NewsFlash. Talent software can’t help you if you suck

I went home last night filled with joy and goodwill toward my development teams.  This is one of the perks of building new software, there comes a time when you are overcome by joy.  Can’t explain it.  It’s a bit like any hard accomplishment, it just feels good when it happens.

Anyway, I go home, and after answering the question, who the heck are you and what are you doing in my house?  I exercised my legal right to bore my spouse about what happens in the office.  And here is where I was slammed back into reality of how possible it is to take a good idea and totally screw it up. 

As luck would have it, I happened to be married to a wealth of use cases of some of the worst talent management practices known to man.  Seriously, it might just be the experience of a varied career or it might be some kind of cosmic irony, but for every “best practice” I could talk about, he was able to give me a “worst case example” of how someone could (and did) totally screw it up.

So I decided to codify my own Meg’s law, as a proactive warning to call upon in the future if/when need should arise.  

It is the intention of our team to build excellent, usable software to optimize a well thought out talent strategy.  BUT if you suck, there is nothing we can do in software, to fix that for you.

So now that we’ve taken care of that disclaimer, here are some gem examples of suck-age.

You might suck if:

• You get feedback on employee development surveys that people are craving development and you arbitrarily mandate 10 training courses each quarter, causing people to cheat and scam instead of actually developing themselves.  Bonus points if you didn’t even check to see if you had  training courses that people found useful in the first place.

 

• You set quarterly aligned objectives and then change your mind weekly as to what the priorities are, never giving any hope of people achieving anything measurable.  Bonus points when you come back at the end of the quarter and penalize individuals for lack of achievement.  Double bonus points when you use this as the reason to not pay out bonus.

 

• You decide you need performance metrics and roll out a rushed performance review cycle only intending to use that data to figure out who to fire.

 

• You roll out talent programs that materially impact employment and compensation retroactively and don’t give any warning that they are coming.

So please, lets not suck.  Frankly, it makes us all look bad when this kind of stuff happens.    Instead, lets think about the point of a talent management strategy.  It is not the end, it is the means. 

And the purpose, is to help make your workforce a competitive advantage.  If you are implementing a strategy that doesn’t address this goal, then I really am at a loss as to what to say when you wonder why it isn’t working.

Hallelujah! Learning takes an upturn in a downturn

At last, they’ve seen the light!

Too often talent management, and in particular learning and development, has taken a backseat during financial downturns. Too many companies have shortsightedly used cutbacks in those areas as a quick economic fix, only to deal with the consequences later, when overtaken by more farsighted competitors who were ready to respond as soon as the economy picked up.

However, there’s evidence of a different approach this time.

From TM Magazine comes a press release from Chief Learning Officer announcing their annual 2009 Business Intelligence Industry Report, which indicates increased support from C-level execs, 83 per cent of whom “said they believe the learning organization will play a significant role in the response to the economic situation“.

Let’s hope the survey results are current enough to reflect this positive attitude accurately.

Are you fully utilizing your potential?

As often happens in Talent circles we spend a good amount of time thinking and talking about high potentials.  We review our high potentials, we define programs for them, we measure and monitor them.  What I don’t see us doing as much is turning the mirror around and looking at our own potential.  In fact I wonder how many of us, after getting out of junior high or high school, have even questioned how we are doing against our potential?

So I thought I’d ask, are you utilizing your potential as effectively as you should be?  Have you looked at your own job and aligned it to best support your strengths?  I have encountered so many people who find themselves overworked but still underutilized.  Why?

I think there are a lot of reasons that this can happen but what I don’t understand is why more people don’t take any action to correct it.  When you find yourself underutilized, it is often a sign that you are not managing your own career.  So how do you get out of the cycle of not being your best?

First you need to recognize what your unique talents are

Next you need to review your current situation and figure out what exactly is holding you back.

Lastly you need to put a plan in place to move yourself out of your inertia and into control.    Opening a dialogue with your boss or a mentor and get the support you need to be your best. 

I can promise you now is the time to be using your full potential.  It is not the time to just be going through the motions.  It’s time to be producing quality not just quantity in your life.

Creating a new reputation

I was in a conference session last year about product offerings in the Talent space.  When it came to the question of usability, someone in the audience asked why Oracle was not named as a leader.  The speaker said (of course I’m quoting this from memory so I might not be exactly quoting):

Oracle is known for building complex applications that solve complex business problems, usability is not really their strength.

Ouch!  That stings, and yet I have to acknowledge that a large part of this reputation was earned. 

The thing about a reputation is, once earned, it is hard to change.  Long after you have fixed the source of the reputation, you will still be working to repair the damage to the reputation itself.

As we look toward Fusion, we are determined to change our reputation.  The tricky bit is, that we know there is no single fix to give us a reputation of stellar usability.  A lot of the reasons that gave us a “complex” reputation still exist.   We are required  to solve business problems for the most complex businesses in the world.  Our large customers, a huge advantage for us, often require complex solutions.

Each and every day, we have to work against the things that got us the reputation for lack-luster usability and learn better habits as part of the process.  To keep us honest, and to gain the benefit from the wisdom of the crowds, I decided to come public.    Here is what I think we need to do to win back the trust and reputation that we ought to have (based upon the level of investment we do in technology innovation). 

To gain a reputation for outstanding usability we must

• Remember that there is a difference between usability and flashy UE.    Quality usability allows me to do tasks efficiently, with a high degree of confidence I’ve done them correctly.

 

• While continuing to solve 100% of the business requirements, we need to be mindful of not putting the burden on the 95% of the users for the complexity needed by 5% .

 

•  We must never think it acceptable to have a user experience be a direct reflection of a data model.  User experience is about task completion and not at all about data storage*.

 

• We must be willing to question our assumptions and challenge our ideas to find the best solution for our customers.

 

• We must be willing to recognize that the “best” solution will change over time.

 

• We must use the wealth of data we capture, to provide better analysis and insight as part of the task itself.  Reporting after the fact is not as good as analyzing in real time.

 

• We must work toward a mindset of continuous improvement, not just because the industry is growing, but because it is the right thing to do. 

 

• We must help our customers get the benefit of the great technology we have to offer, not for the sake of itself, but for the value it can provide.

 Please jump on the comments and tell me what I’ve missed.  Our reputation is in your hands.

__________________

*Important to note, that as an employee of Oracle, I think data storage is VERY important and should be taken seriously

The Delicate Etiquette of Unfriending

So, pop quiz: what’s the one notification that Facebook doesn’t send? Yes, it’s the action of unfriending that is never accompanied by an email to your new un-friend.

I was intrigued by this. I guess we are living in a brave new world, where we all have heaps of online friends, some of the near and dear, and some of them high school friends that one hardly recognises (esp. the women who have married and taken on new names).

The Sydney Morning Herald had a nice story about unfriending. I wondered if being unfriended on Facebook by an acquaintance is really that bad. It’s hard to keep up with the deluge of emails, status updates, blogs, tweets and such that now come streaming in all day (and all night) long. Perhaps I’m a Quality Guy (rather than a Quantity Guy.)

The New HR Carnival is Up

Jon Ingham has posted the new HR Carnival on his Strategic HCM blog. Even though the theme is primarily about the ongoing economic situation, the diversity of thinking is very extensive. Posts cover compensation and bonuses, the role of HR in these difficult times, including impact on specific functions, issues around RIFs, employee morale, career tips, preparing for the upturn, and the future of HR. Our Ken’s post on what might become of the bell curve is included.

Be sure to check out the Carnival!

Getting the most from your engagement survey

At this point, nearly all companies conduct employee surveys. Satisfaction, pulse, engagement – whatever they’re called their purpose is to get an understanding of what people think and what can be improved. This is particularly important in trying times when money doesn’t flow freely and everyone needs to get more creative. The good news is that the will is there. However, organizations are still grappling with the following challenges:

1) How to get people to participate? (to get meaningful survey results)

2) What the heck to do with the results? (to get improved business performance)

Interestingly, the two are related. Those organizations that do something meaningful with their results find that participation starts to rise exponentially.

Where to start?

Start small and targeted. Ask just a few questions and decide what you will do about the results ahead of time. For example, ask “will you be better off if the cafeteria stays open until 6?” If most people say yes, then do it. If most people say no or don’t care, then don’t. But, here’s the catch: tell people. Don’t just extend the hours of the cafeteria. Show people the results. Send an email. Post in the cafeteria. Announce at an All Hands meeting. And then? Plug your next survey.

What’s next?

After you tackle the easy and the tangible, the next step is to take on business process improvement. Ask probing questions about motivation. Take the data and identify a couple of hard-hitting programs. And here’s the catch: add them as goals to the business leaders’ goal plans. Make the business leaders accountable for improvement and have them communicate the survey results, the program, and the goal progress.

What’s nirvana?

Now that you’ve got them hooked, it’s time to turn up the dial on engagement. Measure who and where engagement is high and low. Analyze and experiment. Take programs from high engagement areas and model them in low engagement areas. See if there is improvement. Remember the catch: give people a stake in their own engagement.

If you give them a reason, people will participate. If they participate, you’ve got the engagement you need to do a better job. Just start small and focus the most on the actions that result from the survey. In the end, the actions you take are more important than the questions you asked.

Where is Social Enterprise with no Social Contract?

Imagine the following variant of a classic Office Space exchange:

Bill Lumbergh: So, Peter, what’s happening? Aahh, now, are you going to go ahead and answer some questions on our social network this afternoon?
Peter Gibbons: No.

Bill Lumbergh: Ah. Yeah. So I guess we should probably go ahead and have a little talk. Hmm?

 

Not too difficult to imagine Peter’s response, right? Why is that so? What would work instead?

 

There has been a bit of controversy around a suggestion that companies look at collaborative tools such as enterprise social networks as a means to retain knowledge that would otherwise be lost when an employee is laid off. Part of the problem was that it wasn’t made clear whether the tools were supposed to have been in use for some time prior to the layoff or not. The suggestion also included rewarding or even forcing participation if necessary. There was a lot of pushback – mostly on how it either wouldn’t work or worse yet, would create unintended consequences.

 

We should look at how this might be telling us how employees and employers sometimes view the social enterprise differently. To some employers, collaborative tools are seen as *only* a technology to be used as a means to drive higher productivity, make innovation happen, and capture and preserve “tribal knowledge.” It’s true the technology can indeed enable and/or accelerate these benefits, but the essence of the pushback is that the technology alone is not enough. For the benefits to occur there must be genuine participation by employees. For there to be genuine participation, there must be trust from employees, which means looking at collaborative tools from their perspective and interests.

 

This is where the “Social Contract” comes into play*. The “Social” in “Social Enterprise” is not just a catchy label – it says that genuine participation is needed to make it work. And *genuine* participation, as opposed to merely going through the motions, is primarily an optional exercise for the employee. The “Social Contract” between employer and employee is based on its participatory nature. The employee always has the option to “opt-out”, at least in such a way that will cause efforts to use collaborative tools to fail.

 

So what would work? Focus on why an employee would “opt-in”. You would have little reason to participate if you knew layoffs were imminent and that management has consistently sent a message that all they value is what you know. If management has instead demonstrated they value how you help solve problems or get things done using what you know and collaborative tools in turn help you do that, then you would be more apt to participate. In this situation, the value the company has in the employee encourages the employee to use the collaborative tools.

 

*The idea of the “Social Contract” comes from Jean Rousseau and has been adapted to business issues such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR.) There is naturally a lot of debate on this since Rousseau was focused on political rights and government while businesses are private property. However, employees are not the property of business and therefore a “social contract” of sorts exists between the company and the employee, although its nature has changed over time.

Is the bell tolling for the bell curve?

In an entry I posted last year titled, Taking the number out of the equation: Performance evaluations without performance ratings, I extolled the virtues of eliminating the performance rating.  Well actually what I said was “I am willing to accept that assigning a rating value is an easy and (mostly) objective way of evaluating worker performance.  But I can see no need to ever share the rating assessment with the worker (me) – because the rating is not meant for me, it’s just a tool for my manager.”  Assuming, as I did, that the HR department was closely following my posts, no doubt with great enthusiasm, I anticipated my proposal would be implemented that very same week.  Alas, I am still waiting.  What’s more, in a cruel twist of irony or possibly just well deserved Karma, I was recently asked to manage an internal performance review process we’re conducting within the development organization.  I’m still trying to work out the horrors I commited in a past life to have earned this privilege, but never mind – that’s not really what I wanted to write about anyway.  Getting back to the previous post, in the sentence immediately preceding the one I quoted above, I said “I think the whole bell curve model is a pile of horse manure – but that’s a topic for another day.”  Happily, that day has arrived.

 

Over the past year I’ve been contemplating how companies facilitate their talent review meeting.  Central to the talent review process is a box-chart analytic, generally in a 3×3 configuration, which most in the industry simply refer to as the nine-box.  For the uninitiated, here’s an example:

What I like, scratch that, what I love about the nine-box model is the multi-dimensional feedback it provides; helping customers not just to see what’s happening in their organization, but what they need to do to better align their talent management strategy with their business strategy.  The nine-box discussion makes the talent review meeting a true business driver and not just another dead end discussion.  Talent review meetings help companies assess worker engagement, risk of loss, organizational diversity, candidates for succession, and development gaps and they provide a starting point for addressing these challenges as well.  By comparison the bell curve analytic just feels outdated and sadly monochromatic.

 

In the global battle to attract and retain top talent it may turn out that the people you need to succeed are already working at your company; but if you can’t discover, motivate, challenge, develop, promote and compensate them, the battle may already be lost.  Talent reviews are one way for companies to identify, develop and reward both their best performers and their high potentials; but they also help to reveal the underlying reasons for poor performance –  workers who are in the wrong role, who need additional training, who are being poorly managed or under compensated – as well as those who simply need to be managed out of the organization.  The one dimensional feedback provided in the bell curve will never help to surface these critical path issues.  The nine-box, by contrast, offers a multi-dimensional perspective of the organization that can serve as the anchor for the talent review meeting and the cornerstone of a holistic talent management strategy.

 

I’d love to hear what you think about the bell curve, the nine-box, talent review meetings, or any of the other talent management challenges facing your organization.  In the mean time I’m off to lead this internal performance review and hopefully earn a little good Karma in the process.  Wish me luck!

 

My IT World…

Back in college, I recall as a freshman, I had to work with a bulky dumb terminal with monochrome green monitor.  I also recall in my sophomore year the university set up modem connections so that the students can dial in into the university’s mainframe.  Even at 110-baud modem speed, I was overjoyed that I could do my programming assignments from home.  Winter in Indiana can be bitterly cold.  I would rather stay in a warm and cozy room with a mug of hot coco in front of my 4-mHz Tandy-1000, instead of going to the campus computer lab to do my computer programming assignments for the winter semester.

A couple of years later, I was visiting some friends in Champaign-Urbana Illinois.  I was intrigued with what I saw there. The students were experimenting with a browser called Mosaic.  Back then there were not many pages or sites to browse.  However, the students were encouraged to create personal pages with links to post messages to the bulletin board, participate in the community forum, and sharing their thoughts and ideas with other students, within the university network and other students across states on remote networks.  The system seems very sophisticated and end-user friendly compared to the networking on Unix platform, the FTP and “Talk”, the computer system I had at my college.

After college I experienced the shift of technology from centralize to a distributed computer systems.  Companies and computer firms everywhere were implementing client servers as opposed to the mainframe and migrating from their “legacy” systems to embrace the new technology.  Get rid of the dumb terminals and replace them with smart ones.  There were bunch of software that promised to deliver the next programming language. Visual Basic, Visual C++, PowerBuilder just to name a few.  I recalled my required programming classes in college include C, FOTRAN and COBOL.  I was quite overwhelmed being exposed to the information technology world that seemed humongous.

The information technology world is never boring.  There are a lot of things to discover and re-discover.  Building new ideas and implements new ways to make things working between the old and new technologies.  I was totally content working on my first ever work assignment using PowerBuilder on Sybase and then experimenting with embedded C program calls from COBOL for a client who was migrating from the legacy system to client-server environment.

Looking back, I never had any idea that the internet is going to be the “it” thing.  I saw the preview of Mosaic, way back when I visited my friends at the University of Illinois.  I have to admit it was not that easy to create and publish a webpage back then.  I did use the cyber community bulletin board to inquire someone for a swap of some hardware parts for my old Tandy.  Well, the bulleting board did not have the bells and whistles but it did convey the message.  Now it seems that the internet can offer more than just posting a simple cute message.

Looking forward, I would like to learn and experience more on Open Source, brush up my understanding on OOP, involve and participate in SaaS and get to know more about Cloud Computing.

Oh yeah, I would like to program an iPhone apps. I don’t have an iPhone yet.  I guess I did not get on Santa’s list last year.

Information technology is always going to be an evolving and changing technology. Whether it is going to be something resembling to sci-fi or just another re-cycled and improved technology, I am going to be as anxious as a kid on Christmas morning.