Employee Performance and Learning in the E2.0 Context

February 4, 2010 at 4:37 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Interaction, Organizational Design, SharePoint, Social Computing

As FASTForward readers may know, colleague Rob Patterson and I have decided to put forth a series of opinions about the HR issues that may become prominent as the implementation of purposeful social computing proceeds in the enterprise arena.

I believe it’s fair to say that Rob and I come by our interest in this area honestly, as we both have had significant chunks of our past careers tangled up in the world of human resources management.  Rob was Senior Vice-president, Human Resources for one of Canada’s major banks, and I spent a number of years in a relatively senior role with Hay Management Consultants, one of the well-known global HR / organizational effectiveness consultancies.

Today we are both dropouts from that career path. We both encountered the Web in its early days and decided that it would have a major impact on work, organizations and human activities, and asked ourselves the question “Do I want to belong to the past, or to the future ?” We came to the same answer, it seems.  We’ve both been blogging etc., and proselytizing its usefulness, for what seems now like forever.  I started blogging (arguably) in 2001, and if I remember correctly Rob started around about then, maybe in 2002 ?  We’ve both been intimately involved in what’s now called social media ever since.

In my opinion, nowhere is the impact of hyperlinks, HTMLx, well-designed platforms, easier-and-easier-to-use tools, etc. more apparent than in the lively and far-reaching conversations all over the Web about the tug-of-war between structured formal learning and semi-structured informal learning as bedrock for equipping employees to deliver effective performance in their work.  As my ITA colleague Harold Jarche often says,”work is learning, learning is work”.

Generally, the Learning & Development area of organizations tends to fall under the HR function, though in some instances teh Marketing department is getting involved.  And, from what I can tell, the Learning (Training) & Development industry is in an uproar these days.  More and more of the pros in that area are beginning to understand that fundamental workplace dynamics are probably forever changing in massive ways, as organizations and employees everywhere are exploring the benefits, the tools and the necessary organizational adaptations.  The implications for stimulating, supporting, managing and measuring employee performance are important, and massive.

The L&D pros are wrestling with the fact that most often one of or the core accountability of their role is for choosing, implementing and supporting an LMS whilst the utility and effectiveness of said LMS is increasingly in question.  The question of LMS effectiveness is feeling the impact of ‘work-arounds’, as of course employees everywhere are learning socially, in interaction with others on-and off-line.  And (I think) there is pressure on mainstream LMS platforms also coming from the spread of collaborative social computing platforms like the most recent version of Sharepoint (2010) and its competitors.

How and why employees learn is directly linked to setting and managing performance objectives, which in turn is related to the design of (knowledge) work and individuals’ learning contracts and the acquisition and evolution of job competencies.  Today, performance objectives tend to be developed top-down (which is necessary, as performance derives directly from an organization’s strategy and overall objectives).  But that genesis does not take into account the whole picture of an organization’s or individual employees’ information-and-knowledge ecosystem.

As both horizontal and vertical networks inside organizations (or inclusive of connections external to the organization) become increasingly interconnected and intertwined, the impact on which objectives most clearly define effective and high levels of performance needs to be explored more deeply.  This is  also, I think, connected to the ongoing debate about the ROI of social computing, the value of intangibles like relationship capital and intellectual capital, and metrics about effectiveness in a networked environment

That exploration will be the subject of my next post in this series on HR in the Enterprise 2.0 context.  If you’re interested, please stay tuned.

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Survey: New Social Networking Patterns Among ‘Generation Jones’

January 29, 2010 at 11:11 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0

While social networking is seen as an activity dominated by younger generations, new research shows Baby Boomers are getting into  the game as well.  At least, the younger cohorts of Baby Boomers — the ones that missed Woodstock because it would have taken them way past their bedtimes.

Continuum Crew recently conducted a survey that dissected the attitudes and activities of Baby Boomers – those born between 1946 and 1964 — and the rest of the world. But, as this survey reminds us, we can’t view Baby Boomers as a single homogeneous group with the same attitudes and life experiences. There’s the loud and sassy bunch that had plenty of tantrums — “Generation Ike,” born between 1946 and 1954 — that upended society like nothing before or since. Then, there’s their younger siblings — “Generation Jones,” born between 1954 and 1964 — that have a different, mellower worldview, and came of age in the 1970s.

Generation Jones appears to be taking to social networking in a significant way, almost as much as Generation Xers, who already have a reputation for their computer savvy.

Consider these survey findings in terms of social network adoption — the percentage maintaining a page on one of these sites. Note that the GJers are slightly more active with Twitter and LinkedIn than their younger counterparts:

Social networking site             Ikes    GenJones     Gen X

Facebook                              39%        43%            50%

Twitter                                  5%          15%            14%

LinkedIn                                6%           11%           10%

MySpace                               11%          22%           29%

Interestingly, Continuum Crew notes that a majority of Boomers joined Facebook within the last six months. (Fifty-five percent of online GJers, versus 45% of GenXers.)  even dissected a growing active portion of Generation Jones that appears to plunging even deeper into social media, a portion it tags as “Social Media Mavens.”  The profile of this group is one that is heavily connected, exploring and expanding their networks, the survey shows. Social Media Mavens have more frequent contact with individuals across all types of groups within their social network, not just family or neighbors, but issue-oriented groups and co-workers as well (73% responded ‘People often come to me for advice’). Not merely amassing ‘friends’ or ‘connections’ within these networks, they are communicating regularly. They also have more face-to-face contact and use smart phones more than other Boomers or Generation Jones respondents (78% responded ‘New technology plays an important role in my life’).

They are equally likely to be male as female (53% of this subsegment), which defies the stereotypical female profile of the voracious social media consumer. Of this Social Media Maven group are more likely than the other segments to own their own business (22%), most likely to engage in volunteer activity and to have the highest household income. Social Media Mavens are more likely to try new products, technologies and seek new experiences. They are recommenders who embrace the role of technology in their connected lives.

Lori Bitter, president of Continuum Crew, had this to say about Generation Jones social networkers: “The aging of America is shaping global marketing trends and no one is fueling the zeitgeist more than Boomers, who are craving a story and a reason to align themselves with a brand. Although they are the ‘have-it-my-way’ generation, many companies are missing the invitation and the opportunity to personalize their message.”

Jonathan Pontell, who coined the term for 53 million-member-strong Generational Jones, describes this generation as stuck “between Woodstock and Lollapalooza:”

So who are we? We are practical idealists, forged in the fires of social upheaval while too young to play a part. The name “Generation Jones” derives from a number of sources, including our historical anonymity, the ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ competition of our populous birth years, and sensibilities coupling the mainstream with ironic cool. But above all, the name borrows from the slang term ‘jonesin” that we as teens popularized to broadly convey any intense craving.”

President Obama and Michelle Obama are members of Generation Jones. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is also a member. So is Sarah Palin and Simon Cowell.

Marketing Guru Jim Welch (longtime head of marketing for Hallmark Cards) says members of this generation  have different memories of events associated with baby boomers. But this is a prime group for business to target. They are “still longing for fulfillment,” he says.  “They are individuals that are much more open to influence at this point in their lives.  They are very open to change, and considering change. They are much more open to being persuadable, and open to being persuadable to trying new things.”

At the younger end of the scale, even Generation Y doesn’t fit so neatly into a single definition or value set.  Brad Stone, writing in the New York Times, says “the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.”

For example, today’s pre-school children think nothing of playing computer games and even fiddling with smartphones. Teenagers are fully immersed in social networking and text messaging. 20-somethings are more inclined to still be using email. The younger they are, the more likely they are multitaskers — typing messages into Facebook, text messaging, and watching television all at the same time.

The pace of technology is shaping generational perceptions at a rapid pace, as cited by Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project:

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology. College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

The youngest component of this generation may not even really know what printed newspapers are, and, as Stone puts it, “will believe the Kindle is the same as a book.”

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What evolutionary biology has to tell us about organizational behavior

January 29, 2010 at 12:33 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices,

Lawrence, Paul R. and Nitin Nohria

What happens when you combine what we are learning about evolutionary biology with what we have learned about how organizations work? One of the wellsprings of thinking about organization and organization design has been the Organizational Behavior group at the Harvard Business School. The Hawthorne Effect was articulated based on the earliest research efforts of this group in the 1920s.

Paul Lawrence has been part of this group since the 1950s and Nitin Nohria has been part of it since the 1980s. Their laboratory has been large-scale organizations and their primary methods have been anthropological and ethnographic. They’ve been in the field observing how real people operate inside real organizations. In Driven, Lawrence and Nohria take time away from the field to reflect on that knowledge in the light of what others have been learning about evolutionary biology. The result is a fascinating and provocative book. Warren Bennis, in an Editor’s Note, describes it as a near perfect book "applying the truths of one domain, the biological and neurological sciences, to another, the embryonic and needy organizational sciences."

Instead of working with the overly simplistic theories of human behavior that seem to underlie most current business and economic thinking, Lawrence and Nohria develop a simple theory grounded in the biological sciences that may account for what we actually observe in organizations in the wild.

They propose an model of human behavior built on top of four fundamental drives. Each drive is distinct and like elementary particles in differing combinations they account for all the more complex behaviors we see in organizations. It’s a strong claim but Lawrence and Nohria make a strong case for why their hypotheses are plausible in light of what we do know. Moreover, they propose straightforward ways we could go about testing them.

The four drives they propose are:

1. To acquire – both actual and reputational assets and power
2. To bond – with other individuals and with groups
3. To learn – new things and new skills
4. To defend – the above against threats

Lawrence and Nohria draw on everything from fMRI studies to ethnographic accounts to establish that they choices are plausible. In the process, they take us through a powerful synopsis of what multiple scientists in multiple disciplines have to tell us about human behavior. In an effort to develop a unified theory, they pursue of strategy of triangulating from these multiple perspectives to close in on a likely underlying model.

Given this hypothesis of four fundamental drives, Lawrence and Nohria then turn their attention to how these drives interact with cognition and emotions to create behavior. They synthesize their model using the following schematic:

One of the more interesting aspects of this model is the central role that emotions play in decision making. Lawrence and Nohria believe that their fundamental drives operate through the brain’s limbic center. First, signals from the outside world are filtered through the drives and essentially prioritized in terms of their emotional relevance. Nothing gets through to the rational centers of the brain unless it has been tagged as emotionally relevant by one or more of these underlying drives. Second, emotions provide the motivating energy to translate thought back into action.

Although the principle goal of this book is to lay out a theory consistent with what we’re learning from the biological sciences, Lawrence and Nohria do draw on four broad case examples to test the essential plausibility of the emerging model. They examine GM, HP, Russia, and Ireland in terms of how their model helps interpret where these institutions have been and where they are likely to go. They do so in enough depth to make a plausible case for their model.

Lawrence and Nohria have been engaged in working out the implications of their model since Driven was first published in 2002. Lawrence is at work on a new book extended his thinking and developing materials can be found at http://www.prlawrence.com/. In the meantime, if you are trying to make sense of the complex world of the human animal operating in complex organizations, Driven ought to be at or near the top of your reading list. Warren Bennis made the following claim at the beginning of this book:

When you dig in and begin to understand the four-drive framework of human nature, I doubt that you will ever look at your organization, your work group, your world, your family in the same way. Or yourself, for that matter. I also doubt that you will cling to or be content with a simplified hegemony of one basic Uber Alles motive anymore; the sort of stuff we read in the pages of economic texts that venerate acquisition and self-interest exclusively or in the classic Freudian writings that elevate the psychosexual drive to the exclusion of others, or certainly in the faux-heroic pages of Ayn Rand
                                                    (Warren Bennis, Editor’s Note, pp. xiii-xiv)

I thought this was a bit of marketing puffery before I finished Driven. Since then, I think Bennis has it just about right. More and more, I am finding myself integrating the ideas from this book into my thinking and my practice.

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Data Mining to Help Navigate Torrents of Social Enterprise Data

January 21, 2010 at 4:32 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, Social Media, Web 2.0

As organizations evolve into social enterprises, they face the prospect of being bombarded and overwhelmed by firehoses of data. Every week, petabytes and petabytes of new information is being generated by social networking sites and activities. How do we cut through and filter all this noise?

Data sources just keep growing richer and richer. Facebook alone has more than 200 million active users. More than 1 billion pieces of content—links, blog posts, comments, photos, etc.—are shared each week on the site.

I explored the potential new roles for data warehouse and business intelligence platforms in the new social enterprise in an article published in the latest issue of Teradata Magazine. Platforms such as data warehouses and business intelligence applications were typically limited to internal data on customers, but social networking opens up these capabilities to  non-customer activity as well. Traditional data analysis and business intelligence tools also have a key role to play, as they can cut through the background noise to establish a baseline and then monitor changes. This is important, because organizations will now be dealing with petabytes of new data generated weekly.

There’s significant business value to be mined from tracking and participating in online communities. The data being generated by these encounters provides a wealth of information that was previously inconceivable. This data can be identified, monitored and elevated into actionable information for decision makers.

Social networking and Enterprise 2.0 are providing exciting new channels of connectivity and growth for organizations. Now, as we move into the next phase, organizations are beginning to learn how to mine and leverage the knowledge they’re gaining, adding an entire new dimension to business intelligence.

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Top CIOs Say Social Networks Now Drive Innovation

January 14, 2010 at 5:25 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Event Announcements, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0

Increasingly, large companies are turning to social media strategies to get closer to their customers, and thus get new ideas out to market faster. I had the opportunity to observe a panel at this week’s National Retail Federation show in New York, in which the CIOs of Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, and Best Buy revealed how social networking was changing the way innovation was being driven through their organizations.

David Grooms, CIO of McDonald’s, said his company’s challenge is to focus on and engage customers at all levels. Most recently, the restaurant chain put in free WiFi networks across all its 11,500 locations — as a result of engaging customers through social media channels. “We were listening to customers, blogging and tweeting,” Grooms explained. “It fits where we’re going.”

Neville Roberts, enterprise CIO of Best Buy, said there’s a lot of pressure to stay ahead of the competition in the fast-moving electronics retailing businesses. “A lot of our revenues come from innovation, but it gets copied quickly,” he said. “We have to get innovation out there quickly. We have to bring things to fruition quicker than everyone else.”

Part of Best Buy’s strategy to maintain this speed to market is through social networking. “We engage in listening to customers, and that’s done through social networking,” Roberts explains. “Social networking and the views coming through there is a very important channel for us.”

The keyword coming out of this CIO summit was “innovation.”  The challenge was knowing where the obstacles to innovation are, and working more closely with the business to unleash the creative forces of the business, the CIOs agreed.

Not such an easy task, of course. First of all, there aren’t many technologies particularly unique that give one company an edge over another. With information widely available across the Web, and IT offerings fairly standardized, a company’s secret sauce — be it processes or technology — cannot stay that way for long. “There are very few secrets out there anymore,” said Rollin Ford, CIO of Wal-Mart. “The only competitive advantage becomes the speed aspect. Organizations need to keep embracing innovation and new technology models. At the end of the day, it’s about getting from point A to point B quicker than everybody else.”

Rollin illustrated how Wal-Mart recently was able to cut a lot of costs through social networking strategies. “We conducted a blogging exercise on energy conservation,” he related. “We had more than 6,000 posts with ideas from employees, and saved millions in energy costs as a result.”  For example, he said, one employee posted advice to take the light bulbs out of the drink machines in store stockrooms. The additional light in the machines wasn’t even necessary, he added. “As a result, our savings by taking that one light bulb out of the machines was $1 million aggregated across all our locations.”

Corporate IT departments need to recast their roles, from strictly technologists to enablers of innovation, the three CIOs agreed. Social networking has become a critical part of this shift. “Our role is to foster a culture of innovation,” Roberts said. “when good ideas come forward, we need to spend time pushing these ideas to the next level.”

“You have to wake up every day and say, ‘What are we missing?’ Rollin added. “Every day you have to get up and run faster than the next guy.”  This “healthy paranoia” wouldn’t necessarily be a hardship on staff members either, he added. “People don’t want to do the same thing everyday. They want different challenges.”

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