Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: HR

  • Making way for Gen Y in the executive suite

    Making way for Gen Y in 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

    Understanding the social media whispers

    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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  • Google’s simple recipe for management accountability

    Google’s simple recipe for management accountability

    One of the big challenges for larger organisations is giving managers the feedback they need to do their jobs properly. The New York Times interview with senior vice president of people operations at Google, Laszlo Bock, covers some interesting aspects of how accountability in the workplace helps executives.

    Google surveys its staff twice a year on how they think their managers are performing in a Upward Feedback Survey that pulls together between twelve and eighteen different factors which the company then uses to measure how their leaders are performing.

    That bottom-up, data driven approach has proved to be successful as Bock told the New York Times.

    We’ve actually made it harder to be a bad manager. If you go back to somebody and say, “Look, you’re an eighth-percentile people manager at Google. This is what people say.” They might say, “Well, you know, I’m actually better than that.” And then I’ll say, “That’s how you feel. But these are the facts that people are reporting about how they experience you.”

    You don’t actually have to do that much more. Because for most people, just knowing that information causes them to change their conduct. One of the applications of Big Data is giving people the facts, and getting them to understand that their own decision-making is not perfect. And that in itself causes them to change their behavior.

    Accountability matters – who’d have thought?

    The other thing that Bock and Google’s HR team have learned from their measuring management performance is just how effective consistency can be.

    We found that, for leaders, it’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive.

    Sometimes we make things too complex – and Google’s experience with managers shows that simple accountability and consistency are far more effective than complicated KPIs.

    Image by ulrik at sxc.hu

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  • Google and the workplace

    Google and the workplace

    Over the years Google has attracted attention for its employment practices, particularly for its quirky interview questions which challenged many a genius.

    It turns out those brainteasers have proved to be less than effective, as has the interminable interview process that saw job candidates endure dozens of meetings before being offered a role at the company.

    A recent New York Times interview with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, discusses some of the company’s employment experiences along with some of the ways the organisation manages staff.

    What’s notable is Bock’s findings on Google’s gruelling interview process with its brain teaser questions;

    We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship.

    The New York Times interview is particularly interesting as it reveals much of Google’s legendary employment criteria – particularly that of hiring only graduates with high university marks – turned out to be effectively useless.

    Most telling though is what Bock found about managers and leadership;

    We’ve actually made it harder to be a bad manager. If you go back to somebody and say, “Look, you’re an eighth-percentile people manager at Google. This is what people say.” They might say, “Well, you know, I’m actually better than that.” And then I’ll say, “That’s how you feel. But these are the facts that people are reporting about how they experience you.”

    You don’t actually have to do that much more. Because for most people, just knowing that information causes them to change their conduct.

    Who would have thought that accountability would make people behave better and more effectively?

    Despite Google’s learning on hiring and management, things still go wrong. Business Insider’s Nicholas Carson has a wonderful story on the difficulties at restaurant review site Zagats which was taken over by the search engine giant and absorbed into their maps and geolocation divison.

    The problems at Zagats though owe more to a cultural mismatch, as Carson writes;

    It’s about the collision between the wealthy dream world of the technology industry and the scratch-and-claw meager existence of freelance writers.

    One of the notable things about the current dot com boom is the contempt technologists and entrepreneurs have for content creators.
    In the Silicon Valley view of the world founders and coders deserve to be generously paid but artists, musicians and writers should be thankful for the exposure they get and the odd dime thrown their way.
    Google’s struggles with Zagats also exposes another problem with the tech industry’s hiring practices – that of ‘permatemps’ who never get on the payroll and have few benefits and no security. For years this was a problem at Microsoft and it remains a common practice today.
    The story of Google’s evolution in hiring practices and HR policies is something all managers should read as it describes the risks of relying on gut feelings and the importance of workplace accountability.

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  • Startups and stress

    Startups and stress

    An article in Business Insider describes how staff morale has collapsed at recommendation service Foursqure as the company struggles to maintain its relevance and solvency.

    Something that’s missed in the current startup mania is that building a business from scratch is hard work for everyone from the founders to the staff – not to mention the investors.

    While many people working in safe jobs for big organisation wax lyrical about the romance of startups, the reality is most corporate employees would be found under their desks weeping after a couple of weeks at a new business.

    That stress should be something anyone considering starting or joining a start up should give deep thought about, along with all the other factors.

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