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How to Maximize Millennials According to, Well, Millennials
« Through surveys, the respondents that represent this young cohort indicate their preferences and desires when it comes to taking their place in a multi-generational workforce. They’ve also used the opportunity to promote their growing power in sizes and highlighted the advantages of attracting and retaining them in your organization. »
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Learning: blended, or blinded?
« Even conceding that many of the “blended learning” hits are from formal education (schools, academia), it’s a little depressing that only 3% of them mention job aids. I personally doubt it’s because everyone uses job aids. It’s almost as if developers, yearning to produce ever-more-engrossing courses, are blind to this kind of performance support. »
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And here, at 4%€¦ is what is possibly the least expensive and most effective approach [for blended learning]: on-the-job training tasks. Apparently we are still stuck in the mindset that training is a course.
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the use of “a mega job aid” to enable on-the-job learning. This is her term for combining a job aid (which stores information or guidance so you don’t have to remember it) with instruction (which tells you how to apply what’s in the job aid to a specific task).
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How do you know it’s a job aid?
- It’s external to the individual.
- It reduces the need to memorize.
- People use it on the job.
- It enables accomplishment.
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what makes you think you need formal training for X? Is there another way to help people accomplish the desired result?
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if you build a job aid but find that people need to practice using it, that practice should be like on-the-job use. They’re not going to be doing the real-world task from within the LMS
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It’s not a job aid if you don’t use it while you’re performing the task
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The likelier it is that the task will change (and thus that the steps for accomplishing it will change), the more sense it makes to build a job aid €” and the less sense it makes to duplicate the job aid inside a formal course
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No matter what learning management ideology claims, there are only three kinds of people who return to an online course for reference information:
- People who work for the vendor.
- Actors appearing in the vendor’s materials.
- People on the job who are really bored or really desperate.
When transparency is way too opaque
« I had yesterday one of many great conversations with Luis Suarez on Twitter, during the online chat organized by CMSWire around social business. The subject was, you might guess it, about the main challenges encountered when helping organizations to embrace a collaborative mindset.
Transparency, of course, is a key driver here, but fostering transparency throughout a company not only is a real challenge, but also, if not nurtured in the right context, could sometimes prove itself more harmful than profitable by itself »
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Just imagine how would an employee behave, as the world stands, when, in name of transparency, he stumbles on highly strategic topics€¦ Which answer can companies give to what could be considered as a major threat?
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Another option is to educate employees, to help them understand what should be kept inside the walls of the organization, and what can be shared in the wild. Most of today’s successful, or promising, social business initiatives have chosen this option
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Transparency is in fact the visible doll from a Matryoshka set. Trying to leverage it requests us to restore a mutual and reciprocal trust inside organizations, which, in turn, necessitates us to instil passion into work, as passion drives trust and confidence.
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starting such a virtuous circle is a more than a tough challenge in a world where class solidarities have been dismantled, and where employees are more and more disengaged.
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Progressing further on the path toward the collaborative enterprise means mutating from leadership to fellowship, and reconciling social business with its original definition.
The truth about HR: Good or evil?
« Everybody has an opinion about human resources. As polarizing organizations go, HR wins hands down, with marketing a distant second.
Who does HR really serve, the company or the employees? If you’ve got issues with your boss or a coworker, should you go to your HR person or keep it to yourself?
What was Dilbert creator Scott Adams really thinking when he created Catbert: Evil Director of Human Resources? Are HR people the bad guys or just stuck in the middle with a thankless job?
Does the function do anything for the business or is it just a necessary expense? «
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There are quite a few examples of dysfunctional HR VPs who polarized management teams and, believe it or not, proved destructive to the CEOs that hired and trusted them.
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In most companies, a human resources executive will view her customer or client as the head of the business unit she’s assigned to
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at times, the interests of executive management and employees can certainly be in conflict, that’s for sure.
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If the CEO believes the key to the company’s success rests with its most precious resource, its people, he’ll likely put a premium on employee development and engagement and set goals and direction for human resources that reflect that.
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Company culture is top-down driven. Strong, capable leaders build high-performance cultures that are built to last. Those companies strive to create a work environment that motivates and challenges employees to perform at their best and compensates them accordingly.
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So, the bottom line is this: If you know the culture at your company and you know what kind of HR person is assigned to your group, that’s probably enough information to make effective decisions regarding how to work with them.
Social Business Builds Brand Equity
« Social business has mainly been discussed in terms of what it can do for the company in terms of efficiency of Knowledge Management and Sharing and the impact it has on the organization and culture. One of the aspects of Social Business that so far is under-exposed is the positive (or negative€¦) impact on the way customers perceive the brand and thus the influence it has on their buying behavior. In this post I will briefly outline how Social Business and Brand Equity are related and help to reframe your thinking about Social Business and why it can be a sound market approach for your organization. »
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Sometimes the journey is not about just the experience but just about getting there with as least friction in the flow as possible (think of trying to avoid information overload as a Job), and a brand reduces the friction as it sets expectations and reduces uncertainty about the experience the customer will encounter.
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The 1990s-2000s were Relationship-Focused, whereby customers were seen as active contributors to brand value (which in itself is the perception of a brand’s value-in-use). Another notion that was added was that the brand was seen as a relationship partner, with as a consequence that we need to take a process-oriented approach when dealing with a customer.
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We are now in the Stakeholder-Focus Brand Era, where Brands are now seen as as Dynamic and Social Processes. There is now a realization that not only individual customers but also brand communities and other stakeholders (all stakeholders including the ecosystem in which the firm operates) actively co-create brand value.
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Brand equity, as defined by Aaker (1996), is a set of brand assets and liabilities (i.e., brand loyalty, brand awareness, perceived quality, brand associations, and other proprietary assets) linked€”in customers’ minds€”to a brand, its name and symbol that add to or subtract from the value provided by a market offering to the firm’s customers.
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Social Business is not only about making our organisations more dynamic and social €“ this should be part of the equation but it is not the finality.
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The real benefit it brings is on the net impact Social Business has on the brand equity balance when you account for the brand value co-creation between the customers, the firm and its employees, and other stakeholders.
Metrics are always the wrong place to start
« HR has an unhealthy appetite for metrics. It worries about which ones it should be using, or how they should be defined or how they are going to be produced. Somehow it feels that only if it owned the golden-metric-key then a wonderful world of corporate credibility and importance could be unlocked. »
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Metrics are just the ingredients you need to create insight, to reduce the uncertainty that leads to inefficient decisions. A good chef combines and prepares ingredients to create a dish much more enjoyable than the base ingredients. A good analyst does the same with metrics. The current buzzword for the process they use is €˜analytics’.
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All decisions involve trade-offs and the choice involves what combination of the options is possible and the preferences of the decision maker.
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If we look to technology to solve our problems in this area we are setting ourselves up to fail. Technology can make the analytic process easier, it can improve the reliability of results, it can communicate to a diverse group quickly, but decision making is inherently human.
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The one thing I look for in a good analyst is the ability to really understand the problem. This can’t be done just by asking the decision maker; we often need to use other techniques
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Only with this understanding can we start to explore what information would help drive the decision, where that information is (or whether we need new measurement), how to transform it to new, more valuable variables and which analytic techniques to use.
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Finally we need to understand how to communicate information. We need to understand how our reports are perceived and interpreted, how the decision maker uses them, where they use them, why they looked at them and what they did after viewing
The Problem of Engagement in Social Business
« First, Constellation argues that there are five leading barriers to adoption, 1) Poorly defined incentives, 2) Increase in actual effort, 3) Lack of choice in user experience, 4) Indifference to change, and 5) Failure to communicate the urgency. There is really nothing new here, as these barriers are not unique to social business applications, but are applicable to any software adoption cycle.
Next, Constellation argues that there are five ways to counter these barriers, 1) Adopt gamification strategies, 2) Apply design thinking to transform, 3) Deliver options based on use case, 4) Align to self €“interest, and 5) Define the business model shift. There is a little more meat here, so let’s try to pull it off the bone. »
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If a gamification-based incentive strategy is not linked to the need to perform actual work, participation will be perceived by employees as an €˜increase in actual effort’
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Applying design thinking to transform. This one is so full of jargon it’s hard to draw out what is meant. However, if the real argument is to recognize that the desired outcome cannot be identified without trial, error, and adjustment
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Deliver options based on use case. This is theoretically an excellent idea. However, in practice, most software development efforts barely have the budget to create a single, well-performing, interface,
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Align to self-interest. Now we’re getting somewhere. The best way to maximize adoption of anything, is to appeal to the “what’s in it for me” aspect of the person involved
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In the business social context, the market dynamic is distorted by the fact that participation in enterprise apps can be made mandatory €“ without the value of the participation being real to the user.
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However, the five actions that constellation recommends will simply not work, if actual value is not provided for participation. For instance, gamification strategies do not provide real value for the person involved unless, as Constellation argues, you create tangible and intangible benefits for participating
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Social business platforms and applications will no longer have an adoption problem if 1) they integrate real business processes into the platform, so that the platform is the way the process is done, and 2) the new “social” way to do the process is better than the old way of doing things.
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Finally, they apply social when necessary, and don’t just hit everything with the “social” hammer. Not all processes are best managed using social business applications.
Crowdsource Your Performance Reviews
« Forty-five percent of human resources (HR) leaders don’t think annual performance reviews are an accurate appraisal for employees’ work. And 42 percent don’t think employees are rewarded fairly for their job performance.
These stats, from a recent survey by Globoforce and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), show that HR has lost confidence in the traditional review process. Most people know that employees dread annual reviews, but when nearly half of HR professionals agree, it’s clear we need a new approach to how employee performance is measured and evaluated. »
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Enter the wisdom of crowds €” or crowdsourcing. A group of independently deciding individuals is more likely to make better decisions and more accurate observations than those of an individual.
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Many of us already use crowdsourcing for idea generation and problem solving, but consider the power it has to change the way we manage our employees and organizational culture.
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nd unlike 360 degree reviews, which require specific colleagues to provide a formal, forced review of an individual, crowdsourcing is inspired peer-to-peer performance feedback.
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Capture achievements throughout the year. With social recognition, individual and team achievements and successes are captured at the moment they happen throughout the year.
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Widen the input circle beyond a single point of failure. By leveraging feedback from across the organization, managers can expand the singular viewpoint of traditional performance reviews to include positive feedback from co-workers and peers alike.
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Use inspiration, not obligation. Social recognition is the epitome of effective reviews: they’re truly inspired, not forced by antiquated performance review processes.
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Expand accountability for reputations and careers. By incorporating feedback from peers across the company, you lessen errors for how an employee’s performance and career is judged and nurture
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Empower employees to create a performance mosaic. With relationships and workflows extending beyond immediate teams and divisions, management and HR can create a performance mosaic to appraise true company performance.
IBM Survey: Marketers Face Tech Dilemma
« While new social media and mobile devices are vital, the recent IBM « State of Marketing » survey revealed that 41 percent say keeping pace with the growth of these channels and device choices will be their biggest challenge over the next three to five years. This finding follows IBM’s 2011 CMO study where 65 percent of CMOs stated that they are under prepared for the growth of social and online channels such as Facebook and Twitter and new device choices including smart phones and tablets. »
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Marketing and IT lack integration: While 48 percent of respondents believe that improved technology infrastructure or software will enable them to do more, nearly 60 percent indicated that lack of IT alignment and integration are significant barriers to the adoption of technology
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Marketing and IT lack unified vision: While 71 percent believe integration across owned, earned, and paid channels is important, only 29 percent are effectively integrating these different channels.
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Marketers state social and mobile are biggest challenges moving forward: While new social media and mobile devices are vital, 41 percent stated that keeping pace with the growth of these channels and device choices will be their biggest challenge over the next three to five years
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Marketers ignore social media insights: While marketers continue to experiment with social media channels, 51 percent are not using this data to inform decisions about marketing offers and messages
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Marketers fail to turn data into action: When asked how they are using online visitor data, 65 percent of respondents are doing the basics, reporting and analyzing their dat
Design Considerations For Enterprise Social Networks: Identity, Graphs, Streams & Social Objects
« This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended session – Design Considerations For Enterprise Social Networks: Identity, Graphs, Streams & Social Objects led by Mike Gotta, Senior Technical Solution Marketing Manager for Social Software, Cisco. Here is the session description: »
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One issue is identify. You need to let people construct their own identity. We have moved from assigned identity to claimed identity
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Another issue is recognition and reputation. This helps to identify expertise. Determine what ties you want to support within a network.
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Another issue is social objects. You take work items from a decision process and put it into an activity stream. How do deal with this
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Another issue is activity streams. It will be as bad as the inbox if you do not provide filters or other ways to focus it and not let employees get fire hosed. Activity streams are places to get information and a place to connect with others. It is not simply an information source.
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Another issue is social analytics. You need to ensure algorithms are transparent and adjustable. You want the systems to make recommendations and allow people to understand what is happening so they can make recommendations.
Le leader et la culture d’entreprise : une affaire de conversations.
« Je participe actuellement à un projet d’amélioration pour appliquer les principes du Lean Management à notre R&D. Il s’agit avant tout d’un changement de culture pour une organisation qui a connu un renouvellement assez faible de ses effectifs et où le management a pris des habitudes.
Loin des définitions formalisées par le Service Comm de la Boite, je m’intéresse à ce qui gouverne spontanément les comportements, aux heuristiques et références intériorisées par les personnes. Cette culture là constitue une identité propre de l’organisation qui ne se laisse pas réduire à quelques procédures, une charte ou un slogan énonçant deux ou trois valeurs symboliques à défaut d’être originales. »
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En général, la version officielle de la culture de l’entreprise est bien pensée mais parfois (souvent ?) un décalage des comportements pose problème.
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La direction ne cesse de prôner le travail en équipe mais maintient un système d’évaluation individualisée. Ou encore, l’innovation est une valeur forte mais aucun espace de créativité n’est allouée aux équipes dont le plan de charge est programmé sur 36 mois par la Direction Générale
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Les équipes ne s’y trompent pas et la culture résultante intègre parfaitement ces dissonances. Quand le patron dit “Vous avez le droit à l’erreur”, tout le monde entend “Comme d’habitude, je sanctionnerai toute initiative que je jugerai déplacée”
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Quelque soit la bonne volonté du management, les équipes commencent par décoder les discours à l’aune de la culture existante et de ses paradoxes.
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La culture est un produit du processus d’apprentissage de la vie commune, une expérience btie sur les réponses trouvées dans des situations passées et assimilées pour leur efficacité
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Un levier important de la transformation passe donc l’évolution de ces conversations de couloirs
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Pour changer les conversations qui font in fine la culture de la “boite”, je vois quatre leviers :
- Changer les discours.
- Changer les comportements.
- Changer le langage.
- Changer les hommes.
Pour libérer l’innovation, il faut affranchir les salariés
« Le sursaut économique viendra d’un surcroît de libert逦 donnée aux salariés, loin du modèle taylorien. Isaac Getz, auteur d’un essai remarqué, voit même dans ce mode de management daté une des principales lourdeurs qui pèse sur la compétitivité des entreprises. Dans l’entretien qu’il nous a accordé, il revient sur les atouts de l’entreprise libérée, sur la méthode qui permet de changer. Un ouvrage stimulant. »
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Le modèle de bureaucratie hiérarchique est né avec la révolution industrielle. A l’époque, il fallait faire travailler des paysans analphabètes, d’où la définition de procédures et l’invention du métier de contremaître pour contrôler que les gens les appliquaient
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je dirai qu’il était valide aussi longtemps qu’il y avait des consommateurs demandeurs de biens, que le pouvoir était du côté des entreprises, des offreurs des produits standards.
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Si l’économie française soufre tant des délocalisations ce n’est pas seulement pour une question de coût du travail. Il faut aussi tenir compte du coût exorbitant management fondé sur le contrôle.
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Le succès ne s’explique ni par le pays, ni par les moyens mis sur la table. Ce qui compte c’est l’organisation, la manière dont on laisse travailler les salariés.
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Notre ouvrage insiste sur la notion de leadership libérateur, c’est-à -dire d’un leader qui est au service de ses collaborateurs.
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Un chercheur a dit que le dernier bastion stalinien sur la planète ce sont les entreprises.
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La transformation demande au moins trois ans, car il faut changer de culture.
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Un des points de blocage vient souvent du management intermédiaire dont l’identité s’est construite sur l’autorité et sur l’expertise. Il n’est pas facile de le convaincre du jour au lendemain d’être au service des gens de terrain.
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En outre, parmi les entreprises que nous avons étudié figure Gore qui n’est pas vraiment une PME. Ils ont fait un choix très audacieux en dupliquant, multipliant les business units en leur sein, estimant qu’au-delà de 200 salariés, la tentation est de remettre des procédures et du contrôle.
Reshaping Organizations to Empower Work Ethic, part 1 – Forbes
« However according to his graph (see Figure 1), the number of hours worked in South Korea, Singapore and other eastern countries are almost 1000 hours greater than Western countries today. The West has continued to progressively drop in number of hours worked since the 1950s to about 70% of what it used to be; from 2300 hours a year per capita to about 1600 hours a year. This is not a measure of productivity but an indication of work ethic. In my presentation I ask the question: is €˜Hours Worked’ still a useful metric of showing work ethic? »
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Working more hours in the industrial age can lead to an almost linear growth in production, but this is not necessarily so for the Information age.
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However, working more hours does not necessarily make you more creative, or even understand more about a problem. It is not linear and often not a factor of time.
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Working with knowledge and creativity on the other hand usually requires a multi-disciplinary and cross-functional view
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. The emphasis is more on quality rather than quantity.
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Rather than the well-defined workflows that are documented with tools like dashboards, business process modeling, and databases to track how the work progresses, in the Information age, the work flows through networks.
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“knowledge worker productivity demands we ask the question: What is the task?”
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The six archetypal tasks of social networks in a business setting we found are as follows:
- Connect €“ how we discover and connect to other people and groups
- Learn €“ how we learn
- Organize €“ how we organize into units, teams, projects, activities
- Respond €“ how we respond to requests or questions
- Decide €“ how we decide on ideas, or actions
- Optimize €“ how we optimize our work
How American Airlines Uses Social CRM for Customer Engagement
Le modèle « collaboratif » va détruire des emplois
» Nombre de tches intermédiaires vont disparaître, nombre d’emplois rémunérés vont disparaître du fait de la dimension collaborative de notre société et de nos entreprises. L’économie de la collaboration va faire peser une pression supplémentaire sur le marché de l’emploi, pression qui sera similaire et supplémentaire à celle qu’exerce déjà la « seconde économie ». »
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Mais comme chaque fois qu’il y a gain de productivité se pose la question des traductions concrètes qu’il convient d’en faire : faut-il l’utiliser pour la croissance (produire plus avec les mêmes ressources), pour l’innovation (produire des choses nouvelles) ou pour diminuer les effectifs (produire la même chose avec moins de ressources) ?
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En effet, beaucoup de professions qui trouvaient leur justification en palliant les imperfections de l’information disponible sur le marché disparaissent lorsque celle-ci devient facilement accessible et fiable
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Parmi les activités des cadres moyens, celles qui consistaient à être des courroies de transmission pour aider les individus et les équipes à entrer en relation ou à se connecter à des connaissances ou des outils €“ dans la hiérarchie, trans-silos ou encore vers l’externe €“ vont disparaître avec le développement d’une culture collaborative, des annuaires « intelligents », des réseaux sociaux internes et externes. Les cadres moyens devront se concentrer sur le management à réelle valeur ajoutée et sur le coaching.
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Des emplois rémunérés seront remplacés par des travaux d’amateur disponibles gratuitement ou par des emplois faiblement rémunérés. Certains emplois dont la rémunération était justifiée par une valeur ajoutée difficile d’accès commencent à être remplacés par des services internet qui apportent « apparemment » une valeur similaire.
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En bref, l’approche de la seconde économie soutient que les gains de productivité globale des facteurs (productivité du travail plus productivité du capital) et l’intégration de plusieurs technologies numériques ont entrainé la disparition d’emplois au profit d’une économie comme en second plan, souterraine, entièrement automatisée.
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La troisième économie aura les mêmes effets sauf que la force de déplacement des emplois est les hommes eux-mêmes et non des systèmes automatisés.
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Selon les travaux mentionnés ci-dessus, nous sommes rentrés dans une ère où les destructions d’emplois pourraient bien être durablement supérieures aux créations.
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Mais qui dirait que se trouver au centre d’un nœud d’information ou être un relais de communication est un job de premier plan ? En fait, les cadres moyens seront libérés de leurs tches les moins intéressantes (même s’il faut admettre qu’elles contribuaient à leur pouvoir en interne).
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Premièrement, les progrès combinés des économies seconde et troisième créeront des possibilités d’innovation et des nouvelles zones de croissance.
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la technologie est là pour nous aider à ce que plus de personnes travaillent et que chacun travaille moins (
