Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: management

  • The three S’s of employee engagement

    The three S’s of employee engagement

    We need to rethink how we measure performance in the workplace says Andrew Lafontaine, Senior Director Human Capital Managemet Strategy & Transformation at Oracle Australia.

    As business adapts to a changing society and mobile technologies, one of the questions facing managers is the mismatch between the Millennial generation and those GenX and Boomers who make up most of the executive suite, Lafontaine sees this as been in how the younger cohort approaches authority.

    “There certainly can be a disconnect between Millennials and boomers. Millennials don’t see hierarchy the way boomers see it as important,” says Lafontaine. “Boomers have ingrained view of the way they have come through the workforce.”

    Breaking the old rules

    Unfortunately for those older managers, their world was based on a formalised, ‘straight line’ hierarchy dating back to the days ships’ captains used flags and voice tubes to communicate.

    That rigid military style worked well for nearly two hundred years of business with mail and then the telephone only reinforcing that management model. Now newer collaboration tools mean different ways of working becoming possible.

    A problem with those different ways of working in teams is how performance is measured warns Lafontaine.  “What they are not measuring at the moment are what I call ‘network performance’. How workers they helping their colleagues, collaborating and working together.”

    Separating home and office

    With mobile technologies becoming ubiquitous it becomes harder to separate work from home life, “we working now from home and on the tram. You don’t need a nine to five workforce nad companies have to deal with and embrace the technology,” says Lafontaine.

    In the context of babyboomers and GenX workers, that technology meant longer hours in the office but Lafontaine suggests things are now changing. “There other areas to measure. How are they looking after themselves? The days of babyboomers working 12 or 14 hours a day and neglecting their health or outside life are over.”

    For the future company, the key to success lies in engaging their employees Lafontaine says. “A more highly engaged workforce delivers better outcomes. Engagement is the three S’s: Stay, Say and Strive”

    Those S’s come down to three questions for the worker; should I stay? What should I say? and How should I strive to do a better job?

    For managers the challenge is engage all workers regardless of age, the task of finding what engages and motivates workers of the computer generation is only just beginning.

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  • Twitter’s search for meaning

    Twitter’s search for meaning

    New York Times writer Nick Bilton delves into Twitter’s search for a new CEO and comes up with a left of field conclusion – the company doesn’t actually know what it is.

    Twitter has certainly been casting around to define itself, particularly after its stock market listing that saw it valued at over twenty billion dollars.

    Bilton flags one reason why management is so uncertain about their company’s identity, that it’s directors don’t use the service themselves.

    As I see it, the problems at Twitter come down to a lack of leadership and a micromanaging board.

    And the churn is constant: many of its founders, chief executives, numerous product directors and other top brass have been fired or pushed out. Three of the eight positions on the current board belong to Mr. Dorsey and the former chief executives. About half of the board barely tweets.

    The lack of social media credibility on the board raises another issue about how much direct industry expertise should a company’s directors have. While it’s almost certainly not desirable to have insiders dominate a board certainly some, if not the majority, of directors should have some experience in the industries the company operates in.

    For Twitter though they desperately need to define the business and what its valuation really is. Even more pressing is to show how the platform differs from Facebook as the confusion of investors, users and advertisers isn’t helping.

    Ultimately as Bilton suggests the direction of a business is determined by the board, it’s time Twitter found at least a few directors who at least use social media, if not have some understanding and experience in the business.

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  • Shifting Microsoft’s culture

    Shifting Microsoft’s culture

    “What would be lost if we disappeared?” is the question Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claims is driving the company’s direction in his latest memo to employees.

    In the email obtained by website Geekwire, Nadella told his staff redefining the company’s culture is key to success, “we can do magical things when we come together with a shared mission, clear strategy, and a culture that brings out the best in us individually and collectively.”

    That culture though is not static and Nadella is describes how the company needs to focus on helping its customers through its cloud and Windows based products.

    For Microsoft this is not new, the change from a desktop and server based licensing business to one dependent upon cloud subscription services has been a huge change for the business since the iPhone was released nearly a decade ago.

    The challenge for Nadella however is to keep revenues coming in as the river of gold that was Microsoft’s Windows licenses slowly dries up.

    One of the biggest changes to Microsoft’s culture could be in coming to terms that it isn’t such a huge and powerful corporation any more.

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  • A generation free of poverty and labor

    A generation free of poverty and labor

    How will the future workforce look? A report by Australia’s Committee for Economic Development seeks to give a picture of how employment might look at the end of next decade.

    Australia’s Future Workforce is a weighty tome covering the current structure of the nation’s economy, its trends and the factors affecting employment over the next two decades.

    The report makes it clear the economy will be very different observing 40 per cent of Australia’s workforce, more than five million people, is likely be replaced by automation over the next twenty years.

    In the opening chapter, Reshaping Work for the Future, Professor Lynda Gratton of the London Business School describes the share of the future workforce where roles are more specialised and automation increasingly takes over less complex jobs.

    An important aspect Professor Gratton also flags is the aging population which in a rapidly changing economy will require frequent retraining.

    From a technology perspective Professor Hugh Bradlow, the Chief Scientist of Telstra, suggests the workforce will be more mobile and employed in fields less amenable to computerisation involving skills like social intelligence, creative talents and social intelligence.

    Those without those skills are deeply at risk with Bradlow being the first in the report to cite the likelihood that two fifths of the workforce are at risk of losing their jobs.

    Bradlow concludes his analysis with the observation that if we work to satisfy our basic needs then machines looking after these requirements free up the workforce to address higher intellectual pursuits.

    Rethinking management

    Belinda Tee and Jessica Xu, both of IBM, agree with Bradlow that technologies like IBM Watson will help skilled workers like doctors and teachers deliver their services more efficiently.

    Xu and Tee suggest change in the workforce will need to start at the top with managers needing to enhance collaboration within the organisations and build diverse teams working on open data.

    A two speed economy

    How the effects are distributed across the workforce is probably one of the most important aspects of this report with a team from the soon to be abolished National ICT Australia mapping the regions that will be most affected by automation.

    The news for many of the country’s regions is not good with the survey finding workers in most areas have more than a fifty percent chance of losing their jobs to automation.

    NICTA’s bad news for the regions ties into a recent PwC report that found Australia’s economic power has been increasingly concentrated in the nation’s capital cities.

    A mixed future

    In many respects the CEDA report is disappointing, while it flags many of the issues facing today’s workforce and the forces shaping it, the survey doesn’t identify the industries and occupations likely to benefit.

    Despite not stating the growth sectors, the report’s overall view of the future workplace is optimistic as Telstra’s Hugh Bradlow says: “The change could result in a new generation free of poverty and the burden of labor, thereby unleashing the next wave of human innovation and creativity in directions we can never imagine.”

    This may be the case but the to achieve that will require, as the report later suggests, a new social compact.

    It’s building that new social compact which could be the greatest task ahead of us.

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  • Looking outwards to beat change

    Looking outwards to beat change

    Only one in four Australian businesses are prepared for change says a report released today by telco Optus.

    The Future of Business report is based upon interviews with over 500 business leaders across twelve industries and exposes a disconnect between managers’ beliefs of how ready their businesses are to confront change and the reality.

    Over four hundred of the respondents felt ‘confident or highly confident’ in their organisation’s readiness for change while the survey found only 23% of these organisations are actually ‘highly ready’.

    Organisations that appeared to be highly ready tended to be outward focused with almost all of them citing the desire to meet customer needs as the top trigger for transformation while less change ready businesses are primarily driven to change in order to reduce costs.

    “Change ready businesses are not only prepared for, but also anticipate and predict change. Disruption is happening everywhere and businesses of every size and in every industry need to be prepared to deal with rapid technological change and shifting consumer expectations,” says John Paitaridis, Optus Business’ Managing Director.

    While the Optus survey doesn’t produce any great surprises it does emphasise how the dynamics of change work, organisations that are outward focused are more likely to identify and understand change than those looking inwards.

    Listening to the marketplace and society almost always beats those counting paperclips.

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