Liens de la semaine (weekly)

  • As much as the industry talks about social business and the need for organizations to become more “people-centric”, our conversations too often focus on the merits of social applications and platforms. While technology plays a critical role in enabling new ways of working, those new practices should also be complimented by management and community-building strategies that encourage employee participation. Fostering a more participatory culture and work experience that motivates people to contribute beyond the minimum required of the job requires leadership teams to re-think the ways we engage and recognize employees.

    tags: participation socialnetworking learning GTD work gamification recognition humanresources

    • Employee engagement often acts as an entry-point to a discussion on talent. We often try to solve the talent discovery challenge through the application of new tools but we also need to consider the impact of design practices and user experience.
    • We need to think beyond badges and leader boards and tackle the complex aspects of influencing behavior change.
    • The capture and use of social analytics by management can be perceived as being overly intrusive and a form of employee surveillance.
    • Game design issues strategists should consider include: address real problems, require no specialty training, avoid overlap with the real task, limit the effort needed to interact, and elicit participation through good citizenship.
    • Taking the concept of “smart harnessing” to a higher level, organizations need to avoid limiting themselves to broad knowledge sharing goals. Instead, leadership teams should focus on complex business issues where the impact of payoff of these tools can transform the way work is done, as well as the desired outcome of those activities. The bottom-line? Strategists should be aggressive and apply these practices and tools to transform the way serious work is done.
  • « If there is one topic out there in the field of Social Business that has been bugging me for a long while, as perhaps one of my strongest pet peeves ever, way even before we first started using the concepts of Social Business and Enterprise 2.0, that would be the one on Employee Engagement. More than anything else, because all along I have always felt that employee engagement is a myth. A huge one, actually! It’s a one way lane that has been imposed over us by the business world as perhaps the Holy Grail of social networking. « 

    tags: engagement employeeengagement socialnetworking humanresources

    • disengaged employees, utterly demotivated, rather cynical and skeptical AND fully loaded with a voice using all of these social networking tools to keep up with the dialogue that employers never cared to listen to in the first place.
    • Mark Toth highlights beautifully the 6 E’s of Engagement: Envision, Empathise, Enhance, Empower, Evaluate and Encourage as perhaps that magic formula that you could make it work to revert the change, and I am thinking that
      • some of the various different reasons why Mark himself mentioned employees are ready to quit their jobs, and see whether those 6 E’s would eventually be able to make the cut. To name those reasons briefly: 

         

           

        1. “Limited career opportunities
        2. Lack of respect
        3. Money
        4. Lack of interesting / challenging job duties
        5. Lack of leadership
        6. Bad work hours
        7. Unavoidable reasons
        8. Bad employee relations
        9. Favouritism
        10. Lack of recognition”
    •  

      So, we are back at square one, that is, employee engagement, or the lack of, seeing how employers keep failing to deliver on that emotional and mental energy, probably because at this stage most of them are thinking that employees are just happy to have a job, giving today’s circumstances.

    • In that short speech, Isaac comes up to state the purest definition of what I would consider a true knowledge (Web) worker nowadays: every employee [who] is free and responsible to take any actions he / she decides are the best for the company
      • That’s essentially what Isaac gets to develop towards the second part of the presentation; to him, it’s all down to liberating your company in three easy steps: 

         

      • Intrinsic Equality: take the initiative, because you are competent and trustworthy enough to get the job done effectively.
      • Personal Growth: build an environment where knowledge workers can learn to become better at what they do.
      • Self-direction: build an environment for it where you trust your employees to do what they know best. Excel.
  • I wonder which other companies would be going up next, showing us, and demonstrating it at the same time, what employee engagement is all about and how we need to move away from engaging employees to engaging networks and communities alike
  • « Nicholas lists eight qualities that you should look for in a competitive intelligence systems to reduce the risk of missing what is truly important. They are found below with some comments added. »

    tags: intelligence competitiveintelligence realtime bigdata signalnoiseratio emergence visualization

    • 1. Monitor unique topics of interest €“
    • 2. Operate in real time
    • 3. Be independent of sources
    • 4. Be human centered (rather than allowing algorithms to determine relevance and importance, the experience and knowledge of the human is utilized)
    • 5. Eliminate the noise
    • 6. Display emerging patterns
    • 7. Simplicity
    • 8. Speed
  • « Too many think that social media is all about friends, fans and followers. There is certainly some validity to this thinking because our minds have been trained to focus on outcomes. If done right, the output of smart social media initiatives like general community engagement, advocacy/influencer management, a Facebook sponsored story or a Promoted Tweet will be an increase in community growth. Yes, that’s a good thing but there is so much more to it.

    The problem arises when those who are in charge of social media don’t think about the possible implications that that bright and shiny object called social media can cause. Issues usually include disjointed content, scaling programs globally and confusion of roles & responsibilities to name a few. This is no hype and not a scare tactic. These are real issues that plague business today. »

    tags: socialmedia socialbusiness silos structure scale content communitymanagement governance IT

    • it’s important to first think internally and focus on three areas €“ Scale, Silos and Structure.
    • If content is a challenge for the US market, then it’s probably a challenge across the board. So until that problem is solved, don’t scale.
    • This means that marketing people should NOT be making IT decisions without consulting with IT
    • Establishing roles & responsibilities early on will save a lot of heartache in the future.
  • « Auditing is not just for taxes or financial information. Whether you have a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution today or not, you can audit your digital asset.
    Why audit your digital assets?

    Some people fear the idea of an audit because of what it may uncover. I recommend embracing the idea of an audit as a good practice in the long term so issues get resolved instead of brushing them under the carpet. An audit can bring clarity about assets and around collections of digital assets to help make informed decisions about them. It also helps establish process, policy and presidence around managing digital assets. Too often, digital assets just sit there as they remain:

    undervalued (or not valued as true assets should be)
    poorly used (used only once or remain unused)
    unknown to many users who may need/want them
    not found upon search »

    tags: audit assets digitalassets

  • « The purpose of the manual was to educate people in World War II occupied countries on techniques for simple sabotage, performed by ordinary citizens with no special training or equipment. In addition to physical sabotage, the manual offers suggestions on General Interference with Organizations and Production which should be read as an anti-pattern for Enterprise 2.0 behavior and methods. »

    tags: sabotage organization production socialbusiness enterprise2.0 management collaboration

  • « Today that has radically changed. Most IT departments have developed a social infrastructure strategy and are buying enterprise-wide collaboration systems. But while these tools are in place, most of our clients tell us they are not widely used for HR or L&D applications yet. Why? Because they simply are not well-integrated into HR and talent management applications. « 

    tags: L&D humanresources enterprisesocialsoftware LMS integration

    • So companies have two choices: either they work with IT to tightly integrate these social tools into their HR systems, or they wait for the HR platform vendors to deliver integrated « social features » into their systems. Which gets me to the point of this article: HR systems vendors are rapidly building their own social features. Which makes sense.
    • Leaving out social recruiting for now, there are dozens of mission-critical applications for social tools within HR and talent management:
    • nearly every HR and talent process in a company is « social » in some way!
    •  » But can these generic tools really fit the needs for HR, learning, and talent applications?  Not yet – so HR vendors are developing these features rapidly.
    • The HR systems and talent management market is now mature enough that we, as buyers of this software, should expect social « features » to be embedded within the applications we buy.
    • Social has become a set of « features » not a « platform. »
  • « Low-skill jobs are outsourced to big, geographically-dispersed companies that can do things with economies of scale and have little regard for local conditions. That means crap jobs for employees and, for the rest of us, entire industries that cannot handle the unexpected, because their daily functioning and profit margins alike depend on a set of rules that apply only to the widest possible set of circumstances »

    tags: customerservice customersatisfaction procedures

    • It is these systems €” the rules, the procedures, in effect the operational software €” that allow companies to take relatively low-skilled, low-paid workers with relatively little experience and have them do tasks that were once done by people with higher skills, higher pay and more experience
    • Their only job is to follow rules, stick to the script and leverage the experience and expertise that are embedded in the system.
    • Her computer simply won’t allow her.
    • these shadow bureaucracies are more pernicious than government bureaucracies, which at least have formal accountability processes built into their employment rules and basic charters
  • « In his book Race Against the Machine, Brynjolfsson and co-author Andrew McAfee argue that technology is contributing to unemployment and income inequality by destroying middle-class jobs. »

    tags: secondeconomy employment jobs society technology

  • « Epitomizing the term “at your service”, Eliason has racked up quite a bit of knowledge on handing both positive and negative customer inquiries on social media over the course of his years doing social at Comcast Cares (before making the switch to Citi). Earlier this year, the world’s most famous customer service manager shared four principles at Ragan’s social media conference earlier this year that really resonated with us. Here they are, along with some ways to start acting on them »

    tags: customerservice empowerment procedures policies training

    • 1) “Train your employees to interact with customers on social media.”
    • 2) “Determine the important policies and procedures to consider.”
    • 3) “Use employee accounts to humanize the brand.”
    • 4) “Connect the dots between your company’s message and the message your customer already hears.”
  • « Let me state here again that adding SOCIAL capabilities does not provide the dynamics, flexibility and adaptiveness that knowledge work requires. If that wouldn’t be so, then Lotus Notes would be the one and only system because it provided those social features a long time ago, including forms and collaboration. »

    tags: adaptiveness ACM BPM goals businessarchitecture learning

    • Therefore ADAPTIVE  is about LEARNING from this one special case for FUTURE ONES without going into a complex design exercise. Even if this one case will never be repeated exactly, there may be a lot of knowledge hidden inside it that will help to resolve future cases faster and better.
    • ACM Adaptive Case Management is DATA-focused rather than FLOW-focused
    • the key differentiator of ADAPTIVE is GOAL orientation,
    • one needs a well defined ARCHITECTURE that also handles the data models, which enables business users to define GOALS and business rules
  • « What is the role of two-dimensional process graphing in Adaptive Case Management (ACM)? It is a given that an ACM system must support some form of process. This post explores how processes are specified, what are the requirements on that means of specifying, and what technical training requirements exist for the people who specify the processes. »

    tags: ACM BPM BPMN process businessprocess HPM processdesign

    • For the purpose of discussion, consider this decidedly radical proposition:  “Any work support system that depends upon processes designed with BPMN (or BPMN-like languages) cannot be considered an ACM system.”
    • After 10 to 15 years of experience with customers using this system, my observation is that the business users essentially never design a graphical business process. 
    • Processes are always designed by either developers, or a specially trained business analyst.
    • Drawing a diagram requires a kind of abstract thinking about the process that a business user is not comfortable with
    • Drawing a diagram actually involves some programmer-like skills
    • Modifying someone else’s diagram is particularly difficult because all of the assumptions that went into drawing the diagram are not present in the diagram.
    • ACM however is different from these all of these because there is no distinct design phase.  Designing and performing the work are done at the same time.
    • Even if templates are supplied by process professionals, the case managers must be able to modify the process to fit their specific need, and so must be aware of all the assumptions built into the process diagrams.
    • For ACM the process is designed by the case manager as they do the work, and usually just for the benefit of that one case.  If things work out well, that process may become a template and reused many times, but each case manager must justify the effort of creating the diagram in terms of the case they are currently working o
    • BPMN 2.0 and flowchart models cannot represent real business processes, because a large business clearly is a complex adaptive system that consists of individual acting agents with its employees and customers.
  • « Moving from a document-centered work organization to a relationship-focused one is a long, difficult journey. Adapting some insights about social objects to the business world can help accelerate the pace.

    We are (hopefully) moving out of the expert / content focused world where we have lived for many years, out of this «push» environment where perfection was almost imperative before any given document would be distributed down the organization. And yet, when we move from concepts to everyday work, this is a topic on which conviction is not that easy. »

    tags: socialobjects push exception documents businessobjects pull value compliance processes industrialization

    • In all these examples the assumption is that, without access to the proper document or the proper expert, there is a risk of error or, even worse again, a risk of making the decision to deal with what is an exception without engaging in the proper process (product or functional).
    • Because it was not made to deal with it, exception is hell for the classic push focused organization. 
    • In a world where the value is in relationships and not in economies of scale, an exception is an opportunity to build value,
    • Value is in the interaction, but corporate officers roles, processes and documents have not been designed nor implemented for interaction but for industrialization.
    • The opportunity is to consider documents as social business objects, or business objects, instead of vehicles for expertise deployment and transmission.
    • Considering our valued pieces of knowledge (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, videos, photos, and even, yes, intellectual property) not only as content but primarily as business objects, that allow the relationships between the different functions and projects and people of your organization to be enhanced, is a needed move.
    • For any department, by the way, having a Business Objects strategy will prove very valuable, as they will work on their documents or videos not to provide the perfect document (even though they ultimately will) but to engage all the persons that can add value to that document
  • Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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