The company I work for just had a minor social media hiccup: Over the weekend, a dozen of our most active company microblogging system users lost all of their followers. It was unpleasant: We had all gotten used to using this system as a way to communicate with people we know or don’t know; we would log into the system to share what was going on in a meeting or to get answers from the crowd – often with great insights. Losing a couple of thousand people who listen to you over night is like waking up on a deserted island: You won’t find an audience waiting for you (somewhere in this metaphor hides a joke about the cloud monster from LOST, but I digress). Read the rest of this entry »
From HR Executive Online’s report about the HR in Hospitality conference:
It’s incumbent on HR leaders to take advantage of the opportunity, [conference speaker Adam Clarke from Travelport] said, by utilizing Web 2.0 and social networking to emotionally connect to employees.
“Increasingly, our personal and work lives are intermingling and part of that is this social media phenomenon,” Clarke said.
Successful initiatives in that vein will provide transparency to employees, collaboration throughout the organization and the ability for feedback to be given and received.
The line between the individual and the organization is blurring. Think about it – organizations are social constructs; what we consider an organization is the product of our situational role definitions. A speaker at a conference might consider himself to be a representative, or to use a more Hobbesian metaphor, the voice of organization X. If the same person goes to a private party in the evening, he might think of himself as a person who also happens to be working at X. Read the rest of this entry »
Having worked in HR for over ten years, three of them in Compensation, I can assure you that the assumption that monetary rewards – bonuses, incentives, whatever you want to call them – increase employee motivation and consequently performance is more than just a belief in HR: It’s a holy cow, a basic rule on which systems are built on, an axiom you can’t touch or shake, one where the questioning of its effectiveness borders on heresy.
A couple of weeks ago, I came across a great TED talk by Dan Pink. In his presentation, Pink talks about the link between rewards and motivation. And he sends the holy cow to the butcher. Read the rest of this entry »
Last spring, New York University art student Kacie Kinzer conducted an experiment: Out of cardboard, she built a little robot with a smiley face. This robot, called the Tweenbot, had one ability: It moved forward – nothing more, nothing less. Kinzer took this little fellow to Central ParkWashington Square Park, attached a little flag with its indended destination (the other end of the park), and released it.
What happened? Well, the robot did what it could do: move forward; and since it could move only forward, it got stuck a lot – in pavement cracks, on grass, or driving into trees. But whenever that happened, a friendly person came by, and put the Tweenbot back on its path. Some of the helpers corrected its course by just nudging it with their foot, while others went to great lengths to free the robot when it got stuck under a park bench.
Finally the little robot arrived safely at the other end of the park. Remember: This was in New York, whose residents are not known for their helpfulness. And the outcome wasn’t an outlier either: Kinzer repeated the experiment several times, and all of those re-runs were successful. Read the rest of this entry »
I consider myself to be a social media enthusiast: I wrote my first programs at the age of 7, had my first web site in 1996, started a web business in 1998, and have been active in social media since the first chatrooms. And I have to constantly remind myself that there are a lot of people out there who no idea what social media are.
So what are they, really?
Social media are new ways to share, collaborate, and create communities. The amazing thing is that the principles of social media can be applied to *every* area, as long as two prerequisites are fulfilled:
- People are willing to share, collaborate and connect (culture)
- People have the tools to interact (technology)
Let’s take a look at what sharing, collaborating and creating communities means:
Just stumbled across this brilliant blog post via a Tweet from @pierrefar (he’s the brains behind the cli.gs URL shortener by the way). It’s called “The importance of stupidity in scientific research” and explains that the feeling of stupidity or ignorance is an indicator for one’s treading on new ground:
“[...] we don’t do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don’t feel stupid it means we’re not really trying. I’m not talking about “relative stupidity”, in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don’t. I’m also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don’t match their talents. Science involves confronting our “absolute stupidity”. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown.”
In the context of organizations, this philosophy can be related to cultural predispositions or hindrances to creative thinking and innovation. If we allow ourselves to feel stupid in an “absolute” way, we can embrace the task of solving a problem better than if we were thinking that there is surely someone who has got the answer.
Two days ago, I had a networking coffee meeting with a colleague from IT. One of the topics was the question between “all-in-one” versus “best-of-breed” solution for social media. Unsurprisingly, our views differed: I advocate the best-of-breed approach, while he prefers a more standardized option.
But we also found some common ground on this topic: We both agreed that free software solutions can be very beneficial to the company. So why not introduce the following policy?
“Any organizational entity may introduce new applications on their own, as long as
- they are free,
- they have an API
- and the organizational entity takes responsibility for their support.”
This guideline counters three major arguments against a best-of-breed approach: 1) Organizational entities should be kept from buying expensive software on their own, 2) organizations should avoid lock-in with proprietary software that can’t be linked into the existing IT environment, and 3) supporting applications is expensive.
What do you think? Is this something both a CIO and a social media pioneer can live with?
In my last post, I have been asked what I would prefer for our internal social media solutions: An all-in-one approach, or a best-of-breed approach. This is essentially a question on centralization or decentralization of internal IT applications, and one I have a strong opinion on.
When it comes to social media, a decentralized approach beats a centralized approach: A collection of seperate tools capable of talking to each other is better than a monolithic all-in-one portal. Why? Let me count the reasons:
A friend of mine used to work in a call center for some time. He told me an interesting and counterintuitive fact: Some call centers don’t service their callers in the classical queue order (first-come, first-served); as strange as it sounds, those call centers take callers who have been waiting for longer than 20 seconds and downgrade their priority, while callers who have been less than 20 seconds on the move up in the priority of calls.
Now why would they do that? Because it increases the overall average customer satisfaction!
Customer satisfaction decreases progressively in relation to waiting time, and 20 seconds is a critical threshold: If your call is not being answered within that time, you’re not going to be satisfied anyhow, and it doesn’t make much difference if you wait 30, 40 or 60 seconds. On the other hand, if your call is answered within a very short time (less than 20 seconds), your satisfaction is going to be quite high (if your problem gets solved of course, but that doesn’t have anything to do with your waiting time).
For this reason, catching as many callers before the 20-second threshold is much more important to have a good average customer satisfaction than treating them in the “fair order” of first-come, first-served: It’s the statistical choice between the average of 1) moderately annoyed and very annoyed people, and 2) very satisfied and very annoyed people.
This concept poses an interesting ethical dilemma, which an utilitarist might enjoy. Some consequences, off the top of my head:
- The same principle is probably valid for e-mail responses (whereas the threshold is different)
- Getting positive responses from very satisfied customers will be more motivating than getting average responses from moderately dissatisfied customers
- However, you will have to deal with the accusation of favoritism or unfairness
- Your statistical quality average might be higher, but your boss might not judge you using statistical means (especially if he or she is prone to fall for halo effects – positive or negative)
- The next time you are stuck in a phone loop, hang up after 20 seconds and call again
A year ago, I had an interesting discussion with a colleague about evaluating performance in the context of external constraints. The question was: “If you are leading a team of people whose lives are under differing amounts of non-work demands, should you evaluate their performance in light of these demands?”
Example: There are two people in a team – a single guy and a divorced father with two kids. They both deliver the same results. Should they both get the same rating, or should the person who manages to deliver results despite high non-work demands (i.e. the single father) be evaluated more favorably?
My colleague’s answer was that the two should be treated differently, because it’s harder for the lone parent to deliver the same results than for the single guy (for whom it is easier to stay longer hours or work without interruptions).
My answer was no, the evaluation should solely depend upon the set goals in the beginning of the year. If a person reaches his set goals, he should be evaluated and incentivized accordingly. Certainly, a single parent is likely to have less capacity than a single guy without kids; however, if this difference in capacity influences anything, it should be the respective goals, not the evaluation. The outcome may be the same (the single guy having to work harder than the widower), with one important difference: They both know what is expected of them, and how to reach or exceed those expectations.
And even the differently set goals might be unfair: What if the single guy pursues a promising career in amateur swimming (consuming most of his weekends), or spends a lot of time volunteering in a center for disabled people? Does it matter for your evaluation if you spend your off-work time raising children, volunteering, doing sports, persuing hobbies, or just hanging out in front of the TV? Isn’t work-life balance something individual that it is impossible to use it as a frame of reference for performance evaluation?
What do you think?