My Top posts of 2010

2010 was a mixed year for the blog. I took a lot of sharing content kind of posts off, doing the linking on Twitter and Google Reader  as well as writing answers on Quora

Then I discovered Amplify, and am back to sharing interesting content here (along with it being on Twitter and Google Buzz)

I put out 207 posts in 2010 and got around 62,000 views.

I am particularly proud of these posts, which didn't get that much traffic :

• Designing Training for Organizations 2.0
• How organizations can build talent communities
• How can HR use social media
• Why HR needs to leverage Enterprise 2.0
• 7 types of roles in employee communities
• Employee Advocates
• Use cases for Talent and Employee Communities
• Making Work Meaningful
• The Social Business Employee Manifesto
• Social Human Resources
• Enterprise 2.0 and Social Intranet - what is the difference?

However, the posts that got the most views were:

1. The most powerful HR professionals in India
2. An old post from 2006 10 reasons why Organizations are not able to retain employees
3. A post from 2005 (!) should software engineers go for an MBA?
4. My parting from 2020 Social
5. 5 things social media has taught me
6. A post from 2004(!!!) Challenges for Training and Learning - guess some things don't change :-)
7. Sexual Harassment in India's Knowledge industries - an ugly truth we don't want to see?
8. Cisco on People Power and Collaboration
9. 5 Skills for Career Success
10. The Content Community Social Media Model

And there were some mainstream media mentions also :-)

See you in 2011

The top 25 Influencers in Enterprise Social Media

Bill Ives recently blogged about Traackr (who do the Top 25 Influencers in HR and Talent Management too)

And I guess it was the KM related keywords that Bill defined - but I was ranked number 4 in the list

Others in the list includes many people I look up to, like Bill Ives, John Ingham, Dion Hinchcliffe, Luis Suarez, Sameer Patel and Ray Wang. I am flattered to be in their company :-)

ROI of Enterprise 2.0 at Accenture

My friend Karthik S recently shared a very interesting page on Accenture about their Social Software and how it benefit them.

In case you're an Internal Social Strategist in your firm you should use these numbers to convince your business leadership to adopt the Social Workplace

 Take a look:

Amplify’d from www.accenture.com

Here is an overview of our results as reported from internal employee surveys and our scorecard: Increasing usage and adoption 100,000-plus people use profile pages an average of three times a month to find experts and connect with colleagues. About 100,000 Accenture employees have customized their profiles (options include pictures, bios, hobbies, etc.). 4,634 updates per month made to employee profiles. 10,706 blogs created annually, increasing at a rate of more than 200 percent annually. 3,336 microblog posts made per month. 1,579 specialized groups created to date. 7,886 items added to Accenture Media Exchange. 110,850 desktop audio calls made per month. 764 entries posted to our internal encyclopedia. 14.9 million IM sessions/conversations occur per month. 139,269 desktop sharing sessions occur per month. 3,900 telepresence hours used per month. 15.17 million audio/video/desktop conferencing minutes per month. Reaping cost savings More than 20 million minutes of company-standard monthly VoIP audio/video usage, resulting in avoided mobile and landline long distance/international voice costs. More than 5,000 annual video conferencing meetings resulting in avoided travel costs. Telepresence usage has slashed travel costs and the savings are exceeding our annual targets, thus far returning more than two times our monthly operating cost. Improving employee satisfaction We have achieved our highest scores to date on employee surveys for: “I can easily find information I need to do my job” and “I can easily find people with expertise/skills I need to do my job.” Our employees tell us Collaboration 2.0 plays a crucial part in the timely completion of projects for clients, while improving client satisfaction: “I found the expert in 15 minutes versus two days.” “Collaboration 2.0 served as the lifeline when communicating with our global teammates, and helped us establish less of an offshore versus onshore perspective and allowed for more of a fluid team feel.” “We harnessed the power of social networking to create a virtual community of new recruits—a place where people in similar situations can support each other and access the resources they need. It’s very exciting when we can leverage technology to establish that connection.” “I’ve been generating anywhere from $500 to $1,000 of savings per week over international dialing rates.” “Microblogging helps me connect to the experts. It doesn’t limit me ... I’m able to post a question or make a comment and it doesn’t matter whether I’m an analyst or a senior executive. Everybody’s opinion counts.” Enhancing client relations Enhanced ability to staff global teams with the right skills at the right time during critical junctures in client projects. Helped maintain long-standing, trusted relationships with clients: 99 percent of our top 100 clients have been with us for 5 years and 87 percent for 10 years. Improved reaction time to client requests. Employees on client teams comment on how Collaboration 2.0 strengthens client relations: “Collaboration 2.0 tools helped us reduce our travel expenses by about 25 percent and improve work/life balance. The audio, video and especially application sharing make teaming much more interactive when we are all offsite.” “It is common for us to be in IM sessions and then quickly decide to pull in two or three other people into the session, add audio/video and share someone’s screen so we can review a document together.” “Accenture People has been a great help defining a similar system with our client.” Collaboration 2.0 brings together our highly matrixed, ad hoc, virtual teams. I now interact with people I didn’t know before we built Collaboration 2.0. When we piloted Accenture Groups, one of our US-based employees noted: "I had no idea we had Java developers in Tokyo" after he saw several Tokyo employees join the Java developers group. Forming groups raises awareness of our global resources and enables networking among colleagues at a faster pace, which matches our rate of growth. Most importantly, our tools work in concert with a myriad of workflows and processes — and this ease-of-use, we believe, is the coup de grâce of our groundswelling success. Read more at www.accenture.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/jxe8

Curating the Indian Enterprise 2.0 vendors and tools

Great cartoon at Geek and Poke

Over the last 2 years I have been noting with pride how some Indian startups fuelled by SaaS products are building Enterprise Collaboration tools out of India and competing against the big boys in the global market.

Here's my work in progress list of such tools... If you know any more, please leave a comment with the tool's URL

1. Qontext by the group behind Pramati Technologies (who also built SocialTwist)
2. Cyn.in by Cynapse (open-source)
3. KineticGlue (blogged about it here)
4. Remindo
5. Kreeo - focused on social learning and KM
6. Mangospring
7. Infosys iEngage (blogged about it here) 

Amongst these tools I have worked a little bit on Cyn.in - so am not ranking these on features and functionalities right now. But its interesting to see how they are positioning themselves and building linkages with other tools 

The New Management is Abstract-Expressionistic

In the NYT several Innovation consulting firms and thought leaders are profiled - but what caught my eye is this quote by Dev Patnaik of Jump who shares how technology has changed the meaning of management - and how today we are in the Abstract Expressionistic Era of Management.



Read it here:

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

Dev Patnaik of Jump has his own answer to the why-now question. He contends that advances in technology over the past three decades have gradually forced management to reconceive its role in the corporation, shifting its focus from processing data to something more esoteric. “My dad was a midlevel manager for I.B.M.,” Patnaik explains, “and I remember him in the ’70s, sitting there with plastic 3M transparencies, by hand, with marker, to make presentations. For years, the good manager was one who had data at their fingertips. What’s our sales in Peoria? ‘It’s actually 47 percent above last year.’ People say, ‘Oh, he’s a good manager.’ ” By the early ’90s, though, companies like Microsoft and SAP were selling software that digitized this task. The days when a manager at, say, the Gap could earn a bow just for knowing how many sweaters to ship to Seattle were over. “When that happens, what is the role of the manager?” Patnaik asks. “Suddenly it’s about something else. Suddenly it’s about leadership, creativity, vision. Those are the differentiating things, right?” Patnaik draws an analogy to painting, which for centuries was all about rendering reality as accurately as possible, until a new technology — photography — showed up, throwing all those brush-wielding artists into crisis. “Then painters said: ‘Well, wait, you can tell what is but you can’t tell me my impression of what is. Here’s how it looks to me, like Seurat. Or the Cubists who said, ‘You can’t capture what is going on from multiple angles.’ ” Technology forced painters to re-evaluate, which transformed their work. Something similar has happened in corporate America. As Patnaik puts it, “We’re in the abstract-expressionist era of management.” Read more at www.nytimes.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/jsai

Article on Social Media and HR

I recently wrote a guest column for India's leading HR magazine, People Matters on why and how HR people should leverage social media.



Here's an excerpt from the article. Click on the link to read the full article.



Would appreciate your feedback

Amplify’d from peoplematters.in

The big change between earlier media and “social media” is that people who participate in these have moved from being passive consumers of information and entertainment to creators. Every person can theoretically publish his own newspaper editorial (aka blogs) or his own TV channel (on YouTube). Most organizations don’t get this. They believe Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are additional channels to TV, radio and print. They then are surprised when consumers react and respond. It’s a great high when the reaction is positive – and despair when they react negatively. Organizations that are venturing into social media need to embrace transparent and open communication. It also has to set processes and workflows that add on to traditional operations and customer service workflows so that external issues are absorbed internally and resolved and then communicated externally. Having just one gate between the organization and its customers results in social media bottleneck – and that approach does not scale for larger companies in the long run. Hence, the social business enables a large part of the employees to interact with customers and encourages customers to connect with other customers. A large technology firm in the US found that it could reduce support costs if it put in a bulletin board where experienced users helped newer users. At its epitome, the social business involves the customer in its innovation process either by using the collective wisdom of the community or by an ideation system where users give ideas for the product or service. Why should HR lead this initiative? HR (in the sphere of OD) has the critical skill to make such changes less painful and with a higher rate of success. Let's face it, change management seen from a tool vendor's point of view is just a "training program" and about process changes. Other business functions really don't have the change management understanding that OD practitioners have. That understanding can be channelised to make "social business" a reality by thinking about the structure, process, emotional and personal aspects of change. Enterprise 2.0 is both about engaging people with other people (employees, partners, customers) as well as embedding that in the business processes. Typically, HR professionals don't get a chance to influence what happens in the business – but with E2.0 they can – and build their strategic impact. Holy grail, anyone? Enterprise 2.0 will soon be the platform of learning and people to people engagement in the organization and as such will have impact on all aspects of HR work – Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Learning and Development. And unless HR leads the conversation, it will find itself more and more redundant like IT departments are finding themselves. My view is that someone in the Marketing / Recruiting function needs to take a “Talent Community Manager” role to drive these initiatives and to get others internally in the organization to get engaged with the candidate community. This community manager needs to have a mindset of open and honest collaboration and organizations must be clear about what objectives they expect from her / him and therefore what metrics to track to check her / his performance. Soon companies will collate all these efforts into a community that they will own – and which will have representation on social networks and blogs. Read more at peoplematters.in

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/jjf2

Workshop on Social Media for HR departments

Recently I conducted a workshop for the HR leadership of a firm on how they could use social media internally and externally

Thought I should share the presentation with you all too

Click on the link below

Social media for HR executives workshop

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh.

If you think anything more needs to added send me a mail at gautam@gautamblogs.com

If you'd like me to run this workshop for your organization do let me know :-)

The Presentation I didn't make @Indiasocial #iss10

This was the presentation I had initially prepared for IndiaSocial summit - but didn't end up making

Thought I'd share it any way ;-)

Work is Social, Gautam Ghosh, Management Consultant

View more presentations from India Social.

Customers and Employees in the age of Social Media

At the IndiaSocial talk I made a point that social media does not scale. Lots of people mentioned that they disagreed with me.

Maybe I wasn't clear, what I meant was that conversations don't scale - if you start a Twitter account or a Facebook page (managed by Marketing/or outsourcing it) and people flood you with questions.

Which is why instead of an "social media strategy" team - the conversations need to be between all employees and the customers.

Like the way Best Buy has done with Twelpforce (see this introduction for their employees)

I have talked about how we're seeing the employee emerge as a huge brand ambassador and advocate, indeed the new media. 

However, as this post by @BillIves quotes a Forrester research, employees who are empowered and use social media are more likely to recommend their company's products and services.

Sure, you will need to give up control when you empower employees to speak on behalf of your firm. And yes, some might misuse the power. 

However I believe that employees when really empowered - respond admirably. 

What it also needs to be balanced with is processes, structures and culture internally where this is reflected. 

As I said during the IndiaSocial summit - "you cannot be social outside and anti-social inside" the firewall. 

Enterprise talk at @IndiaSocial

Was an interesting experience today at my first "Social Media" conference - where I was part of the B2B and Enterprise panel.

When Gaurav (@gauravonomics who was moderating) asked me what I thought B2B organizations should do internally - I replied that organizations that want to be social externally should not be anti-social internally. To really leverage the power of employees and scale conversations. I also shared that organizations needed to "design time" for employees' "cognitive surplus" to ensure sharing and internal connections and conversations to develop

Prem Aparanji (@prem_k) shared that social CRM looks at customers having consistent experiences across channels - and therefore internally silos need to be connected using social networking within the enterprise. He added how his firm Cognizant has a vibrant internal blogging culture, which is possible because there already was a culture in place where one could give open feedback to seniors. So the culture needs to be in place before the tool, to make it useful

Here's the presentation that Prem made about Social CRM

SCRM@ISS10

View more presentations from Prem Kumar Aparanji.

Amit Ranjan (@amitranjan) of Slideshare shared examples of how different parts of organizations are not in sync. He said often the Marketing folks put up slides on their site - and after some months they are sent DMCA notice by the same firm's Legal team to take down the presentations.

Sanjay Sahay (@sanjay_sahay) of Infosys shared that internally moving a large organization to "social" is going to be bumpy - and there will be disruptions which people have to be ready for.

Hari V Krishnan (@harivk) of Linkedin India shared how investing time by business leaders can build thought leadership by simple things like using Polls and Linkedin Answers informatively.

Overall it was a great conference and I thoroughly enjoyed some other sessions - specially the Mobile Social Networking session and the key note speech by Santosh Desai (@desaisantosh) of Future Brands. His insights on "brands hate people" and therefore will be painful for them to adapt to this new form of media - that was refreshing.

Here's a photo that @prem_k clicked when I was listening to Santosh Desai



The ended on a great note when I found that I had made it to two Influencer lists compiled

1. The Enterprise Social Media top 25 Influencers
2. Top 25 Online Influencers in Talent Management v2

P.S. Blog posts on the IndiaSocial summit by Gaurav Mishra and Karthik S.

Some Interesting Articles: HR, Social Business

Eric Garland thinks HR systems and processes are at odds with the demands of innovation and creative destruction. And I think he's right. HR focusses on how do we hire/promote/develop people based on what has worked in the past. Which could be a huge reason why successful companies fall into the Innovator's dilemma. What do you think?

Oscar Berg writes how in today's increasingly virtual workplace corporate social networking helps employees build strong personal networks that cut through silos.

McKinsey’s new survey research finds that companies using the Web intensively gain greater market share and higher margins. A new class of company is emerging—one that uses collaborative Web 2.0 technologies intensively to connect the internal efforts of employees and to extend the organization’s reach to customers, partners, and suppliers.

Prasad Kurian asks whether HR should stop worry about being a "strategic partner to business" and instead try and become "Architects of Meaning"

Did you know that the word "dynamic" was the most overused word in Indian job hunters' resumes - according to analytics by Linkedin. See some of the fun facts and other hackneyed phrases here.

And if you've ever worked in a toxic workplace you'll nod at the Gervais principle or recognise the Office according to The Office

Happy reading!

Participating at @IndiaSocial Summit #iss10

This Friday, 17th December, I will be participating in a panel discussion at the first IndiaSocial summit 2010 - probably the first Indian conference dedicated to how businesses can leverage social media.

The panel I would be participating in is:

Different Expectations – B2B and enterprise How can B2B marketers leverage social data for product development, customer service, marketing and others aspects of business. Lead generation is a key aspect of B2B use of social media -what are the learnings? How do social technologies facilitate and impact Enterprise collaboration. Is Social CRM just a buzzword?

The panel participants would be moderated by my friend Gaurav Mishra, Director – Social Media-Asia, MSL Group, Amit Ranjan, Co-founder, Slideshare, Hari V Krishnan who's Country Head, LinkedIn India, Prem Kumar Aparanji, Evangelist – Social CRM, Customer Solutions Practice, Cognizant and Sanjay Sahay, Global Head of Digital Marketing at Infosys

Am also looking forward to hearing Santosh Desai of Future Brands, Kirthiga Reddy of Facebook, Jaspreet Bindra of Microsoft at the conference.

Can HR really be the Rockstar of the Talent Age

I think I saw it first on a slide in Tom Peter's presentation. It stated something like "Human Resources? Or Rockstars of the Talent Age?"

That was a time I felt really proud of being a HR professional.

However, over the years I have seen organizations which rely on "Rockstar" talent - and I can say because of  the critical and central nature to the business, HR gets sidelined in such organizations by the business leadership.

So while HR thinks of standardisation - in a firm driven by rockstar talent (think a stock market trading firm, a law firm, or a football team or an IPL team) the focus is not standardisation, job descriptions are discarded, and there is stratospheric compensation for the rockstars.

The focus of talent and development in such firms is not "competency development" by looking at what gaps need to be filled. But rather to deepen and sharpen the skills the rockstar talent already has.

Recruitment is the personal goal - not of the HR people- but of business leaders and the CEO. And they recruit not by sending out job descriptions, or advertising on job sites - but by knowing the industry and knowing who are the rockstars and pursuing them as they would pursue a prospective client and taking responsibility for closing the deal (read this article on how Bill Gates used to spend 50% of his time on recruiting related roles)

What do you think?

Is HR needed in a Rockstar driven organization?

Also read this earlier post of mine: Great HR Happens when work is Boring

Related articles

• Is HR Too Important To Be Left to HR? (blogs.hbr.org)

Enterprise 2.0 and Social Software should be opt-in

Often I've come across the argument how activity streams in Enterprise 2.0 tools would be great for building the "ambient awareness" that microsharing works - and I agree. Today's email culture of cc'ing everyone leads to overload of actionable information for the employee.

And yet, I shudder when I think what would happen if really social softwares are adopted by the majority of employees, if things are not designed well can we see tools that add to the noise they were supposed to solve?

This thought struck me when a CEO of a firm that makes an enterprise collaboration/social intranet tool called me and was describing a new feature they have added. (I haven't got a demo yet, so don't have screen shots to share) The feature basically adds every activity you do on the software and even your desktop software to the activity stream.

So imagine if you opened the ppt your colleague sent you - added your comments on specific slides and made some changes - that update goes on to the activity stream. Imagine even 25% of your employees doing that regularly.

Clearly this is a useful feature and yet we have to make this as granular to opt in as possible in the part of every employee - otherwise we'll see the issues that plague email on the social software too.

What do you think?

Related articles

• Make It Work: One Key to Enterprise 2.0 Adoption | Enterprise 2.0 Blogs (aiimcommunities.org)

Signs of a toxic workplace

Image via Wikipedia
There are various definitions of toxic workplaces that can be found. Here's my take on what makes a toxic workplace:

1. Zero trust or worse, active distrust. When a manager/leader believes that people are basically bad and they need to be "controlled" we have the most critical pointers to a toxic workplace. This gives rise to a plethora of policies that puts the onus on the employee to prove everything - and gives rise to behaviour by them that is shirking and slacking.
2. Big brother syndrome. Arising out of the first point every body is expected to seek permission before every small activity. And decision about that is centralised and lower managers are not empowered to take those decisions.
3. Ethically challenged. In the rush to control the bottom line the focus on doing the right thing is lost and employees bear the brunt of it.
4. Negative behaviour is rewarded. When the leader comes from a domineering and bullying workstyle - the tolerance for other behavior is low. It is assumed that a collaborative leadership style is ineffective. This leads to every manager role modelling the bullying behavior to conform to the leader's style and a cascading nastiness in the workplace.
5. No distinction is made between behavior and people. Mistakes are pointed out publicly in front of peers and people are humiliated with their dignity stripped away.

What do you think? What are the other signs of a toxic workplace that you might have encountered?

See some of the articles linked below:

Related articles

• Trashy Leaders and Corporate Black Holes (psychologytoday.com)
• Why Nastiness in the Workplace Can Destroy a Company (biojobblog.com)
• Snakes in Suits - risks with psychopaths in the workplace (lukenotricks.blogspot.com)

Employees Creating the Social and Sustainable Organization

Came across this interesting interview of Judah Schiller on Sustainability: Make It Personal | Sustainable Life Media

SLM: More companies seem to be putting employees at the center of their green marketing efforts as well. For example, Anheuser Busch is airing new commercials that feature employees discussing the company's environmental programs. Coke's chief marketing officer recently called employees the company's "green ambassadors." Is this the beginning of a trend?

Judah: A brand can stand for a lot of things. Having a culture of sustainability - one that's based on an organization of people who are actively tied into creating a sustainable company and a sustainable brand - speaks very loudly and shows a deep commitment. What could be better for a brand than being backed by five or ten thousand people who are genuinely working both for their own personal interests and for the organization and its attempts to be a better corporate citizen.

I see a fundamental difference between the companies that are instituting high-level sustainability programs and the companies that have culture-building engagement programs designed to incorporate sustainability at all levels of the operation. The companies that create a culture of sustainability are equipped to demonstrate their sincerity and authenticity to the consumer by really unpacking the brand throughout the product lifecycle. There's already a sea of eco-labeling going on. Being able to tell a more robust sustainability story is going to be essential.

Should HR students read my blog?

I guess I write about unconventional things - which I have to admit "traditional HR" might find impractical, subversive or nonsensical. So I was surprised to find that this blog was listed as one of the 50 Resources for Students Attending Online Human Resource Management Schools

You can see it here

Personally, I think HR students shouldn't read my blog :-) They'll question their HR leaders too much then ;-)

More on Social Media and Organizational Use

So last night I was invited to a party where there were lots of legendary Indian HR leaders. These were folks who probably collectively handle HR for some of India's biggest conglomerates, BPOs, HR Consulting firms.

The host introduced me to them as the "HR professional who knows most about web 2.0 in India" and the conversation soon turned to "oh, I always wanted to blog but I think it's a generational thing - I just can't get round to blogging or Tweeting"

Normally I smile politely (taking the compliment that I am "young" ;-) in my stride) but yesterday I decided to take a different track. So I said "No it's not a generational thing"

"What do you mean?"

"Well if Tom Peters (@tom_peters) in the US and Sivakumar Surampudi (@s_sivakumar) CEO of India's very own ITC ABD can Tweet and Blog - what's your excuse. And they're not exactly generation Y :-)"

And I quoted @rotkapchen who said in @marciamarcia's book that "Status updates are to the knowledge firms what the assembly lines are to manufacturing firms"

I then shared my view that soon organizational firewalls will melt away and the only way to manage in the coming age would be to nurture employees into becoming advocates for both your employer brand as well as your product brands.

Then I asked the folks if they had heard of Zappos - and when they said they hadn't - I told them that they should read the @zappos CEO's book - Delivering Happiness ( my review here) - in which he says "Culture is the brand - and the brand is the culture"

There is no greater call to HR leaders to be integral to the business than that!

My interview at Blogadda

The folks at Blogadda - the Indian blogging community- recently interviewed me on my experiences as a blogger and my understanding on the Indian workplace and social media

You can read the whole interview here