Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: HR

  • Stack ranking claims another victim in Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo

    Stack ranking claims another victim in Marissa Mayer’s 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

    Employee engagement in small business

    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

    Little Boxes, big data and 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

    Defaulting to transparency

    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

    Offshoring, the internet and the future of business

    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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