Tag: HR

Stack ranking claims another victim in Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo

Stack ranking claims another corporate victim with Merissa Mayer at Yahoo!

One of the clumsiest management tools deployed by modern executives is stack ranking, the practice of putting staff members on a scale where the bottom 20% miss out on bonuses and, in bad times, are the first to be fired.

The process has terrible effects upon the morale of workplaces as it rewards political manoeuvring over effective performance; the worker who focuses on their task and the business tends to be overlooked compared to those who curry favour with the boss.

Another debilitating effect is it destroys teams as it has the perverse effect of discouraging people joining teams with high flying colleagues as it increases one’s chances of receiving a poor rating.

Stack ranking has previously damaged Microsoft and HP and now it appears Marissa Mayer has made the same mistake at Yahoo!.

That Mayer has made the same mistakes at Yahoo! is a disappointment; there were so many high hopes for her in reinvigorating the troubled company. Indeed carrying out the stack ranking process every quarter seems particularly debilitating and management intensive, it’s hard to think of a more effective way of destroying morale and distracting management.

In some situations Stack Ranking can be effective but the way companies like Yahoo!, HP and Microsoft have implemented the method, it’s proven to be the wrong tool for the job of managing high skilled workforces.

When implementing clumsy management tools like stack ranking, it’s worthwhile considering whether it’s the right tool for the job.

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Employee engagement in small business

Blogging helps small business tell their story and improves staff morale

Earlier this week I was asked what tools small business could use to increase employee engagement.

My reply was a simple one; start a company blog and let staff contribute to it. Letting workers tell stories of why they enjoy their work not only gives them a feeling of being recognised as part of the team but also shows the human face of the business.

That latter part is an important point as too many small businesses try to sound like Exxon-Mobil when they present their company face when in actual fact most customers are after the human touch.

It’s a simple thing, but showing your business’ human face is not only good for staff morale but also good as a marketing tool as well.

 

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Little Boxes, big data and modern management

The careers of folk singers Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds have some lessons for modern management.

Yesterday’s passing of folk singer Pete Seeger at age 94 is a chance to think about old age, the Twentieth Century and how we use technology might be restricting us from seeing the opportunities around us.

One of Seeger’s best known hits of the 1960s was Malvina Reynold’s song ‘Little Boxes’ that described middle class conformity in the middle of the Twentieth Century, which had a renaissance in recent years as different contemporary singers did a take of the song for the TV series ‘Weeds’ .

As the ‘Weeds’ opening credits imply, we are probably more conformist today than our grandparents were in the 1960s.

In business, that conformity is born out of modern management practices that insist employees be put into their own ‘little boxes’ – if you don’t tick the right boxes then the HR department can’t put you in the right box.

With big data and social media expanding, increasing computer algorithms are used to decide which box you will fit into. One of the boxes that managers and HR people love ticking is the age box.

Little Boxes’ writer Malvina Reynolds would never have fitted into one of the modern HR practioners’ little boxes as she only entered the folk music community in her late forties.

Despite being a late bloomers, Malvina wrote dozens of folk and protest songs through the 1960s and 70s – The Seekers’ Morningtown Ride was another of hits – before passing away at age 77 in 1977.

Were Malvina Reynolds born 60 years later, she would expect to live to at least Pete Seeger’s age and expect to switch careers several time during her working life.

Modern age expectancy means the modern workplace’s age discrimination and the box ticking of HR managers is unsustainable; there’s too much talent being wasted while individuals, business and governments can’t afford to fund a society where the average person spends the last thirty years of their life in retirement.

With technology there’s no reason why a forty year old air pilot can’t retrain to be an accountant or a sixty year old farmer get the skills to become a nurse, the very tools that are being used to keep workers in boxes are the ones that enable them to break out of those boxes.

Similarly modern technology allows an accountant, farmer or young kid in an obscure developing nation to create a new business or industry that puts the box ticking HR managers in downtown high rises out of work.

Just as today’s box ticking manager might be confronted by a threats they barely know exist, so too is the business that spends all its time looking at data that confirms its owners’ and executives’ prejudices.
Life, and data, doesn’t always neatly fit into little boxes.

Filing box image courtesy of ralev_com through sxc.hu

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Defaulting to transparency

Messaging startup Buffer seeks to be open in every aspect of business, will this help the startup grow?

Social media scheduling startup Buffer takes transparency seriously, will it help the business?

Many fine words have been written about openness, sharing and collaboration in recent years but few organisations really practice what’s been preached. An exception to this is social media service Buffer that takes openness to extreme levels.

Buffer keeps few secrets with the company sharing its monthly operating figures, internal emails and even its formula for calculating salaries.

The company’s CEO Joel Gascoigne believes this helps build trust in his startup, saying in his blog:

There are many reasons we default to transparency at Buffer, and perhaps the most important is that I genuinely believe it is the most effective way to build trust. This means trust amongst our team but also trust from users, customers, potential future customers and the wider public who encounter us in any way.

Building trust is one of the most important tasks of any business owner or manager; whether it’s with customers, staff, suppliers or investors and startups have a bigger task than most. So Joel is onto something with this approach although one wonders how long the philosophy will last as the company grows.

One thing that stands out in Buffer’s figures is how little Joel and his staff earn; while $158,000 is a good wage it isn’t the massive income that those who glamourize startups pretend founders earn.

Joel’s experiment with Buffer is an interesting experiment and it will be fascinating to see how long the company continues the philosophy of extreme transparency and how many others follow the example.

While it might not be necessary to be as open as Joel Gascoigne and Buffer, the idea of defaulting to transparency is one that many organisations – particularly governments – would benefit from adopting.

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Offshoring, the internet and the future of business

Outsourcing sites like oDesk, elance and Freelancer are changing recruitment and labour markets in ways that big and small businesses need to understand.

One of the big changes in business over the past thirty years has been outsourcing offshore – offshoring – as labour markets around the world have opened, communications have become cheaper and trade barriers fallen.

As the global war for talent accelerates, offshoring may be one of the ways many businesses deal with labour shortages in their home markets.

For most of the last thirty years, offshoring was only really available to larger businesses who had the resources to manage overseas suppliers and service providers.

With the internet becoming accessible services like eLance, Freelancer.com and oDesk started appearing that established virtual labour exchanges where smaller businesses could connect with individual contractors.

As part of the Decoding The New Economy video series, I had the opportunity to speak to Matt Cooper, Vice President of Business Development & International at oDesk about how the global workforce is evolving.

oDesk itself came about in 2005 when its founders Stratis Karamanlakis and Odysseas Tsatalos wanted to engage developers in their native Greece while working in North America.

That project turned out to be a business in itself and now the company now has over three million freelancers registered with the service.

Addressing the global skills shortage

Cooper sees oDesk’s big opportunities in areas such as developers, e-commerce and customer service.

“If you look globally there are very acute shortages in certain geographic areas and certain skills,” says Cooper.

Looking ahead, the company sees new skills coming onto the market with larger companies adopting oDesk and similar services.

“We’ll see new skills come onto the marketplace with increasing liquidity and depth with this longer scale of skills,” says Cooper. “We’re also seeing increased demand from enterprise companies. Of the 600,000 clients using oDesk have been traditionally small companies, entrepreneurs and startups. Now we’re seeing increasing demand from the enterprise companies.”

Managing remote workers

Regardless of the size of the company, managing a global workforce of freelancers presents challenges for management and Cooper has some advice for those businesses looking at engaging workers through his service.

“Managing an online, distributed workforce is different to managing locally,” says Cooper. “You have to be much more specific, you have to document your expectation and you have to make the investment in getting your team up to speed.”

One common problem Cooper sees with engaging workers through services is like oDesk is employers thinking they can throw their problems over the fence, “you can’t just throw your project over the wall and hope it comes back.”

Cooper also suggests businesses “try before they buy” with engaging potential freelancers to do smaller trial tasks to see if they do have the skills needed.

“If you need one person, hire three and keep one.” Cooper says, “create a very small and very discrete project that closely replicates the long term role that you want and see how they perform.”

The threat to existing businesses

Services like oDesk present a number of opportunities and challenges to industry, in some ways they threaten existing service businesses which have relied on providing skilled knowledge work to local markets.

Now cheaper workers are to anyone with a computer and a credit card, there’s a fundamental shift happening in the small business sector.

How the small business sector, and larger corporations, use services like oDesk and Freelancer.com while reacting to the threats these sites present to their businesses will determine how many of them will survive over the rest of this decade.

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Making way for Gen Y in the executive suite

A challenge for organisations is opening the career path for Gen Y managers as baby boomers hang around the executive suite.

One of the great challenges in today’s workplace is how organisations will manage Generation Y entering the boardroom.

Lazy, unfocused and high maintenance are some of the descriptions used by boomers when talking about younger workers, but how much truth is there really in that and how do organisations plan for this generation to take leadership positions?

As part of the recent Sydney EMC Forum, I had a chance to discuss the challenges of managing Gen Ys with social researcher Micheal McQueen and EMC Australia Managing Director Alister Dias.

Like many tech companies, EMC has a younger workforce with around 25% of staff being GenY and Diaz sees global thinking and a fresh, bright approach as some of the advantages younger people bring to the workplace.

“We want to see this grow,” says Diaz. “There’s two reasons for this; one is that energy level, quick learning and adaption to the new world but the other is the shortage of general talent in the market.”

That shortage is an early part of the global race for talent, with Diaz seeing the priority for EMC and other tech companies to develop home grown skills rather than importing skilled workers.

Offering a career

For Diaz’s, one of the great challenges in this race for talent is retaining skilled and motivated Gen Y and Gen X through offering more diverse career options.

Career progression is one of the big problems facing both GenY and X workers as, in McQueen’s view, the baby boomers have no intention of going anywhere as many define themselves by their work so they don’t plan to retire.

“For Baby Boomers their work ethic is their identity,” says McQueen. “Stepping back from a leadership position, or any position in general is a big deal.”

Not working huge hours which is a key difference between baby boomers and their GenY kids and grandkids who don’t wear long hours as a badge of honour.

Language barriers

An area that concerns McQueen is a lack of vocabulary as text and social media messaging has eroded the teenagers vocabulary with average 14 year old today only knowing 10,000 words as opposed to 25,000 in 1950.

“It started off as text speak and it’s gone beyond that now,” says McQueen. “If you have a Gen Y person operating with older workers there’s often a disconnect there.”

The effects of electronic gaming and communications also has created a climate where today’s teenagers have less empathy than those of twenty years ago — McQueen cites a University of Michigan study — this has consequences in fields as disparate as sales, technical support and nursing.

Organisations are going to have to learn to deal with these differences.  “In our own organisation we talk about the need to adapt to Gen Y,” says EMC’s Diaz. “Personally I think we have to meet them half-way.”

“We’ve found it difficult to get talent. You really have to do your homework on it.”

Part of EMC’s problem in finding skilled Gen Y workers has been the collapse in university IT course enrolments along with the broader turning away from STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathmetics — related degrees.

Diaz is quite positive on this and sees the pendulum swinging back towards more technical degrees and diplomas with more younger people taking on STEM subjects. At present though enrolment statistics aren’t bearing this out.

Finding those skilled workers is going to be one of the great challenges for business in planning for the rise of GenY workers, one of the greater tasks though might be getting the baby boomers out of the corner office.

Image of a younger worker courtesy of ZoofyTheJi through sxc.hu

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Understanding the social media whispers

The evolution of Roamz into Local Measure tells us a lot about how businesses can use social media and online local services.

What do you do when paying customers tell you they would rather your product be different to what you were offering? This is the predicament that faced Jonathan Barouch when he discovered the real market for his Roamz service was in social media business intelligence.

How Jonathan dealt with this was the classic business pivot, where the original idea of Roamz evolved into Local Measure.

Originally Roamz was set up to consolidate social services like Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook. If you wanted to find a restaurant, bar or hotel in your neighbourhood, Roamz would pick the most relevant reviews from the various services to show you what was in your neighbourhood.

The idea for Roamz came from when Jonathan was looking for places to take his new baby, jugging several different location services to find local cafes, shops or playground is hard work when you have a little one to deal with.

A notable feature of Roamz was the use of geotags to determine relevance. Even if the social media user doesn’t mention the business, Roamz would use the attached location information to determine what outlet was being discussed.

Enter Local Measure

While Roamz was doing well it wasn’t making money and, in Jonathan’s words, it was a “slower burn, longer term play”. On the other hand businesses were telling him and his sales team that they would pay immediately to use the service to monitor what people were saying about them on social media.

“People said, ‘hey this is cool, we want to pay for this.” Jonathan said of the decision to pivot Roamz into Local Measure.

“I want to say it was a really difficult decision but it wasn’t because we had people saying ‘we want to pay you if you continue with this product.’”

Local Measure is built on the Roamz platform but instead of helping consumers find local venues, the service now gives businesses a tool to monitor what people are saying about them on social media services.

The difference with the larger social media monitoring tools like Radian6 is Local Measure gives an intimate view of individual posts and users. The idea being a business can directly monitor what people are saying are saying about a store or a product.

For dispersed companies, particularly franchise chains and service businesses, it gives local managers and franchisees the ability to know what’s happening with their outlet rather than having to rely on a social media team at head office.

The most immediate benefit of Local Measure is in identifying loyal users and influencers. Managers can see who is tweeting, checking in or updating their status in their store.

Armed with that intelligence, the local store owner, franchisee or manager can engage with the shop’s most enthusiastic customers.

Customer service is one of the big undervalued areas of social media and Jonathan believes Local Measure can help businesses improve how they help customers.

“It makes invisible customers visibile to management,” says Jonathan.

An example Jonathan gives is of a cinema where the concession’s frozen drink machine wasn’t set currently. While the staff were oblivious to the issue, customers were complaining on various social media channels. Once the theatre manager saw the feedback he was able to quickly fix the problem.

Employee behaviour online is also an important concern for modern managers, if employees are posting inappropriate material on social media then the risks to a business are substantial.

“From an operational point perspective we’ve picked up really weird and wonderful things that the business doesn’t know,” says Jonathon. “Staff putting things in the public domain that is really damaging to brands.”

“We’ve had two or three cases of behaviour that you shudder at. I’ve been presenting and it has popped up and the clients have said ‘delete that, we don’t want that up’ and I say ‘that’s the whole point – it’s out there.’”

That’s a lesson that Domino’s Pizza learned in the US when staff posted YouTube videos of each other putting toppings up their noses. Once unruly employees post these things, it’s hard work undoing the brand damage and for smaller businesses or franchise outlets the bad publicity could be fatal.

Local Measure is a good example of a business pivot, it’s also shows how concepts like Big Data, social media and geolocation come together to help businesses.

Being able to listen to customers also shows how marketing and customer service are merging in an age where the punters are no longer happy to be seen and not heard.

It’s the business who grab tools like Local Measure who are going to be the success stories of the next decade, the older businesses who ignore the changes in customer service, marketing and communications are going to be a memory.

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