Indian HR Blogs

Image by niallkennedy via Flickr

Have started to curate a list of blogs written by Indians (irrespective whether they reside in India or not !) in the areas of Human Resources, Careers and Work

You can find the list here: Indian HR Blogs 

If you know of any more Indian HR Blogs and bloggers who need to be on that list - post a comment here or there - or send me a mail

Brand You is about Content and Community - Thoughts on Personal Branding and Social Media

Today I had a conversation with a journalist who's doing a story on how people can get career success by building their personal brand. I have earlier blogged on personal branding here and here

I believe that the essence of building your personal brand (whether internally in an organization or externally) is Content and Community.

1. Content - refers to the expertise you build - it is the sum of your intellectual and emotional quotient. It is not just what you know - but also how you do. To build a really distinct personal brand - answer this question "What do I want to be known for" In most cases you will find the answer in a T-shaped expertise - a broad expertise of an area - and a deep expertise of one specific niche. In your organization - are you the "go-to guy" for any aspect? If you are not - then build a niche that's purely your own. Remember deep expertise requires deliberate practice. There's no shortcut to it.
2. Community - refers to the relationship capital you build with people who know and trust your Content expertise. In an organization these would be seniors, supervisors, CXOs across functions. They will know and trust you if you demonstrate (a.) Visibility - being seen at group events, volunteering for cross functional projects, taking on "above and beyond" challenges that others are not - and (b.) Credibility - showcased in you keeping your commitments and delivering above and beyond. Remember, visibility or popularity alone will not be enough to develop your personal brand. Also, be sure that your community comprises of a diverse group of people (best explained in this article)

When you have a community and have built a trustworthy relationship with them - you will give insights that will feed your Content bucket - and the secret is to continually keep growing both of them - as and when your career evolves (an make no mistake - it will evolve) you will be poised to grab opportunities before others.

So what does this have to do with Social Media?

When you want to build your brand externally - social media is the tool you use to showcase your content and build your community. As Michael Brenner posts:

I am an advocate for social media marketing and personal branding which I believe can help to benefit both your company and your career. And so I am often asked why I tweet, why I blog and why I participate in both online and offline social communities and events.

Despite the huge press coverage around social media, I am still surprised at how many marketers and other market-facing professionals resist the call to participate in social media and to be brand ambassadors. To me, social media is all about personal branding. Grow your personal brand, with respect and proper attribution to your company as an ambassador, and the company benefits through the greater exposure of a positive voice out to the market it serves.

As a marketer, I feel compelled to participate as an individual voice in my company ecosystem. Companies are a collection of individuals with all the diversity that is inherent in its employees. A company brand is directly impacted by the voice of its employees, along with customers, partners and the larger community and ecosystem in which it participates. I actively and passionately participate in social media conversations with authenticity and I do it because I want to. But I also believe success in building my personal brand is direct evidence of my abilities to execute an overall marketing strategy for the company – in essence to build the company brand.

Open Source Enterprise 2.0 by Lockheed Martin

Came across this interesting news item thanks to my twitter friend @ParamShobhit

This will be an interesting development to watch - and depends on how Lockheed Martin will choose to monetise this project. Would be exciting to check what functionalities it supports - and whether it'll be launched in a freemium model

Some excerpts from the article:

Lockheed Martin Launches Open-Source Social Networking Project

Lockheed Martin has launched a new open-source project for enterprise social networking called Eureka Streams.

The Eureka Streams technology, which looks and behaves much like existing commercial social networking software, is aimed at helping what Lockheed Martin refers to as knowledge workers make informed decisions by finding relevant colleagues and groups, following their streams of activity, and engaging in conversation.

Lockheed Martin is making the technology available to developers and inviting their feedback on Eureka Streams. Developers can learn more about the technology at www.eurekastreams.org.

Eureka Streams represents a new communication experience for knowledge workers, empowering them to pick and choose the channels of news, information and conversation that add the most value to their day-to-day work, Lockheed Martin officials said.

Lockheed Martin has released Eureka Streams as an open-source project—the Eureka Streams Community Edition is licensed to developers under the Apache 2.0 open-source license. However, in the future, Lockheed Martin plans to offer editions of Eureka Streams for use by enterprise customers, the company said in its release.

According to an independent Forrester Research report titled "Harnessing Social Networking to Drive Transformation" dated November 2009, "Smart organizations are looking to tap into the full power of the enterprise and beyond to drive better and faster decisions and to foster innovation that will keep them at the forefront of the changing economy. One approach that's top of mind for business technology leaders is the use of social networks to drive communities that span traditional organizational structures."

Online MBA acceptance rising in the US

Interesting article by PayScale on the growing acceptance of online learning compared to traditional MBA learning programs.

However this is US specific, and I really don't see this reality being replicated in India soon. That's because the credits offered in online or "satellite" courses results not in a Post-Graduate Diploma (like IIMs and XLRI offer) but in a PG Certificate. Employers simply don't equate both these together - leading to salary differences between the two.

In fact - in one of my roles - I was looking after the Continuing Education Policy of an organization - and was amazed how even a course of full time employees who would visit the MBA college every few weeks or on weekends also ensured that the education given was a certificate!

Check more from the article PayScale - Online MBA Programs, Online Degrees Accepted

A Sloan Consortium study cites barriers to the widespread adoption of online distance learning. Topping the list is the concern that "students need more discipline to succeed in online courses"-64 percent of all institutions see it as a significant hurdle. The number-two concern is the extra time and effort that online faculty spend; 32 percent of schools think this is a problem.

Other disadvantages include lack of face-to-face feedback and in-person activities with peers, and loneliness, according to DETC's Lambert, who also said, "The few drawbacks are more than offset by the convenience features."

Experts say benefits of online distance learning include savings on time and money-no commuting, gas money or parking fees are required. And some students just function better online.

"Online there's anonymity, you can interact and participate, and you can be whoever you want to be. For some people it's a more comfortable environment for them to study in," said Walden's Sidler.

Another plus is the increased earning power an MBA brings. According to 2007 statistics from the Graduate Management Admission Council, a nonprofit group that owns the GMAT, MBA graduates who have gotten job offers typically earn 58 percent more than before they got their degrees.

Hay Group on Leadership and Social Media

It's great that blue chip HR Consulting firm - The Hay Group has blogged about Social Leaders and is heartening to know that concepts on Leadership in the Open Organization that I have blogged about in the past is being seen as mainstream enough by such firm. Hope conservative organizations - which have mostly followed the herd will now be convinced to move from the fence they have been sitting on and become more Open organizations a.k.a. Organization 2.0 (see my presentation - Why Organization 2.0?)

In the blog post Paul Bleier writes:

Thanks to the Social Media Revolution taking place, many organizations are starting to see clear value and benefit to becoming more open and less formal in their approach to engagement. For leaders within these organizations, championing such out-of-the-box thinking has not been an easy task due to the lack of discrete measures against success. Before receiving the necessary executive level buy-in to invest both time and money to operate within these online channels, demonstration of tangible bottom-line benefits were required. Today, social media ROI success stories and case studies are plentiful and provide compelling evidence for organizations to embrace openness and recognize the importance in promoting, developing and retaining the very best social leaders. Fueled by collapsing boundaries, increased competitiveness and demanding customers, social leaders have an uncanny ability to capture real-time market realties while effortlessly extracting hidden value from crowds using multiple online communication channels and common social media tools (such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc).

A summary of these benefits included:

* clearer and more consistent corporate visions and strategies
* access to unexpected knowledge capital outside of the formal organizational structure
* increased stakeholder ownership and accountability
* improved corporate social responsibility.

When I began this research, Facebook was frowned upon as a waste of time, LinkedIn was solely thought of as a recruitment tool and the notion of a twittering CEO would have been laughed at. How the times have changed. No one has done it better than Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com who has amassed a Twitter following of 1.7 million users by transforming his organization into a well-oiled customer service machine that delivers happiness to employees and customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Using social media, Tony publicly shares the core values of his company as well as his leadership philosophies that have grown Zappos to $1 billion in gross revenue in just 10 short years. He is an exemplary social leader who models a culture of trust, love and respect for his devoted employees so that they can in turn apply the same principles for the betterment of the organization and the customers they ultimately serve.

And then there is Martha Stewart with her nearly two million Twitter followers and an official blog that has aided her in repairing her public image by extending her iconic brand deep into cyberspace. A relatively newcomer is the always charismatic Richard Branson, Chairman of the Virgin Group, who has over 400,ooo Twitter followers who tune-in daily for a dose of all things Virgin. Richard routinely tweets about the places he goes, the interesting people he meets and even drops hints about future promotions and new products and services scheduled to launch under the Virgin brand. Other present and past CEOs that have become strong social leaders worth following include: George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, Nancy Lublin, CEO of DoSomething.org, Peter Aceto, CEO of ING Direct Canada, Bill Gates, Former CEO of Microsoft and Jack Welch, Former Chairman and CEO of General Electric.

Creating Online Content and #socialrecruiting

The newspaper The Hindu has an alarmist take on social networking and job hunting called Gossip to eternal regret

Yes, we are in the Wild West world of social networking - and using our earlier models of thinking - and it will take some years to figure out how to make sense of this data that is being generated. An NYT article says that the web means an end to forgetting. While the print medium existed - only things about the important people used to be preserved for posterity - and never at the reach of a mouse-click. The digitisation of data and information about everyday people like us will mean something profound - and we'll realise that in some years only.

The Hindu article says:

It is a mindless exercise in inanity. Getting into social networking sites, feeding the ever hungry digital blank that asks you “What's on your mind”, “What are you doing.” You feed it and it asks for more and more, finally you feed it something to your eternal regret. As information from Facebook, Twitter, Orkut and blogs swamp our collective lives, it is proving to be a treasure trove of information for recruiters, hirers and online job search companies.

The crescendo of information has reached such a state that recruiters are weeding out potential hires on the basis of the information, just as employees are being weeded out based on their social networking updates. Apocryphal stories are aplenty. “We had this person who was just out of college who would call up and say he is ill, but by afternoon there would be status updates about how the lunch with the friends was and by afternoon how good he was at network gaming. He would post his top scores to cheers and jeers by his friends,” says an HR person at one of the big five IT companies.

It is not that young people are unaware of the changing scene. “It is really difficult to create a profile that is not so – you. Every bit of the profile has to be you, right from the information that you keep updating, to the photos, to the friends, to the groups you like. You cannot hide information and you cannot be not doing what young people are doing,” says Divya, who works in the media.

There are two ways in which people would react - a few people are content creators - and which status updates and photo-uploading via Facebook has made the percentage increase - most people are still content to consume and respond to content that the few create.

As for the author who claims :"it's a mindless exercise in inanity" I'd like to point him to Clay Shirky's views on LOLcats

The range of creativity is not limited to the civic-ly valuable actions. But even if we take Lolcats and we stipulate, as the lawyers say, that this is the stupidest possible creative act… the stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act.

Doing something is different than doing nothing.

But creation of content is - I believe- just the first step that we are taking. The next step that people would take is creating and nurturing their own online communities and tribes - to bring people of a shared interest and passion together.

Human Capital Management goes Mobile

Aberdeen Group in a survey (which you can access by clicking on that link)  has found that progressive organizations are looking at leveraging the cell phone for HR processes. According to their survey

Best-in-Class companies are 26% more likely than all other organizations to use mobile tools to facilitate HCM processes and workflows

Best-in-Class companies 65% of employees at companies using mobility tools for HCM rated themselves as "highly engaged" - versus 57% at organizations without mobile HCM

Best-in-Class companies 45% of employees at companies using mobility tools for HCM received ratings of "exceeds expectations" on their last performance review - versus 37% at organizations without mobile HCM

As workplaces become more and more flexible and distributed - moving closer physically to the customer/clients - and the "corporate" headquarters comes under intense scrutiny of the cost-conscious CFO, more and more work and processes will be delivered via the mobile and newer gadgets like the netbooks and the tablets (like iPads - which are hybrids between phones and netbooks!)

Already some businesses provide platforms for Business to Employee communication using text messages in India. With 3G we'll see a lot more multimedia content and two-way communication enter the business conversation.

Future of Learning is Social

Image by fellowcreative via Flickr

ASTD has an article based on the book The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow's Employees Today, which is co-authored by Jeanne Meister and Karie Willyerd.

Jeanne Meister is an internationally recognized thought leader, speaker, and author in enterprise learning. She is a co-founder of Future Workplace and frequent blog contributor to the Harvard Business Review. Karie Willyerd was the vice president and chief learning officer for Sun Microsystems, recognized by ASTD with a BEST Award in 2009.

In this article for ASTD they look at what the future holds for how people would learn Looking Ahead

What I find exciting about the future of learning based on this article is that it looks at simulations and social gaming, augmented reality and collaborative web 2.0 - that are core to the values of Organization 2.0 - and make me feel vindicated :-)

The big question is - will current trainers and facilitators be ready to adapt to these new methods - or will they be rendered irrelevant ?

The predictions from the article:

Prediction 1| Augmented reality learning emerges

So what could be the implications for social learning? Simulations and games could take on a whole new level of interactivity, technical training could be done virtually without expensive labs, and management conferences could become networking events designed around finding knowledge content built on a pre-event profile, just to name a few. Even in prototype, SixthSense is less than $350, so in the near future, the device could be a highly affordable supplement in the learning environment.

Prediction 2| Most learning incorporates use of a mobile device

With increased capabilities of real time search on all mobile devices, learning will truly be just in time. Ask a question, get an answer. Our world will turn into three-minute learning vignettes. When you incorporate GPS sensitivity into a learning environment, many possibilities emerge.

Similar to the GPS-sensitive program FourSquare, we could design check-in points for new hires to get to know their company and its history. Or with programs such as Serendipity (under development at MIT), set our social networking profile to alert us whenever we're near an expert in the topic of our choice. Perhaps the future role of learning is to find, organize, and enable the experts?

Prediction 3| Games and simulations are used for every content area

The Millennial generation, which will comprise the majority of the workforce in just a few years, grew up on GameBoys, World of Warcraft, and EVE Online. IBM has already studied whether participation in massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) develops leadership skills. They found that having to recruit a guild, fulfill a series of tasks, motivate, and retain a guild led to the development of leadership skills. MMORPGs can be nonviolent, virtual-world–building games as well, with experiments in teaching math and science already under way.

A management simulation provides the ability for what Michael Schrage has called "serious play"—an opportunity to innovate, take risks, and practice in a safe environment.

But games and simulations aren't just for management. New-hire games can be used even in advance of hiring to allow players to become familiar with a company's products and services. Collaboration is increasingly important at most companies, and games could take a key role in teaching collaboration skills.

Prediction 4| We will have a huge app-etite

In the words of Apple's marketing department, "there's an app for that." In the case of applications for iPhone and iPod touch, more than 130,000 have been developed to date. Morgan Stanley predicts 500,000 new applications before the end of 2010. Since people are already accustomed to the convenience and functionality of apps, a whole new breed of apps for corporate environments will emerge. Corporate HR and learning functions will get into the business of custom app development. Possible apps include

* acronym lookup
* product description and specs apps
* benefits chooser
* campus and conference room map
* room scheduler
* retirement planner
* expert locator
* virtual profile (replacing the company phone directory)
* cafeteria menus and reviews
* virtual manager.

With just a little work, you could probably brainstorm another 10 apps in the next 10 minutes. Nearly anything that is in print now can be converted into a rich, constantly updated application.

Prediction 5| Peer-to-peer learning blossoms

When people attend conferences or workshops, it's not unusual to read in the evaluations that one of the most beneficial aspects of the event was the ability to network and learn from peers. Through technology, that peer-to-peer learning has now taken on a whole new level of meaning. While baby boomer managers fret that time spent on Facebook is a time waster, Millennials can't imagine getting their work done without relying on the tribe they've collected through their online social networks.

To mediate an organization's concerns for security while balancing the need to allow people to connect, expect to see a proliferation of platforms aimed at Facebook-type applications in the organization. Furthermore, expect some of these platforms to be specifically developed in the learning field and incorporated or integrated with the LMS. Learning functions will be able to determine which content is most in demand by perusing the most popular and most viewed content, and then assembling content developed by contributors into formal learning courses.

At this point, knowledge management and training become such a seamless continuum that it becomes fruitless to try and separate them functionally. Anticipate that learning functions will become the new and improved knowledge management owners as well.

Prediction 6| Expert and credibility ratings create trusted search networks

In a study at the University of California at Berkeley, it was estimated that knowledge is doubling every 18 months. Combine that with the time it takes to become an expert, which is usually estimated at 10,000 hours of practice, or roughly 10 years. No sooner do you become an expert than your knowledge is outdated.

Now consider how you spend your days and how you learn about something quickly. For example, maybe you'd never heard the term "MMPORG" before. If you're like most people, you would be unlikely to look up a training course on MMPORG as your first stop. Instead, you go to your favorite online search engine and type in the term. The problem is that there is so much information available, you might not know which definition to trust.

As search evolves, we will be able to identify industry experts and friends whom we trust, and our search results will include in the algorithm of results those sites and resources that our trusted sources have indicated as solid content. For example, you might add Tony Bingham, the president and CEO of ASTD, as a trusted source. If Tony had endorsed a definition of MMPORG, then that definition would rise to the top of your search results. Your tribe of trusted sources will become the way for you to navigate through the proliferating mass of online information.

Prediction 7| Search bots go on the prowl for you

It's one thing to know what term or question to type into a search engine, and it's another thing entirely to know the terms you should use or the questions you should be asking. As Will Rogers once said, "It's not what you know that hurts you, it's what you know that ain't so." In other words, with all the knowledge available, it's what is out there that you don't know about that can hurt you.

Now imagine that you've completed a search profile that says you are in sales training, in a major pharmaceutical company based in New Jersey. You'd like to know about the top developments in healthcare reform, any news alerts for the major suppliers you rely on, important news feeds on products and executives in your company, and a search through any publication in the world relevant to training for pharmaceutical sales reps.

Your bot will be at your service, culling the data on the web and delivering it to your doorstep every morning. Like any good pet, it will get better with feedback and training, so you will teach it to become more accurate by indicating that you like some bits of content and not others. Your own personal information robotic concierge, at your service soon!

Prediction 8| Governments will become more involved in ensuring that its citizens have access to training and retraining

With advances in human longevity, the economic setbacks many people experienced during the last few years, and a backlash against an unfettered corporate focus on profit, governments are starting to see that the strain put on their purses due to unemployment and underemployment is out of balance. In Korea for example, the government not only provides tax benefits for training investment, but also provides co-investment dollars.

Expect to see governments provide more incentives for retraining workers. These incentives could include anything from tax incentives to authorizing personal accounts, much like 401(k) retirement savings plans in the United States. Sometimes called "Lifelong Learning Accounts (LiLAs)," California, Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, Washington, and other U.S. states have introduced legislation to provide tax credits and breaks for investment in training.

Imagine a day when the learning function is not only getting funds from the corporate budgets, but individuals can elect to attend classes using their LiLA account money. Will that change the way learning functions think about the offerings they have available, and will it drive even more cooperation with universities to provide focused, relevant curriculum?

Prediction 9| The learning function's focus shifts to accreditation, with less emphasis on the learning process itself

As the amount of knowledge required to perform the job moves more and more to instant access, it will become less and less likely that people will prove their credentials by having an internal corporate training completion on their personnel records. Instead, learning functions will set the standards of performance required to achieve accreditation, install systems for enabling achievement of that accreditation, and track completion.

Prediction 10| You will be rated publicly, much like a Yelp or Amazon rating for people

Yelp is a popular social networking and review site where users rate and comment on local restaurants. The Millennial generation is accustomed to relying on user input on sites such as rateyourprofessor.com to steer everything from where to have fish tacos to which professors to avoid at college. Few people order from Amazon without looking at the cumulative rating stars of past purchasers. Sites such as glassdoor.com already provide insights regarding the culture, pay, and management quality. It is not a big leap to assume that eventually, managers will be publicly rated, followed by everyone being rated.

Will it change a manager's behavior if he knows that his tendency toward berating employees will show up in a public review the next day? Will the manager who chronically micromanages begin to adjust her behavior if multiple reviewers have commented on the same thing? It is one thing to go into the quiet of your office to review a private 360-degree report and quite another to have your children reading about your work behaviors.

This may be one of the scariest predictions so far, as you wonder about the fairness of disgruntled employees commenting publicly. On Yelp, the establishment owners are allowed to provide a rebuttal on comments, so this could be a feature of how a public people review system would work. But do anticipate that privacy has taken a whole new turn and will continue to do so as we progress.

Learning's future: champion or outcast?

One of the main reasons we like to think about the future is because we hope the learning and development field will be the first to step up to take ownership of many of the ideas we have presented here. We've been in learning functions where people have said they think social networking is a fad and micro-blogging is a waste of time. We beg to differ, and believe that the next generation of work coming into organizations will demand being able to work in ways they've already found to enable success. If the learning function does not step up to the task, some other department in the organization will, and a learning function will become irrelevant.

On the other hand, if the learning function has a vision for the future, and works patiently to inspire organizations to move into a new way of work and learning, the relevance and core criticality for business success could be unprecedented in our field's history.

Which will we choose?

What would a Talent Community Manager do?

Image via Wikipedia

Earlier I have posted about whether Talent Community Managers should or would exist in the future and how organizations are using Talent Communities for hiring as well as building their employer brand.

I also have looked at what community managers do.

So was excited today when I came across this job description of EMC's Community Development Manager[pdf] as well as Credit Suisse's Alumni Network Director.

Yes the future is here already!

As blogged earlier - these roles incorporate various disciplines - and can best be described as Technopologists - a combination of marketing (or recruiting/HR), technologist and social anthropologist.

Check out both the job descriptions - they combine technology expertise with an ability to engage online groups.

What are the characteristics of online communities - and how are they different from social networks like Facebook, Orkut and Twitter. Lithium Software's Principal Scientist of Analytics had a series of great posts on the same subject. This one for example is about Communities vs Social Networks and this one is about how they help in developing weak ties to Strong Ties.

So can we say that the focus of the online Community Managers would be to bring in members leveraging the weak ties between people - and providing content around the social object of the community - so that they help members develop strong ties.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Does Your PR Agency Need a Community Manager? (pamil-visions.net)
• Community Manager Tip: Value of Waiting (fastwonderblog.com)
• What to expect as an online community manager (communityspark.com)
• 8 Misconceptions About Community Management (socialmediabiz.com)
• How to recruit a Community Manager via social media (customerthink.com)

HR and Enterprise 2.0 - time to get involved: The EMC story

I came across this great presentation by Jamie Pappas (@JamiePappas on Twitter) on the journey taken by EMC to become a "social business".

I specially want you to check out slide no. 12 - the business case and how much it focuses on the employees and to enable collaboration, breaking silos.

Also check the quantitative measures on slide 21 - two are employee satisfaction surveys and drop in attrition rates.

This makes it clear why HR should be a key stakeholder in Enterprise 2.0 rollouts - are HR bodies like @SHRM in the US and @NHRDN in India listening at all?

Also check slide 18 which details the Training and Education initiatives
• Don’t underestimate the need for training on these tools • Enterprise New Hire training – get in early
• Integration into existing Manager and Director training
• Seek out opportunities to present value
• Online training
• Opt-in in-person training
• Lunch-n-Learns
• Podcasts/Webcasts
• “Train the trainer”
• Set expectations/guidelines for use

Is your business on the road to social business? What's your journey like?

EMC Case Study - Jive Get Social Tour

View more presentations from Jamie Pappas.

The social business employee manifesto

I posted this presentation based on my blog post Social Business employee Manifesto a couple of months ago.

Do take a look and leave your comments :)

The social business employee manifesto

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh.

Job Search by using Twitter

by Pipe  via Flickr

The folks at MindWorks Global have come up with a great short crisp presentation which you can see at this site:
A Quick Guide to Twitter Job Searches

Personally I think organizations are not really using the potential of Twitter and Facebook for recruiting employees - and instead are focusing their energies on Linkedin.com (see this post on how Linkedin can fire up your career)

That makes sense - at least for now - but as Twitter and Facebook's popularity in India rises - and more and more people start conversing there organizations will be missing the trick if they don't tap their potential to reach the appropriate talent pool.

Some interesting recruiters you can follow on twitter are: @indiajobstweet @hrnext @priyachettyr @hrsouls @sarangbrahme @femmehire

Are you using Twitter to hire or search for jobs? What's your experience?

Leave your comments below.

Tracking the Outcome of Training

It's good to see that McKinsey Quarterly article that focuses on training outcomes rather than the "input metric" tracking that is usually the focus of L&D initiatives. And happy that I had articulated similar thoughts on impact of training in 2004 :-)

Some excerpt from the article titled Putting a value on training

Picking the right metrics is the key to creating real value from training. Most for-profit organizations have a longer list of quantitative business-performance metrics than BGCA does. A retailer pursuing better customer service and sales growth, for example, could train employees by getting its managers to provide real-time coaching and to role-model best-practice customer-engagement techniques. Rather than just measuring the managers’ time allocation or employee-engagement data—as most would do now—the retailer should measure the impact of its programs through hard business metrics, such as sales, basket sizes, and conversion rates in critical categories or departments. Similarly, a manufacturer might try to improve its operations by teaching plant supervisors lean-manufacturing and coaching skills, but rather than tracking only how many managers have been trained, it should track metrics such as downtime, the overall effectiveness of equipment, or fill rates.

In every case, companies must continually review and revise the links between skills, performance, and training programs. Typically, to determine which metrics should be improved, companies assess their current performance against industry benchmarks or their own goals. Like retailers and manufacturers, most other companies know what kinds of skills are tied to different areas of performance. So a good next step is to conduct an analysis of the relevant groups of employees to identify the most important specific skills for them (as BGCA did) and which performance-enhancing skills they currently lack. To get a clear read on the impact of a program, it’s crucial to control for the influence of external factors (for instance, the opening of new retail competitors in local markets) and of extraordinary internal factors (such as a scheduled plant shutdown for preventative maintenance). It’s also crucial to make appropriate comparisons within peer groups defined by preexisting performance bands or market types.

Some Job Hoppers may not be so bad

Image via Wikipedia

Penelope Trunk is at it again, writing a counter-intuitive article that is sure to upset a lot of peopleWhy Job Hoppers Make the Best Employees Personally I think she's generalising, and a lot of job-hopping also results from incompetence or people not really knowing what they want to do, rather than the other way around.

It also does not hold true in jobs where the results of a role are long term and not really measurable in months.

And her views will not really be supported by the majority of Indian corporatedom.

Here are the reasons she gives for thinking so:

1. Job hoppers have more intellectually rewarding careers.
If you change jobs often, then you’re always challenged with a lot to learn — your learning curve stays high. This is true for office skills, and industry specific knowledge. It also applies to your emotional intelligence. The more you have to navigate corporate hierarchies and deal with office dramas, the more you learn about people and the better you will become at making people comfortable at work. And that’s a great skill to have.

2. Job hoppers have more stable careers.
The way you do that is through networking. Because you can be sure you’ll need to find many jobs in your lifetime, you want network as efficiently as you can. After all, the most efficient way to find a job is through a network. It’s how most people land jobs. People who work for lots of companies have a larger network than people who stay in one place for long periods of time. Which is why job-hopping creates stability.

3. Job hoppers are higher performers.
You can’t job hop if don’t add value each place you go. That’s why job hoppers are usually overachievers on projects they are involved in; they want something good to put on their resume. So from employers’ perspective, this is a good thing. Companies benefit more from having a strong performer for 18 months than a mediocre employee for 20 years. (And don’t tell me people can’t get up to speed fast enough to contribute. Fix that. It’s an outdated model and won’t attract good employees.)

4. Job hoppers are more loyal.
Loyalty is caring about the people you’re with, right? Job hoppers are generally great team players because that’s all they have. Job hoppers don’t identify with a company’s long-term performance, they identify with their work group’s short-term performance.

5. Job hoppers are more emotionally mature.
It takes a good deal of self-knowledge to know what you want to do next, and to choose to go get it rather than stay someplace that for the moment seems safe. It takes commitment to personal growth to give up career complacency and embrace a challenging learning curve throughout your career — over and over. And it’s a brave person who can tell someone, “I know I’ve only been working here for a month, but it’s not right for me, so I’m leaving.”

Blogging is the newest profession?

Image by Vicki's Pics via Flickr

Mark Penn wrote an interesting article titled America's Newest Profession: Blogging in the Wall Street Journal. However, I would contend that blogging is a profession. There are as many kinds of blogging as there are bloggers and while a number of 452,000 bloggers earning their living primarily through this seems a huge number - we've got to recognise that many of these might be journalists and writers - people who would earned their living writing for magazines/papers a decade ago.

Anyway, here are some of the numbers - and I would think this would only grow - as organizations slowly turn to content creation and transform into media outlets to feed a community of customers

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.

Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend: Their ranks have grown dramatically over the years, blogging is an important social and cultural movement that people care passionately about, and the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults.

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That's almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click -- whether on their site or someone else's. And that's nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: "It's my work he'd say, I do it for pay."

Career Advice and Job Hunting

I recently got listed as the 30th blog for "career advice" by Online Degrees. I must admit - it's been a long time since I posted something specifically about managing one's career.

However since the last few weeks - I have been job hunting - and some things that I have done and some reflections on what is happening in my career front. It's not an advice piece - so if you get anything out of it - it's purely your own :-)

• When I knew I had to move on from my last role - I got into touch with people - recruiters, college friends, ex-colleagues, twitter friends, bloggers I knew. People cannot help you unless they know you need help.
• Over the last few years I had opened up my networks to help many of these folks - particularly journalists, recruiters. So asking them for help didn't feel strange for me :-)
• I blogged about my changed employment status, shared it on facebook, linkedin and twitter too. Many people would consider that a bad move. Friends in large corporates told me "you have to look without looking" - however I believe in being transparent and open - so even if a prospective employer offers me a salary that's lower (which is where the hesitation to share one's true employment status comes from) that's OK with me.

So yes, I haven't yet got a job - but people have been incredibly helpful, pointing me out to opportunities, and helping connect with people they think can help.

Some other things that I have done:

1. Targeting 2-3 different kinds of roles - depending on what I have done so far - and the next steps in my career.
2. Trying to get as much referrals from recruiters to get at least a phone conversation with the hiring managers. I'm fortunate that recruiters are pushing their clients to at least talk to me when they don't seem very impressed with my resume. One interviewer said "Mr. [recruiter] urged me to talk to you because you're creative and have done different things"
3. Traditional HR and Learning and Development folks don't understand my "Social Business" stint - so I explain it not using Facebook, Blogging and Twitter - but as modes to increase employee engagement and employer branding.
4. Researching as much about the hiring manager (using Linkedin, Twitter) to discover common interests, previous employers, mutual friends - helps to discover common ground and a shared ground. If it's a hiring manager who's interviewing you - you have to get to a comfortable personal equation.

Ultimately it boils down to a few important things - how much social capital you've invested in your networks, how much do your family and friends support you and help you not to be down - and your own determination not to be cynical or get into a self-pitying mode.

What are some of the things that have worked for you when you have been looking for a new job?

Care to share?

Reverse Mentoring the Social Organization

Rawn Shah of IBM shines the spotlight on what I consider a critical aspect of driving Organization 2.0 - the generational gap- in his Forbes article Why You Must Network With Your Younger Employees

Leaders who connect to mentees in an enterprise 2.0 network can stay in touch with them more easily, understand their strengths and offer them more opportunities. They can mentor on an ambient level, openly broadcasting their ideas, knowledge and help for mentees or anyone to consider, by sharing their thoughts on micro-blog systems, and they can receive feedback the same way.

There is no free lunch. Mentees may take to Facebook easily but still find social networking awkward at work. In surveys and interviews of interns and new hires, I have frequently heard that they don't see the value of that kind of connection in the workplace. But the reasons why lie less with them than with organizational culture.

When you're new to an organization, your relationship networks are usually limited and have little built-in trust. Millennials who converse freely with their friends socially are often told at work to stay strictly work-focused. This can limit the depth of their conversations and keep them from developing trust and extensive networks.

Personally I think this piece is critical for organizations to focus on.

When GE wanted to teach its leaders technology - it opted for a reverse mentoring program. And I think this is the way social software will need to be kick-started to make an organization social.

Game Mechanics at work in the Enterprise 2.0?

Image via Wikipedia

My ex-boss Gaurav blogs about a talk that Amy Jo Kim gave in his blog post Eight Tips for Using Game Mechanics to Design Fun and Functional Software Applications

This got me thinking why can business processes and Enterprise 2.0 software be designed to make them "fun" and engaging?

There are lots of research that talks about how mixing work and play is the key to innovation.

And don't we do it as HR people within organizations - I remember sending out emails with performance appraisal discussions completed schedules to groups - urging them to be the first one to finish - triggering their competitive juices.

Now imagine the badges of foursquare and the social aspects being built into business processes - people who do a certain activity first or better - become "experts" and they vie for that honor? A better way to generate an internal yellow pages? Maybe.

Reward and recognition systems that are peer-generated (social) is another aspect I think would catch on. Definitely better than today's manager mandated rewards :-)

How do you think game mechanics can be incorporated into work?

Here are the principles of game mechanics from Gaurav's blog post:

Amy talks about how five principles of game mechanics (collecting, points, feedback, exchanges and customization) can be combined with three trends of social media (accessibility, recombination, syndication) to design fun yet functional software applications.

Here are the five game design principles Amy talks about –

- Collecting: Players love to collect artifacts and complete sets.
- Points: Players love to be rewarded with points from the game itself or from other users. Points can be used for leveling up, for creating leaderboards, or for redemption for gifts.
- Feedback: Players love to get feedback from the game itself or from other users. Feedback can be about how they are doing against others, or even against themselves over time.
- Exchanges: Players love to engage in exchanges with other players. Exchanges can take the form of explicit trading or implicit gifting.
- Customization: Players love to customize their character or profile, and also their interface or dashboard.

Here are the three social media trends Amy talks about –

- Accessible: Social applications are becoming more accessible because of simpler user interfaces, but also across devices, often enabled by open APIs.
- Recombinant: The data from social applications can be combined into different types of activity streams.
- Syndicated: The data from social applications can be exported and showcased elsewhere using RSS feeds and widgets.

I specially like Amy’s distinction between game-generated points and feedback and social or human-generated points and feedback, which reminded me of Chris Dixon‘s (@cdixon) post on single-player and multi-player modes in applications.

Reframing is the key to Disruptive Innovation

I have always considered the ability to see things in a new way as the critical aspect of innovation (changing mental models as Peter Senge has said) and this HBR article which looks at three leaders including Ratan Tata shares what are the three aspects of this skill - called "Reframing"

The article is titled How Reframers Unleash Innovation in Their Companies (And Beyond)

First, Reframers dare to question well-ingrained business truisms and industry paradigms. As they experiment with radically new business concepts, Reframers constantly ask themselves "why not?" For instance, Tata shattered the century-old car manufacturing paradigm: rather than completely producing the Nanos in its own factories, Tata Motors will distribute component kits that entrepreneurial small businesses can assemble close to customers. By questioning the conventional wisdom, creative leaders like Ratan Tata help their organizations navigate an increasingly complex business environment that places a premium on leaders with a flexible mindset.

Second, Reframers think not only with their minds but also with their hearts. After all, the heart of change begins with the change of heart; as Mahatma Gandhi eloquently put it: "Be the change you want to see in the world." As such, Reframers are erecting what we call a mental (and heart) barrier to entry for competitors. For example, you can bet that leaders at major food and beverage companies are busily hatching new business models to compete with PepsiCo's wellness strategy. But these rival business models won't be sustainable unless the leaders who developed them sincerely care about the wellness of consumers. In the dawning Web 2.0 world where authenticity is the new source of competitive advantage, a heartfelt business model transformation will be more readily accepted and handsomely rewarded by consumers than a disingenuous me-too competitive offering.

Third, Reframers catalyze massive social innovation. To borrow from chaos theory, the change in the minds and hearts of Reframers is akin to the butterfly flapping its wings over Hong Kong that can unleash a tornado in Texas. Even a minor reframing can yield a disruptive business model that can revolutionize not only an industry but entire societies — a massive chain reaction captured in the following formula:

Mental model innovation → business model innovation → industry innovation → social innovation

The key to business in this century would be creating social innovation - and the focus on sustainability.

What do you think?

Leveraging Social Media for Organizational Learning and Development

Geeta Bose of Kern - a learning solutions firm interviewed me recently for Lionsher.com the "learning den" for Learning and Development professionals and focused on asking me Is social media hype or reality? and the way it can add to the learning process.

An avid blogger, a twitter-addict, with 1000 friends on Orkut and an enviable fan following on Facebook, Gautam is a social media and network junkie. But when asked how he’d like to categorize himself, Gautam Ghosh says, “my foremost identity is as an HR professional.” Those who know Gautam describe him as the “Face of HR blogging” in India as well as the global community. This young man has successfully connected the dots between HR, learning and social media. He believes that “learning happens by doing and sharing!”

Gautam has rich experience in the corporate world through his journey as an HR professional in organizations like DELL, Deloitte, HP, Satyam, as an independent OD and Training consultant as well as a consultant with 2020 Social. “I see everything kind of fitting into a larger umbrella of saying how do we make a more human organization,” he explains. By ‘human’ he refers to an organization that is open and transparent. Gautam believes that all his L&D work, HR professional work, HR journalist work, and his social media work belongs to the larger umbrella of building an organization that is more open, transparent and human. “While it wasn’t really obvious when I started off the journey but now when I look back, that’s one thread that has continued throughout the journey,” he adds thoughtfully.

The best part is that the folks at Lionsher.com went over what I said and made some models which explain beautifully better than my words :-)

You can read the full interview here.

Change Management is Changing the Stories People Tell

Abhishek Mittal in his blog poston employment branding asks What Is Your Company’s Story? and urges people to think about stories when they think about change.

I believe that the internal conversations about the company is what guides this image – the dialogue employees have with one another – the vocabulary people use when discussing internal issues.

Focus on the stories people tell internally about your company. Think what needs to be done to “change” the stories to your company’s advantage.

I think Abhishek hits the nail on the head. Stories are pointers to the values and norms that are at play in organizational culture - and if one wants to change these values and norms - one has to focus not on changing the stories (because that's not possible) but in creating compelling new stories and enabling employees to share these new stories.

Hewitt Associates gets acquired by Insurance Broking firm Aon

Image via Wikipedia

This is interesting news for people in the HR industry. Insurance broker Aon Corp is to buy Hewitt for about $4.9 billion According to Reuters:

Aon plans to integrate Hewitt with its existing consulting and outsourcing operations and sees annual revenue of $4.3 billion for the combined entity, which will be named Aon Hewitt.

Russ Fradin, chairman and chief executive officer of Hewitt, will head Aon Hewitt.

Aon expects the deal to add to 2011 and 2012 earnings and generate about $355 million in annual cost savings in 2013, primarily from reduction in back-office areas.

The Aon-Hewitt deal is the second major deal in the consultancy space in a year after Towers Perrin and Watson Wyatt agreed to a $3.5 billion merger to create the world's largest HR consultants.

The insurance brokerage expects to finance the deal through a $1.5 billion bridge facility and $1 billion bank term loan.

I really don't see a reason why an insurance broking firm sees the need to acquire a HR Consulting and Outsourcing organization.

Hewitt has a big outsourcing facility in India - and looks like they'll be getting a lot more outsourcing work in the insurance space - but what it means for existing Hewitt Associates clients and employees in India will become clear soon.

In India Aon has a small operation, as its website states

Aon Global Insurance Brokers Pvt Ltd. (Aon Global) is a joint venture between Mr. Prabodh B. Thakker of Global Insurance Services and Aon Corporation. Aon Global is the leading insurance intermediary in the Indian market.

Aon Global is a Composite Broker licensed by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority. As a Composite Broker, Aon Global is permitted to offer both reinsurance and corporate (domestic) broking solutions to its clients. Aon Global combines international expertise and local knowledge to provide value added, professional, cutting edge risk management and insurance solutions to its clients. The company is the leading broker for placement of facultative risks in the aviation and energy sectors.

Aon Global became operational on March 3, 2003. The company is headquartered in Mumbai, has offices in Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and Pune. The company has 80 staff members on its rolls, 60 of whom are insurance professionals having the requisite qualifications and experience to meet client needs.

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• Aon Buys Hewitt in Move to Expand Its Consulting (nytimes.com)

The Open Organization - Open Book Management

In a recent conversation with a CEO of firm - he mentioned that his organization practices Open book management - and that he often wonders how and why more and more organizations don't adopt the same practice. Having never heard of the specifics of open management I asked him where I could learn more about it. Is it something similar to the transparency that Ricardo Semler talks in Maverick, or what Tony Hseih talks in Delivering Happiness. The CEO then told me that Open-book management focuses on financial transparency. According to Wikipedia:

The basis of open-book management is that the information received by employees should not only help them do their jobs effectively, but help them understand how the company is doing as a whole (Kidwell & Scherer, 2001). According to Case, "a company performs best when its people see themselves as partners in the business rather than as hired hands" (Case,1998 as cited in Pascarella, 1998). The technique is to give employees all relevant financial information about the company so they can make better decisions as workers. This information includes, but is not limited to, revenue, profit, cost of goods, cash flow and expenses.

Stack and Case conceptualize open-book principles in similar ways.

Stack uses three basic principles in his management practice called, The Great Game of Business

His basic rules for open-book management are:

* Know and teach the rules: every employee should be given the measures of business success and taught to understand them
* Follow the Action & Keep Score: Every employee should be expected and enabled to use their knowledge to improve performance
* Provide a Stake in the Outcome: Every employee should have a direct stake in the company's success-and in the risk of failure.

(1992).

Similarly, in 1995, Case made sense of open-book with three main points:

* The company should share finances as well as critical data with all employees
* Employers are challenged to move the numbers in a direction that improves the company
* Employees share in company prosperity

In a company fully employing Open-Book Management employees at all levels are very knowledgeable about how their job fits into the financial plan for the company. However taking a company from "normal" to open is not as easy as just sharing financial statements with employees. The true success of open-book management is when companies allow numbers come bottom-up (as opposed to traditional top-down management)(Johnson, 1992 as cited in Aggarwal & Simkins, 2001). While employees need to be trained to understand income statements and balance sheets; open-book's true triumphs are when employees understand the numbers to a level that they are able to report predictions to upper-management (Stack, 1992). In order to motivate employees to strive for change, Open-Book Management focuses on a "Critical Number". The number is different for every company but it is a number that represents a prime indicator of profitability or break-even point. Discovering this Critical Number is a key component of creating an open-book company.

So how ready is your organization to embrace Open Book Management?

Why not?

Personally, I think something like this will actually take the pressure off leadership to "meet the numbers" and give everyone a line of sight to how their job is linked to a larger purpose.

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• It's More Than Just Opening the Books (boss.blogs.nytimes.com)

Is Stopping Performance Apparaisals Better?

My twitter friend @beastoftraal shared this article (you should read the full article)
Annual Job Review Is 'Total Baloney,' Expert Says An excerpt given below:

Don't get me wrong: Reviewing performance is good; it should happen every day. But employees need evaluations they can believe, not the fraudulent ones they receive. They need evaluations that are dictated by need, not a date on the calendar. They need evaluations that make them strive to improve, not pretend they are perfect.

In fact, if firms did nothing else but just kill off this process they'd immediately be better off. When it comes to performance reviews, there's no question that nothing is better than something. That's how bad they are. The mission of this book is to put corporate executives on notice that they have created a monster. With the help of performance reviews, they've built a corporate culture where bullshit, not straight talk, is the communication etiquette of choice. The result is a managerial mess that they better deal with, and fast.

One of the biggest issues with performance management process is that only one end is shown rigor in. Performance appraisals are linked to pay increases and the "normalization" process across employees can (and does) result in unfairness.

The biggest reason? There is little of the normalization during goal setting time across departments and businesses - and people are measured for different things in the same group.

But the biggest reason is that managers are not adept at giving performance feedback - on an ongoing basis. As someone asked: "Would Roger Federer be a better player if his coach conducted an annual performance appraisal?"

Performance improvement feedback has to be immediately and managers need to judge what is keeping employees from improving - skill or will - and then focus on addressing the root cause and not the symptom.

Job Search and Social Networking

Interesting article by @meridith on BusinessWeekSocial Networking Ever More Critical to Job Search Success quotes a survey by JobVite

social recruiting is beginning to eclipse traditional channels for sourcing candidates, such as job boards and third-party recruiters and search firms.

If you're looking for a job and not active on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter (the three social networking websites most popular with employers, according to the survey), here are four reasons to join these sites and actively manage your profiles.

1. You'll have access to job opportunities at progressive, growing companies.

Companies that are hiring the most people in the shortest periods of time "are the ones who are more aggressively pursuing social recruiting," says Dan Finnigan, Jobvite's CEO. "Companies with the most growth opportunities are trying to get better, higher-quality candidates through social recruiting."

2. You'll have access to job opportunities first.

The Jobvite survey results show that employers prefer using social networking sites for recruiting because they make advertising jobs and sourcing candidates cheap and easy. Tweeting a position they need to fill, for example, doesn't cost a dime. For that reason, online social networks are among the first places employers advertise jobs.

3. Employers are increasingly using LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to find and vet prospective employees.

According to Jobvite's social recruiting survey:

* 73 percent of respondents currently use online social networks or social media sites to support their recruiting efforts.
* 92 percent of respondents hiring in 2010 currently use or plan to recruit via social networks.
* 78 percent of respondents use LinkedIn for recruiting; 55 percent use Facebook (up 15 percent since over 2009); and 45 percent use Twitter (up 32 percent over 2009).
* One-third of respondents always check out candidates' social media profiles when vetting them.
* 58 percent of respondents have successfully hired candidates through social networking websites.

4. You may not find as many job ads on job boards or job opportunities through recruiters.

Some employers are shifting their recruiting activity away from traditional channels, such as job boards and third-party recruiters and search firms, as they deepen their engagement with social recruiting. Jobvite found that 36 percent of survey respondents say they plan to spend less money on job boards as the economy recovers. Slightly more (38 percent) will spend less on third-party recruiters and search firms as the recovery continues.

How differently do tomorrow's workforce and today's leadership think?

A new study by IBM: Millennials And The New Corporate Leaders - Social Responsibility Is Essential shows how differently tomorrow's workforce (people who are currently students) thinks about larger issues than today's CEOs. Read the full post, it's insightful to note the differences as well as the similarities

Among the nine leadership traits CEOs and students could choose from, students placed a higher emphasis on only two leadership qualities - global thinking and a focus on sustainability. Students were 46 percent more likely than CEOs to view global thinking as a top leadership quality. And they were 35 percent more likely to include sustainability in the top three."
Beliefs about globalization and sustainability were even more defining. We found students were much more concerned with these issues than CEOs, and most importantly, saw them as inherently connected."
...
Based on their comments, it was clear that students view globalization and sustainability as intertwined themes. They believe that a global citizen has responsibilities to others in the world, and that an emphasis on sustainability makes one better appreciate the impact of globalization.

"Students' views were stronger than CEOs on every one of the ten questions relating to these topics, and, as their comments made clear, called for bold and immediate action. They spoke about a new relationship among societies and business, economies and governments, and the need for a new definition of 'value' on what they see as a shared planet."

When asked for the top three factors that will impact organizations, 23 percent of CEOs mentioned globalization and 21 percent environmental issues, ranking them number 6 and 7 among their top issues.
For students, globalization was the highest ranked issue, voted on by 55 percent. Environmental issues were voted on by 42 percent of students and ranked fourth.

Employee Satisfaction

John Baldoni writes about the malaise of low employee satisfaction in this article Managing Employee Satisfaction in the Workplace - BusinessWeek and comes up with some important steps organizations and managers can do to address it:

Solutions are not easy. Yes, recognition and incentive programs work, but too often such programs address symptoms rather than the root causes of worker dissatisfaction. They serve as proverbial Band-Aids for deep-seated malaise. If work has little meaning, incentivized solutions are ends unto themselves, not means to an end: a more fulfilling workplace. Making work meaningful is no simple matter and frankly is beyond the responsibility of most managers. After all, businesses hire managers to get the work done, not make work enjoyable.

Finding purpose in work is an individual pursuit, but in my experience I have found good examples of how managers do create higher levels of buy-in and thereby do make the work experience more tolerable. Here are some suggestions.

Address the situation. The worst thing managers who suspect worker dissatisfaction can do is to ignore it, although that is the time-honored tradition. Avoiding the topic does not make it go way. Find ways to raise the issue at staff meetings. The blunt approach—"So what's wrong?"—may not work. People will likely clam up. But if you are clever and talk about the issue and perhaps voice your own dissatisfaction with the situation, you may have better luck. Make it safe for employees to talk about workplace dissatisfiers. Often they are simple things: input into scheduling, flexibility in work hours, or even something employees can make happen themselves, such as cleaner break rooms.

Encourage alternatives. Find ways you can improve the situations. Take the lead in addressing employee complaints. Over the longer term, the best way is to let workers figure things out for themselves. Challenge employees to come up with ideas for making improvements, either in job design or in job process. Look for ways to remove the drudge factor in favor of the value add. Replace make-work projects with make-it-work projects.

Show outcomes. Relate what your team does to what the company does. Say you work in purchasing: Find ways to link your striving for best-value, best-cost suppliers with improved-quality products. Make the link between improved quality and customer satisfaction. Such things would not have happened if purchasing had not done its job. Some companies introduce employees to customers when possible. Then employees see their products or services in use. That's a great way to encourage meaning in the workplace.

Putting meaning into work is not a managerial responsibility; it falls to the employee to find work that matters to him or herself. And when employees sign on to do a job, they have a responsibility to perform it. Yes, in times of scarcity, as we are enduring now, compensation may be less competitive and opportunities for advancement less available, but workers must do the jobs employers pay them to do. Obvious, yes, but as studies show, many employees remain disgruntled.

Simply acknowledging trouble in the workplace is a good first step. It creates an atmosphere of honesty. There is always a risk that people will reveal too much dissatisfaction, but when the manager makes it safe to offer up concerns and provides avenues of redress, workers can feel they are part of a solution rather than part of a problem. And maybe that's all that can happen in the short term. If so, acknowledge it and make the best of it. There are far too many people out of work who would readily switch places with you or your employees.

The Indian Way of Learning?

Image via Wikipedia

One of my favorite programs on TV these days is Business Sutra on CNBC-TV18 which has mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik looking at Indian myths to decipher what are the uniquely Indian ways and how they impact business and work in India.

More interestingly for me - in the embedded video below Devdutt talks about the Indian way of Learning





He says that a Training department - separate from the business is the wrong way to go about it - because if the purpose of a business is growth, then learning - as a precursor to growth - becomes the core of the business - and the business leader who imparts learning gains as much - if not more than the person who is the "learner"

But the crux of the learning method for India - is encapsulated in his statement that while the rest of the world believes that "Feed a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him how to fish and he will not be hungry again" in India the belief is "help him discover his own way of catching fish, because then that is his own!" 

I agree with what Devdutt says, and the main issue (which he touches) is how do we make a process that internalises that growth in the organization is not possible - unless one has shared his/her learning/information with the next generation, and move ahead to the next responsibility.

Business these days is fast and "real time" - there is little or no introspection for (as we L&D types say!) "double-loop learning" - which is not just learning what we did right/wrong - but also why and how we did it right/wrong.

Often such answers are not arrived by solitary introspection - but in conversation with someone who doesn't know - a student - who would ask "how and why" without knowing the norms - that is one way for businesses to evolve into learning organization- giving time and space for introspection by coaching - sharing war stories and letting young soldiers ask questions