Links for this week (weekly)

  • What happened? The financial crisis, sure, but that’s not all. Companies have continued to invest in new technologies for white-collar workplaces, but the benefits are no longer visible. In fact, we may have reached a tipping point where each new investment in office technology must be carefully assessed against a simple test: will it actually help people get more done, or not?

    tags: Collaboration technology productivity

    • What happened? The financial crisis, sure, but that’s not all. Companies have continued to invest in new technologies for white-collar workplaces, but the benefits are no longer visible. In fact, we may have reached a tipping point where each new investment in office technology must be carefully assessed against a simple test: will it actually help people get more done, or not?
    • My colleagues at Bain and I have studied these effects using people analytics and data mining tools. We combed through email, IM, calendar and other data to understand how organizations spend their collective time. We then combined this data with information on headcount and productive output to understand the impact of technology in the workplace.
    • A typical front-line supervisor or midlevel manager works 47 hours per week. Of this time, he or she devotes 21 hours to meetings involving more than four people and another 11 hours to processing e-communications. (This doesn’t count the emails sent during meetings, a common practice in many companies.) So the manager has less than 15 hours a week to do other work.
    • The average manager has less than 6½ hours per week of uninterrupted time to get work done.
    • A recent CEB study found that 60% of employees must now consult with at least 10 colleagues each day just to get their jobs done, while 30% must engage 20 or more. The result? Companies take more time to do things. For example, it takes 30% longer to complete complex IT projects, 50% longer to hire new people, and nearly 25% longer to sign new customer contracts. And that’s just in the last five years.
    • Some of today’s office technologies have the opposite effect: they encourage workers to behave in ways that are wasteful and unproductive, such as scheduling unnecessary meetings.
    • 1. What impact will the new technology have on organizational time?
    • 2. Could better rules eliminate the need for further investment?
  • “To help explain what the employee experience actually is I created the visual below which shows what I like to call The Employee Experience Equation. This is: culture + technology + physical space = employee experience.”

    tags: employeexperience


  • Article Actions

    Share this article on LinkedIn Share this article on Twitter Share this article on Facebook Email this article Download this article

    Companies often complain about the unrealistic expectations of millennial workers, but heeding their call to action can improve the work environment for everyone. “

    tags: humanresources millenials

    • Because all the peoples of the world are part of one electronically based, intercommunicating network, young people everywhere share a kind of experience that none of the elders ever had. . . . This break between generations is wholly new: it is planetary and universal.
    • Yes, the youngest generation differs from the older ones. But this has always been true.
    • Instead, they should see how questions and challenges from their youngest employees can spark action to help their companies change for the better.
    • even high-performing young professionals acknowledge the harsh economic realities they’ve seen and the stress they experience.
    • Millennials also speak of themselves as hyperconnected globally—always on—with resulting work behavior that seems peculiar to some of their managers.
    • Young professionals don’t want to be patronizingly singled out; they just want to create the kind of environment that many older employees have longed for but never found
    • Build bridges with data.
    • P&G has deployed its consumer-marketing expertise to learn more about them and to generate ideas that help middle managers to shift their own mind-
    • Put communication on steroids
    • But the young ones in our research expect this to happen at hyperspeed: real-time, two-way communication that accepts input from everyone, followed by fairly immediate action.
    • Develop a culture of mentorship.
    • Get creative about professional growth.
    • Make flexibility more than polite talk.
    • Shape midlevel managers into leaders.
  • “Cisco.com is now the starting point to all of Cisco’s online properties. Instead of starting behind the firewall on some arcane internal IP address, Cisco employees now access internal tools and content via Cisco.com. Upon hitting the website, the technology platform recognizes the individual’s role — whether employee, customer or partner — and serves up the necessary access and information architecture.”

    tags: intranet digitalworkplace casestudies cisco extranet website

    • While Cisco.com is not technically the intranet homepage, employees can easily navigate through this menu to the intranet homepage, where the focus is on employee tasks.
    • the Quick Tasks menu at the bottom of the page for World users becomes the Employee Quick Tasks menu with icon links to Find People, Find Tools, Get Support, Download Software, Internal News and Share Documents.
  • tags: digitaltransformation casestudies banking societegenerale

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
1,756FansLike
11,559FollowersFollow
28SubscribersSubscribe

Recent posts