HR in the Social World
Human Resources.
The term and title conjures up images of payroll, benefits, and interviews. It almost seems clinical at this point and definitely not the group you look forward to receiving an email from. Why is that?
If there is any group in the company that should be responsible for getting people to work better with one another, to collaborate, to communicate, to make the most of the most important asset of the company, shouldn’t that group be Human Resources?
HR is the business of people. And People are social. The relationship is transitory. HR is Social.
There is a groundswell change to how business is managed and conducted. That groundswell is social. HR has the opportunity to redefine their role in business by championing tools and platforms that enable social business. HR truly begins to facilitate a higher level of collaboration, efficiency, and by proxy, productivity throughout the entire organization they are tasked with shepherding. But where to begin…
I recently spoke at Jive Software’s worldwide customer conference, JiveWorld, last week. Obviously this is a crowd receptive to the idea, having already purchased a social platform, but it’s worth noting that businesses are only starting to scratch the benefits epidermis of moving conversations out of email and into a structured, collaborative, and social environment. Ideas are running fast and welcome.
The idea is this. Your social platform provides the collaboration substrate. People operating on that substrate need incentive to collaborate, in essence to get out of their native environment and into this new warmer and more effective medium. The work they do needs to exist here. To accomplish what needs to get done, key information needs to exist in the new environment. Once early adoption occurs it needs to take root via interactivity. Other people inside and outside the work group need to not only consume the information but also interact with it.
The incentive is positive feedback from the environment and even more importantly from the other people participating in the environment. And just as Gabe Zichermann describes in his book on Gamification by Design and in his Keynote at JiveWorld11, in order to provide that positive feedback loop it’s extremely important to know how the individuals are wired; what motivates them, what makes them feel satisfied. A targeted feedback loop is what lifts the entire system off the ground.
Three easy steps:
1) Post your important work into the social environment
2) Comment and collaborate with others in a way that targets their motivational core
3) Reward others in a way that creates a sense of fulfillment
HR is the group that helps managers build incentives and manage to success. HR can help to build social best practices, foster communication and collaboration, help to embed monitoring and reward systems into social environments, and lead the evolution of business from hierarchical and stultified to social, collaborative, and hyper-performing.
Let’s start working together better. HR, you can help lead the way.
Communicating Corporate Values
photo by pasukaru76
Harvard Business Review’s latest email tip of the day is around how to communicate your company’s values. While this isn’t exactly rocket science it’s often easy to fumble identifying, communicating or changing the value system.
Rosanna Fiske’s first two points are vital.
1. Ask employees what is important to them
2. Establish values across the company, not just within management
A company’s value system cannot be mandated top down. You didn’t mind being told what you valued when you were 6, but you also didn’t know any better.
Each day you contribute to your company’s culture based on what you value, how you get things done and how you behave.
In fact, everyone does.
So while a plush corporate off-site to hammer out new values feels like important work, it’s a boondoggle. Without assessing the value systems of the employees, not as they experience the existing culture, but what they truly value in the workplace, the initiative is destined to be a very public flop.
Culture initiatives typically suffer the same fate as the boy who cried wolf. You don’t get many chances to make an impact on the culture so don’t waste that bullet trying to create something without the feedback of everyone who walks through your doors today.
As I said, this isn’t rocket science. The best way to guess what someone is thinking is to ask them.
Culture Matters: Business Is Social
photo by jronaldlee
Company culture matters to your business. That’s not a terribly bold statement. But why?
Culture matters because business is social.
These days most of us work interdependently. Your success is likely predicated upon exchanging ideas with your peers and receiving intellectual inputs from several different departments. True individual contributors are few and far between in a knowledge-based organization.
A crude example is the evolution from waterfall to agile technology development. Ideas and new products are created in highly interconnected and iterative processes rather than via assembly lines. Which gets us back to culture.
We need to know how to exchange information with one another.
Culture sets those norms. It establishes how we interact, how we make decisions and what’s deemed worthy of reward.
When employees’ value systems are aligned then so too is the company culture. It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle because everyone interacts and rewards according to their own value system (no matter what the annual performance evaluation sheet says).
A well-aligned culture allows people to communicate freely because the norms are well understood. The ground rules are implicitly agreed upon by everyone who has elected to work there and they are reinforced with every interaction.
When values systems are out of line, cultures ‘go bad.’ Rewards seem arbitrary, nascent ideas are used against their authors or credit is co-opted.
Culture fosters trust (even in cultures that are aggressive and competitive). In a game of repeated interactions it doesn’t take too many bad experiences to not want to work with a peer again. Or to withhold your best when dealing with them. Self-preservation will almost always win out over doing what is best for the business.
The better we all communicate the greater the likelihood of achieving success. And since we’ve already optimized processes, slashed workforces and off-shored as much as we can there aren’t too many places left to squeeze out more profits. Optimizing communication and aligning culture isn’t easy, but it’s the next frontier in driving business success.
Bad Boss Stories
photo by macaron*macaron(Est Bleu2007)
A good friend is a teacher in a charter school and her principal has shown a repeated pattern of passive aggressively hiding behind email instead of discussing issues with his staff or with the individual who is creating ‘the problem’ directly. This staff-wide reproach was just too good (read: atrociously awful) not to share.
The moral of this story for us is that if you have something that really bothers you and don’t know who is causing it, gather everyone together and discuss it in person.
At the very least it gives you plausible deniability. Otherwise, you wind up with everyone laughing behind your back and forwarding your email to all their friends. You just look like a complete jackass (hard to argue otherwise).
Subject: Disgusted Beyond Belief…
“I believe this email will be read by one person for whom this message applies. I hope the strength of it encourages you to be thoughtful enough or simply embarrassed enough to change your ways. I know I speak for everyone when I tell you this is unbelievably disturbing behavior for an adult. Please read below. There is actually no humor intended on any level in this message. It is written by someone who is deeply concerned, disgusted, and angry.
Dear adult who continues to pee all over the staff bathroom seat,
I have to believe that if you are a thinking, feeling adult with even a measure of humanity and decency that you must be deeply embarrassed and disappointed in yourself for repeatedly peeing all over the seat in the staff bathroom even after your colleagues have begged you to change that practice.
You are an adult so you must be fully aware that all you need to do to avoid peeing on the seat is lift it up. Really, all you have to do is lift it up and you won’t leave a disgusting mess behind. If that feels too disgusting for you to do, I find that both ironic and sad. All you need to do is grab a piece of toilet paper to put between your fingers and the seat as you lift it up.
I am really troubled that someone I hired comfortably does this nearly every day knowing that the privacy of bathroom use gives them anonymity.
It is the choice of a small child who does not know better. It is a choice that lacks humanity, citizenship, and basic decency. Really? This is so unbelievable to me. Really?
Why do you believe that it is up to us to clean up after you if we want to use the toilet ourselves or send a visiting adult to that bathroom?
If you make it a habit to let students use that bathroom, cease that practice immediately and let me know so I don’t worry about determining which adult is doing this.
I find this so disturbing that it is nearly worth putting a card reader security system in place to determine who is doing this and when.
I truly hope this email effects some change.”
- [name redacted to protect the horrible boss behind this mail]
Hope you find some solace in this and realize your boss could be worse.
Interpersonal Issues: Touchy Feely Meetings
Hiring people who fit your company culture and team personality vastly improves overall performance, but there is still hard work to be done to make sure that the interpersonal dynamics are being actively managed so that the good work sees the light of day.
Even when people are friends, as we are, and have a lot in common, which we do, there will always be bullshit (our fancy internal term) that arises. If left unattended, it will take root and blow up spectacularly.
And those festering issues can manifest themselves in other ways. Someone will shoot down an idea not on merit, but because of who suggested it. Or someone gets caught up thinking about how they’ve been ‘wronged’ rather than focusing on the business.
There are only so many minutes in a day. You can either do your best to clear the mental decks or you can ignore the issue altogether, let things build up and then fire someone.
Unfortunately, most companies select the latter option.
At RoundPegg, we’ve chosen a different approach. We air our concerns and grievances with eachother in a bi-weekly Touchy Feely Meeting (a bit of a misnomer since it’s actually one of the hardest things to do).
We also have the benefit of knowing how each of us are wired and we pull out our ‘Peggs’ at every meeting to remind others of what we value or what our personality is. That makes things more effective…as do the rules we’ve put in place:
- 1. Start by stating how a situation makes you feel (When X happened, I felt Y). Describe the situation and your reaction to it only. No focusing on what you think the other person intended or their motives
- 2. Be vulnerable. Letting your guard down is the best way to prevent the meeting from going south and ensuring that everyone has the same goal of improving the situation
- 3. Think. Don’t react. Being defensive is not helpful. Instead, try to understand why someone felt that way. Needless to say, attacking is prohibited. Nobody is keeping score so it’s pointless
- 4. Take ownership of making someone feel the way they did/do. Likely, that wasn’t your intention, but it happened. Own it
- 5. Don’t let issues linger. It’s okay to agree to think through things as ‘homework’ and revisit in the next session but the person who brought up the issue must agree
- 6. Walk out stronger than you came in. The air should be more clear and will be if people are owning their actions and agreeing to
- 7. Work hard. Put real thought into solutions between meetings. If, like most other meetings, you walk in and wing it then it’s not going to work and you’ll likely violate rule #2.
We’re then posting the output on our internal wiki. This may be going too far, but we want to have a fully transparent workplace and you can’t get more sensitive than these meetings. We’ll continue doing so until we’re badly burned. And then we’ll still probably continue doing so with a tweak or two (like removing names).
As we grow we have every intention of rolling this out for every team. Frankly, it’s a couple hours a month that are very well spent. You waste more times doing less productive things, like status meetings.
While I’d like to tell you these are the elixir that cures all workplace ills, it’s too early. We’ve been at it for a couple of months, but we can definitively say that it doesn’t hurt and that we all believe we’re a stronger team for feeling comfortable bearing our insecurities.
