Liens de la semaine (weekly)

  • « I own a $160 million South American company named Semco, and I have no idea what business it’s in. I know what Semco does€”we make things, we provide services, we host Internet communities€”but I don’t know what Semco is. Nor do I want to know. For the 20 years I’ve been with the company, I’ve steadfastly resisted any attempt to define its business. The reason is simple: once you say what business you’re in, you put your employees into a mental straitjacket. You place boundaries around their thinking and, worst of all, you hand them a ready-made excuse for ignoring new opportunities: “We’re not in that business.” So rather than dictate Semco’s identity from on high, I’ve let our employees shape it through their individual efforts, interests, and initiatives. « 

    tags: strategy semco casestudies planning innovation transformation change resilience management

    • The way we work€”letting our employees choose what they do, where and when they do it, and even how they get paid€”has seemed a little too radical for mainstream companies.
    • I believe we have an organization that is able to transform itself continuously and organically€”without formulating complicated mission statements and strategies, announcing a bunch of top-down directives, or bringing in an army of change-management consultants.
    • . We never planned to go digital, but we’re going digital nonetheless.
    • Forcing change is the surest way to frustrate change.
  • « In theory, actively engaging your front line employees in improving the way work is done makes perfect sense. It allows front line workers to learn by doing. It builds capability. It gets the work done. It builds emotional commitment to changes.

    Yet in practice, leaders seldom choose to actively engage the front line when redesigning work. Why? »

    tags: engagement employeeengagement learning learningbydoing work workredesign humanresources management

    • Leaders usually hold engagement and speed in an opposing paradigm of either/or: either they can actively engage workers or move fast. It can’t be both. It’s a trade-off. But this is not necessarily true
    • Under stress, they resort to command-and-control, work in silos, and stick to turf they own. Most leaders can’t embrace something new and different if they don’t know how to do it. They usually need more than just being told. They first have to experience a different « how. » Only then can they begin to apply it broadly.
    • But process change can engage the front line and be fast. F
    • We had to simultaneously determine the best match between people and new jobs, manage development opportunities, and plan for implementation challenges. We designed a selection process with decisions made by a team in a working session
  • « Whirlpool is a hundred-year-old company that markets and sells appliances throughout the world with 70,000 employees. It is the world’s largest appliance company with sales of $18B. In the last ten years, Whirlpool has survived the war for talent by adopting leading edge tools and disciplines in talent management. Yet, even with such advanced talent systems, Whirlpool found that a continuous flow of adequate talent is an ongoing strategic issue. »

    tags: 9box whirlpool casestudies humaresources leadership talentmanagement

    • Our hypothesis was that if the 9-Box is the primary tool in any organization to assess leaders, it misses real-time performance of some leaders as perceived by their peers and subordinates.
    • We were seeing increasing importance of social networks in the workplace and wondered if we could carve out a unit of analysis that was not hierarchical or identified by an organization chart.
    • we asked the executive committee to identify the top twenty pressing problems of the enterprise and to assign a multi-level, cross function and regional team to address the problem
    • The sociograms quickly surface the knowledge brokers€”individuals who are the glue that holds a social network togethe
    • Our hypothesis is that most of the knowledge brokers were not rated high the 9-Box, if they were considered at all.
    • We asked the head of the talent pool system to compare who was ranked at the top of the 9-Box with our list of key knowledge brokers. We found very little overlap. We found that many of the key knowledge brokers (good ones) or nodes in each social network rarely showed up on official talent pool lists of top talents.
    • We are just starting to remodel our leadership and talent model to include social networks as a key development mechanism.
    • The head of Human Resources and the heads of training are working to develop the structure and processes that will use social networking as a way to identify experiences, feedback, mentoring, training and development.
    • Using a peer review or crowd sourcing lens in addition to the traditional top-down lens would provide an alternative to assessing talent. In addition to a 9-Box rating and feedback, individuals could receive sociogram feedback about how they were rated by their social network and the role they play in the network. The network could rate their contribution, much the way a supervisor rates a subordinate’s performance.
  • « My presentation covered some of the core concepts that underpin my thinking about how the world is changing and why a community management approach is growing in urgency within our organizations. The distilled version it is that the world is becoming more complex, which has some big implications:

    Complexity must be managed simply (complexity managed with complexity is a disaster)
    There are few verifiably €˜right’ answers in complex environments (possibly why traditional ROI models are breaking down) and being able to make decisions when faced with ambiguity is critical
    Trying to €˜control’ things at best doesn’t work and at worst deceives people from seeing reality, creating unnecessary risk »

    tags: communities complexity adaptivesystems adaptiveness system

  • « I’m often asked “What are the risks of implementing social in my business?” Fewer people these days are surprised when my answer begins with “it depends.” And it depends on any number of items. First of all, it depends on who’s asking the question because the risk that you care about depends on your point of view and your role in the organization. Answer that risk question to a Corporate Communications executive, for instance, with “inbound malware and viruses are a big challenge” and they’ll look at you blankly. So, learning to speak the language of social that your audience uses is important. »

    tags: socialbusiness enterprisesocialnetworks risk compliance legal datasecurity security governance

    •   Let me start this series with the roles of IT and Security, which while distinctly different, I’m going to group together in the interest of time. These departments are concerned with two primary categories of risk €“ inbound and outbound threats to the organization.
    •  

        The second area of risk that the IT and Security departments care about is outbound threats. Is someone in the organization leaking confidential or personally identifiable information out through a social mechanism

    • A third area of concern for the IT and Security professional is somewhat linked to outbound threats and risk, however I’ve separated it out, as this content, this information is put there by us as users, usually as part of our set up when we create our social personas.
    • Check your privacy settings €“ make sure that you’re only sharing your information, your posts and your photos with WHO you want to
    • Before you click on links from social friends, followers and connections, ask yourself if this is from them €“ pay particular attention to content you click on from mobile devices, and in direct messages
    • Ensure that important outbound content, from any brand identities is checked and approved in the appropriate fashion
    • Come back soon and read about risks from the perspective of PR and Corporate Communications.
  • tags: humanresources agility management leadership learning talentmanagement

  • « Or, pour redémarrer, les entreprises ont besoin de s’appuyer sur l’engagement total de leurs salariés et non sur des troupes qui avancent à  reculons.

    C’est pourquoi elles doivent leur proposer un nouveau pacte social motivant, qui les mette vraiment au coeur de l’organisation, et non pas produire, une nouvelle fois, un catalogue de voeux pieux en guise de politique. »

    tags: management engagement values wellbeing efficiency effectiveness talent talentmanagement

    • Le premier consiste à  attirer, identifier, développer et fidéliser les talents, tous les talents.
    • A elles d’être motivantes, en sachant détecter et faire grandir leurs talents ignorés et en donnant à  tous l’envie comme les moyens de progresser et en leur offrant des perspectives durables.
    • Le nouveau pacte social intègre en second lieu bien-être et efficacité au travail, étroitement liés.
    • Le pacte social stipule, en particulier, que l’impact humain des changements, trop souvent synonymes de stress et de risques psychosociaux, est vraiment pris en compte
    • Le pacte dessine un nouveau modèle de manager bienveillant, empathique, proche de ses collaborateurs.
    • Au-delà  des outils et des process, il s’agit de leur permettre d’acquérir les comportements managériaux appropriés, d’élever leurs compétences, à  tous niveaux hiérarchiques, en particulier celui des managers de proximité.
    • Ce changement de cap passe par le renforcement de la fonction ressources humaines de proximité, aujourd’hui mise en route dans nombre d’entreprises
  • « Social media and analytics intersected at the recent Emerging Technologies 2012 conference at MIT in a way that should grab the attention of anybody looking at how these technologies can change the game for companies.

    Speakers featured in a session called “The Personal Implications of Big Data” included two data scientists from Facebook, one from Microsoft and an entrepreneur €” all of whom had things to say that could prove important for companies. »

    tags: socialanalytics weakties sharing data personaldata cooperation collaboration

    • Those billion-plus citizens of Facebook create mad amounts of data €” every 30 minutes they upload six million photos, post 160 million stories in their newsfeeds and send five billion messages
    • The research they shared showed that we actually are more likely to share something from our weaker connections. That supports the well-established idea of the strength of weak ties [pdf] and has implications both for marketing and for dispensing information internally.
    • Watts and his colleagues showed that cooperation, and overall group effort, tends to improve when people have the ability to drop people from their networks.
    • What does it mean to turn your thinking about data upside down? Green says most companies should simply give up trying to make sense of data. They don’t and won’t have the skills they need to do it. (In corporate speak, analytics will never be a core competency.) Since individuals will be better at aggregating their own data than any company can be, companies should let them treat it as an asset. In Green’s model, your customers bring the data they think you need and present it to you, giving companies, as he says, “access to better data from me than Facebook or Google ever could.”
    • Companies, too, have adopted these technologies but have generated only a small fraction of the potential value they can create.
    • social platforms can unlock $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value2 in those sectors alone
    •   

       Of late, some bearish sentiments surround social technologies after disappointments for several companies in the capital markets. It’s worth noting, however, that today only 5 percent of communications occur on social networks. Moreover, almost all digital human interactions can ultimately become “social,” and jobs involving physical labor and the processing of transactions are giving way, across the globe, to work requiring complex interactions with other people, independent judgment, and the analysis of information.

    • Specifically, our research indicates that interaction workers typically spend 28 percent of each day (13 hours a week) reading, writing, and responding to e-mail
    • Capturing these technologies’ full potential to improve collaboration and communication, however, will require organizational change and new management approaches, which often take time to implement.
    • Besides these productivity opportunities from improved collaboration, social technologies offer a wide range of business benefits in additional areas€”including consumer marketing (for instance, in industries such as consumer packaged goods and automotive), customer service, and even fraud detection (in sectors like insurance).
    • Highly educated knowledge workers, though central to R&D operations in these industries, often remain “siloed” in their specific units within sprawling global operations.
    • Texas Instruments, for example, uses social platforms to share design information with engineers at client companies, tailoring products to their needs while avoiding costly overdesign.
    • Professional services

       

      Interactions with colleagues and clients lie at the heart of how professional-service firms, such as advertising, accounting, engineering, and consulting businesses, create value. Productivity gains from the effective use of social technologies could be correspondingly significant, principally by reforming internal work flows and by providing meaningful real-time interactions with customers

    • TD bank, for example, deployed a social platform for 85,000 employees. One result: a reduction in the number of phone calls, meetings, and unwanted e-mails.
    • However, for most applications of social technologies€”particularly enhancing collaboration and communication€”we recommend that instead of focusing on best practices in the early stages of the journey, executives should be open to discovering next practices, to which broader principles apply:
  • « Vineet Nayar, however, is a scrambler, and since taking on the top job at HCL Technologies (HCLT) in 2005, he’s been working to foment a genuine revolution in its management practices. (A note: HCL Technologies is also a founding sponsor of the MIX.) »

    tags: hcl casestudies vineetnayar management ceo commandandcontrol hierarchy evaluation communities councils accountability reverseaccountability financialdata transparency humanresources

    • “We must destroy the concept of the CEO. The notion of the €˜visionary,’ the €˜captain of the ship’ is bankrupt. We are telling the employee, €˜You are more important than your manager.’ Value gets created between the employee and the customer, and management’s job is to enable innovation at that interface. To do this, we must kill command-and-control.”
    • . For HCLT, the “value zone” lay at the intersection of employees and customers. That’s why the most important decisions for HCLT’s future were the ones taken each day by front-line employees.
    • his meant that the company’s management processes were better attuned to the needs of control-obsessed executives than of customer-obsessed employees. “The archaic pyramid €¦ was shackling people and keeping them from contributing all they could and in ways they longed to
    • HCLT, he argued, needed a new management philosophy based on the principle of “reverse accountability.” Managers should be accountable to those in the value zone, just as employees were accountable to their managers.
    • €“ Transparent Financial Data. Vineet realized it’s hard to feel empowered if your manager has a lot of data you don’t. With this in mind, HCLT’s IT team created a simple widget that gave every employee a detailed set of financial metrics for their own team and other teams across the company.
    • €“ U&I. Early on, Vineet and his leadership team set up an online forum and encouraged employees to ask tough questions and offer honest feedback. Nothing was censored on the “U&I” site; every post, however virulent, was displayed for the entire company to see.
    • In 2009, Vineet opened up a “My Problems” section on the U&I site where he could solicit advice on the crucial issues he was wrestling with.
    • €“ Service Level Agreements. Powerful corporate departments, like HR and finance, often seem more interested in enforcing blanket policies than in making life easier for employees.
    • Once issued, a ticket can only be closed by the concerned employee, and if that doesn’t happen within 24 hours, the ticket gets escalated up the line
    • Today, HCLT employees are able to rate the performance of any manager whose decisions impact their work lives, and to do so anonymously. These ratings are published online and can be viewed by anyone who has submitted a review.
    • The solution: MyBlueprint. In 2009, three hundred managers posted their business plans, or “blueprints,” online. Each document was accompanied by an audio presentation. More than 8,000 employees were then invited to jump in and review the plans. The result was a torrent of advice and counse
    • €“ Employee First Councils. The goal here was to help employees connect with team members who shared similar interests and passions. Supported by a web-based platform, the new initiative rapidly spawned a host of communities around cultural, recreational and job-related issues
    • 20% of HCLT’s revenue is coming from initiatives launched in these communities of interest.”
    • We all believe that democracies are good and totalitarian systems are bad, and yet we tolerate dictatorships within our companies, even though the people at the top don’t have enough information to know what needs to be done. At HCLT, we have been trying to democratize our compan
    • Since 2005, HCLT’s revenues and earnings have tripled, a peer-beating accomplishment.
    • Nevertheless, if a $2.5 billion company can invert the pyramid and live to tell about it, then we have to admit that there really are alternatives to the management status quo€”and that’s amazingly cool.
    • The world has become too complex for the CEO to play the role of “visionary-in-chief.” Instead, the CEO must become a “management architect”€”someone who continually asks, “What are the principles and processes that can help us surface the best ideas and unleash the talents of everyone who works here?
    • Second, it really is possible to change the management DNA in a large, established company€”and this is where Vineet’s book really shines
  • « Le télétravail impose de nouvelles règles aux collaborateurs, mais aussi aux managers1. Nicole Turbé-Suetens2, qui a participé à  différentes missions gouvernementales sur le télétravail et à  de nombreux projets de recherche européens sur les nouvelles formes d’organisation du travail, nous délivre quelques rappels et conseils »

    tags: homeoffice remotework humanresources management managementbyobjectives objectives

    • Règle n° 1 : le manager doit réellement adhérer à  l’option « télétravail »
    • Il faut souligner que la notion de télétravail repose, légalement et humainement, sur le volontariat du collaborateur
    • en France, le principal obstacle au télétravail se trouve bel et bien du côté managérial 
    • Règle n°2 : inscrire le télétravail dans les objectifs du manager

       

      Dans une entreprise qui souhaite s’engager sur le chemin du télétravail, il faut aussi créer une dynamique « par le haut », impulsée par la direction générale.

      • Ils doivent donc les aider et leur donner les moyens de :

         

      • comprendre en quoi consiste le management à  distance et le management par objectifs,
      • maîtriser les outils de communication (les salariés étant souvent plus aguerris que leurs managers),
      • remplacer l’idée de «contrôle» du collaborateur par une démarche d’amélioration continue,
      • en finir avec ce que l’on constate encore trop souvent : un management par la voix plutôt que par les actes !
  • Pour prendre le seul exemple des Pays-Bas, où le télétravail est très développé, on constate une différence radicale dans la relation manager-collaborateur. Nous restons adeptes et prisonniers de la relation hiérarchique, laquelle tend à  l’obsolescence aux Pays-Bas, où l’on se base sur du respect et une juste appréciation des compétences de la personne, plutôt que sur la définition de son poste.

     

  • Le manager doit donc apprendre à  juger sur des faits et des actes, lesquels sont directement liés aux objectifs qu’il aura été capable de définir clairement.
  • L’expérience montre très souvent que la mise en place du télétravail exige plus de précision dans la formulation des objectifs professionnels du collaborateur ET du manager
  • Les objectifs sont rédigés de façon trop vague ou générale… Encore une fois, on retrouve la volonté de contrôle : plus la directive est floue et plus le manager s’octroie la possibilité d’intervenir ensuite, selon son humeur.
  • En France, une culture d’ingénierie semble dominante : on cherche à  contrôler les personnes comme on le fait pour les processus industriels. La prise en compte de la dimension humaine est très insuffisante.
  • tags: culture socialtechnology values

  • « Broadly applied across all company functions, social analytics can focus attention on the most pressing internal performance issues. »

    tags: finance socialanalytics analytics measurement performance

    • From customer data to social data to performance data, there’s no limit to what companies can collect, track and measure. And we’re just at the beginning
    • social analytics — the integration of social software and big data analytics to create insight from unstructured information — has been the purview of the marketing and sales departments, where the focus has been on monitoring sites such as Twitter and Facebook to gauge customer sentiment and engagement. But social analytics can do more. Broadly applied across all functions, social analytics can focus attention on a company’s most pressing internal performance issues.
    • For example, most business leaders realize that financial metrics, though widely reported, tell us how we did in the past, not how to move forward. Operating metrics, such as customer churn rate or time to market, can be leading indicators of financial performance, but by the time companies accurately measure them it’s often too late to change the outcome. In contrast, creating flow metrics based on internal and external interaction patterns can help managers not only anticipate operating performance — and in turn financial performance — but also help them take corrective action.
    • These new leading performance indicators could move management practices beyond « break/fix » or « sense/respond » and help executives anticipate performance problems and opportunities.
    • IT leaders have an untapped asset. As the custodian of the company’s data, it’s the CIO’s job to tap into it.
    • To fully capture the opportunity of social data requires more than building out the technological tools to capture and analyze vast repositories of data. The real opportunity comes after. Collectors of data must learn which questions to ask of it and which hypotheses to test.
  • « There are essentially four ways to go about implementing an enterprise collaboration initiative at any organization, each with their own challenges.

    The factors that control the four options are: the duration of the deployment and the scope of the deployment (length of time and how broad the deployment is i.e. across a department or enterprise). Other types of special factors may present themselves on a case-by-case basis but are unique, most organizations fall into one of these four deployments (often called pilots) which can be seen below. »

    tags: collaboration deployment pilots socialnetworks enterprisesocialnetworks socialcollaboration

    • Skeptical: Limited by Duration and Scope

       

      This type of pilot is usually deployed by organizations that are not entirely convinced of the value emergent collaboration can provide; in other words, they are skeptical.

    • Reluctant: Limit by Scope, Not by Time

       

      The challenge in this scenario, as was mentioned above, is that you are limiting the potential value of deploying an emergent collaboration tool because you lose the network and the serendipity effect. You have eliminated time as a barrier, but the scope is still a barrier.

    • Willing: Limited by Time, Not by Scope

       

      The challenge with this type of pilot is gaining adoption for a particular tool and then removing that tool after a certain period. If the organization deploys a tool only to find that nobody is using it, then adoption is the problem that needs to be addressed, and that can’t happen if the entire effort is completely abandoned.

    • Assertive: Unlimited Amount of Time Deployed Across the Enterprise

       

      In my opinion, this scenario really isn’t considered a pilot. If something is deployed without restrictions, it’s most likely not being tested; it’s being deployed fully

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