Author: simongterry

Many disciplines are seeking to tackle the effectiveness of work and realising the potential of people in organisations. It is time to coordinate these efforts for the benefits of organisations and our people.

The Frustrations of Silos

This year I have been to a number of conferences across a range of different fields: employee communication, collaboration, digital workplaces, future of work, innovation, learning, intranets, knowledge management, culture, design & employee engagement. Three things were evident from all those earnest conversations:

• All these disciplines are working on a similar, if not the same, problem – how to better help people to work more effectively, to achieve strategic business goals and to realise their personal potential.
• There are insights and solutions in each field that can contribute to making better solutions for organisations.
• Everyone struggles with the conversation to win and maintain support for their field or discipline. Most of these teams don’t even have a secure home in the organisational hierarchy and are constantly bounced around between People, Communications, Technology and functional businesses.

For people who talk a lot about the need to work across silos, it is remarkable how siloed much of the conversation is within these disciplines. Connections with related disciplines are often seen as a threat rather than an opportunity. The challenges of managing large complex systems that impact the functional goal are often ignored.

The lack of senior management support may simply be an outcome of the confusion that senior managers experience when they receive requests to support similar sounding work from multiple teams in an organisation. I  have seen many versions of a CEO say something along the lines of ‘explain to me again what the community manager does? How’s that different from our collaboration manager, the knowledge manager or the learning team? Can’t someone just focus on employee effectiveness? After all we have a hiring freeze so I’m a big unsure why all these new roles need to keep appearing’

Organise Around the Problem

Changes in approach have already begun. People in the Learning function have reacted to the need to focus on on-the-job learning and already begun to describe themselves and operate as as performance consultants. At one health insurer, the knowledge management team is part of the innovation and design team to ensure effective knowledge is designed into customer and employee processes. Innovation labs are becoming the centres of collaboration and communities of practice in many organisations. Rather than targeting employee engagement as a goal, organisations are starting to see it as an outcome of a whole system of interactions. The boundaries of disciplines are blurring in the pursuit of greater effectiveness.

We need to go further in breadth of ambition and the disciplines involved. To achieve the needs of our organisations the goal cannot be we need to focus on the redesign of the employee experience for greater work effectiveness.  That redesign must include all the functions that can contribute to a better and more effective work experience. We need to move beyond delivery of programs to design of systems that deliver better learning, knowledge, collaboration, experiences and effectiveness.

Let’s put aside the jargon, the silos and the disciplines and focus instead on what employees and organisations need. Their need is people who bring a cross-disciplinary expertise to managing the complex systems in organisations that shape the effectiveness of employees in delivering to customer and organisational goals.  Driving step changes in employee effectiveness at realising business goals is the opportunity for all.

People Analytics offers real potential but it demands new rigour in data gathering and a connection by the HR function to the data in business processes.

People Analytics has its moment in the sun with most consultants and many organisations exploring the possibilities and potential of people data for organisations.  We have been led by organisations like Google that have shown the opportunity for data on human performance and relationships to be a foundation of better realising the potential of people.

Do You Really Have People Data?

One of the consequences of the historical approach to human resources is that people data is often siloed and not integrated into management processes in the organisation. The lack of integration to the every day work of the organisation means that data is not captured and checked for accuracy in the every day course of work. Data that goes through critical processes will be kept in a level of accuracy through use. Data that is viewed as separate and secondary rarely has the same attention.

In organisations, remuneration information for individuals is the most accurate. That information is managed through strict performance processes and it checked by both the employee and the organisation on a regular basis to ensure the right money is being paid for work.

As we move out from this data, the quality of our information traditionally declines. Maintaining role information is often delegated and not tied to business processes that provide checks. The business can often see people processes as a constraint on their flexibility so people operate in ways unrelated to their position or role as described in people systems. There is little or any consequence for this until a restructure or other significant change highlights the inaccuracy of people data. Personal data like employee skills, qualifications and potential is often poorly captured or rarely updated. Relationship data might exist for customer-employee relationships but it is rarely recorded anywhere else other than in dated hierarchy charts. There is a good chance your finance hierarchy is different and more accurate than the hierarchy shown in your people systems.  These types of data are no accurate because there is simply no business need to recognise this in systems in most organisations. Managers know this data and use it but don’t have an obligation to record it. We can contrast compliance learning where there usually has been historical rigour in gathering people data, again because of consistent business processes and the need for external audit by regulators.

Performance data is another source of challenge. Most people systems capture performance data as required for scorecards, but not the rich data on the actual work that individuals have done. There will be a difference and it is the first source of value of most people analytics approaches. Connecting these systems to record the richness individual performance in real time matters too.

The first challenge that organisations experience when they start to work with People analytics is that they have lots of data but none of it is accurate.  Early efforts at analysis are stuck dealing with ‘garbage in, garbage out’. There’s no surprise that many of the leaders of people analytics have been startups or other digital organisations. They have built their management processes with an integrated approach to people data and have integrity of data as a result.

A New Start

Start by gathering the rich people data that the business uses but doesn’t record in people systems. Create incentives for people to maintain their own data because it will contribute to their performance and their potential in the organisation. Connect people data into business processes that provide checks and balances to maintain accuracy and currency. Ensure that people processes are streamlining and supporting business agility not holding it back.  Capture the other forms of people data that you have been missing, especially relationship data. These foundations need to be in place before any organisation tackles the journey of leveraging people analytics.

 

Community Manager. The word is there in the title. You manage the community. We know management means control, decision making and power. You have the power and your organisation expects you to use it.

No wonder the challenges of community management drive many people to frustration. Communities don’t respond to control. There is a great expectation gap between what organisations expect of community managers and the real role of fostering and developing purposeful mutual relationships. Like oil and water, control and community don’t mix. Worse still, too much control and you will have an oil spill that kills every living thing for miles.

Many organisations fear that their communities will become a chaotic & lawless place. They don’t want open two-way discussion of what matters to their community members. They want everything neatly locked down, authorised and controlled. Control is seen as a way to protect their brand, their business and their strategy. However, the neatly ordered brand, business and strategy they want to achieve is only realised through decisions of the same people they seek to control.

Your community will become a wild west of lawless conversation, if that is what your community needs to get value from their purpose and relationships. They don’t see it as lawless. They see it as a valuable relationship. Shut down the activity you don’t value and it doesn’t disappear, it simply goes elsewhere. If too much of the valuable conversation goes elsewhere, so does your community. Losing relationships is rarely a good thing when they determine the success of your business and the value of your brand. 

Think for a minute of your home town or suburb. Hopefully, your local neighbourhood gives you a sense of an open and inclusive community. You have networks of interactions with others through family, commerce, schools and work that help bring value to your life. You don’t agree with everyone about everything and not everything works as planned, but the collective interactions mean everyone fulfils their needs in their own ways. We know from history that communities are led to disaster when external forces seek to govern all the relationships. Control breaks down community by undermining individual purpose, initiative and relationships. The lessons from history of efforts to design, relocate or control the interactions of whole villages are worse still. What is left after these efforts is rarely a community because of the work of those exerting control. The community only remains because of the determination of the individuals to stay connected, despite the external forces.

If there is one thing that is important in managing community, it is realising that it isn’t about you, your wants or your performance. Community management is first, last and always about what it takes to realise the potential and purpose of a community of mutual relationships. Focus on work with influence through your community, not using control against them.

Inspired by a conversation with my friend & community management expert, Melanie Hohertz. Read more (and better) on community and control see Melanie’s perspective on our conversation.

 

Our lives are full of distractions. Many organisations sole purpose is to distract, to hold or to shape our attention. In our hands we hold devices that are a window to a global world with distracting images, notifications and the insistent call of unread messages. Our attention wanders.

We find it harder than ever to be present. Here. In this moment. Now.

Earlier this week at the end of a long day, I was going through the motions of life wrapped up in my thoughts. Luckily my intuition twigged me that something was not right. When I stopped and paid attention to what was going on, I found a little change that helped another person. All I had to do was be present, make a connection and ask some questions.

If we aren’t here now, we can’t make the change that is ours to make.

Presence underpins our awareness of our context. Presence gives us the time to be aware of our intuition, our purposes and our capabilities. Presence enables us to truly see and engage with others.

When we take the time to be present, we give ourselves the chance to make a difference.