Joining People Matters as head of Digital Content and Community

Here's a bit of news. Remember I told you that I had joined a firm as head of HR? Well, that experiment did not go too well, and I quit in two months.

Here's the new bit of news.

I am joining specialist business magazine People Matters where I'll be doing a tonne of stuff (writing stories like this), but primarily would be responsible for Digital Content and Community. Apart from being a magazine, People Matters does syndicated research like this Gender Inclusion Survey report {pdf file}, events (like this Total Rewards conclave this Friday in Gurgaon) as well as training for HR professionals.

Wish me luck :-)

How to get promoted

Image via WikipediaCongratulations, so you’ve landed your first job after graduating. That’s some great news. You’ve got great communication skills and you’ve heard about the great talent shortage in India and therefore you’re fairly certain that the next few years will see you get a promotion every year to make it to the top management of an organization in about a decade, right?

Sorry, but that’s dead wrong.

Getting promoted to higher levels of responsibility is not that easy. Success in your current role does not ensure that you will get promoted to the next level.

“Then how do people get promoted every year?” you might ask.

One needs to understand that organizations (and I do mean all, from business organizations to organized religion to armies and even criminal gangs!) are organized in only one way-like a pyramid. The only thing that changes is how flat or extended that pyramid is!

The truth therefore is that there are always less people in the next level than the lower level. Hence, the number of people that get promoted is always a subset of the people in the current level. How do you get a step ahead of others to get promoted?

Here are three things that done right, could considerably increase your chances in becoming one of those people who are privileged (!) to get promoted.

1. Be a star where you are

To be considered for promotion, you have to be excellent in your current role.

There is no getting away from that fact. One needs to work hard, know what one’s critical goals are and then plan and achieve those goals.

How does one go about it? Here’s what I would suggest someone who’s working for the first time :

Spend some time with your Manager and understand what is expected out of you and how will you be evaluated.

One employee who I knew always used to nag (in a positive way, of course!) his manager if he was unclear of any aspect of the job. He was also proactive in figuring out who could answer his questions if his boss was busy. Over time since he knew so much about the job that he became the default expert in his area and new employees would invariably be sent to him by his boss to be mentored.


If your organization does not have a clear goal setting process or an ineffective evaluation process, then the tendency would be for subjectivity to rule.

2. Show initiative

Focusing and meeting your goals is what is expected out of you, but to be really considered for promotion you have to a lot more.

One of the things you can do is to look or opportunities to display managerial or leadership skills. How can one do so? Simple, take initiative when any opportunity presents itself to organize, direct, plan or bring together people to reach certain goals. Ok, it’s not so simple. How can you get such opportunities? Thankfully, life in organizations presents lots of opportunities. What you need is the ability to spot these opportunities.

These could range from organizing a simple office picnic or party, to putting together a presentation for visiting clients. Showing initiative and asking for roles that help you showcase your leadership skills is a valuable way you can get senior leadership to be aware of your case for promotion. Of course, you have to execute what you have taken on your plate, flawlessly as well.

3. Solve Problems Creatively

Not everybody can get the chance to lead official or informal events, so solving problems is an excellent way to get noticed by your managers. If you’ve spent some time in organizations you will know how people crib and complain about small things!

Resolve not be one of them.

Instead, solve the most pressing issues that might be bothering your boss. Then let him or her know that you have done so. There was this lady in an IT services organization who always knew the better and more economical way to get the job done. When the organization was going through a slowdown in the early 2000s her expertise was very valuable to reduce overheads and probably helped in saving someone’s job!

4. Get to know what the next level demands

If the organization has a written job description of what the next level entails, can you demonstrate that level of performance in your current role?

You can also volunteer to do your leader relatively simpler operational tasks that will help you in
a. learning what the role is
b. free up his/her time to concentrate on doing more productive things

If demonstrated well, these skills will show your Manager that you can do aspects of his/her role well and you will be better off in your chances of getting promoted than others who have only concentrated on doing their current job role.

Conclusion:

What organizations say they expect from employees is very different from what they want from employees they want to promote !

(This article was originally written for JAM )

Innovation and HR

Image via Wikipedia

A senior HR professional mailed me, saying that he's going to be part of a panel discussion on Innovation and what are the areas I think HR can impact innovation. Here's what I wrote back to him:

1. If the culture of an organization is not geared to innovation, then a “skunkworks” approach to innovation is best. That is, a place and structure and group of people separated from the parent company – to form a separate group without the systems and processes of the parent group to reduce innovation.

2. On a personal level, innovation is the way to see reality from a different point of view – hence HR needs to stress on systems and processes that drive diversity in thought and execution.

3. Performance management needs to be tweaked so that risks are rewarded and inaction is penalized. The more risks are taken, the better the chances of innovation. That would also mean that managers need to change the way they view failures.

4. Move focus away from saying No to saying Yes. When an employee approaches a manager with a new idea or innovation in doing the work, the manager should be able to say yes easily, and when he/she says no, he/she should write a business case on why the idea won’t work. This process would incentivize saying Yes instead of No

Why resumes are not going to be redundant

Image via Wikipedia
Dan Schawbel writes about the reasons why he thinks that your online presence will replace the resume in 10 years. While I agree with some of his points, I don't believe that most people will be comfortable with that.

Here are my reasons:

1. Most people are not content-creators. Even when they are experts and practitioners, sharing their POV and experiences does not come naturally to them. They might curate and like content, but for an online presence to be truly representative of showcasing passion, content creation is key.

2. We decode behaviors in the online space as signs of intent. Change your linkedin particulars and people think you're looking for a job. We'll see a lot more people be aware of the signals they are sending and subvert ways to do it.

3. It depends on industry. Let's face it, some industries might move to online presence in some way, but a vast majority of employees working in most industries will not change the way they look for jobs.

4. People will choose privacy over sharing on social networks when they realise that employers are using such sites to assess their employability.

5. Having a common name with just a website/blog along with a Linkedin presence will not make you stand out, if 4 of your namesakes (googlegangers is the term!) Then you need to worry about SEO, ranking high in search engine queries et al. I don't see the John Does doing that.

Research on using internet for leisure and productivity

Image via Wikipedia

There are tonnes of research online. Some saying things to the contrary and some (like the one linked below) supporting the theory that if workers are allowed to use the internet for leisure they are more productive.



I personally am wary of such research that draws correlation between two behaviors. I am always reminded of my Social Research Methodology professor warning us in B School "correlation does not imply causation" - meaning, just the fact that two things are happening together does not mean that one is causing the other. There may be other variables that the researcher has failed to measure or take into account.



In a case of research like this I see a gaping hole. There are at least two factors which will impact productivity: the nature of the work the employees do, and the nature of the organization itself. If you're a courier service, then giving your employees access to the internet has a different meaning than when you're a creative design house. The other factor is, how focused on "time vs output" is the organization. Most organizations cannot track output of most employees, hence get fixated on tracking their time. Such organizations are the ones who cannot give time to employees for "internet leisure"

Amplify’d from uninews.unimelb.edu.au

Dr Brent Coker, from the Department of Management and Marketing, says that workers who engage in ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’ (WILB) are more productive than those who don’t. “People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t,” he says. “Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos on YouTube, using social networking sites like Facebook or shopping online under the pretense that it costs millions in lost productivity, however that’s not always the case.” According to the study of 300 workers, 70% of people who use the Internet at work engage in WILB. Among the most popular WILB activities are searching for information about products, reading online news sites. Playing online games was the fifth most popular, while watching YouTube movies was seventh. The attraction of WILB, according to Dr Coker, can be attributed to people’s imperfect concentration. “People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration. Think back to when you were in class listening to a lecture – after about 20 minutes your concentration probably went right down, yet after a break your concentration was restored. “It’s the same in the work place. Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days work, and as a result, increased productivity.” Read more at uninews.unimelb.edu.au

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/br3xd

Musings on Organizations 2.0

Image via WikipediaMore as I think about the social technologies, I am struck by how many people are caught up at the tools without thinking about the broad societal trends that are being shaped and are also shaping these tools. You might call it cognitive surplus but I love the way Paul Ford describes it - he calls it the "Why wasn't I consulted?" view of people.

And it's not just restricted to the internet and business.

Look at stuff like the Right to Transparency act in India. People expect information to be given and their ideas listened to.

So is this the same mindset that's disrupting 30 yr old dictatorships across Tunisia, Egypt and more and more countries? Maybe. 

People want to have their say, and first they will start with expressing it - and when nobody listens to them, they will impose it.

What does this mean for organizations? Well as Gary Hamel says, it's time for management 2.0

We are in the early days of this movement, and I won't assume that Organizations 1.0 - built on the assumption of the "boss knows the best" and "command and control" is going to die any time soon. I believe that it's as resistant as the proverbial cockroach. 

The organization 2.0 will not be egalitarian. Far from it. It will be biased in favor of opinionated content creators. In some ways it will be a drawback... and a new form of elitism. But I have faith that systems will find their balance and take the lurkers' views by design.

.... more to be continued

The 7 trends to the Future of Talent Management

I was recently invited to be the guest editor of a HR magazine, People Matters, and worked on their cover story The Future of Talent Management.It was an interesting experience, and I discovered that magazine articles have their own needs and constraints compared to writing a blog post



Here's an excerpt. You can read the full article at the link below.

Amplify’d from peoplematters.in

1. Predictive talent analytics As more and more money is being spent in the areas of developing and acquiring talented people, organizations are no longer content with fuzzy ideas about their ‘Return on Investment’ (ROI). Forget return, some large organizations want to predict how people will behave before they spend their money on them. This is causing a few pioneering firms to look at data analytics and predictive analytics. Starbucks, Limited Brands, and Best Buy, can precisely identify the value of a 0.1 per cent increase in engagement among employees at a particular store. At Best Buy, for example, that value is more than $100,000 in the store’s annual operating income. In an HBR issue, Cognizant analyzed social media contributions on its internal social network, particularly internal blogs. It found that employees who contribute in the form of blogs were more engaged and satisfied than others, and performed about 10 per cent better, on an average. An article in Businessweek magazine talked about an employee retention program developed by the software company SAS, which crunches data on employees who have quit in the past five years, detailing their skills, profiles, studies, and friendships. Then it uses this data to find current employees with similar patterns, and flagging them off as potential attrition risks. Another SAS program pinpoints the workers who are most likely to suffer accidents. The Wall Street Journal in May 2009 (iii) reported that Google was starting to analyze data from employee reviews, promotion, and pay histories in a mathematical formula to identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit. Google said that the algorithm had already identified employees who felt under-used, which is a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving the company. This view is echoed by Sanjay Modi of Monster.com. “Technology will help organizations move from present analysis on what is happening, to futuristic analysis of what is going to happen. The more capable the organization is in predicting what is going to happen, the better are their chances to be competitive in the market”, he says. CXOs and HR heads, at companies where employee expenses form a significant part of total costs, will increasingly need to think in terms of quantifying their employee initiatives – effectiveness of engagement programs, impact of engagement on performance, ROI from employee development initiatives, most likely profiles who need successor planning – and, act on the rational basis of such analysis. 2. Backward integration in the people supply chain As organizations run into a shrinking or slow-growing talent pool, with increasing competition, the only thing they can do to stop the wage bill from shooting through the roof is to come together and build more skilled and talented people at the entry level. This is the story that is being played out in the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) as well as the BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) industries. Organizations with large talent needs, like Genpact and ICICI Bank, have tied up with education providers like NIIT to create a highly skilled talent pool, to benefit themselves as well as most organizations in their respective industries. This is making organizations think long-term about collaborating with other organizations for developing talent pools while they simultaneously compete in the marketplace. 3. Focusing on Core Talent Companies are increasingly looking at bringing exceptional talent on board for those roles that are core to their business as opposed to spending on talent across functions that are not so core to the business. There are two main reasons for that: one being a general scarcity of talent, and secondly, that companies are growing between 20 to 30% and cannot afford not having the adequate core talent. Hence they tend to concentrate in recruiting those key people, and focus their attention and resources on developing them. The consequence is that a marketing company will look at bringing in the best talent in the areas of sales and marketing, and a technology company will look at bringing technology experts, and so on. This obviously requires the company to outsource non-core functions, to be handled by the external experts, who specialize in those processes. “We are seeing a clear trend of companies looking at outsourcing to ensure they also have the best talent and systems in those areas that are non-core to them” says Tiger Tyagarajan, COO, Genpact. At the HR operational level, there are two challenges, on one hand, the mandate is to become more effective, while on the other, there is a need to enhance employee experience. As HR people focus more on strategic roles like talent management, they realize they have to farm away from the administrative routine tasks like payroll processing and employee records management to specialists who can reduce costs, as well as increase efficiency in turnaround times by using scale. As a result, the Indian HR outsourcing providers are seeing high growth by focusing on HR service delivery for large organizations. 4. Getting Social with Talent As more and more students have grown up using Facebook and other social networking platforms through school and college, when they look at legacy email systems in large corporates with little or no external access to the internet, they get disengaged. Most of them then access these sites on their mobile phones. In fact, there are quite a few Indian players, like Infosys’s iEngage product to Qontext, MangoSpring, Cyn.in and KineticGlue, who offer SaaS (Software as a Service) based “social environments” to worldwide clients. World leaders in this space are Socialtext, Jive, Yammer and Socialcast. Now even large ERP vendors like Oracle and Salesforce, and software firms like IBM and Microsoft are building a social layer around their products, to enhance collaboration and communication. Organizations which have to work with and engage today’s generation will need to provide them with a technology ecosystem that is similar to the technology ecosystem they access in their personal lives. Clunky email systems and static intranets will cause a workplace to be labeled “not cool”. However, it is not just about the technology, but the values behind these tools, that organization would be wise to heed. These technologies accord primacy to the value of the great idea, co-creation, the wisdom of the crowds, and radical transparency. These values are what compete directly with most organizational cultures - based on command and control. Tomorrow’s talent would want both the values to be congruent - old values along with new technology will merely work in the short-run. In the long-run it would be a waste of money. 5. Leveraging Technology As employees spend more and more of their work on technology platforms, they are going to leave digital trails about what they do and how they perform. The activity stream of the social intranet will meet the traditional talent management suite, and unless all aspects of an ‘Employee’s Life Cycle’ can be represented in it, the dollars spent on it would be a waste. For example, an employee referral application on the company social network should tie into the Applicant Tracking System, or the recruitment process module of the HRIS, seamlessly. And perhaps in the future, should also look at mobile integration, for the employee to easily check the progress of his referred candidate. Most talent management systems are strong in one aspect of talent management, having grown from one module, and then developing the other modules. However, what employees and HR professionals need is an integrated system that seamlessly combines talent acquisition, talent development and career development modules, and where the data is dynamically kept alive by constant updation by the employee and mentors/supervisors. 6. Just-In-Time Talent This refers to talent brought in to address specific tasks for really short periods of time. Some examples of such just-in-time talent could be for getting their inputs on tactical choices or designing or focused answers around an industry. Small and medium businesses in the US use websites like Elance.com to invite freelancers to pitch for small jobs. On the other hand, firms like Gerson Lehrman Group act as platforms where large investment firms can tap rare experts across the world - for an affordable sum like $100 for an hour’s conversation. We expect large firms to increasingly need short-term talent and expertise, and will need to start building their own “expert networks”, or partner with other firms to build such networks. In the future, the ability to attract creative individuals for specific consulting engagements will be critical for organizations. 7. The CEO as the Chief Talent Officer In themselves, the ideas suggested in McKinsey’s ‘The War for Talent’ article were not revolutionary. Many of the most admired firms which were great places to work have been following these practices since a long time. The difference that the article did was that it made talent management a CEO-level priority. And it showcased that organizations which did not have a talent mindset could stand to lose as the “War for Talent” intensifies in the future. And this made CEOs look at the HR function with new eyes. The talent imperative is forcing CEOs to increasingly discuss people issues - who are the people ready to lead businesses, who are ready to take over from them, and who are being groomed for business lines of the future. He will also need to know who the key talents are, without whom the competitiveness of the firm will erode. Is it the hot-shot sales overachiever, or is it the R&D scientist who is getting his fifth patent this year? Or is it someone else? The trend in companies is to identify who key people who have special skills and losing them would set back the organization. Is it the DBA who knows the innards of the database unlike any one else? What’s the risk mitigation strategy if he decides to leave? HR professionals and general managers will need to have anticipated questions such as these. Sanjay Modi of Monster.com shares this sentiment. “30 to 40 per cent of the of the CEO’s time will be spent in people-related issues and decisions. The reason is that talent is a business driver, so the CEO cannot take an eye away from people issues. The need for HR and the CEO to work together will intensify because the war for talent, like we saw in 2007, is back. Overall, I think what is new is the mind shift; issues like retaining talent, use of technology, focus on communication, will become central, to both the HR and CEO, in terms of understanding and sincerity to execute.” Talent Management is more and more business critical to organizations, bringing with it, new visibility and challenges, for HR people. This new age also means that other business leaders and the CEO will seek to influence the ‘Talent Agenda’. HR must welcome this reality and work to create an organizational culture where talent is accorded top priority. HR must facilitate members of the leadership team to act as talent ambassadors, constantly thinking of new innovative ways of building their talent and keeping a track of external talent. These factors are fast becoming crucial requirements in the process of creating “talent magnets” in each industry – companies with the best employer brand among peers will ultimately contribute to market leadership. Read more at peoplematters.in

 

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

HR people need to care about learning not just training

So I met a HR head of a large firm today and told him that while I have been a Training professional most of my life, my real passion is to help people learn.

On hearing that one eyebrow of his shot up and he asked "What's the difference?"

I answered that training is the thing that the organization does to the employee. But learning is what the employee carries with him/her.

Sometimes, if things go well the circles of training and learning overlap to a large extent. However, most often than not, the overlap is not high. And sometimes there is no overlap. (if you're a HR person and are shaking your head, here's a small exercise for you.. go and ask 20 people their biggest learning and where they learnt it. Only 1 or 2 people will say it was in a classroom training)

Learning is impacted by many things outside the HR professional's control. Like whether the correct people are nominated to the training, and whether they can experiment and make mistakes when applying learnings.

The biggest aspect to learning is social interaction between learners. And between experts and learners

Connecting people who are journeying their own discoveries of learning is the best way for a person to learn.

The community so formed is non-judgemental and supportive.

Mostly organizations didn't have the technology to keep a learning community like this alive, but now with social tools they don't have that excuse any longer.

So if you're a HR person, think more than "training" and think about how to facilitate people's learning.

Are you doing what's important?

Image via WikipediaOver the last few weeks I have been grappling with some personal bad news... relatives admitted into hospitals. Two of them passing away. Engaging with family members in grief.

These were also time that made me introspect. About what is important to me in life. Where do I come from. And where am I going towards. And what I want to be doing in my journey.

These are not simple answers, and these questions are journeys in themselves.

If there's one thing I want you to focus on everyday it's in asking yourself "What is important for me? And what I am I doing today to focus on it?"

Social Media at Work - A way to manage Talent?

Image via CrunchBaseThe folks at GD Goenka World Institute and the National HRD Network of India organized a Talent Acquisition, Engagement and Retention Conclave in Mumbai on 21st Jan 2011. The Corporate Resource Centre, GDGWI creating a resource handbook for the conclave participants and requested me to contribute a written interview for the same.

Here are the questions and my answers to them:


Q1. Like an email policy do you think it is important to formulate a social media
company policy as well?

Absolutely. Unlike email social communication on networks and communities are
transparent and open to all. People share their feelings, frustrations and joys with
their connections – and these can have implications for their employers. Progressive
organizations like Intel, IBM have put into place social media policies (see here for a
great list ) and Indian firms like Infosys are also starting to do the same

Q2.’ Facebook, twitter are a waste of time to Facebook, Twitter are critical to our
survival’, do you think there is a middle path?

Social networks are not an add-on. They have to have a base in the business of the firm. If the firm has customers online who are talking about the products and brands and sharing their experiences then it’s critical to join the conversation and engage with them. In B2B situations harnessing social networks and building specific communities can help firms build additional business. Firms like Zappos and Best Buy use twitter to respond to customer feedback and service them. While firms like Dell have used Twitter to sell more than 2 million dollars worth of products in one year.


So the short answer is the right path depends on the willingness of the business leadership to embrace this new model of customer engagement, co-creation and service.

Q3. What do you think about searching for information on ‘Google’ for the shortlisted candidates you wish to hire?

I personally think that professional data that a google search gives is OK. It can act as a filtering/reference check. However we have to be careful that we do not get into moral/ value judgement on what the internet shows about the candidates’ personal profile/ political/sexual outlook. It would also need to be seen as to what time was the data shown. If the candidate had posted something on a website 2-3 years ago it might not
be his view currently – so that would need to be looked at too.

Q4. Is your company using any social media platforms for talent acquisition and or
marketing?

I am a freelancer and I use social media platforms like my blog , Twitter (Gautam Ghosh), Facebook (Gautam Ghosh) and a custom community HR Professionals' Network to build business and engage with prospective clients.

Q5. What is your advice to students about managing their online personas?

•Always remember that what you post can be traced and found.

•Check your privacy settings - and post accordingly

•If you blog, have a disclaimer that these are your views only

•Do not indulge in hate speech against any community, religious group or person.

•If blogging about movies/sports make another persona – and delink it from your real name. Unless you want to make a career in movie/sports writing.

•Do not use copyrighted images or plagiarize other’s works as your own. If you use other’s works under the creative commons license always attribute.

After giving this interview I came across two great posts - this one by David Weinberger states how we are the medium, as well as John Seely Brown and John Hagel's contrarian views on how to engage in social networking

Related articles

• Gautam Ghosh: Work is Social (fredzimny.wordpress.com)