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The Biggest Mistake You (Probably) Make with Teams
« Which is more important to promoting collaboration: a clearly defined approach toward achieving the goal, or clearly specified roles for individual team members? The common assumption €” and my personal approach for many years €” is that carefully spelling out the approach is essential, while leaving the roles of individuals within the team open and flexible will encourage people to share ideas and contribute in multiple dimensions. »
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But our research has shown that the opposite is true: collaboration improves when the roles of individual team members are clearly defined and well understood €” in fact, when individuals feel their role is bounded in ways that allow them to do a significant portion of their work independently.
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Without such clarity, team members are likely to waste energy negotiating roles or protecting turf, rather than focusing on the task.
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The leader’s role, as I learned from this research, is to ensure that the roles and responsibilities of the team members are clearly defined for the specific project at hand
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“You can’t change corporate culture.” Yes, you can |
« When considering culture change, more than a few of the senior leaders I’ve engaged with say, “You can’t change corporate culture.” I’m not surprised at this belief. Blanchard’s experience indicates that most senior leaders, in their careers, have not lived through successful culture change. Even fewer have led successful culture change. »
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Leaders change the way individuals perform by:
- Setting clear performance goals.
- Directing, supporting, coaching and delegating where needed.
- Measuring progress and accomplishment.
- Celebrating progress and accomplishment.
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Changing your organization’s culture is no different from changing how your organization performs. It requires intentional definition of, communication of and accountability for your company’s:
- Purpose: The reason you in business.
- Deliverables: Your promise of high-quality products and services.
- Culture: Values you stand for and live by daily with stakeholders, peers and customers.
Leaders can change their organization’s culture by:
- Setting clear values standards, in the form of behaviorally defined values.
- Directing, supporting, coaching and delegating as required.
- Measuring values progress and demonstration.
- Celebrating values progress and demonstration.
Generation y innovation manageriale individualisme
« Pourquivons sur notre série d’article sur la Génération Y et l’innovation Managériale avec L’individualisme. Il est assez fréquent de reprocher à la « génération Y » son individualisme.
Mais qu’entend-on par là ? Il règne une certaine confusion entre « égoà¯sme », « égocentrisme » et « individualisme ». »
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Si l’égoà¯sme consiste à se préoccuper essentiellement de son plaisir ou de son intérêt
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Différent, l’individualisme est une tendance qui fait prévaloir l’individu sur toute autre forme de réalité. Dans le contexte d’entreprise, l’individualisme accorde plus d’importance à l’humain qu’à l’économiqu
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A bien y réfléchir l’individualisme revendiqué par la « génération Y » s’inscrit dans la continuité des revendications de leurs ainés, même s’il elle s’avère légèrement différente : primauté de l’humain, aménagement du temps de travail et dernièrement sélection de ses outils de travail à en juger par le phénomène « Bring Your Own Device » né aux Etats-Unis en 2009.
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Semco au Brésil, permet à ses salariés de choisir l’équipement de travail qu’ils souhaitent dans le respect d’une enveloppe budgétaire
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Renault a signé un accord d’entreprise en 2007 afin de permettre à ses salariés de travailler à domicile entre 2 et 4 jours par semaine (cible affichée : 10.000 personnes)
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SAS offre la possibilité à leurs ingénieurs d’adapter leurs horaires de travail en fonction de leurs rythmes de créativité, conscient qu’il est impossible d’être inspiré dans une plage horaire fixe;
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WL Gore embauche ses futurs collaborateurs sur des missions et non via une description de poste. Les premiers mois, les nouveaux collaborateurs passent par plusieurs équipes puis font leurs choix d’affectation, sous réserve d’être « adoptés » par les équipes en question.
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Pour en revenir au management, toutes les expériences que nous avons recensées en la matière reposent sur deux valeurs principales : la confiance et la responsabilisation, ce qui nous amène à réfuter que la culture soit basée sur le « TPMG« . A suivre€¦
The Secret to Team Collaboration Is Individuality
« Most of us have had a boss who preached teamwork. Some bosses even like to put up posters with slogans like there is no « I » in team.
Teamwork is essential to organizational success but too much teamwork can be deadly. This is the point that Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, argues in an essay for the The New York Times. She points out the drawbacks of too much teaming. « Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption, » she writes. »
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Cain also quotes from the memoir of Steve « Woz » Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer and inventor of the very first Apple computer, who advises fellow engineers and inventors to « work alone€¦ not on a committee. Not on a team.
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Collectivism leads to « group think, » which, as Susan Cain argues, is the bête noir of teamwork; collaboration leads to innovation.
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The secret to effective collaboration is individuality. You want everyone on the team to feel free to contribute ideas to a project as a means of instilling ownership and therefore increase engagement. That does not mean that every idea that anyone says goes but it does mean people can contribute their brains as well as their brawn.
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1. Affirm the purpose. The central organizing principle of a project is the why.
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2. Encourage individualism. A secret to effective collaboration is individual contributions. When people think alike they shut out alternate viewpoints
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3. Focus on team. Few things will get done without individuals pulling together.
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4. Reflect, together. There is one other valuable ingredient to effective collaboration: reflection.
Why Strong Ties Matter More In a Fast-Changing Environment
« It has become accepted wisdom that weak ties €” your acquaintances, distant colleagues €” can provide more novel information than close ties. But new research by Marshall Van Alstyne, associate professor at Boston University and a visiting professor at MIT, suggests that in some cases strong ties are better. »
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“You can think of knowledge markets as crowdsourcing, but our particular twist on it is the economic optimization of crowdsourcing, applying economic theory to these social science properties,” he says. “How can we get better answers, get higher rates of contribution? How can we do better resource allocation? Can we value the information shared? Can we cause economic growth inside an information economy? Those are our areas.”
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Van Alstyne explains how some of his new research challenges the existing theory about the value of strong ties versus weak ties, and why we should beware of “interrupt-driven communication.”
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The original answer provided by Mark Granovetter [now at Stanford University] was, well, possibly by a weak tie, meaning an acquaintance rather than a friend. The reason was that strong ties are likely to be redundant. T
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Yet Ron Burt [now at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business] subsequently refined that theory with a theory of structural holes, arguing that, it’s probably not the strength of the tie that’s critical. What’s really making the difference is bridging the boundary between two different groups that have different information.
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Rather than asking, “where do you get the most novel information?” we asked, “where do you get the most novel information per unit time?” If the environment is stable, you get exactly the original answer of Burt and Granovetter.
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But if, on the other hand, the environment updates constantly, you can get the opposite answer of Burt and Granovetter. In fact, you might want a close, cohesive, strong tie that’s constantly updating you with novel information. We
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Reason number one is that if the environment changes so rapidly, then you can go back to the same person and learn something new or different.
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Reason number three is the uniformity of knowledge distributed over the whole population. If everyone knows the same thing, no amount of structural diversity whatsoever can increase the amount of novelty you’ll receive
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The original theory is correct if the environment is stable, the information space is narrow, or the distribution heterogeneous. Yet, the original theory is incorrect if the environment is constantly updating
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So it really depends on the nature of the information you need. If it’s information that’s really time sensitive, you may need to rely on people who are looking out for you rather than people who are remote from you.
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One of my favorite stories is from an information sharing environment at SAP. SAP, of course, is the large enterprise resource planning, ERP systems, company.
They built a developer ecosystem where developers can answer each other’s questions. Before the introduction of this system, a value added reseller on top of SAP’s software had no particular reason to help out another value added reseller. As a matter of fact, one might not want to answer the question of a competitor because it might make them more competitive.
But after the introduction of this question and answer marketplace, things shifted completely. Now you earn points in proportion to the value of your answers. Now it’s the case that value added resellers are telling their employees to go in and answer the questions of other value added resellers to prove, hey, we’re the ones with the expertise, not those guys. It’s completely shifted the incentives. Folks are now pushing their information into the marketplace. And it happens in a way that benefits SAP.
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I think as everyone has experienced, you can get too much information, you get too many distractions. There’s a marvelous study I came across from some researchers in England with Hewlett-Packard, where they examined interrupt-driven communications. If you allow some of these social technologies like Twitter or Facebook or others to interrupt you constantly, it can dramatically reduce your productivity.
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You need to batch your time on task. You really need a focused hour to two hours uninterrupted by instant messaging and phones and texts and Twitter feeds.
Managing Confrontation in Multicultural Teams
« Everyone knows that a little confrontation from time to time is constructive, right? And the classic business literature confirms it. Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team, for example, discusses at length how to achieve the right amount of confrontation for ultimate team effectiveness €” and concludes that fear of conflict is one of the five major barriers to success. It was a bestseller in the U.S.
But what if you come from a culture where confrontation is downright rude? Or what if you just happen to have people from such cultures on your team? »
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In the Indonesian cultural context, confrontation is considered rude, aggressive, and disrespectful. Open disagreement, particularly in a group forum, is strongly avoided.
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Confrontation is part of French culture. The French school system teaches us to first build up our thesis (one side of the argument) and then to build up our anti-thesis (the opposite side of the argument) before coming to a synthesis (conclusion). And this is exactly how we intuitively conduct meetings.
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We make our points passionately. We like to disagree openly. We like to say things that shock. And afterwards we feel that was a great meeting and say, « See you next time! » With confrontation you reach excellence, you have more creativity, and you eliminate risk.
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Well, it is possible to manage a global team and to reap the benefits of disagreement.
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Do your preparation. In many Asian cultures the default purpose of a meeting is to put a formal stamp on a decision that has been made before the meeting in informal pre-meetings
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Depersonalize the confrontation. Instead of asking people to express their opinions and challenge one another’s ideas in a meeting, ask team members to send all their ideas to a nominated third party
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Change your language. You might try following the advice of Sean Gilbride, an American living and managing in Mexico. He says: « I soon learned that if I wanted to encourage team debate it was important to use phrases like ‘I do not quite understand your point’ and ‘please explain more why you think that’, and to refrain from saying ‘I disagree with that’
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As a French person who has lived extensively in the US, I can certainly relate to this. When confronted with a problem, we love to take the opposite side of the person making a point which we view as a way of enhancing the solution we eventually reach. Accept we don’t preface it by saying we are playing ‘devils’s advocate’ since it is second nature to us. Beware of doing this in an anglo saxon environment without saying you are playing ‘devil’s advocate’ or people will soon label you as a difficult person. I regret to say it has happened to me
40-Hour Work Week €“ The Magic of Sustainable Growth
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A few days back I bumped into this very intriguing and rather helpful article put together by Jessica Stillman under the rather provocative title of “Why Working More Than 40 Hours a Week is Useless” where she points us out to a superb piece of writing done by Sara Robinson at Salon under the suggestive heading of “Bring back the 40-hour work week” where she questions something that I am sure most of us knew, deep inside, from all along, but that very few have dared to even bring up as a topic of conversation. Specially, at work. Basically, when was the last time you worked 40 hours a week? Or, more importantly, does working more than 40 hours per week make you more effective and productive at what you do? »
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you don’t need, you shouldn’t have!, to work more than 40 hours a week to be effective and productive. So stop doing that today! Stop working those unpaid hours that research has proved don’t contribute much to your overall performance, or to the overall business outcomes!, and for a good number of reasons. Stop working longer hours than you should and you will even feel much better as a result of it eventually
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But you push on anyway, because everybody knows that working crazy hours is what it takes to prove that you’re “passionate” and “productive” and “a team player” €” the kind of person who might just have a chance to survive the next round of layoffs.
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how and why it was established on that timeframe and how the whole concept of working overtime and staying productive is a myth.
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It drains our physical body, our brain, our capacity to collaborate, share our knowledge, innovative and think clearly; it damages not only our very own health, but also our very own healthy, and much needed!, relationships with the outside-out-of-work world: family, friends and relatives, etc. etc.
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knowledge workers can only produce good quality work in a range of 6 to 7 hours per day
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The fundamental realization is that an employer who asks for more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week is stealing something vital and precious from you. Every extra hour at work is going to cost you, big time, in some other critical area of your life.
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Two generations of managers have now come of age believing that a “good manager” is one who can keep those butts in those chairs for as many hours as possible. This assumption is implicit in how important words like “productivity” and “motivation” are defined in today’s workplaces. A manager who can get the same amount of work out of people in fewer hours isn’t rewarded for her manifest skill at bringing out the best in people. Rather, she’s assumed to be underworking her team, who could clearly do even more if she’d simply demand more hours from them.
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eight [hours] for work, eight for sleep and eight for what we will.
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For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies [Or any company], and the future of the country [any country], this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done.
Sheryl Sandberg Leaves Work at 5:30 Every Day €” And You Should Too
« Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is familiar with the funny, uncertain feeling that comes with checking out soon after 5:00 to be with family, and although she used to worry about what others thought of her departure time (which is a completely reasonable hour to head home, by the way), she has finally reached a point where she can take off at 5:30 p.m. without the lingering concern of how others are perceiving her. »
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To make up for ducking out at 5:30 p.m., Sandberg said, she would send emails to colleagues late at night and early in the morning as proof that she was still giving her all to work:
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There should never be any shame associated with heading home before 6 p.m. to eat dinner with one’s children and spouse, and Sandberg is sending a much-needed message to parents everywhere that it’s OK to leave work before dark for family time
How IBM manages 80,000 bring-your-own devices
« IBM CIO Jeanette Horan has plenty of IT projects and systems to worry about, but perhaps one of the most pressing and timely is Big Blue’s ongoing BYOD (bring your own device) rollout, which is aimed at including all of the company’s 440,000 employees over time. »
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more iPhones and other devices began cropping up in the workforce, and IBM decided it was time to get in front of the issue, Horan said. « If we didn’t support them, we figured they would figure out how to support [the devices] themselves, » a no-no given the amount and nature of corporate information potentially at risk.
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« They will find the most appropriate tool to get their job done. I want to make sure I can enable them to do that, but in a way that safeguards the integrity of our business
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So far, about 120,000 users are accessing IBM’s network through mobile devices, and of that total, 80,000 are supplying the device and paying the monthly service fees
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While IBM could use secure containers to deploy applications to users’ devices, enabling it to wipe just the container and not the entire device, that option hasn’t been used so far,
What Really Replaces Marketing (Madness)..
« What Really Replaces Marketing (Madness)
Here’s my take on What Really Replaces Marketing (Madness). I will do so following the story line of my recent Guest Lecture for the Marketing faculty, headed by Peter Verhoef, of the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). The guest lecture was titled: Marketing Leadership in age of Service. »
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The bottom line in my thinking is that, since Value is dominantly created in-use and is a result of co-creation between company and Customer, marketing strategies should shift their focus from creating momentum for value exchange (the sale) to creating momentum for interactions that support Customers in creating value for themselves.
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And since value is something that can only be defined by its beneficiary we need to understand what outcomes Customers desire when they hire a company’s resources to get their jobs done.
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Marketeers need to turn into Service Designers that are capable of designing end-to-end experiences. And they need not only design, orchestrate and market the experience (or value proposition in Service Dominant Logic terminology), they also need to ensure the company’s capability to deliver on the promise. And this also means involving, and taking responsibility for, company partners in the value network.
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Marketing’s first job is to understand Customer’s jobs & outcomes (or value creation process) and where in that process they fail to meet their desired outcome.
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Secondly Marketers need to build relationships in communities of individuals with similar Jobs-to-be-done and desired Outcomes.
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Their third job is to start supporting Customers to create value, not doing stuff to create value to the company.
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- Marketing’s fourth job is to design for interactions that stimulate engagement in these networks or communities (=your Customer segment!).
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More and more I think that the fifth job is one of the most important ones: engaging employees and partners in supporting Customers to co-create value.
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Your 6th job is to extract actionable insights out of 360 degree feedback to foster innovations and design new value propositions that attract new Customers
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You last job is to redesign metrics that capture the engagement value to firm and to ensure that there is a high correlation to these metrics and Customer’s value created. I
Entreprise 2.0 : quels gains ?
« Soyons clair, quand on parle ici d’entreprise 2.0 on parle bien de cette dernière dans ses trois dimensions : interne, externe et présence ce sur les médias sociaux. Voici la synthèse de différentes études qu’a fait Dion Hinchcliffe, du Dachis Group, au dernier Enterprise 2.0 summit qui s’est tenu à Paris en février. »
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Cela va conduire à une réduction de certains coût, notamment au niveau des coûts de communication et de voyage compris entre 10 et 20%
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Mais cela a aussi un impact sur la productivité de 30% grâce à un gains de temps pour accéder à l’information recherchée et une montée en expertise.
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Les interactions avec les clients vont permettre de réduire le cycle de réponses pour les fonctions clients d’environ 30%, ce qui a un véritable impact sur la relation client avec une satisfaction supérieure de 18% et une fidélisation plus importante de 10%,
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La fluidification des processus de vente va conduire aussi à une augmentation des revenus de l’entreprise de 10% en moyenne.
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Mais au delà de l’ensemble de ces chiffres, l’attachement à l’entreprise, la cohésion d’équipe, la diminution du sentiment d’isolement, sont aussi des choses non négligeables, même si elles sont moins souvent mesurées, mais donne lieu à des projets comme Plazza chez Orange.
Retour sur le colloque « Le numérique, moteur du changement »
« LE NUMERIQUE, MOTEUR DU CHANGEMENT
C’était le thème du colloque proposé par l’Institut Edgar Quinet qui s’est tenu au Sénat le 30 mars dernier. Après une ouverture du colloque faite par le sénateur David Assouline, j’ai assisté aux 2 premières tables rondes, la première évoquant le numérique comme moteur de l’économie et la deuxième les rapports sociaux à l’ère du numérique »
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la révolution du numérique ou comment le numérique révolutionne notre quotidien de salarié, de citoyen, de particulier…bref, le numérique apporte la nouvelle révolution industrielle.
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– Tradition et modernité. Etonnant mélange non? et pourtant, plein de bon sens. C’est Edwy Plenel qui lança ces 2 mots en expliquant qu’il faut toujours chercher la modernité mais en gardant le meilleur de la tradition.
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Le manager de proximité, clé de voute de l’entreprise numérique. Cette fonction a (malheureusement) l’habitude d’être mal menée. Entre les attentes des dirigeants et celles des équipes, les managers de proximité se retrouvent parfois un peu seul face aux challenges proposés
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Donner un sens au travail quotidien de l’équipe, être à l’écoute, savoir expliquer, savoir reconnaître la performance et la non performance…Selon moi, le numérique réaffirme la position clé du manager de proximité dans l’entreprise. L’entreprise qui aura compris ce point et qui saura investir, dès maintenant, sur ses managers de proximité, réussira à avoir une longueur d’avance sur ses concurrents.
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L’expérience salarié. Et si l’enjeu de demain pour les DRH ou managers que nous sommes reposait sur l’expérience salarié?
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En d’autres termes, les salariés regardent de plus en plus leur entreprise comme un produit leur permettant de répondre à des besoins au quotidien ou dans le futur. En tant que DRH, je pense donc qu’il faut s’attarder sur ce point et définir dès maintenant ce qu’est la « User Experience » des salariés de notre entreprise pour mieux recruter, mieux fidéliser et donc mieux performer.
Intranet Content We Want to See from HR –
« The Human Resources Department has a lot at stake in the success of an intranet. By making information and forms accessible through the intranet, HR frees up a lot of its time enabling them to focus on more value-added tasks. Useful HR content also increases employee satisfaction. »
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They can do so much to make the intranet more relevant, engaging, and a hundredfold more useful.
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1. The meaning behind policies
Aside from telling employees about new policies, it would help for them to know exactly what the changes mean.
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2. Interactive training/learning
It’s nice not to have to leave the intranet to access company training. But enough of boring manuals and Powerpoints! Instead, how about an annotated slideshow followed by a quiz?
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3. FAQs
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4. Video tutorials of common HR transactions
Not all forms are easy to fill out; some of them can be confusing, even to a smart employee.
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5. Common employee mistakes and how to avoid them
Just as employees have FAQs, they also have FMMs €” Frequently Made Mistakes. Nip them in the bud by alerting employees to, for example, mistakes they typically make when making benefit claims, or common errors made that delay travel requests
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6. Career advancement tools
Job vacancies are fine, but employees also need to know how to actually get these jobs.
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7. Superstar employees
Forget choosing an Employee of the Month based on sales performance or some other achievement. Instead, shine the spotlight on each employee. Give every employee one day of fame on the intranet by featuring them on the home page
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8. Staff opinion
Give employees a chance to have their say in polls, discussion forums, and internal blog posts.
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9. Relevant laws
Companies aren’t only governed by company policies, but also by government laws covering labor, privacy, sexual harassment, etc. To an employee who needs to refer to these laws, it’s a big help to find them right in the intranet and not have to Google them.
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10. Wellness
It’s great for HR to think of employees’ well-being beyond the office. Little reminders, cartoons, articles, videos and other resources that help employees with health, fitness, diet, and stress management would be highly appreciated.
« Vers la fin du modèle multi canal en libre service ? »
« Cette étude qui explore les « Nouveaux comportements et nouvelles attentes des consommateurs en matière de Relation Client » permet d’établir une typologie des consommateurs en matière de préférences relationnelles, mais surtout de comprendre les motivations et facteurs qui expliquent ces préférences. Elle bat tout d’abord en brèche l’idée selon laquelle les technophobes disparaîtront lorsque les consommateurs appartiendront tous à la génération « Y ». Elle remet également en cause l’idée selon laquelle le fait d’offrir au consommateur le choix parmi tous les canaux (point de vente – centre de contact – Web) est le gage de sa satisfaction. Elle fait également émerger la notion de « jachère relationnelle ». »
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Bien sûr le fait que l’étude soit effectuée via Internet constitue une limite : 20 à 30% des consommateurs ne s’y reconnaitrons pas ! Rappelons que 30% des français n’utilisent jamais ou très rarement Internet, dont 20% n’ont jamais utilisé un ordinateur.
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Du point de vue des consommateurs : le choix du canal est bien perçu, mais leurs demandes fondamentales portent d’abord sur l’efficacité et l’accès à la compétence. C’est donc l’efficacité globale du dispositif qui est plébiscitée au-delà du choix du point d’entrée.
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Du point de vue de l’entreprise : le Muli-canal libre-service est aussi critiquable. Outre les problèmes de coût (tous les canaux n’ayant pas le même coût), ce modèle par construction ne garantit pas la bonne allocation des ressources compétentes (et rares), face aux demandes (nombreuses) des clients
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Un des résultats le plus étonnant, est que ces clients en jachère relationnelle se déclarent tout aussi satisfaits de leurs fournisseurs que ceux qui sont en plus forte intensité relationnelle.
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Développer des parcours assistés sur Internet : Internet ne doit pas être réservé aux experts très autonomes sauf à intéresser réellement moins de 20% des clients. L’enjeu du développement d’Internet porte sur son « humanisation » c’est-à -dire sa capacité à apporter une expertise humaine à certains moments clés du parcours clients.
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Pour beaucoup, un acte ou un service gratuit, cassant la vision mercantile de l’entreprise, peut se révéler plus efficace que de nombreux programmes de fidélité onéreux.
Why Enterprise Social Efforts Fail and Succed
« I also believe that training people on tools puts the emphasis on the wrong things (e.g., which buttons to click), but that training people on new socially-enabled ways of working is paramount.
What business problems do you have that could be solved by collaborating better internally?
What business processes are involved in the cited business problems?
How could you change the way management and employees execute these processes to address the cited business problems?
How will we educate and train management and employees on this new way of working? »
P&G puts clamps on web surfing
« When P&G’s IT sleuths investigated why the company’s computers were running so slow, they found something surprising:
More than 50,000 YouTube videos were being downloaded from company computers every day. Along with watching videos, P&Gers were listening to 4,000 hours of music a day on Pandora, the personal playlist Web site. »
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Social websites can slow productivity, soak up bandwidth and threaten the safe flow of corporate data, says Steve Feller, a steering committee member of The Circuit, a local IT professional group.
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P&G has not blocked YouTube or Facebook, which claims more than 500 million users around the world. The company uses both of those sites for marketing its brands and for internal and external communications.
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P&G is regularly using all of its Internet capacity because of “an exponential increase” in Internet use and its shifting of work to Web-connected applications as it seeks to move faster and connect its far-flung sites in real time.
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“As P&G drives toward end-to-end digitization of our business, ensuring bandwidth capacity within our networks is a high priority.”
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At GE Aviation, where 7,500 work, Pandora, YouTube and Facebook “are fundamentally blocked,” said spokesman Rick Kennedy. Employees who need to use the sites for work can get access.
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TriHealth, which runs Good Samaritan and Bethesda hospitals and employs 10,400, blocks all social media sites except for YouTube, which is used for employee training
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f the company keeps using bandwidth at the current rate, it will cost $15 million a year just to add more for non-business use, the memo estimated.
« On ne peut pas envisager d’améliorer la place de l’humain dans l’entreprise sans changer la fonction Ressources Humaine. De la même façon, rien ne changera si on ne change pas la dénomination de la personne chargée de piloter cette évolution. Mais transformer le Directeur des Ressources Humaines en Directeur du Capital Humain cela implique quoi ? »
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Aujourd’hui parler de Ressources Humaines est dépassé. Hier, cette expression de Ressources Humaines est venue remplacer celle d’Administration du Personnel
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Nous sommes entrés dans un monde industriel, commercial et administratif où l’humain tend à se faire rare. A ce titre de rareté, l’humain n’est plus un facteur de production, il est devenu un investissement stratégique dans le capital immatériel de l’entreprise
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Dans ce monde des analystes financiers, l’humain a été trop souvent vu comme un facteur, donc comme un coût au lieu d’être vu comme un investissement, donc comme une richesse.
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Considérer l’humain comme un investissement implique de pouvoir lui donner une place dans l’Actif du bilan de l’entreprise en plus de ses lignes de Passif ou au Compte de Résultat.
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L’employabilité ne doit plus être la capacité à retrouver un emploi quand on a perdu le sien, mais la capacité à en occuper un autre dans l’entreprise rapidement en permanence
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L’humain doit être un investissement permanent, ce qui implique non seulement de maintenir ses compétences en termes de savoir, savoir-faire et savoir-être, mais aussi sa capacité à agir et réagir face à l’évènement.
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C’est le savoir-agir, au sommet de la pyramide de la compétence, qui fait toute la différence dans l’évaluation des compétences.
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‘est de cette manière que nous pourrons sortir d’une gestion des compétences par postes et aller vers une gestion des postes par les compétences, telle qu’elle fut notamment définie par le MEDEF dans sa « Démarche compétences » et son « Objectif compétences » en 2002.
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L’exercice du travail et la possibilité d’en changer dans des conditions propices font partie de la prévention des risques psychosociaux
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S’interroger en permanence sur la capacité de ses salariés à s’insérer rapidement dans des processus de changement ou dans l’évolution de l’entreprise doit être une des missions du Directeur du Capital Humain.
Study: Executives Agree That Social Business Has Tangible Economic Benefits
« A recent study by PulsePoint Group in collaboration with The Economist Intelligence Unit titled, “The Economics of A Fully Engaged Enterprise” (their definition is close to that of a social business, see below) found that companies that fully embrace social business initiatives are experiencing four times greater business impact than companies that do not. »
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in the most companies where social business is a priority, the CEO and other executives are the vital advocates for cultural change that drives deeper levels of engagement within the organization.
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- The average return on social engagement was calculated to be between 3-5%. The most engaged businesses are reporting a calculated 7.7% business impact
From Systems Thinking to Systems Being
« A system is a set of interconnected elements which form a whole and show properties which are properties of the whole rather than of the individual elements. This definition is valid for a cell, an organism, a society, or a galaxy. Joanna Macy says that a system is less a thing than a pattern€”a pattern of organization. It consists of a dynamic flow of interactions which is non-summative, irreducible, and integrated at a new level of organization permitted by the interdependence of its parts. The word “system” derives from the Greek “synhistanai” which means “to place together.” «
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Peter Checkland defined systems thinking as thinking about the world through the concept of “system.” This involves thinking in terms of processes rather than structures, relationships rather than components, interconnections rather than separation.
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Systems being involves embodying a new consciousness, an expanded sense of self, a recognition that we cannot survive alone, that a future that works for humanity needs also to work for other species and the planet. I
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Systems being and systems living brings it all together: linking head, heart and hands. The expression of systems being is an integration of our full human capacities.
Social Business isn’t About Companies, It is About Cities
« In The Social Psychology of Organizing, Karl Weick exposed the theory of enactment, stating that organizations were fundamentally an abstraction of the reality, essentially brought to life through management’s narrative. In that sense, changing the way we work requires much more than technology and the empowerment of knowledge workers. Taking a broader perspective, and looking at organizations, not only as a production and profit-making machines, but as center of a part of human activities mainly taking place in cities, sheds a different light on the role and nature of what we call social businesses. »
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Drawing a parallel between the evolution of the city and the one of the workplace is of course tempting. The industrial era has rationalized space, productivity has got rid of shapeless shops and offices to implement neat open spaces, large passageways and functional lines of production. I might push the analogy even further: a majority of companies still operate in a Modernist-like manner: managers are the workplace equivalent of continuous commuters (the dark side of mobility), and knowledge workers populate impersonal open spaces or tentacular alignments of cubicles
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Starting in the middle of the seventies, the post-modernist movement rejected the utilitarian view of post-war urbanists, aiming at integrating new constructions into the context of the city, and at reconciling the main human activities within the same space
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Inside organizations, the frontier separating private from professional life is rotting, and “work” is no more a monolithic activity separated from others. Increased mobility and remote working, allowed by technology, are gaining in importance, and are quietly involving new relationships to time and to space.
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the workplace needs radical redesign to allow for more collaboration and continuous learning. Customer-centricity, whatever this really means, not only implies the growth of different behaviors, but also to think differently about our spatial and symbolic relationships to customers.
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the divorce between work and other facets of human life which take place during the industrial era has to be considered under the light of Enterprise 2.0. As organizations aim at leveraging the relationships dynamics, they must taking seriously into account their own role in the city,
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Restoring the city’s economical role and identity has become a sine qua non condition to a successful urbanism as well as a truly social business. Organizations do not need to become customer-centric, but citizen-centri
Can Social Technology Deliver?
« Looking beyond ROI and hard benefits, insurers are turning to Web 2.0 concepts to invigorate internal operations.
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Social technology may not promise ROI in a conventional business sense, but the benefits can be culturally and logistically inherent, according to a recent report from Celent.
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Some insurers, recognizing the value of sharing and openness across very large organizations, are engaging in the adoption of programs seeking a change in culture via communication networks. Based on the experience of these insurers, Celent lists five key benefits of social platforms: timeliness, visibility, discovery, sharing and crossing of boundaries.
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Despite a challenging business case for implementation, insurers embarking upon social technologies have observed a reduction in travel among employees, an improvement in processes that require multiple teams and better leverage of knowledge across the organization.
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Social software provides insurers with access to massive amounts of content, internal and external, and the ability to shape this data into relevant packages specific to a company or mission
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both people and workflow systems can leverage presence, information and unified communications technology to reach out to the right people, in the right manner at the right time. Not only can an agent avoid leaving an underwriting decision in the email box of someone on vacation, but the system could allocate the task to someone who is at their desk at that moment and even connect the underwriter and agent in real time
The Essence of Connected Learning
« I am actually talking about Learning in the wider, more general context of education, and where a good number of really inspiring stories continue to emerge to highlight how we may be on the tipping point of re-thinking learning itself and its purpose(s), as we have known it for decades, and, most importantly, how we have been dealing with it at schools, colleges and universities. It’s probably a good time now to, at long last, rethink the Essence of Connected Learning. »
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I get the opportunity to experience serendipity doing its magic, once again, and allowing me to bump into another short video clip, that lasts for a bit over six minutes, which points back to a rather inspirational Web resource: Connected Learning, under the suggestive title “The Essence of Connected Learning“:
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model of learning that holds out the possibility of reimagining the experience of education in the information age. It draws on the power of today’s technology to fuse young people’s interests, friendships, and academic achievement through experiences laced with hands-on production, shared purpose, and open networks“
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work is learning and learning is the work
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The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn”.
What is Social Business? A Clear Definition
« “Social business” is a white-hot buzzword right now. However, there is little consensus as to what it actually means. In a #socbizchat Twitter chat hosted by online magazine CMSWire last fall, top consultants, executives, and marketers spent over an hour debating the question, “What is Social Business?” without gaining an inch of common understanding. »
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“Social businesses implement social technologies, strategies and processes that span across their entire enterprise, creating and optimizing collaborative ecosystems of employees, customers, partners, suppliers, communities and stakeholders in a safe and consistent way.”
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Obviously, organizations are made up of people. Since people are coming at social business from all angles and organizational situations, the definition could easily be brought down to an individual or departmental level. In that case, social business would be the ability for you or your group to use your organization’s com
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However, in most contexts, social business refers to improving the results for the business or organization as a whole
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While online communities are the most common type of community, organizations have always had communities €“ communities of employees, communities, of customer, communities of suppliers, etc.
IT Is From Venus, Non-IT Is From Mars
« In many companies, the relationship between IT and business leaders is a very troubled marriage indeed. Miscommunication is rife, leaving executives struggling to figure out what’s working for the company, what’s not, and how to improve the situation. Can a marriage like this be saved? »
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The first step in fixing the situation was to understand exactly what IT costs and performance really were, not just what they seemed to be.
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The key in bridging the gap is for IT leaders to explain clearly the reasoning behind saying « no. » If they give the business side enough insight, future requests might even be more reasonable.
Les étudiants privilégient une entreprise aux dimensions internationales
« Suite à la 1ère édition de son baromètre sur l’humeur des jeunes diplômés[1] qui montre notamment que 84% d’entre eux considèrent l’entreprise comme un lieu d’épanouissement personnel, Deloitte a décidé de mener une étude pour approfondir les attentes de ces futurs actifs. Les résultats de cette enquête menée auprès des étudiants de grandes écoles et d’universités permettent de dessiner le portrait de « l’entreprise idéale de demain. » »
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Par ailleurs, une majorité des répondants (58%) ambitionne un poste de travail nomade plutôt que sédentaire.Le poste idéal combinerait une variété de tches plutôt qu’une seule spécialisation et permettrait surtout de travailler en équipe
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55% sont attirés par une organisation matricielle combinant des activités et des expertises diverses, et 62% préféreraient une organisation sans différences hiérarchiques, basée sur le travail à distance et la mobilité.
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Le savoir-faire, la qualité de service, la satisfaction du client, la créativité, l’innovation, et l’esprit d’équipe et de communauté sont les valeurs les plus recherchées dans la culture d’entreprise
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la jeune génération privilégie à 67%, à la fois une évolution hiérarchique et/ou transversale
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88% des étudiants considèrent que les qualités du manager devraient être centrées avant tout sur les relations plutôt que sur les tches, et pour 73% il devrait être très participatif plutôt que directif.
Et si on enseignait vraiment le numérique ?
« Ils sont nés en 1996. Ils ont aujourd’hui 16 ans. L’ensemble de leur scolarité s’est faite dans l’ombre et la lumière du numérique. A leur naissance, le web est gé d’à peine 7 ans. John Perry Barlow rédige et publie la « déclaration d’indépendance du cyberespace », un texte qui reste emblématique de l’idéologie des « pionniers » et qui fut structurant pour toute une génération de primo-internautes. On peut notamment y lire ceci : « Nous sommes en train de créer un monde où chacun, où qu’il soit, peut exprimer ses convictions, aussi singulières qu’elles puissent être, sans craindre d’être réduit au silence ou contraint de se conformer à une norme. Vos notions juridiques de propriété, d’expression, d’identité, de mouvement et de circonstance ne s’appliquent pas à nous. Elles sont fondées sur la matière, et il n’y a pas de matière ici. » »
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Bien au contraire la plus grande partie du cyberespace est un monde fermé, propriété, contrôlé par le marketing, régi par un carcan de normes arbitraires, de lois liberticides et de technologies « privatives ».
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Apple, Facebook et Google décident seuls et en fonction de leurs seuls critères ce qui est publiable et ce qui ne l’est pas, invoquant le plus souvent le motif de « nudité » ou de « pornographie », et l’appliquant, par exemple, à la fermeture du compte d’un internbaute ayant osé choisir « l’origine du monde » de Courbet comme photo de profil.
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Combien de collégiens, de lycéens et d’étudiants, combien de ceux qui sont nés en 1996 sont-ils au courant de cette Histoire, de ces pratiques, de cette évolution ? Combien d’entre eux connaissent-ils le fonctionnement – même schématique – des algorithmes qui, dans Facebook ou dans Google, leurs proposent aujourd’hui des réponses avant même qu’ils n’aient formulé leurs questions ?
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Combien d’entre eux sont-ils conscients, en s’inscrivant sur Facebook dès l’ge de 13 ans, que commence alors un long processus d’entrée en documentation de soi, qui ne cessera probablement même pas avec leur décès ?
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En revanche, tous ont généreusement été exposés au discours stigmatisant et stérilisateur de la « recrudescence du plagiat », de la « mort des autorités et des encyclopédies de référence », et autres billevesées qui rappellent le discours des fabriquants de chandelle réclamant l’interdiction de la lumière du soleil.
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, l’école, le collège, le lycée et l’université doivent être les garants d’une citoyenneté numérique et dépasser l’ère de la didactique des légos, celle d’une unique approche « par compétence » comme le propose le B2i et autres « certificats informatiques et internet ». On n’apprend pas la citoyenneté numérique comme on apprend le code de la route.
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: il faut enseigner la publication. De sa naissance jusqu’à sa mort, le web fut et demeurera un média de la publication.
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Enseigner l’activité de publication et en faire le pivot de l’apprentissage de l’ensemble des savoirs et des connaissances
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Comprendre enfin que l’impossibilité de maîtriser un « savoir publier », sera demain un obstacle et une inégalité aussi clivante que l’est aujourd’hui celle de la non-maîtrise de la lecture et de l’écriture, un nouvel analphabétisme numérique hélas déjà observable.
Innovation in Coordinated Business Networks – Forbes
Most writing (and oral presentations) on networked business today is about social networks €“ the interconnections and relationships between individuals within an organization and its various external constituents (e.g. suppliers, partners, customers). We read and hear much about €˜loose ties’ €“ weak relationships that form (and often dissolve) rapidly around a specific opportunity or problem. Many of us now understand the value of crowdsourcing €“ the act of reaching out to a large, usually meshed network to solicit members’ ideas that may help us solve a problem or address an opportunity.
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Lost in this plethora of loose-tie thinking is the possibility of innovating within a smaller network, in which the strength of the ties between nodes is relatively strong. In the first chapter of the book Business Network Transformation, Geoffrey Moore and Philip Lay call these €˜coordinated networks’,
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In a star topology, one firm coordinates the activities of the others in the network, with those activities occurring in parallel or another non-sequential, seemingly random pattern of orchestration. Walmart and Apple are familiar examples of this model, in which the coordinator also wins the largest percentage of the value created.
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Coordinated, strong-tie networks may also follow a linear bus topology, in which each node (organization) performs its value-adding activity, then passes the work on to the next node in the business process. An upstream (often the penultimate or final) node usually captures the most value and either dictates or heavily influences the activities of the other network nodes. Automobile manufacturers are a frequently cited example of this model.
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When I was in business school in the late 1990€²s, the accepted thinking (and teaching) was that the organization that created and captured the most value in the chain €“ the coordinator in a star network or the dominant company in a bus topology €“ was responsible for innovation in the network.
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That reality, whether perceived or real, has largely disappeared in both the automotive and retail sectors. BMW, Ford and other auto manufacturers have well defined programs that seek innovation from other members of their industry networks, implement those ideas when qualified, and annually recognize and reward their suppliers
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pulling of innovation from the edge to the core is one of the major differences between networked business and traditional value chains. The next step in this evolution will be for network coordinators to reach out to other networks for new ideas they can implement.
Management collaboratif et gestion des egos
« L’objectif d’hier soir était d’échanger sur la gestion des egos en faisant se rencontrer deux mondes, celui de la haute performance sportive et de l’ « élevage de champions », et celui des “knowledge workers” en prise avec les nouvelles approches collaboratives du travail. «
« As a shy person, I’ve believed for most of my life that being among new people required an elaborate social disguise, one that would allow me to feel both present and absent, noticed and unnoticed. I’d yearn for some sort of social recognition without the bother of having to be recognized, without that oppressive pressure to live up to anything that might get me attention in the first place. So I’d find myself executing oblique tactics €” being stingy and stealthy with eye contact; wearing a mask of deep concentration; staring at an underappreciated object in the room, like a light fixture or molding €” in hopes of discouraging people from engaging me in actual conversation while still conveying the impression that I might be interesting to talk to. »
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The problem with polite conversation, I thought, was that it required the orderly recitation of platitudes before one can say anything interesting, let alone something as original and insightful as I wanted to believe myself to be. I couldn’t bear it. I had an irrational expectation that people should already know what I was about and come to me with suitable topics to draw me out. Rather than attempt agreeable chitchat and compromise my “authentic” identity with false congeniality, I would isolate myself, hoping that withdrawal would make me come across at a glance as mysterious and different rather than rude and feckless.
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I’d rather my self-importance remain undisturbed by anyone’s curiosity about me than risk seeming ordinary to myself.
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This gave me my basic framework about how to behave in social situations. The possibility of discovering genuine connection with other people receded to fantasy; I could only try to make it through without embarrassing mysel
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The best way to manage that risk, I thought, was to be unapproachable but legibly fascinating at a distance, to present myself as an object to be read
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Facebook is engineered to facilitate “sharing.” It frees users to build an identity in isolation, unhampered by contingencies of face-to-face interaction or real-time reciprocity
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A 2010 study, “Shyness and Online Social Networking Services,” by Marquette University psychologists Levi Baker and Debra Oswald, confirms the social network’s potential to mitigate shyness, finding “immediate benefits of Facebook use, especially for shy individuals, as it allows social interaction in a comfortable context.”
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Naturally, this removes inhibitions, as urges to share and respond aren’t disciplined or evoked organically by the particularities of any given moment.
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Thus in Baker and Oswald’s study, shy Facebook users report experiencing “increased friendship quality” and “increased social support” from their Facebook friends.
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Social media don’t merely insulate shy people from shame and suppress social risk; they routinize sharing and automate camaraderie, giving them standardized forms.
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By improving users’ levels of social capital, it offers a more stable rationalization for the shy person’s behaviors of avoidance, and by offering mechanisms to control social presence at a distance
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Rather than eradicate shyness, Facebook seems to generalize its pathology to all its users.
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But now they shy person’s apprehension of social risk seems entirely rational,
