song form – “We are the Champions”.
“We Are the Champions” is a power ballad written by Freddie Mercury, recorded and performed by Queen for their 1977 album News of the World. One of their most famous and popular songs, it has since become an anthem for sporting victories and has been often used or referenced in popular culture.
Posted by admin on Wednesday, December 10, 2008 @ 12:01 AM
One of our Fortune client based in USA raised an issue regarding compatibility of AICC courses on their LMS. The courses were published using Captivate Authoring tool. The client proposed CommLab to fix this issue in the courses. Nearly 100 courses were in queue and the client was not able to launch them because of this issue.
When we took up this assignment, we were a little confused on where to start our research and how to solve this issue. On the other hand it was a very challenging task because we have to work on the coding of an authoring tool to make the courses function properly on the LMS. Earlier, we had the experience of working on coding side of another authoring tool. It was proprietary tool and the courses published by the tool ran on a particular portal. It was really a tough time to work on that tool.
To solve the Captivate issue; we planned a strategy which consists of three stages:
We will search for the solution in search engines with similar issues
We will go through the coding of Captivate course and try to fix the issue
We will implement our own AICC wrapper in-between the coding generated by Captivate
In our first stage, we were able to find out some information regarding AICC compatibility issue with regards to Captivate. Then in the second stage we went through the coding of the course to understand the flow of AICC and we could successfully figure out the reason for this issue.
The actual issue in the course was the AICC URL. The course was not able to get the correct AICC URL. Finally the courses worked fine on the Client LMS.
We worked on this assignment for around 8-10 hours and at the end of the project we were little happy and little disappointed. Happy because the project is closed successfully and disappointed because at the end, what we changed in the coding was just one line!!!
Actual code:
strURLParams = (strURLParams==unescape(strURLParams)?escape(strURLParams):strURLParams);
On the other hand, I think we should really cheer for the success because even though it is only one line, the client was not able to launch their courses. And we helped the client to solve his problem and launch his courses.
Posted by admin on Monday, December 1, 2008 @ 11:40 PM
We at CommLab believe that whatever we focus, we achieve. If we focus on negatives of recession we tend to go down. If we focus on what is great about this situation, we tend to get empowering strategies to improve company’s performance.
As CommLab India is a 100% Export Unit and 90% of our business comes from US, it was a concern that US is getting hit by recession. The usual feelings and thoughts of a lot of Indian companies are to reduce costs by laying off people, cutting down perks, reducing travelling and slashing training budgets. We took a very drastically different approach – we decided on very different results:
Focus on getting business fromGlobal fortune companies located in Australia, UK, Canada and Saudi Arabia. From the time we heard of the impending economic meltdown, we started focusing on markets outside US. In less than three months time, we have acquired clients in all these countries – Oil majors in Saudi, a very large Insurance Company in Australia, consumer goods giant in UK and Networking and IT Company in Canada.
Increase our products and services range to attract price-sensitive US clients. We decided to add a Corporate University with the price of a catalog company but features of custom courseware. It offers a huge cost advantage as the client has to pay only per user. We are also marketing our competence in producing huge number of courses using authoring tools like Captivate, Articulate and Lectora.
Focusing on achieving 3 times more turnover as compared to last year! We believe that in recession, all the US clients would like to reduce their cost but still need the essential product and sales training in order to beat the recession and competition. We have decided to campaign for very cost effective and quick turnaround product training solutions to these companies.
Focusing on streamlining processes to generate greater ROI per employee. Even though we are not an ISO certified company, all our processes are documented. All employees at CommLab go through an Elearning course on the processes and need to pass the course in order to be eligible to work at CommLab. These processes help us in meeting quality and deadlines. This eliminates lot of wastage of manpower and other resources.
Gave 6 monthly hikes to boost employee morale and enthusiasm to achieve greater performance. We believe that in order to get something we need to first give it. To meet the target of increasing the turnover by 4 times this year, we decided to give increments and salary hikes to all our employees so that we in turn achieve our targets.
The CommLab India eLearning Blog is all about the latest, most useful and most talked about topics under Corporate Training, Performance and Learning Technology.
