More on hiring a blogger

Jeremy has posted a good summary on his blog as to why a company would to set up a blog. While I agree with all of his points, this post could be just seen as advertising for his auction. However I hope it is not the case, as he does offer some very valid points that organisations should consider when looking at if they should start a blog.

Jeremy talks about how a blog can add value to the organisation through several different mechanisms. These ideas will give any new blogger a good framework to work within.

I want to point out one thing with Jeremy's post:-

So, why hire a blogger instead of just some writer off of eLance or
Guru.com? The short answer is that you don’t just want a writer. The blogging
consultant you hire should know how to write, know how to communicate (which is
an entirely different matter) and know the business and marketing drivers which
are likely to cause success or failure in this new venture.

I would say you don't just want any blogger. You want one that that understands your business, ideally an internal evalgalist who will write for you ongoing once the hired blogger has departed. As Jeremy says you do not hire a golf pro for life, just to improve your golf game. This is very good advice and if you are looking to hire a blogger make sure they teach you the ropes and hlep you develop the environment so that when they are gone things sill continue.

But you also don't hire a golf pro if you have no interest in golf, no time to play golf or no access to golf in the long term. In otherwords you only hire the golf pro because you have decided up fron thtat you can see value in the arrangement, the action of hiring the golf pro does not solve the no interest, no time etc issues. My point is you need to see the value in the arrangement before you begin, like the saying goes "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink".

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Businesses to fund training

I read an interesting article in the Financial Review this morning (unfortunately I cannot link to the online article as it requires paid registration) about how the government is looking to force companies to invest in staff training if they wish to tender for government contracts. This comes on the back of the Department of Workplace Relations announcing last week that there will be a 7.7% annual increase in vacancies within the traditional trades.

It seems Gen-Y's are just not taking to the traditional trades, instead they are getting university educations.

This coupled with the massive growth in over 65's in the next 10 years is certainly going to be cause for concern for society in general.

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Chatting to BlogosphereRadio

Just had a chat with Mack from BlogosphereRadio over Skype, the longest call (distance wise I'm in Sydney, Australia and he is in Edmonton, Canada) for either of us and it was crystal clear, I could now be a VOIP convert.

We chatted a bit about the blogger auctions (1 & 2) going on, watch this space as Mack plans to do a show on the topic (not to spoil his plans). This would mean I might be in my first podcast, exciting if it all happens.

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Scobleizer gone wild!

Did Scoble take some No Doz or something, he just bloged for 6 hours straight! Interestingly I found even his last post interesting, thats amazing after 6 hours and no sleep.

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Bloggers for hire

Ok, I have slept and think I have a clearer perspective and Blog your way summed up many of my thoughts very nicely. But here are my 2 cents worth anyway.

Basically the trouble I see with hiring a freelance blogger is how do you judge the end result? Just having someone writting words for your company turns it into a PR event. (Sorry to the PR folks out there.) Yes I think having a blog can do wonders for your PR, but having an external party write for you might not be the best method. I think if a company is really behind getting a blog going them they can find people internally to write.

Darren is addressing one of the important issue and that is helpping the company set up a blog. Setting up the blog for many small businesses could be one of the hurdles stopping them and through Darren and Jeremy's auctions they could help remove the hurdle.

Another issue I seem is how they both plan to introduce the blogging culture within the organisation so that after 3 months the whole thing does not stop. Essentially a blogger should be an evangelist for your organisation, like Scoble is for Microsoft or Jeremy Zawondy for Yahoo. An evangelist should love your product or service and believe in it. It is this bit I see as lacking in both auctions, and maybe in many of the PR focused corporate blogs. A corporate blog (or blogs) should have ownership within the organisation it should be nurtured and developed as part of the oraganisations culture. If we know anything about people changing a culture from the outside is VERY difficult if not impossible. I hope the guys know a bit about change management cuase they might need it.

Anyway I guess on Dec 3rd we will all know how much a blogger costs (on eBay that is) and Mar 3rd we should be able to see the results.

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Another blogger for hire

Following Jeremy Wright, now Darren Barefoot is auctioning his services. The idea must be catching on.

Darren seems very qualified for write a blog, as he says he has 75,000 visitors a month, which lets just say is a few more than me :-).

I agree with Splatt it will be interesting to see the value placed on these bloggers via eBay. But over the last couple of days I have been questioning the whole idea. Buying the services of a blogger is fine if you want "just another PR" device. But I personally feel it kind of misses the point of blogging. Maybe I am just missing the point.

Anyway I might sleep on this thought and see how I feel tomorrow.

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Is the world broke?

After another very hot weekend in Sydney (38-40C or 100-104F) we got home tonight and decided (in a second on stupidity) to order Pizza Hut. Boy what a mistake.

Initially the order taker denied our voucher because she did not know about it, then my wife tried to call them back to complain. Then things what really bad. Lets just say after 3 phone calls to the call centre, two deliveries, a call from to the call centre, a call to the call centre manager and a call to the customer complaints, we finally got what we tried to order, which they said did not exist, and we are still missing the $2 they over charged us. Only to add insult to injury while I was cleaning up I found another voucher offering the same thing, oh and $1.95 cheaper.

Now I log into Blogger and find they still think I have 99 posts, when by my count I have 130, I know not a lot but still.

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Another aussie podcast

Seems like podcasting is taking off downunder, G'Day World by Cameron Reilly & Mick Stanic. Sounds very cool, look forward to the next one.

Found this from frankarr.

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Managing your identity

Found Kim Cameron's new blog today, an very interesting read, Kim works for Microsoft and their architect for identity. Kim is the architect of Active Directory and other identity activities, while fairly technical topic they have very significant impacts for HR systems.

In one post Kim talks about the first law of identity "The Owner Decides Law of Identity" Now I am not aware of the background to all the work Kim and others have done in this area however the post struck a cord with me.

Kim also talks about implied and explicit consent over the collection and usage of personal information from employees. Very interesting, while at a basic level I think all solutions in the marketplace cover these items, however if we extrapolate Kim and others thoughts things become very interesting. How do HRIS systems help facilitate the control over an employees identity, should we?

What do I mean. Imagine a world as described by Apple in their Knowledge Navigator (video link via Jeremy Zawodny) a lot of the underlying information needed to provide these environments will come from HRIS systems.

For example, many IT folks believe that IT systems such as LDAP are the basis of this information, here I disagree. HRIS is the master source and should be used to populate LDAP etc. HR are the first people in the organisation to begin data collection and as such should be the master.

This means long term we have some serious things to consider.

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Vote testing

I have just been reading Tantek's Thoughts (via Scoble) where Tantek provides some feedback on Scoble's Information Overload session at BloggerCon. Anyway I felt I might test out the voting that Tantek wrote about. So my choice for a vote is for Firefox.

The rest of Tantek's item is very interesting and worth a read, and some serious thought time.

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Before I go to bed

Just noticed that MS Australia have started a recruiting blog. Good to see another HR-based blog in Australia. It will be interesting to see how they develop their blog.

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Want to buy a blogger?

Jeremy Wright from Ensight is auctioning himself on eBay as a blogger for hire. I notice that I could buy him right now for US$5K and get his services for 3 months to provide 5 -10 posts per week. So lets do the math. Over 13 weeks I would get at a minimum 65 posts at the top end around 130. Therefore each post would cost me between US$76-US$38.

Now if I was a corporate blogger this starts to become a very attractive proposition. Good luck Jeremy!

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Deviance + Innovation = ?

Scott Aldred has been talking about how the timeframe between fringe dwellers and social acceptance is reducing and the associated impact within an organisation. Scott refers to an old article from FastCompany on how we should all be thinking more like a deviant as this is a source of innovation. In reading these items it gets me thinking about The Innovator's Dilemma which profiles innovation and how organisations cope with it and how innovation from other organisations can destroy market leaders (recommended reading for anyone who works for a market leader).

If the lag between fringe dwellers and social acceptance is reducing this also means that the timeframe for organisations to accept new ideas has reduced. This results in a significant challenge for oranisational development professionals in implementing change in an organisation. Can the organisation afford to take too long to adapt? How do you assist your employees to adapt to the change? How do you know you are changing in the right direction, as you might have missed something on the fringe?

The issue that faces many over us is if you surf close to the fringe how do you stop yourself from a wipe out? However if you do not surf close to the fringe, innovation might become more difficult to find, and at what cost.

My thoughts. Think Deviant.

Now who should I take out for lunch?

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HP begins to blog

Just found this item on ComputerWorld it seems HP has begun a company sponsored blog area on their web site. Good to see.

I wonder if Jonathan's blog has anything to do with it?

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Unlimited money?

I colleague asked me an interesting question a few days ago.

"If you had unlimited funds what would you recommend to a medium sized organisation (3000-5000 people) as an HR/Payroll platform where today there are many different tactical tools in place and a trend towards an ERP platform in other portions of the business? Would it be a pure ERP solution or something else?"

I started to think about the different potential solutions. While it would never happen it is interesting to go through the motions of what would your ideal solution be. Being able to describe your solution helps give you an idea as to the steps that could be used in any organisation regardless budget. Such a "vision" can then be used as a framework for all work within the HR/Payroll system space as you know what you would ideally like to see in place.

My answer, while it is very hard to describe a solution in a few words as you are likely to miss very important portions, also having a two or three word motherhood statement gives you nothing concrete to focus on, here is a summary of what I said.

While the organisation has a trend to ERPs, that may not be the right answer for HR/Payroll, there are many different factors that need to be taken into account. While the back office changes are manageable the deployment of employee and management self service has a far greater impact on the organisation and as such you would need to ensure that the ERP vendor's solution matched the organisational culture, if not then a point solution would be required for this portion. This type of analysis needs to be done in all areas of the organisation to determine the right solution.

I can almost guarantee that even if your solution is a single ERP vendor, implementation will take a while, even with the fast tracked approaches. How long will it take you to deploy to payroll, recruitment, ER, OHS, remuneration, benefits, training and self service to employees? Not to forget knowledge management areas of the business. During this time you will still want to be able to report and consolidate data from different systems. As such a parallel process of data standards should be undertaken. This way an OHS system will have the same location codes as the payroll and you can effectively analysis the information.

Also all employees should be allocated a unique identifier that is permanent. this identifier can then be used in all systems until consolidation (if that is the preferred end result). It also allows effective data inter-change solutions with system such as IT, building security etc.

I think you get the idea. I'm sure I have missed lots of areas, however it is easy to see that such a simple question can have such a diverse and complex answer.

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Blogs the new social network?

Jeremy Zawodny has posted an interesting item on how blogs might be the new "professional lubricant" (aka network). He is right on the money, unfortunately still only in some job markets. Blogs are the new networking device for many people, mostly technical in nature at this stage, however this will change over time.

Many bloggers are finding that their blog acts like a viral marketing program of themselves, in a similar way as Phil Wolff wrote about a couple of months ago with regard to an ideal employee referral programs.

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Feel better!

If you have had a bad day or just not feeling 100% then feel better now! (via Ponderance)

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Can one person make an impact?

Over the last year the train system across Sydney has been collapsing under mis-management and technical issues. Delays of 1 30 minutes are regular enough to cause major frustrations. Sometime it can take be 2 hrs to complete a journey that should only take about 45 minutes.

Eventually Rebecca Tuner a legal secretary had had enough and call ed on the public to take action, not to pay for tickets today. Rebecca called on all commuters to join her in an action of civil disobedience. More background on why she has done this here.

Initially the government said they would fine anyone who did not have a ticket, the current fine is $200. The government eventually had to back down when massive media and public support swelled for Rebecca's idea. This was topped off by 20,000 unionists pledged their support. Even RailCorp workers got behind her campaign by handing out leaflets blaming management for the poor train service.

Eventually the government backed down and tried to out do Rebecca and announced that today would be a "government approved" fare free day! Now it seems that the Premier himself is taking the blame.

Once again it seems a single person can make a difference.

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Firefox Advocator

It is interesting to see the wave of public support for Firefox. I have been watching news articles pouring out all over the globe about Firefox and I personally now use if for most day to day browsing, although some sites do not support Firefox just yet.

Chris Holland has a new term Firefox Advocator, I just check so far the term is only appearing on Chris's blog (or his referenced) when search in Google, Yahoo and MSN, this is as of 9:30am ADEST Sunday 21 Nov. I wonder if the term will take off?

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Amazing story

I just finished reading an amazing story of Audion a MP3/Music player for the Mac (via Charles Arthur). Nothing to do with HR or HRIS just a really interesting story of how two guys in an appartment who's software almost bacame iTunes.

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Keep It Simple Stupid or KISS!

I wrote about Google's current billboard advertising last month. This week I noticed something very interesting outside our local Holden (GM for those in the US) dealership. They are advertising for new technicans via a sign they have placed out the front of the dealership.

Why is this interesting? Well directly opposite them is two other dealerships, BMW and Toyota, both who might have people wanting a change. This is a great example of knowing your target audience when you advertise. The technician accross the road obviously know something about cars, they also familar with the area and have no issues about the commute to work because they already do it.

I have posted a couple of pictures on Flickr which you should be able to see one the feed in the right had column. I am trying to figure out how to now link directly to the pictures, I know if can be done cause I have been sending the pictures to my blog directly before.

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Want to go to Blogging University?

OrackeJack (aka Rob Williams) has put together an intro on blogging. I have not had a chance to review all of the content, however the bits I have looked at contain content from Rob and links to other sites. He talks about setting up a blog using Blogger, not a bad thing as it is what I am using. Everything he talks about can be done through the other blogging software out there, sometimes easier sometime not.

If you are interested in getting a blog going it is certainly worth a look.

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Insightful Wiki's

Further to my last post Jeremy Wright also runs ResumeWiki, a very interesting concept. As Jeremy describes it on the Home Page

ResumeWiki is a community edited resume centre. You post your profile (goals, etc) and assume the community of peers will give you comments and possible edits. Feel free to view the ExistingResumes or the RecentlyUpdatedResumes for examples of other peoples' profiles, resumes and cover letters. You are free to omit personal information (since this is primarily about improving your resume, not getting you exposure).


I like the sound of it! I can see this type of idea working well within departmental environments for goal alignment and team planning.

This brings me to an item I found in ComputerWorld. Where Chad Dickerson gives a short intro into what and where a Wiki could be used for within the IT department. I feel Chad limits his thoughts a little but baby steps are the way with many new'ish concepts. One really good point that Chad makes is trying to draw a line between Wiki's and Weblogs, he uses a very good example of where one technology would suit over the other. Lee from CommonCraft provides a good description of the differences between a basic message board and a Weblog.

In looking at both of these posts I feel I might try and develop a general guideline as to which technology is best for each circumstance. Maybe something for tonight.

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Recruiting blogs

Ok, here is the third post of the day. I noticed that Jason over at Recruiting.com is now offering blogs (I assume for free) on his web site for organisations that want to start a recruiting blog. Fantastic offer Jason!

One person who has taken up Jason on his offer is Jeremy Wright who has created a blog for jobs that might be of interest to bloggers. This is very interesting. Jeremy setup the blog on Nov 17th (USA time I assume), that was sometime Wenesday evening down here. The first jobs were posted same day, which is interesting just to see how quick things can move on the Internet.

I notice that the second job has been posted by Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo fame. Now what is interesting here is Jeremy is not a recruiter he not in HR but I am not surprised that he found this new blog so quickly. I would hope that the person he hires has also already found the blog and applied, given what he is looking for.

Singleton OgilvyInteractive from Sydney have also posted and job, I guess they have got a good handle on blogsphere as well!
Wow I feel like a kid in the candy store, I know I shouldn't but I do that is just me when technology helps out within the HR space (I know I should see someone about this :-) ).

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Trade unions and Gen X & Y

The Age had an item yesterday on the possible reason for the failure of Labour at the recent election. While I am not sure I completely agree with the complete item it does raise in interesting perspective that we all need to face over the next 5 - 10 years. That is the make up of the workforce is going to change dramatically with the intro of Gen Y.

The impact of 3 generations in the workforce I firmly believe is going to be more profound than most of us realise. It will impact all areas of business, however the HR field is probably going to be impacted more than any other, ok may that is an overstatement but you get the idea. HR is going to have to rethink all areas of service delivery, it is going to take a certain type of HR Director who can balance the needs of their Baby Boomer CEO (ok generalisation) with that of the Gen Y's they need to hire to keep the workforce within the organisation for going stale.

The change in service delivery by HR will naturally impact the types and styles of technology used to deliver these services. Now that is an interesting challenge for people like my who work in the HRIS space, I hope I can meet it.

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What's happened this week?

This week has been a little quiet on the blogging front, there are a couple of reasons for this. First and the biggest time! Second I have not really had more to write about, maybe I am having "thinkers block", or something. Anyway it is Friday and I think things are going to change today as reading through my feeds there are lots of interesting things out there today.

First up from the MSN Search team some interesting principles on what they are going to cover in their blog. I am not an expert on what "should be in a blog" but I like the sounds of what they have to offer.

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Microsoft out of touch?

I was reading this item on Yahoo News and was amused by the comments of Steve Vamos and Ben English. Firstly Vamos is yet to use Firefox, I would have thought he would have at least been interested to give it a small go.

However the bit I found interesting was the comment from ben that IE users did not find tabbed browsing important? Hmm I was an IE user and I found it important, hence my switch for most browsing.

I Vamos mentioned that MS are quick at responding to user feedback. Well unless I am mistake Scoble stated in is Podcast with Dave Winer that we are about 12 months away from the next IE release. I also read into their statements that most of the features for this next release have been determined, although I might be completely mistaken.

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Microsoft to do payroll in Office?

Hmm, not sure what to make of this. Found this article on Information Week about Microsoft partnering with ADP in the Us to delivery payroll services to small business. (Via eHRMS)

I am sure this is going to raise some eyebrows in the SME payroll market place, especially in the Australian marketplace if they decide to enter. Why? Not only because they might cause some grief but it would be very interesting to see if Microsoft build their own or partner with local vendors. I guess time will tell if they decide to move into Australian.

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Guidelines for corporate bloggers

I came across this good summary for employees who blog via Corporate PR.

If you are looking at updating your "Acceptable use of the Internet guidelines" in your organisation they might help you. I would suggest some guidelines be developed for all internet usage within your organisation just make sure they are relevant, sensible and can be adhered to by your employees. The guidelines need to take into account the type of employees you have and the industry you are in.

Sun has guidelines, however this has still not stopped their CEO getting in a little bit of hot water over blog posts.

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Unique resume

I found this from Scoble a very unique resume. This is a very cool way of showing off your skills.

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Happy Anniversary

Today I have been married 10 years, how cool it that! It certainly doesn't feel like 10 years. I hope the next 10 are just as good if not better!

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Sebel Hotel Pier 1

The lobby of the Sebel Hotel Pier 1.

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Museum of Sydney

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More on eLearning

I attended today a session on business cases and ROI for online learning initiatives run by the AHRI Learning & Development SIG. The SIG had sourced a couple of interesting speakers, the first from Deloitte and the second from Roche Products.

The first session was very interesting in providing an insight into how Deloitte's goes about building a business case for online learning initiatives. They use some interesting methods for linking learning to business strategy, or "top-down" and then they build specific plans and items around the learning activity, "bottom up".

I had two big takeaway's from the session, firstly was how few eLearning programs they believe provide a return on investment, less than 25%! The second takeaway is related on how few organisations still do not conduct a benefits realisation process to ensure they are realising all of the possible benefits. Quite possibly if the second items was done the there would be more successful projects.

There were discussions on how even Gen-Y's were not adapting to eLearning. I wonder could it be that we are trying to provide a learning paradigm from the wrong generation?

The second session was more practical case study of what has been happening at Roche. It was fantastic to hear such a practical and complete case study on the benefits of eLearning. Roche take a blended approach to learning, that is a mixture of both offline and online delivery depending on the requirements of the course. Alison Bickford showed us all she is very passionate about eLearning but at the same time she seems very pragmatic about things. At times Alison was talking about personalised learning which covered a number of different areas for learning. She has a vision of providing learners with a very flexible collaborative approach to learning. I felt there were similarities to Bryan Alexander's discussions on mLearning. How timely!

Alison seems very switched on, after the People in Business conference it is good to hear an HR professional in Australia who is pushing the envelope. She even mentioned blogs, wikis in the presentation and refers to both in her references. Wikipeida as an example of a Wiki (I wonder if there is an example wiki for eLearning out there), and Scott Aldred's blog.

An interesting side note is Roche are installing broadband connections into the homes of employees who are being targeted for the eLearning programs. This is very interesting as I spent a bit of time talking with Tim Dean from NSW TAFE about the online learning programs they have been doing. We spoke about the potential for real time video streaming and podcasting (although I did not call it podcasting). A big barrier he has found is the lack of bandwidth within TAFE and where they do have bandwidth the high cost of it. Tim mentioned he is going to give audio/video streaming a try and see how it is accepted.

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Is eLearning passé?

I found this item on Corporate PR about how learning is now going mobile (m-Learning). Elizabeth Albrycht's comments on "the old brick and mortar college/universities need to break down the walls, admitting learners from elsewhere via cyberspace" is right on the money. She points to TheFeature where the original interview with Bryan Alexander exists. m-Learning is mobile learning, or put another way continual learning via online communities where participants are active not just passive consumers of information.

While both seem to be referring to learning in a formal institutional context the same holds true within corporations, and will become even more relevant with the growth in Gen-Y's in the workforce. Howard Rheingold refers to the backchannel being used by the students that encompasses IM, chat, SMS and other items in cyberspace. All of these technologies have appeared in the workplace already and are disruptive to the traditional organisation. Many IT departments have been working to remove access from their workers for many reasons, which I will not cover.

But what would happen if our corporate learning groups started to embrace m-Learning in the manner referred to by Bryan? Would we be able to get closer to "the learning organisation" and be more competitive in the "knowledge economy". Courses and content continually updated via blogs, wikis, podcasts, moblogs, supported by IM, SMS for participants anywhere in the workplace?

Would the organisation see bottom line impacts? I think so.

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Baby boomers and workforce applications

Over the last 5 years or so when deploying workforce applications, such as Employee Self Service, I have regularly dealt with organisations who are concerned that their workforce does not know how to use computers or have such limited skills that deployment will be and issue. Now for a generalisation, the organisations tend to be referring to the baby boomers as they feel the Gen X & Y's of the world know what is what. Typically this is managed via comprehensive change management, training and quite often additional public kiosk deployment to support the project.

Over the last month I have begun to have some strange experiences where baby boomers are concerned, specifically with my parents.

About a month ago my father-in-law begins talking to me about the merits of Firefox vs Thunderbird vs Internet Explorer. I found this a little different.

What got me was last night having dinner with my mother we began showing her our photos on Flickr and how she could view them as a family member. I then was asked "So what is a blog and why would you have one?" After spending about 5 minutes explaining things she calmly says "oh now understand, I have been mentioned in a blog. Someone was reading my book and put something in her blog about it and I have been wondering what they are." I asked how should knew someone was writing about her, and was told that she regularly keeps an eye on things via searching in Yahoo and Google! On further discussion she actually turned down a Gmail address about 6 months ago.

After giving her a quick run down on Blogger she decided that it was the sort of thing she could use with her research and now wants to set on up. About 5 minutes later she pulled out a 128MB USB key/MP3 player that she had been given and did not know how to use it. Another 30 minutes later and we had completed a short training session on iTunes, MP3s, ripping and other such items. She now is set to take Mozart on the road.

Now, you might think my mother is a knowledge worker in a corporation. In fact she is so not that. She is a piano teacher, ok maybe one of the best in Australia or even the world, but still not your traditional IT savvy demographic.

Now if I look at my father he has been online for ages, my step father regularly trades online and emails. Therefore these baby boomers understand enough technology to use regular workforce applications.

Now coming back to the issue of deployment. Maybe the baby boomers in the workforce do actually understand technology and us Gen X's just do not give them enough credit. Something to definitely consider next time you are deploying your applications.

Now off to help setup a Blogger account for my mother.

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Recruiter, candidate relationships

What should the relationship be between a recruiter and the candidate? Stephen Harris over at Recruiting.com talks about the respect that should be shown both ways, something I completely agree with. Unfortunately the relationship is many time not like this, as we have all seen.

I think the whole area becomes more volatile when he recruiter is working on a contingency basis, as opposed to a retained search.

On the other side of the coin, what sort of relationship should an internal recruiter have with the candidate? I'm sure the recruiters (which I am not) out there have an opinion.

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The user experience

I have been thinking once again about how much the user experience impacts the take up of broad based workforce/people applications. I wrote earlier about calloborative applications needing to be low friction, I feel that this must translate to a good user experience. None of this is new, so why the post.

I have noticed that most vendors in the marketplace have been busy over the last year or so and upgraded their interfaces. Now system have colourful, smart, "sexy" looking user interfaces. I wonder does this automatically translate to a good, no excellent user experience? Going back to my days using a Mac and reflect that a good user experience was not about colourful, smart and "sexy" looking interfaces, it is about usability. It is about how easily the user of your product to complete there tasks.

Now back to broad based workforce applications. They must be easy for the user to complete there tasks, provide enough guidance so as to help them complete the task but not to get in the way. When you are dealing with complex applications this a difficult activity. I have been using gmail now about about 2 months and I find it fantastic, however the activity of sending emails is fairly simple (email software developers may disagree), when compared with developing a tool for managers to use to complete your annual salary review process, and this is only one aspect of a broad based workforce application!

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100th Post

According to Blogger this is my 100th post!

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Dispelling the myths of global teams

Ross Mayfield has a good summary on the productivity of far flung teams.

He pointed me to an article (and another) from Fast Company, reading it just made me think of my time at Nortel Networks, the last team I had there was of 20 people spread over 8-10 countries across more timezones than I care to remember. We had more teleconferences than regular meetings, a lady I worked with in Nashville who was a telecommuter, spent many a day in her PJs as that was how she was dressed when she sat down "just to check here emails" .

The myths and truths referred to in the Fast Company article are very relevant. While you can have a read yourself here they are just in case you want the summary.

Myth: Far-flung teams are deployed to save money on travel.
Truth: High-performing global teams are measured on faster, better responses to rapidly changing environments.
Myth: Far-flung teams require hands-off leadership.
Truth: These teams require communication-intensive leaders. These team leaders check in on each of their members frequently, mentor them, and establish and communicate team norms.
Myth: Global team leaders don't deal directly with diversity.
Truth: Far-flung team leaders handle diversity purposefully, recognizing it early in the team's life cycle and leveraging it throughout the team's life cycle.
Myth: Face-to-face meetings are required early in a far-flung team's life cycle to build trust.
Truth: Global teams build trust through a planned team communication strategy and frequent in-process, team-tuning sessions mostly without ever meeting.
Myth: Given the restrictions of time and space differences, far-flung teams are best served by allocating one task to every member.
Truth: Far-flung teams build trust and simulate intellectual growth by pairing diverse members into subteams that perform highly interdependent tasks.

As more and more organisations are becoming global workforce technologies must continue to keep up so that they still add value. Technologies such as instant messaging, electronic white boards, electronic meeting rooms, workflow etc are key to your survival. No longer is it acceptable for a solution to require you to use processes and techniques that are outdated.

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Forward thinking recruitment ideas

Johanna Rothman pointed me to this nice item on turning your recruitment program into viral marketing.

Another interesting idea I have come across in the last weeks is using Google/Yahoo/any search engine to find applicants.

I have been thinking further about this and the potential impact on applicant tracking systems. Why should I have to send my resume to a potential employer? I should be able to submit a link to my resume and their system can then use the information from there. Now if my resume was in XML format, the system should be able to just reference my details without having to store anything. Now add a search engine like Google and your applicant database is done.

I wonder how much of this is being thought of within the companies who build ATSs? Now add RSS feeds to all this and we are set.

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Fear, fear and more fear

Interesting item on ComputerWorld about how all bloggers could end up at the wrong end of the law. It covers some really good points and we all should take note.

Thanks for the find Steve.

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Free Corporate Blogging Primer

Corporate Blogging has developed a free intro guide to setting up and running a blog within your company. Some good intro items so if you are interested take a look.

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Employee engagement and technology

I have been thinking about employee engagement and the different aspects of business that either increase or decrease engagement and if technology solutions can have any impact on this.

I see engagement covering 4 areas motivation, advocacy, commitment and satisfaction. If an employee has a high level of these four areas then they are more likely to be engaged with your organisation and as a result you should have a reduction in turnover. Not to mention happy employees usually equals happy customers and this in turn has a direct impact on both the bottom and top lines.

But how is engagement created? There are many factors that create engagement, this is greatly impacted by the generation of the employee, however I see that all factors can be reduced into three areas. Involvement, Listening and Understanding.

These three things I feel can be enhanced through collaboration, and here is where the link with technology is. Yes, other types of technology can impact, that is for another post.

I think I might ponder this a little further and see where it takes me.

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Everyday RSS feeds

The other day I was wondering who has the top spot on Google for my name. So I did a Google for "Specht" the first site that pop's up is Juergen Specht - Photographs (a warning some of his photos may offend). Jurgen is a german photographer who is living in Japan, nothing too different about that.

What is different is he seems to completely understand the online world, he has an RSS feed. Everyday Jurgen publishes a daily snap (snap is too loose a word, more like art, although Jurgen calls them snaps) that he has taken. If you like you can subscribe to receive notification via RSS.

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