Web 2.0 in HCM

I hesitate to use the term web 2.0, as it will probably be out of vogue in a month or two.  Nevertheless, the concept of web 2.0 (or collaborative tools) will grow as a business model and personal requirement in the coming years.  It is helpful to define how this applies to HR …

HRWorld just published an article on this topic –> Human Resources 2.0

Here’s what I think:

The term “Web 2.0” refers to the rapidly changing way people use the internet as a way to communicate and achieve outcomes.  When the web was first introduced, it was very flat and did not lend itself to the way people actually interact.  While it did provide many benefits such as posting and sending out content quickly to a global  workforce, web usage was limited.  It was top-down, passive, and one-size-fits-all.  Meanwhile, the workforce is full of individuals with individual interests. The tools in the Web 2.0 arsenal appeal to individuals as they are collaborative,  personalized, and agile.  Such tools include interactive blogs, collaborative wikis, social networking, tagging & bookmarking, and RSS feeds.

Web 2.0 tools may be used in conjunction with traditional HR solutions for maximum benefit.  For example, employee development has long been an area of interest to HR.  Traditional solutions involve the establishment of development goals based on personal and business needs, coursework targeted toward those goals, and new assignments to test out what has been learned.  By adding Web 2.0 tools to these traditional solutions, HR can significantly enhance the development experience.  Employees can leverage communities in identifying goals, depend on colleague ratings and reviews when choosing coursework, share informal tips & techniques, and subscribe to an RSS feed to jump on upcoming opportunities.

Web 2.0 capabilities serve HR organizations in two important ways.  First, is at the micro-level.  These capabilities stand to improve the effectiveness within HR itself.  As with any organization, HR can leverage the collaboration tools and techniques to improve its own efficiency, idea-generation and goal achievement.  As a result, HR may elevate its appeal as a place to work – attracting individuals that think strategically and like to work in such an environment.

The second way Web 2.0 serves HR is at the macro-level.  Assuming that one of HR’s primary goals is to create a highly engaged and highly performing culture, web 2.0 tools can be leveraged in a broader sense.  By embracing these tools, HR can facilitate increased interactions, relationships and collaboration amongst its leaders and employees thereby increasing morale and retention.  Beyond just facilitating, HR can also leverage these interactions to elevate its strategic importance.  For example, HR leaders can identify pivotal talent based on relationship, response, and output data.

Web 2.0 provides HR organizations with tools that can elevate the engagement level of the workforce, which in turn increases customer service levels, innovation, and profitability.

How Much Investment is Needed to Win?

In wrapping up the series of questions described in an earlier post, the answers to how your talent helps you win leads to answering where to invest in your talent, which in turn leads to answering the question of how much to invest in your talent. Why is how much to invest so important? Just as answering where to invest in your talent recognizes the opportunity cost of applying a “peanut butter” approach to investment across all roles and competencies, so does answering how much address the same issue at the individual role or competency level. As the talent science described in “Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital” shows, the best answer looks at how the level of investment in a given role or competency affects its impact on the successful execution of your strategy.

Why is the level of investment at the role or competency level so important? This is because not every role or competency creates the same increment of value to the organization for a given increment of investment. We tend to look at input-output relationships as linear by default. For instance, our mental model might assume if a single hour of training would produce a 5% increase in ability, then 2 hours of training would product 10% increase in ability, 3 hours produces 15%, and so on. This is natural, intuitive, and reflects a lot of our experience. It also has the benefit of being a very simple, easy to understand model that can usually be captured with just one number – the slope of the line that describes the linear relationship. While we are aware of exceptions to this relationship, our default perspective is linear and it can actually shape our thinking of how systems operate. For more about this, “The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization,” offers a good introduction into systems thinking, feedback loops, and non-linear models.

As “Beyond HR” shows, many factors can affect how much value an organization derives from a role or competency for a given level of talent investment. For instance, how a job is engineered can greatly affect this “response curve.” Here, it may be that the policies and procedures, etc. of the job are well-defined, clearly laid out, and individuals are trained to strictly follow those policies and procedures for the bulk of the job. Alternatively, the education credentials and experience requirements, coupled with standards of quality, etc. may be very rigorous. In situations like this, the response curve is such that a minimum threshold in performance must be met (through training, experience, etc.) before the individual is even allowed to perform the job. In addition, because of the policies, procedures, and standards, there might not be a lot of leeway in the way that job’s main function is performed. This would cause the response curve to start off steep as you invest in training, pay, or whatever to reach the minimum required performance, but then level off beyond that point. In fact, jobs that are more “critical” or “important” to an organization can sometimes be engineered the most as insurance against major mistakes. This is a risk reduction strategy. Whatever the cause or reason, the result is not necessarily zero value gained beyond that threshold investment, just not as much increase in value as was previously observed. Competencies within a role can exhibit similar properties. “Critical” competencies may be trained or filtered for to such a degree that again little discretion is provided for in a risk reduction tradeoff once a threshold level of investment is made.

Other roles, however, or competencies within roles, can continue to provide the same or similar increases in value to the organization for a given increase in talent investment. These are what “Beyond HR” calls “pivotal” and the authors’ definition is a little more specific than what several others have defined as pivotal (i.e. as being a synonym for “important”), which can be a source of confusion. It’s easy to see how one could view “important” roles and competencies as “pivotal.” That definition comes more from the notion that an important role or competency is the role or competency upon which success “pivots.” However, it doesn’t go into depth around how that success is really generated by how the role or competency continues to positively impact the successful execution of strategy the same amount regardless of how much talent investment has been made. That is what differentiates “pivotal” talent. Of course, it is entirely possible that an important role or competency could also be pivotal, but we’ve seen how sometimes the way a job is engineered can put risk mitigation at odds with being pivotal for important jobs or competencies.

So what does that mean in terms of answering the “how much” question? Start off by not assuming that even though you have differentiated roles and competencies in terms of their impact on the successful execution of your strategy (i.e. you’ve answered the where question), that you’ve found the magical, fixed priority for talent investment. You should view those roles and competencies in terms of how the level of talent investment relates to the actual value they contribute to successful execution. Determine at what point further investment to improve performance in a given role or competency no longer results in an optimal increase in value to your company. Beyond that point, prioritize investment to more pivotal roles and competencies where investment continues to generate the most benefit to successful execution.

A case for goal setting

Before January is over I wanted to make a case for Goal setting and encourage you to consider taking a moment to invest in yourself in the new year.  Personally, I’ve never been a fan of new year resolutions but goal setting makes sense to me.  Goals are targets you give yourself, which by definition show a commitment and a belief in your abilities.  In fact, I think Lululemon has it right in their mainifesto where they say

“Write down your short and long-term GOALS four times a year. Two personal, two business and two health goals for the next 2, 5 and 10 years. Goal setting triggers your subconscious computer. “

It’s possible that setting goals is just wasting your time.  It’s possible that  you are not disciplined enough to follow through.  But it also just might be possible that, by virtue of writing down your goals you will remind yourself of what is really important and will take action to focus some effort on those things that really matter. 

Sure, there is a corporate benefit to aligning and cascading goals which I also believe in, but I think the benefits for ourselves is not to be ignored.  So, take a moment and set some goals before January is done.  I think you can!

I want to join the Anti-Social Network

Confession: I don’t like Facebook.  I tried.  Well, I haven’t tried a lot…but I do pop on from time to time, and, well, I just don’t like it. Problem #1:  I am generally anti-social.  And, when I do have something to share, it’s usually sarcastic, which is better shared one-on-one, not broadcast to the world (or to my 23 friends).  I mean, I’m often grumpy and sarcastic, but I still want people to like me, right? 

So there’s that.   

And Problem #2: what word can I use in this blog? Can we say crap? OK I don’t like all this crap that is on my Facebook page. Where did it come from? Did I put it there?    

People are always sending me things and ok, maybe that’s fun, but in order to actually see what they are sending/ waving/ throwing/ gifting/ writing-on-my-wall I am forced through some multi-step process of accepting this unknown application before I even see what it is. So of course I uncheck all the boxes. No you cannot access my information (oh? So then you won’t let me play? FINE!), no you cannot put a box in my profile (what does that even mean?), maybe I’ll let you put a link in my left-hand navigation, because I am a fan of links…but I think I might have too many links so can I decide later?…well if I must decide now then NO to the left-nav links, no you can’t publish stories in my feeds, and why do you need another link below my profile picture, didn’t you just ask to put one on the left…isn’t that enough? 

So, I get through all of that and already I’m crabby from saying ‘no’ so many times.  And then I see all my “friend’s” pictures and now it wants me to send this unknown thing that I haven’t yet seen to them?  It’s like those pesty “forward this to 10 friends within 60 minutes and you’ll have good luck” emails?  So now I’m carefully reviewing this and unchecking all my friends names and looking around, ok now how do I find my ‘free gift’ or thing that was just thrown at me?  Sometimes I give up at this point, so if you threw something at me that you wanted back, I’m sorry, I lost it.  Just today I accidentally found a bunch of my outstanding invitations – seven zombie/vampires and some walls that I don’t understand yet, and some compares.  My “friends” must hate me for not accepting their vampire bites…but I’m sorry that just scares me…… 

All right, I paused this blog exercise and attempted the fun wall…I believe I may have accidentally sent something stupid to all of my “friends”.  Brings me to Problem #3 with Facebook.  Everything is so hard to use that I have a fear of accidentally spamming my friends with crap (see problem #2) which means I am fearful to type anything or press any button or check any box.  

So mostly I just log on and look at my friends pictures from time to time. I’m too lazy to always scroll down (unless it’s during a Recruiting Team status call) so I just mostly see the “B’s” (I don’t have any A friends for some reason).  So I see Ravi and Louise and Meg (and maybe Mark and Klaus if I scroll a bit…but sorry Vivian and Christine, I rarely get down to see you) and then I log off. 

That’s all I want – to log on, see my friend’s faces and log off.  The Anti-Social Network. 

Interesting Talent Management Use of Internal Prediction Markets

Thanks to Jake for pointing out this recent post about a different and interesting talent management approach to prediction markets, showing how they can be used to gain a better understanding of the flow of intangibles in your organization. That is key for both getting the most out of your talent as well as helping your talent feel engaged.

Bo Cowgill at Google and two economists, Justin Wolfers (Wharton) and Eric W. Zitzewitz (Dartmouth), have been for the last two and a half years studying Google’s internal prediction markets. As the NY Times article states regarding the markets:

“At Google, they are used, of course, for business. In the last two and a half years, 1,463 employees have made wagers with play money (Goobles, as in rubles) on questions like: will Google open a Russia office? will Apple release an Intel-based Mac? how many users will Gmail have at the end of the quarter?”

People typically look at prediction markets for the most part as a “Wisdom of Crowds” tool (where they are also known as “decision markets”). Internal decision markets can provide value to the company by, for example, getting a jump on the competition by spotting something or some trend sooner to generate new business ideas, saving costs by shutting down projects that sales forecasts predict will do poorly, etc. The prediction market acts as an aggregation mechanism for the collective wisdom of the people participating in the market, and it is most effective in its direct application to making informed decisions when the group members are diverse, independent, and decentralized.

Even when those properties aren’t fully present, like many other things where people are involved (crowds, surveys, etc.), the value in the prediction market isn’t just in the answers to the direct questions you ask of it. There is value from what those answers are telling you about other things regarding the people you are studying. That’s exactly what the paper, “Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence From Google,” drills into, and it applies very much to ways in which companies can derive more value from their talent. Here’s what the paper’s authors summarized:

“…we illustrate how markets can be used to study how an organization processes information. …We find strong correlations in trading for those who sit within a few feet of one another; social networks and work relationships also play a secondary explanatory role. The results are interesting in light of…recent work on the importance of geographical and social proximity in explaining information flows in firms and markets.”

These kinds of findings are very useful from a Talent Management perspective. Using internal prediction markets as a way to understand how information flows within your organization is an area to pay attention to, especially in conjunction with tools like social network analysis, which also help you understand the flow of knowledge in your organization. Knowing how intangibles flow within your organization is a key competitive advantage, both in helping to find ways to improve that flow as well as helping to increase employee engagement.

8 Things

I’ve been tagged by Meg, so here are 8 things about me:

1. I am very fortunate to have a wonderful wife and a terrific daughter, both of whom I am very proud of for the quality of their character and for their accomplishments.

2. I was heavily into science when I was growing up. I had microscopes, telescopes, electricity experiment kits, crystal radio kits, steam engines, chemistry sets, etc. I was also big into Lego and building model airplanes. Imagine a ceiling with about a dozen or so airplanes hanging from it and a floor with buildings, cars, machines, etc. I thought I would study chemical engineering in college (credit an excellent high school advanced placement chemistry professor), but switched to computers and business instead.

3. I had a paper route when I was 12 (delivering papers at 4:30 AM). I stocked shelves for a grocery store chain (at 3:00 AM) through high school and college. My first job out of college was writing application modules and a self-service terminal for a hotel management system (at more normal hours).

4. Although I grew up in San Diego, I spent my summers in San Francisco, helping my dad in his downtown auto repair shop near Market Street. I learned to drive manual transmissions and motorcycles on the hills of the city. Quite a blast.

5. I played baseball growing up, and then tennis, soccer, and golf. I broke my leg playing soccer, which apparently is not an uncommon occurrence. The doctor who saw my x-rays immediately guessed, “Were you playing soccer?” saying the fracture had all the indications of originating from a soccer mishap (a v-shaped fracture coming out from the point of impact on the tibia.)

6. We’ve traveled a lot. We enjoyed every place we visited, but Paris, Venice,  and all of New Zealand hold a special place in our hearts.

7. I like to listen to music, especially classical and world music. I love to read, a lot. I spend most of my time trying to find quality business reading, but I also squeeze in both history as well as historical fiction (and yes, sometimes that line is blurred, but that’s how history is.)

8. I like to spend time sharing and discussing ideas with friends, family, and acquaintances.

No tags yet.

8 Things About Amy

Meg has blog tagged me … She was tagged by Jake.  So, here goes, 8 things you may not know about me: 

1) I watched the Buffalo Bills lose to the NY Giants (Superbowl #1) during a blizzard in Buffalo.  2 years later, I did a statistical analysis proving why the Bills should have played Frank Reich instead of Jim Kelly for my Statistics 201 class.

2) As a lonely only child, I grew up drawing houses, floorplans, and towns for hours every day.  Like George Costanza, I wanted to be an architect.

3) Due to poor artistic talent and high math competency, I entered college as an engineering major.  After a detour to psychology and women’s studies, I graduated in economics.  I still like going to open homes and hearing about psychological studies.  I still do not like differential equations.

4) My great-grandparents were homesteaders in Montana.  Much of my family still lives there today.

5) My husband, Paul, is a stay-at-home Dad.  Paul has also developed into a fantastic cook.  It is a marvelous arrangement and I would recommend it to everyone. 

6) I was the first girl on the golf team in high school.  My father got me clubs when I was seven and I took lessons/participated in leagues periodically.  I was not a “competitive player,” but my dad was able to play with the team at various country clubs around Buffalo. 

7) Despite taking years of piano lessons, participating in band, and singing in many choirs as a kid, I have a serious musical disability: I am unable to hum or recognize any popular song.  My husband’s favorite party trick is to try to get me to hum the Rocky theme. 

8) I do many things fast, but writing & blogging is not one of them!

I’m not sure how this blog tagging thing actually works, but here goes … I’m tagging Jonathan Vinoskey and Martin Millmore

Evolution of Engagement – Part II

Technology Enablement

At last the guilt of posting a part I and no part II has overwhelmed me.  And really, if you don’t count Christmas and New Year’s as holidays, then my goal of posting every major holiday still stands …

First, I want to point out that technology will never create engagement – no matter how fancy or fun the system.  Culture and process come first.  However, technology has evolved dramatically over the past few years to better support the natural needs of engagement as well as the changing expectations of engagement.

When meeting with organizations, I use the following chart to illustrate these concepts:

Humans have natural engagement needs.  They are things like gaining visibility to organizational motives and goals, learning & developing on a continuous basis, feeling part of a community, and so on.  These needs have not and will not change.  They’re basic.  However, the way we work has changed and will continue to evolve as the world continues to flatten, technologies evolve, and people (kids) adopt flatter approaches and new technologies earlier and quicker. 

The traditional methods of fulfilling engagement needs were focused on personal interactions – a company meeting, a team building event, classroom training, etc.  As organizations expanded globally and virtually (and transportation costs increased), such interactions became impractical. 

Meanwhile, we had the internet boom.  Internet tools quickly solved organizations’ needs to globalize, virtualize and save money.  Thus, the company meeting was moved to a webcast, the team building event became a distribution list, and learning went online.  The downside of such tools is that they are not truly meeting the needs of engagement.  They removed all of the good aspects of traditional tools, and kept only the bad – top-down, passive, and one size fits all.

That is changing.  Having recognized how individuals engage virtually and globally outside the workplace, along with the technologies available to them, organizations are equipping themselves with a new set of engagement tools.

Organizations that I speak with are leveraging interactive blogs as an open communication vehicle between executives and their staff.  They are also beginning to adopt corporate social networks to share strengths, interests, and goals for purposes of learning informally, finding opportunites, and completing projects.  Mark talks about the value of corporate social networks here.

Keep your fingers crossed for a part III … perhaps it will be a Valentine’s Day present to Meg. 🙂

If you love someone set them free

Yes, the topic today is “Talent Mobility”. 

But Meg, you say, Mark already covered this topic a few weeks ago.  Yes, I know he did, but I’ve made a career out of repeating what Mark has to say, I don’t see why I should stop doing that now that I have a blog goal of an entry every week.

So the question is, how do managers deal with the conflicting priorities of wanting to succeed against their own objectives vs. the goals of their team members for career development?  Especially when the next career progression for an individual is not an opportunity that the manager has on their team?   How does an HR group encourage the idea of individual career development if they have managers who are incented to hoard talent?

One of the first problems to address is how you incent your managers.  If their incentives are exclusively project based and not based on growing their people you are probably going to have limited success in driving the kind of employee engagement that we have been talking about here at TalentedApps.

Another key factor will be showing talent mobility as a core value.  Are those managers who develop and share talent known in your organization?  Does your organization see these managers as more valuable?  They should.  Managers who are able to develop and share talent are going to provide more long term value to your company than those managers who are only concerned about their own personal objectives.  In addition, those managers who are good at spreading talent across your organization are probably those managers who have a more effective network in the organization, certainly a more loyal one.

So, as you look to set your own objectives this January think about how putting opportunities for those who work for you ahead of opportunities for yourself.   Not only does the golden rule tell you to do this, but in the end you and your company will benefit more as a result. 

Also, consider thanking someone who was influential in your own career by helping you achieve your own career goals, especially when that involved being open to the idea of you working somewhere else if that was necessary.  To that end I would like to thank my last two bosses (you know who you are and are probably thrilled to have me mention you publicly) who have made personal sacrifices to help me grow professionally.  This, in addition to having to put up with me as an employee, certainly disserves a good karmic return.

Where Do You Need to Invest in Your Talent to Win?

In continuation of the series of questions described in an earlier post, the answers to the first question – “How Does Your Talent Help You Win?” help start the process of answering the question of where to invest in your talent to win. Why is it important to know where to invest in your talent? We’re all familiar with the “peanut butter” analogy. The failure to optimize investments in talent in the context of how it impacts strategic success is referenced in “Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital” and Knowledge Infusion’s Neil Jensen spotted how the Navy SEALs stopped using the “peanut butter” approach in their recruitment efforts. It’s a concept that resonates with those familiar with the Theory of Constraints, which eschews trying to optimize every element in a system, but rather continually focuses on the element, in this case which role or competency, where optimization does the most to increase value to the system. Taking scarce resources and spreading them equally to all roles and competencies results in opportunity costs. That is, resources that would have resulted in greater value to the company if invested more heavily in a set of particular roles and competencies get frittered away instead on roles or competencies that don’t have as significant an impact on success.

In addition, applying the same type of investments to all talent segments results in opportunity costs to the organization. Different talent segments contribute differently to the successful execution of strategy and therefore are likely to have different needs, not just in obvious areas such as training content, but also in areas that are typically seen as standardized across the organization, such as recruitment. This kind of differentiation in programs may at first seem on the surface to be contradictory to the notion of standardized processes, etc. However, this is more about understanding where the processes, while being standardized, still need to be flexible to accommodate unique needs around talent segments that are important or pivotal to strategic success. This brings us back to understanding how your talent helps you win first in order to know where investments in flexible programs are justified.

Another example in “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” shows how not investing equally in all aspects of your talent can benefit your strategy. In this case, the time had come to acquire a replacement for a player who had become unaffordable, but who had both exceptional offense (batting) as well as defense (fielding) capability. Rather than try to find an exact replacement, which likely would have been just as expensive a proposition as keeping the original player, the A’s focused on finding a player with high performance on offense and acceptable performance on defense. This was because they had found that key offense skills such as getting on base contributed more to winning games than defense skills.

“Beyond HR” has a lot to say about the impact “important” and “pivotal” roles and competencies have on strategic success. Both the “important” roles within the organization and the “important” competencies within roles should obviously get investment in performance. These are the roles and competencies that are central and essential to the successful execution of strategy. In many cases, this investment is focused around reduction of performance risk, through job engineering/design (which trades off variability, both good and bad, for consistency through repeatable process and procedure) and essential performance investment (through rigorous training, credentials, testing, and documentation). This sets the minimum bar of acceptable performance that guarantees as much as possible the correct operation of fundamental processes to achieve business results. While these important roles and competencies typically contribute the highest value to the company, once the investment has been made to reach acceptable performance, the very nature of the risk reduction efforts made makes further investment in those particular areas often result in smaller marginal improvement in value to the company.  

Therefore, authors Boudreau and Ramstad also point out how important it is to find and focus your investment to improve performance in your “pivotal” talent. That is, the roles in your organization and the competencies within those roles where improvement in performance results in the best overall increase in value to your company through strategic success. Here, the investments are also more in line with supporting the ability for talent to exercise “discretion” and not as much about reducing variability. Variability relates to discretion for talent; i.e. the ability for talent to differentiate itself in responding to circumstances. While a source of risk, this can also be a source of sustainable competitive advantage, because it is not easily replicable. Processes and procedures can be observed, studied and replicated, but the novel ways in which talent solves problems, often through collaboration, is not as easily replicated. Investing in talent here can continue to reap dividends down the road through innovation, network effects, higher customer satisfaction, etc. Also, “pivotal” talent is likely to be found interacting or in combination with “important” roles and competencies and at the “boundaries” of the organization or in the interactions of the roles. This highlights the importance of using mechanisms like social network analysis as a way to identify pivotal talent.