Category: Future of Work

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.

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.

What we forget, we must relearn through experience. Corporate memory loss is a barrier to effectiveness, change and adaptation.

The pressure of now in organisations can be incessant. It can feel like there is no time for history. When I work with an organisation, I like to ask questions about the history of the organisation. The stories and insights are always worth the conversations. In all organisations, history shapes many drivers of current performance – community, context, purpose, values, customer value propositions, strategy, structure & culture. Sometimes this shaping is an explicit choice to be one way or a choice to not be another way. Often the influence has been forgotten but the legacies remain in the structure of performance in the organisation.

When organisations forget their history, they lose the context to be able to review current performance and these drivers against the past. Past success on its own is a terrible guide to future performance. Past strategies without context or understanding are even more dangerous. Usually strategies are born of successes and failures in specific contexts. When we forget the failures and the context, the strategies become harder to interpret, implement and adapt. Effective organisations understand their failures, successes and the context for each. They understand what they have learned ongoing.

Failures forgotten, or worse hidden, will be repeated by future generations. Many organisations enter a cycle of repeating the same series of decisions in a circular effort to improve performance. Centralisation fails and decentralisation follows. Decentralisation fails and centralisation follows. The cycle continues without progress until someone with the history and the understanding can challenge the binary choice and learn a new way to manage.

The same process of forgetting dooms many change programs. Launched for a specific reason at a specific time, that context is soon lost. The project develops its own logic and soon the organisation moves on to another change leaving the change orphaned. If the project succeeds many will question why. Later the organisation will return to this change to try again.

Help your organisation to understand the full context of its history and experience, both the successes and the failures. The lessons of this experience will be the foundation of future adaptation.

“Has everyone got a drink, lots of paper, a pen and a device? Good, Dave is still not here, but let’s start the meeting anyway.”

Future of work experts like to focus on email as a source of ills. There are many cases where emails can be avoided by more social forms of communication. Undoubtedly, there is much information in email that would be better shared other ways. Email takes up a lot of time, but there is far greater danger to productivity and effectiveness in our organisations: meetings.

The Cost of Meeting Culture

The real challenge in organisations is the meeting culture.  Efforts to become more collaborative, inclusive, decisive and to mitigate risks have results in a marathon series of pointless meetings. There is no research suggesting that our current level of meetings are a great idea. Research from Verizon and Atlasssian suggests between 25-50% of meetings are wasted. 45% of people admit to being stressed by how many meetings that they have.  We spend hours preparing documents for meetings that don’t scratch the surface of the discussion required. In a world in which all other forms of management are subjected to performance scrutiny meetings escape attention because they are where managers try to create performance scrutiny.

Reflect on your last 24 hours of meetings. How many of those meetings were:

• required to be held at that time, started on time and finished when the work was done?
• had exactly the right people in the room and the right pre-work had been done?
• effectively chaired to stay on topic, engage all participants and achieve an outcome in the minimum time required?
• had a clear purpose, sufficient information for the conversation and a defined outcome with clear next steps?
• kept a record for later review of the information considered, the relevant discussion and any decisions or actions required?
• were back-to-back with another meeting that allowed no time for personal reflection or preparation?

Running great meetings is an art, but these basic needs are just the tools of a great meeting. Too many meetings are called without regard for these basic needs. Nothing in that list above is meeting rocket science. These are the fundamentals of thinking through purpose, timing, audience, pre-work, agendas and outcomes.  In most organisations you need approval to spend $500 but you can waste thousands of dollars of salary costs by calling a meeting without any of the above basic preparation even considered.

Replace Meetings

We use meetings for five main purposes:

• Gathering Information
• Sharing Information
• Discussing Issues
• Making Decisions as A Group
• Building personal rapport

The first two purposes are almost always better done using other ways outside of meetings. How many hours would you save by removing these meeting from your diary? Move the gathering and sharing of information to tools designed for this purpose. At least this step will at least halve the length of your meetings.

There are alternative, and often better, ways of managing the next two of these purposes than a meeting. Requiring everyone to have been seen in the same room or teleconference for a decision to be made or for work to count suggests work needs to be done on an organisations culture of personal accountability and trust.

Even for building rapport, extensive experience with social tools shows rapport can be built without a meeting when people have seen each others style of interaction and understand their positions, talents and contributions.

Bad meetings are the reason most executives doubt the effectiveness of collaboration. Managers who have experienced bad meetings struggle to see how collaborative work is not time-wasting, indecisive or lacking in accountability. The way to fix the collaboration problem in organisations is not more meetings. It is to replace meetings with ways of working that are far more effective at achieving value.

An awful lot of the wasteful emails are setting up, sharing documents or following up on bad meetings. Let’s fix the collaboration problem at its source. Make meetings the last resort as a way of working.

If you’d like to improve the effectiveness of the meetings, collaboration and work in your organisation, get in touch with Simon Terry.

Remember there is a difference between the tool and the result.  Keep your eyes & efforts on the outcomes that matter.

Why are the worst users of LinkedIn those selling LinkedIn marketing services?

— Simon Terry (@simongterry) July 11, 2016

This morning, I was prompted to ask why it is that some of the worst users of Linkedin are Linkedin marketing service providers. I had to report a user yesterday who was from a Linkedin marketing organisation, had a poorly constructed profile that looked like a fake and responded to my decline of their invitation by immediately sending a second vanilla invitation. If your goal is to show people how well you use Linkedin, sending spam is hardly the best showcase of the service. Yes spam will get you a lot of hits on Linkedin, but it won’t win you the business or the reputation you need to grow.

Last week, I was discussing with friends the number of salespeople who pitch their product in the first conversation. These are specialists at building relationships who have confused the pitch with the sale and the relationship that follows. We have seen Glengarry Glen Ross and we know our ABCs. However, real relationship building is not that hard. If you want to build a relationship with someone, build a relationship first about something valuable to them. Make a contribution eg ‘I saw you asking about this topic and I thought you’d be interested in this study/post/thread. Happy to discuss’ It takes five minutes of study here to find that topic & value in our connected social world. If you have to mention your product in the first contact then, then a relationship is not going to happen unless they happen to be searching for your product at that moment (less than 0.5% of cases). Who wants to send 200 spam messages in an hour to get one reply & a lot of aggravated connections, when ten thoughtful notes in a hour will build five connections.

A week ago there were furious debates in the Microsoft Office365 Customer Community about this article from Laurence Lock Lee on the need to ensure that adoption measures aren’t distorting the outcomes of an enterprise social network community. When the confusion cleared from that debate we all saw the need to continue to remind people that adoption measures are a tool of strategic value creation. Yes adoption measures are measurable and actionable.  They may help a community manager to know that there is an issue. However, they are not the outcome that businesses seek.

In a world that values actionable data as a tool, we must remember that data at best is a clue that something is going on. Correlation is not always causation. The simple and obvious may not always be so. Some times the biggest mysteries are also the biggest gains in value. We often need to dig deeper to understand exactly what is going on and what response is required to make our businesses perform better and to realise our purpose.

Management is a tough challenge in a competitive market. Don’t make it harder by confusing the tool and the result.