Scott McArthur: HR 2.0 – the end of the business delusion (Update from Bucharest HR 2.0 conference)

 

 

Technorati Tags: Scott McAthur,HR 2.0,measurement,business delusion

 

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Face to face, tweet to tweet

 

       I’ve been reading quite a lot about social media over the last few weeks, and as a result, I’ve been considering my own investment in and use of this technology.

I’m still spending a lot of time blogging – writing, reading, and commenting. The reading part at least has been made significantly easier now I’ve got an iphone, and have downloaded Google’s Reader onto it. This means I can catch up on the latest feed updates in any spare five minutes, and love the ability to quickly scroll through all the latest posts from the fee hundred feeds I’ve subscribed to.

I’m putting more time into podcasting, although I still feel very much an amateur at this. But working with Krishna on TalkingHR is great, and I’m slowly beginning to feel more confident with this, and able to start planning new developments as well.

And I’m also starting to get hooked with Twitter. I think what made the difference here was abandoning the desire to only follow those people I know (not many of whom use Twitter). I’m now following most of the HR people I’ve been able to find (using lists provided by HR Zone and Steve Boese to add to those I was already following). But I’m also following the great and good of the social media world, and following their conversations has highlighted many interesting points, links and resources.

All together, I grow increasingly convinced that social media provides a great basis to both increase knowledge / the rate of learning, and to develop relationships.

So, I’ve been thinking about a recent post from Matthew Taylor on his RSA blog, contrasting the use of social media to the power of face-to-face communication:

"The big question is whether on-line collaboration will always be much weaker and shallower than off-line or whether it is simply that we haven’t yet developed the tools to compensate for the absence of the kind of face to face dynamics seen yesterday in Washington."

 

I don’t think it is shallower. I probably actually know a lot more people through social media than I do through having met them in person (meaning that I have some sort of relationship with them, and that I could call them up, email them, or DM them on twitter, and they’d have some sort of understanding of who I am – as opposed to someone I met at a conference a year ago who has probably forgotten the fact that we even met). And some of these connections have grown quite deep – I feel I could trust the person, even though we’ve never actually met.

The tools are here, and you're missing out if you're not using them.

 

Technorati Tags: Social media,blog,podcast,Twitter,HR,relationships

 

• Consulting - Research - Speaking  - Training -  Writing
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• jon  [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

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Social connections and social intelligence

 

   This month's Harvard Business Review includes an article by Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis (co-authors of Primal Leadership)on 'Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership'.

The article combines Goleman's thinking about about social intelligence (the bottom two squares in Goleman's model of emotional intelligence) with Boyatzis's ideas on how leaders can create resonance with others by becoming attuned to the needs and dreams of people they lead.

Calling on evidence from social neuroscience, Goleman had previously noted how our brain’s very design makes it permeable and sociable, producing automatic neural responses in response to social interactions.  As he described this, "our brains engage in an emotional tango, a dance of feelings".

This is especially the case those with whom we have an emotional connection and with whom we spend the greatest amount of time.

When we engage with these people we enter an intimate brain-to-brain linkup - a neural bridge that lets us impact the brain of everyone we interact with, just as they do us: "we are wired to connect".

But we also know that our brains and bodies are connected, so our relationships don't only mould our experience or even our brains but our biology too.

This leads to the idea of ubuntu: that we are the product of our relationships.

Two of the most important facts I've heard about social neuroscience were provided by David Rock at the CIPD conference one year ago today.  These were that when idling, four out of five of the brain's activities are to do with relationships and how people are connected up.  And that someone's level of social connecting determines their overall level of happiness more than any other factors.  So this is important stuff.

In this article, Goleman notes that:

"Certain things leaders do—specifically, exhibit empathy and become attuned to others’ moods—literally affect both their own brain chemistry and that of their followers. Indeed, researchers have found that the leader-follower dynamic is not a case of two (or more) independent brains reacting consciously or unconsciously to each other. Rather, the individual minds become, in a sense, fused into a single system. We believe that great leaders are those whose behavior powerfully leverages the system of brain interconnectedness.

It follows that a potent way of becoming a better leader is to find authentic contexts in which to learn the kinds of social behavior that reinforce the brain’s social circuitry. Leading effectively is, in other words, less about mastering situations—or even mastering social skill sets—than about developing a genuine interest in and talent for fostering positive feelings in the people whose cooperation and support you need."

 

He also provides some updated evidence from neuroscience, looking at the role of three different types of neurons in the brain:

Mirror neurons

"The brain is peppered with neurons that mimic, or mirror, what another being does. This previously unknown class of brain cells operates as neural Wi-Fi, allowing us to navigate our social world. When we consciously or unconsciously detect someone else’s emotions through their actions, our mirror neurons reproduce those emotions. Collectively, these neurons create an instant sense of shared experience.

Mirror neurons have particular importance in organizations, because leaders’ emotions and actions prompt followers to mirror those feelings and deeds. The effects of activating neural circuitry in followers’ brains can be very powerful. So, if leaders hope to get the best out of their people, they should continue to be demanding but in ways that foster a positive mood in their teams. The old carrot-and-stick approach alone doesn’t make neural sense; traditional incentive systems are simply not enough to get the best performance from followers.

There’s a subset of mirror neurons whose only job is to detect other people’s smiles and laughter, prompting smiles and laughter in return. Top-performing leaders elicited laughter from their subordinates three times as often, on average, as did midperforming leaders. Being in a good mood helps people take in information effectively and respond nimbly and creatively. In other words, laughter is serious business."

 

Spindle cells

"Intuition is produced in part by a class of neurons called spindle cells because of their shape. They have a body size about four times that of other brain cells, with an extra-long branch to make attaching to other cells easier and transmitting thoughts and feelings to them quicker. This ultrarapid connection of emotions, beliefs, and judgments creates what behavioral scientists call our social guidance system. Spindle cells trigger neural networks that come into play whenever we have to choose the best response among many—even for a task as routine as prioritizing a to-do list. These cells also help us gauge whether someone is trustworthy and right (or wrong) for a job. Within one-twentieth of a second, our spindle cells fire with information about how we feel about that person; such “thin-slice” judgments can be very accurate, as follow-up metrics reveal. Therefore, leaders should not fear to act on those judgments, provided that they are also attuned to others’ moods."

 

Oscillators

"Followers of an effective leader experience rapport with her—or what we and our colleague Annie McKee call “resonance”. Oscillators coordinate people physically by regulating how and when their bodies move together. You can see oscillators in action when you watch people about to kiss; their movements look like a dance, one body responding to the other seamlessly. The same dynamic occurs when two cellists play together. Not only do they hit their notes in unison, but thanks to oscillators, the two musicians’ right brain hemispheres are more closely coordinated than are the left and right sides of their individual brains."

 

The questions this triggers for me are

1) - is this group contagion where 'culture' comes from?  Is organisational culture simply the result of this wide area network operating across our organisations, linking up everyone in these organisations via the right side of their brains?

This would also explain why culture often reflects the personality of its founder.  As the HBR article explains, "spending time with a living, breathing model of effective behavior provides the perfect stimulation for our mirror neurons, which allow us to directly experience, internalize, and ultimately emulate what we observe".

 

2) - do we need to increase the understanding of social connectedness within our organisations in order to develop pro-social cultures?

 

What do you think - is there something in these ideas?

 

 

Technorati Tags: Daniel Goleman,Social intelligence,Richard Boyatzis,Primal Leadership),Harvard Business Review,September 2008,Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership,mirror neurons,spindle cells,oscillators,ubuntu,RSA,culture

Linking social connections & social media

 

   If you were on yesterday's webinar, over at Knowledge Infusion, I hope you enjoyed it.

If you weren't, the slides and recording (available until 26th September) are here (if you're not already registered at KI's centre of excellence, you may have to do this first, but then if you're at all interested in HCM, you need to be on there anyway).  And I know there'll be some more discussion on the COE, that I'll be joining in with, over the next few days.

But I also want to follow up with a post on the graph from that last slide (shown here) I didn't quite manage to get to.  Because this is what my piece was all building up to, and I don't think people will have got quite the impact I was after without it.

The graph is from my social connecting survey.  This has been running for a while, and I've not yet had time to analyse all the findings, so it's still running, and therefore these aren't the final results.

But what this graph shows is that current business priorities (the blue bar) are mainly about aligning and engaging people; developing human capital (attracting, developing and retaining staff) and organisation development / change.

But that social capital is going to get a lot more attention (an increase in priority - shown in the green bars) over the next five years.  It may still be a lower business priority than human capital, which is increasing in importance too, but the increase in the importance of social capital compared to its current level is proportionately much higher than any of the other areas.

And I'd suggest, based upon the slide before this one, that that increase is still being underestimated too.  My take on this is that those transformational opportunities I referred to in the webinar definitely exist.  But I'd repeat the point I made at the end - I think these opportunities are about transforming through people (aided by technology), rather than transforming through technology.  It's an important distinction.

Try to transform by technology and you get to the mess we got into when we all tried to focus on pure e-learning, before we all learned that a blended approach is best.  And some organisations are making this mistake.  The examples I gave during the session were all about recruitment, and there's a great expose of the mess recruiters can get themselves into by focusing too much on the technology in FOT (it's something Krishna mentioned in our podcast on Monday too).

The opportunity is about connections, or as Jason put it, interactions rather than transactions (see, I was listening really!).  And I think that leads to taking one of two choices when implementing digital HR.

Either, you accept your business isn't going to value connections (and if it currently bans Facebook, it's a good sign that it's not) and do want you can with the technology.  But because there's no clear business benefit, you're going to have to do it carefully, sneaking it in under the radar and hoping people don't notice it's 2.0.

Or you make a big play on connections / interactions / social capital, and you get the business to understand how important this is. This can then lead into a significant change programme, and a big launch for the new technology.  But the activities themselves are going to involve a mix of physical as well as technological approaches (ie be blended again).

In my survey, physical activities, particularly team meetings are currently rated the most popular, and team meetings plus social events the most effective.  But people expect the greatest increase in activity over the next five years to be in more traditional (non 2.0) IT systems such as knowledge management systems and corporate directories, and in web 2.0 technologies as well.  And they expect a decrease in the number of team meetings.  Why is this if team meetings are currently rated most effective?  I presume it's because they expect to get better at using and leveraging social technologies over time.  But if you think there's something else to it, do let me know.

As further evidence of this, I'd point to the Internal Communication conference I attended this June.  The best case studies, to me, were the ones where the organisations clearly had some appreciation of the value of connecting, and had made a big thing of the launch (Microsoft being a particularly powerful example).  Others clearly didn't have this perception and implemented web 2.0 using a stealth approach.  Of course, there were also examples to prove the rule - BT clearly understands the value of connecting, but still started their programme off 'under the radar'.

I also think this relates to the debate on whether you link web 2.0 to a key strategic programme, and introduce all the technology that's going to be useful in supporting this at once (yes - if the programme is about connecting , or an outcome of connecting eg collaboration or innovation), or just introduce one particular technology eg expert Q&A, and find as many uses for this technology as you can (yes - if there's no real or perceived value attached to connecting).

Oh, one more thing.  I am going to close the survey at the end of September, but if you're reading this before then, do go into survey monkey and complete it.  The survey is available here: www.snipurl.com/socialconnecting.

I will be posting summary results on this blog, but if you want the full analysis in all it's glory, you'll need to participate in the survey (or just be very nice to me, and I'll probably still send it to you direct).

 

Technorati Tags: Digital HR,webinar,social capital,social connecting,social media,web 2.0,HR 2.0,survey,BT,Microsoft

Aberdeen Group: Workforce collaboration and web 2.0

 

The Aberdeen Group report provides a number of interesting findings too.  The report defines workforce collaboration as "connecting employees and sharing knowledge to achieve identified goals".

It is therefore one outcome of both connection (through social networking) and knowledge sharing (through web 2.0).

In terms of my HCM value chain (input, activity, output, impact), the main inputs are the technologies organisations are using to support collaboration.

These include:

• Calendar sharing (94% of best-in-class organisations)
• File sharing tools (81%)
• Web-conferencing software (78%)
• Task management tools for project-based teamwork (78%)
• Web portal creation software (75%)
• Wikis (72%)
• Software that enables surveying / polling of the workforce (72%)
• Blogs (66%).

The activities that best-in-class organisations are taking to support workforce collaboration include:

• Capturing internal knowledge, expertise, experience and making it available to others within the organisation (52% of organisations)
• Reducing the time it takes for workers to find relevant information (45%)
• Enabling workers to communicate and / or collaborate via preferred modes (42%).

The top human / organisational capital challenges organisations seek to overcome through collaboration (ie outputs) are:

• Workforce productivity (59%)
• Transfer of knowledge between and among workers (56%)
• Capture knowledge of existing workers (32%)
• Employee engagement (30%).

The major intended business impacts of workforce collaboration are:

• Responding to increased globalisation and geographic spread of the enterprise workforce (44%)
• Responding faster to market changes (43%)
• Providing innovative products and services (38%)
• Responding to an increased competitive landscape (21%).

 

Supporting McKinsey's findings, the report also provides some evidence that organisations are starting to move from tactical to strategic applications (in my HCM value triangle, moving from value for money to adding value to creating value).

Value for money applications include use of web 2.0 tools within recruiting, onboarding, performance management, learning and development and succession planning.

Adding value applications include support for project-based team work:

Web 2.0 software tools "are used to manage team calendars, project documents and milestones.  In fact 64% of best-in-class organisations cited 'collaborating on project-based work' as the number one method for which collaboration tools are used."

Creating value applications include connecting workers with subject matter experts:

"This demonstrates that in addition to using these tools primarily for improving current output (such as that from project-based work), they are increasingly used to develop employees professionally by connecting them with subject matter experts.  These experts will not only answer questions or address issues that employees face on a daily basis, but will act as mentors or coaches who become involved in those employees' learning and skills acquisition process - even if informally - making them more valuable assets to the organisation in the long-run...  Indeed, the data shows that best-in-class organisations are 69% more likely than all other organisations to use web 2.0 tools to ensure workers are connected to subject matter experts."

These findings support my view that my HCM value matrix provides an effective structure for planning workforce connecting / collaborating / knowledge sharing applications.  The key for me is selecting objectives at each step in the value chain and at appropriate levels in the value triangle, possibly but not necessarily selecting from the most popular objectives identified in Aberdeen Group's report.

 

Aberdeen Group also identify several important enablers other than the technology that is needed to support workforce collaboration:

• A process that enables multiple units with the business to edit, modify and share content
• Senior level support and buy-in
• Communication of the availability of collaboration software tools to the workforce
• All parties being able to connect and share knowledge irrespective of geography
• Employees being able to find each other
• Appropriate metrics for performance management of workforce collaboration activities.

Their report also identifies common hurdles and suggests the appropriate steps to success for best-in-class, industry average and laggard organisations - do check out the full report (available until 29th August).

 

Technorati Tags: Aberdeen Group,Workforce collaboration,web 2.0,HCM value triangle,HCM value chain,HCM value matrix

Web 2.0 in professional services / legal firms

After having discussed the main business impacts of operating in the networked world, today's session then went on to explore the use of web 2.0 to support the changes that are necessary.

A highlight of the conversation for me was a discussion on the importance of face-to-face communication and the need to use technology to optimise this:

"10 years ago meetings were about information exchange.  Today, this can be done via technology meaning that meetings can focus on meaningful relationship building. 

Face to face is where firms can really make a difference and provide clients with key insights.  The small number of minutes you get with clients are more import than this facetime ever used to be.  The danger is that firms squander the opportunity by spending this precious resource doing things can be done in a more efficient way.  Firms need to place a huge emphasis on improving the quality of conversation."

My presentation focused on the different opportunities to use web 2.0 both internally and externally, for both connecting people, and collecting content (or connecting people with the content of other people).

See my slides below and let me know if you want me to talk you through them:

 

| View | Upload your own

 

Resources:

• Allen & Overy: http://www.slideshare.net/tag/allenovery
• Ernst & Young: http://www.facebook.com/ernstandyoungcareers?ref=nf
• H&R Block: http://twitter.com/HRBlock
• Goodwin Procter: http://kmspace.blogspot.com/2008/04/wikis-in-sharepoint-2007_17.html
• Callum Roberts: http://www.callumroberts.org/blog

 

• My survey: http://www.snipurl.com/socialconnecting

 

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0,Social networking,connecting,professional services

HR 2.0 survey

The elearning network are running a survey on organisations' use of social networking / web 2.0 initiatives, on behalf of the CIPD.

I think this is a great initative and I look forward to hearing about the results of the survey at the CIPD's HR Software Show in June.

However, I do think they've missed a trick by approaching this from the viewpoint of the initiatives and the technology. After all, we all know that the technology behind e-learning doesn't matter; it's how this is used as part of a blended solution to achieve certain learning and business outcomes that counts.

So what are we really trying to do with social networking and web 2.0? I think if we could answer this, we'd be in a much better place to predict the impact of the technology.

Here's my perspective: it's about connecting. Connecting with other people both inside and outside of the organisation to increase human and particularly social capital (capability, engagement and useful relationships).

Another thing we all know is that the point of performance in most organisations is no longer the individual, it's the team. So human capital is no longer the only thing that counts. It's the combined social capital from people working together that's increasingly going to make a difference to organisational success.

And if social networking can influence this, well, then, I think it's got a future...

However, I don't believe many corporates have got this message yet. I think the value of connecting is well understood by independents like me, and by a lot of individual employees too. But I don't think many business leaders, or HR people, are thinking like this yet.

I could be wrong of course.

So I've also written a survey to find out. Please, please, please, take this now!*

It will mean a lot to me, and I think your insight together with everyone else's will add a lot of really helpful clarity to this important area.It is a slightly longer survey than the elearning network's and I apologise for that, but it's only 16 questions, so it should only take you 5 minutes to complete.

I'll publish the results in my blogs in a few months time, but if you include your email address in the survey, I'll send you the results.

And look out for some interesting posts on web 2.0 coming up too.

* The survey is designed for practitioners, but I'd still encourage others to complete it as long as you answer from the context of one particular organisation that you know.