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.
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.
Building Great Teams – A How To
Aligning teams and getting everyone engaged and pulling in the same direction is key to your business’ success. Engaged employees are 50% more productive than under or dis-engaged employees according to Gallup.
To pick up a few action items on how to re-engage your team, follow along with Natalie Baumgartner, RoundPegg’s Chief Psychologist as she outlines the most important things you can do.
Making Great Hires
Yesterday, RoundPegg hosted a 15-minute webinar on improving your hiring process in order to increase your odds of making a great hire.
RoundPegg’s Chief Psychologist, Dr. Natalie Baumgartner runs through the hiring landscape, the pitfalls most fall into, how to improve the process and finally, how RoundPegg can help.
Please check it out. And if you’d like to learn more or have specific problems you’re struggling with please email us at: Natalie.Baumgartner@roundpegg.com.
The Worst of Times
photo by photomish dan
A sobering article from the Economist illustrates how unhappy people currently are with their jobs. When the economy turns expect to see a massive surge in voluntary turnover. The article included some alarming numbers from the US-based Center for Work-Life Policy:
Between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of employees who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to 39%; the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% to 22%.
Employers have the upper hand these days, but what good is that if nobody is willing to bring their best? Quality work doesn’t flow from mistrust.
The employment process is a two-way street. Employers need to get quality ideas and execution. The employees, however, are trickier. They all need something different. Each is motivated differently, has different goals and needs to be communicated with in a certain manner.
There is no magic bullet to engaging people except by taking the time to know what makes them tick. Clearly, these economic times are tough. And companies are taking the opportunity to pare back and let loose the dead wood.
This requires doubling down on the efforts to learn about the others in order to make sure they don’t all check out as well.
Better yet, build this into your process. Don’t wait for dire economic times to trim the workforce. Frankly, people who aren’t engaged and aren’t fitting in with the culture are a drag on your time and bring others down with them.
Start with who you hire and remember it.
- Take the time to ensure those you hire fit your culture and are likely to remain engaged. RoundPegg can help you do this
- Learn about what your new employees need during those first few weeks (they typically aren’t working on meaty projects yet anyhow)
- Check back in regularly (aka re-interview)
- Communicate your needs and how the employee helps solve them
- Be quick to release those who aren’t working out. Easier said than done, but failing to do so will cost you a helluva lot more than their salary
Times are dire. Not just for the unemployed, but for the employers as well.
The job market is far more fluid these days and once companies start hiring again we’re guaranteed to see that fluidity in action. Protect your most valuable assets and get the most out of them as you can.
