Backblog—IT Staffing Solutions
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Exploring the HR Management Framework for Enterprise 2.0 February 3, 2010 By Jon Husband Categories: General IT Staffing Solutions Web 2.0 (cross-posted at the FASTForward blog)
... but really, in spite of the last two decades replete with talks, books, workshops and consulting about learning organizations, high-performance work environments, knowledge-work or customer-service friendly organizational cultures and so on, the basics of human resources management goals and practices have remained little changed, philosophically and practically. The main metaphor today's HR professionals live in is still a machine with its designed-and-fitted parts and cogs, as opposed to the 'living' system of social networks in which people participate and interact. This dominant metaphor leads to language such as optimization, alignment, productivity and control. Let me be clear ... in an enterprise setting, these are unequivocally good things to seek and realize. However, the basic vocabulary of intention, methods and practices that can create these characteristics in a networked environment may be different. In electronically connected networks where we "work at the speed of light" (McLuhan), different thinking and ways of working are necessary, and a new vocabulary may be very useful with respect to advancing on what we now have and use. Talent Wars and Computers-Everywhere Meet the Era of Social Networks The notion of purposeful social computing in and by workers (and customers) in an enterprise setting developed out of the rise and growth of what has come to be known as Web 2.0, and was termed Enterprise 2.0 about three and a half years ago. Given that it arose from the welter of confusing-to-many activities that defined web 2.0 (Participation, interaction and sharing) I have often wondered if the term itself has been more of a hindrance than a help when making decisions about whether, why and how to put social computing and the potential of social networks into play in any given organization. However, the term is here to stay, and acquires more and more legitimacy all the time, thanks largely to the pioneering work of several thought-and-practice leaders and an excellent summary of the issues and examples to date in a new book titled Enterprise 2.0 - New Collaborative Tools for Your Enterprise's Toughest Challenges, by Andrew McAfee (widely known as coiner of the term "Enterprise 2.0" So ... what about HR 2.0 for the Enterprise 2.0 ? Human resources management is basically about finding, attracting, engaging, motivating, and retaining (helping to grow / evolve ?) the best available talent. In an era increasingly defined by information, knowledge and more recently participation, engagement, relationships, influence, etc., people who are talented, imaginative, creative, honest and hard-working often remain an elusive and slippery target. Much of the foundation for modern human resources management frameworks and established practices comes directly out of the 50's and 60's (yes, including more recent competency analysis and modelling and self-directed work groups, etc.) and is firmly grounded in mainstream management models. Two major waves that sought to review and revise the established practices came with the debate (70's and early 80's) over Theory X and Theory Y management philosophies, and the basic steps taken in the 90's and 2000's to recognize that the enterprise's future involves different kinds of knowledge workers than those who dominated over the past40 years. In my opinion, the issues have become more complex over the past five years. Many of the established HR methods and practices depend upon the foundations of traditional management science, and plain and simply did not foresee the rise of pervasive and ubiquitous socially-connected workplaces. Let's look at each of the main areas of HR, and make some educated guesses as to how the interconnected 2.0 context may affect HR methods and practices. Recruitment Recruitment is about attracting, finding, wooing and checking out talent - it's the courtship before the relationship begins. This area of HR felt the dramatic impact of the Web early, in the form of job boards. Job boards and template-based resumes became the norm pretty quickly, given the efficiencies introduced for busy HR people concerned with the first steps of recruitment. There are / were disadvantages, however. Keyword-constrained templates and functionality of most job boards ensured two things; 1) that some interesting and potentially very valuable candidates would be screened out because the match wasn't precise enough, and 2) many people would be screened in (by using appropriate keywords) who did not really belong in the given recruitment process. As web use and the presence and population of social networking platforms has grown, new dynamics have appeared in recruitment. LinkedIn is a source of much activity, as is the more 'organic' word-of-mouth recommendation of people by people who know them. This latter dynamic is, in my opinion, the really important one here. It's how people operate, and networking to find new work or a more interesting job, or just to make a change, was well underway long before Web 2.0 came around. The Web has just made it ... easier, faster and more effective. I expect before long that people will offer potential employers as many references from people they know and have worked / interacted with on the Web as they will from former employers and colleagues. Employee Orientation Employee orientation is all about helping new employees "get their feet under the desk". Supplementing job descriptions and the expectations agreed to upon hiring, an early response to the challenge was the use of an enterprise intranet, with which to support all the information new employees needed to know. However, the real work of getting ones' feet under the desk requires participation, interaction and 'learning the ropes', and here it's clear that joining into the flow(s) operating in social networks inside an enterprise can be very useful with respect to a new employee's more rapid and more effective orientation. Many (all ?) of the collaboration / social computing platforms offer features such as profiles, personal tag clouds, and other contextual information that is crucial to effective orientation. Work Design (Job descriptions) Here's an area that I suspect will come under a fair degree of scrutiny as the adoption and traction of Enterprise 2.0 continues to grow. Job descriptions have a bad rep, and yet are essential in modern organizations, even if they are short and sweet. The issue? If they are short and sweet, they tend (in my experience) to be found in organizations that are already by and large nimble, adaptive and probably pretty well suited to operating in today's networked environment. They are an (but not THE) indicator of less bureaucratic organizations. However, in many more structure or more bureaucratic organizations, they have become an input and an emblem of power and status, in the sense that their main purpose is often to help peg a job's position in the organizational hierarchy and the salary, benefits and other perquisites obtained by the job. As jobs in the modern world change rapidly and pretty regularly, there's been growing (but often slow) interest in what I call role profiles. As an aside, I was just last night reading a lecture delivered in 1974 by Marshall McLuhan (mentioned above) in which he noted that the notion of 'job' in an electronic era was a relic of a bygone era; in the more rapid electronic environment, he said, we are more clearly engaged in role-playing than we are in carrying out the task of a 'job'. 1974 !! A well-crafted role profile need be no longer than one page (landscape) and can include all of the essential information (including competencies and learning objectives) related to a given role. Job descriptions are likely to remain an issue in many organizations getting involved with Enterpise 2.0 initiatives, as it will take some learning and experience to know what will be the effect on the concept of a 'job' from people operating constantly in a socially-networked environment Employee Performance Performance management has been a hot-button issue in most enterprises for a long time. At its best, a well-designed and disciplined approach to performance management can play a positive and constructive role in delivering sustained high performance, and can be central to creating a performance oriented culture in the enterprise. All too often, however, performance management schemes serve to remind us that too many workplaces are the adult version of grade school, with report cards and a parent-like boss who has unwanted power over employee's future and fate. 360-degree feedback processes (soliciting input on performance from subordinates, colleagues, superiors and even external customers and liaisons) have been around long enough now to have most of the kinks worked out, and are probably a decent pre-cursor to forms of 'crowdsourcing' input on employees' performance. Many (most ?) of the social computing / collaboration platforms out there have features and functionality designed to offer support to gathering and processing information about peoples' performance. The culture of an enterprise is an all-important aspect of why and how performance management is used. I expect that this aspect will become more important as social computing and collaboration continues to grow and spread. Training & Development Too big a subject area to deal with here. Suffice it to say that this is an area that has over the past five years or so generated a wholesale review of T & D philosophies and activities. Much of the discussion is aimed at assessing how effective formal learning / T & D has been, and why and how informal, or social, learning is so pervasive and so important. This issue gets at the heart of why social computing and collaboration is a big deal, and is (probably) changing the nature of knowledge work in today's interconnected environment. It's important to note here that there will (IMO) always be an important role for structured formal training & development / learning focused on specific aspects of the kinds of information and knowledge needed by workers. It's also probably the case that much or all of that type of learning will be available online, and offered in various hybrid combinations of virtual and F2F learning environments. For a concise yet comprehensive summary of the core issues and why the impact of the Web is so important in this area, see my colleague Harold Jarche's "Social Learning in the Enterprise". Reward & Remuneration Where to start ? In many of my writings about social computing, collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, hierarchy and wirearchy, I have stated that the enterprise-driven process of job evaluation is a real and ever-present challenge to the effectiveness of Enterprise 2.0 adoption and effectiveness. In a vast general sense, levels of remuneration for many types of jobs are determined by job evaluation, a process of 'measuring' the amount of knowledge, problem-solving and accountability contained in a job. There are of course other influences like union contracts on specific industries, 'hot' (or currently-in-demand) skills, local and regional issues, and so on ... but there is clearly stratification in the levels of pay and compensation depending upon the type(s) of work. Not only that, there is important legislation in many of the developed countries governing the issue(s) of Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value that specifies in general terms how the worth of a job is measured and what the issues are for setting remuneration levels for types of work Remuneration is a subject area that is too vast (and too arcane) to get into here, but it's one that I expect will experience more and more change as the era of social computing and social networks in the workplace really gets going. I have some ideas on the evolution of this area of HR, mainly gleaned from work I have done in the past on 1) competency-based pay and 2) contribution-based pay. And, to revive a term I have not heard much of for the past 15 years or so, might Enterprise 2.0 help rejuvenate the concept of gainsharing ? Administrative Most administrative issues and practices in the HR field were automated in HRIS systems at least a decade ago, if not longer. I am not aware of how Enterprise 2.0 would visit any change to this area of HR management. . This is already a too-long post. And, I have not even touched on the ways HR professionals need to change what and how they deliver to meet the challenges posed by Enterprise 2.0. As noted at the beginning of this piece, I am not aware of significant work in the general area of changes to mainstream HR practices as a result of embarking on the path towards Enterprise 2.0. I will be delighted to learn from any of you of examples and / or issues I may have missed or glossed over. Jon Husband Wirearchy 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email Employee Engagement – a Core Goal of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption ? January 25, 2010 By Jon Husband Categories: General IT Staffing Solutions Web 2.0 By now, reams have been written about the possibilities offered by the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities. The interest continues to grow as the daily use of the Web at work approaches ubiquity. Also, reams have been written about why the engagement of knowledge-work employees is a central means of increasing productivity, effectiveness and the achievement of sustained high performance. The greater engagement of employees has been a central aim of the work of organizational development (OD) professionals for at least the last two decades (and much further back if we are striving for precision). In a recent Wall Street Journal blog post titled “Management’s Dirty Little Secret”, Gary Hamel brings us face-to-face with this fundamental issue:
. Effective (and/or increased) engagement of employees engenders leadership, organizational culture and the core requirement for management effectiveness at motivating, guiding and coaching employees. These issues are NOT new. However, they are all central elements to the whys, whats and hows of the productive adoption of social computing, aka Enterprise 2.0.
. Here’s my opinion about Hamel’s premise and how to address the issues he has raised : As a generality, what companies (and managers) have not done well is acknowledge or understand that the fundamental responsiveness to customer or employee feedback comes from what people have always done well … what they, arguably, are designed to do or what is in their nature to do .. which is:
In effect, these *social processes* have been suppressed or limited by the structures of most sizeable companies, with the attendant rules underpinning reporting relationships, spans of control, delegations of authority. This is, colloquially, why so many people like to complain about *hierarchy* … there are often better ways available, or conditions which no longer suit yesterday’s (and today’s) bureaucracy, but all too often they are not permitted to enter into play. These ruminations bring to mind the approach known as Participative Work Design (about which I have written before on this blog), known mainly to organizational development theorists and practitioners. Participative Design was developed in 1971 by Fred and Merrelyn Emery. They developed the method as a faster and more acceptable alternative to the Socio-Technical Systems (STS) approach, where a multi-functional task force redesigns the organisation, usually taking a whole year to do so. A design created and then implemented in this way tends to be flawed, because it is based on an incomplete assessment of reality. Also, workers do not have ownership of the design, and this generates resistance to change. And, perhaps most significantly, the organisation’s underlying power structure remains intact. The latter points … an incomplete assessment of reality, no or little ownership on the part of workers and an unchanged power structure … have only been exacerbated by the near-real-time (and accelerating) conditions of the interconnected environment in which we now work. Whereas STS is based on what the Emerys call the ‘bureaucratic design principle’, Participative Design reflects the ‘democratic design principle’. This design principle asserts that:
The Emerys have also identified six basic conditions that need to be met if people’s work is to be productive and satisfying. There must be:
The examples of human interactive behaviour while doing *work* are characteristics of the give-and-take of purposeful interaction. Working interactively using wikis, or purpose-designed blogs is a social process, and helps support, and make visible, engagement with an organization’s objectives The lightweight, inexpensive, user-friendly tools are now available to let people interact, both with each other and with larger, integrated systems, and to integrate social processes into (existing) more static and more clearly defined work processes. In my opinion, managers everywhere should look at using participative social technologies and processes to help them … 1) learn about, encourage and support on-purpose engagement, and 2) adapt the ways they ‘manage’ to achieve results when engagement, responsiveness, creativity and innovation are the characteristics that support an organization’s sustained performance. What do you think ? 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email Survey says - One-Third of IT Employers Plan to Increase Hiring in 2010 January 22, 2010 By Charlie Bess Categories: General IT Staffing Solutions CareerBuilder conducted their annual hiring forecast and the perspective is that IT organizations are optimistic about their future and plan to begin to invest in the growth in 2010. Their forecast reveals that nearly one-third (32%) of IT employers plan to increase the number of full-time, permanent employees -- the highest among all industries surveyed. The survey was conducted among more than 160 Information Technology employers between November 5 and November 23, 2009. Only, one-in-ten (12%) plan to make a decrease in the amount of full-time employees. There are a number of ways organizations are hiring that may differ from the past:
Charlie Bess 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email Technical trends from an HR perspective October 23, 2009 By Charlie Bess Categories: General IT Staffing Solutions A few weeks ago I participated in a technical trend conversation aimed mainly at the oil and gas organizations. Last weekend I did something similar but this time talking with some individuals from various HR organizations - at an HR Roundtable Summit that SMU held in San Antonio. Their rankings came out it four tiers: The highest level of interest was:
The next highest grouping was:
The lowest grouping receiving votes were:
And those with no votes:
These are quite different ratings than the previous set so it shows how important it is to know your organizations definition of innovation. 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email When Working Well With Others, It’s Important To Use The Right Tools January 27, 2009 By Vaclav Vincalek Categories: IT Staffing Solutions From time to time, us information technology consultants have to work together on stuff – web portals, web development, network security assessments, you name it. And it helps to have the right tools to ensure that collaboration is as seamless as possible. IT people generally do cooperate well together. It may have something to do with a problem-solving mindset that just doesn’t allow for distractions like personality conflicts. We "play well with others" -- at least, other IT people (NOTE: this applies to internal office projects. IT consultants dealing with tech support personnel over the phone are another matter. Or maybe it’s just ME and tech support. No, it’s tech support generally.) Lately, I’ve been checking out version control tools like Subversion or Git that might help me and my fellow PCIS colleagues work on upcoming projects either together, or just on my own. Even a few people working on a project, changing files or updating and occasionally forgetting to document the change, or keeping files on a bunch of different computers could cause issues in future, so it's good to be pro-active about these kinds of issues. So I’m looking into this to nip any such snafus in the bud. The process of working on a web portal development project for a client is what actually got me started on this. The job is intended to provide better collaboration on work functions for our client, which has a number of remote locations. The client already had a Lotus Notes Intranet set up, but it turned out what they really needed was a web portal with web-based applications staff at the different offices could actually use, rather than just view. Having the right tools to work together can be just as important as being able to play nice together. Vaclav Vincalek Pacific Coast Informer Blog 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email Bold use of IT January 8, 2009 By Charlie Bess Categories: General IT Staffing Solutions I've seen a number of notes and articles about it being time for IT leaders to focus on cost cutting... during the economic downturn. In fact, there are whole seminars dedicated to it. That statement is true, but it should always be true (regardless of economic conditions). The same thing could be said about ROI within IT (or the business overall). What should be thought about in a new way is the continued separation of IT from the business. It's all business. Now is the time for those in a business leadership position to understand that this is not a time to be passive and wait out this economic downturn. It is more than just a focus on survival; instead, it can be about advantage and value. Strategic money spent today has more effect when everyone is thinking tactically. I've mentioned before that I believe IT will undergo a shift during this down cycle, and that what we spend money on when we come out of it will be different. Now is the time for organizations to think about how they operate. If they keep operating the same way and merely cut each line item of the budget without rethinking the overall approach, it is simply admitting they're a victim. This is a time to rethink, reprioritize, reengineer, and regenerate. Formally ask: Do all the elements in your application portfolio deliver value to the business? Are the assets utilized as efficiently as they should be? These kinds of activities do take some time and money, but the benefits are long lasting and may even cut costs in the near term. Organizations that understand the value and visibility provided by IT have a greater ability to identify innovative ways to help reduce operational costs, improve their connections with customers, increase communication across and between organizations, and reduce time to market and enterprise response (latency) using collaboration. It is a time to brainstorm ways to reposition businesses for the future. It may be time to realize that there is no other choice. In many industries, businesses are vulnerable. It is a time for leadership. Leaders are always willing to hear about innovative, creative ideas, but you still need to address the basics of ROI and business drivers. Managers, on the other hand, may be willing to focus only on operational excellence issues and cost cutting at times like these. Understand what the motivators are for the organization, look at these drivers and their implications from a different perspective and the impact of your ideas will be felt, now, more than ever. 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email Interview Questions for Prospective Website Managers August 22, 2008 By Glen Farrelly Categories: IT Staffing Solutions Before I left my previous job, I was asked to come up with some questions on what would be good job interview questions to ask of a prospective website manager. This is for a jack-of-all-trades and hands-on kind of manager that needs to know a lot of things to run a website. Here's what I came up with plus some new ones I just though of (in no particular order): Can you describe a situation where you helped make a website more user-friendly? More client focused? What would you say is a good measure of website performance that might not commonly be thought of? Describe your experience with web analytics? What are you thoughts on interactive media? Any success stories? Any caveats? Which web authoring software do you use? How proficient are you with HTML? With CSS? JavaScript? XML? ASP or PHP? What methods of troubleshooting a problem with a webpage do you use? How do you uncover buggy code? What's your favourite browser and why?
Every website will have unique needs, based not only on software used but also resources available, but I think I have got some standard items. This list is certainly not definitive, so I'd love to hear some suggestions. Glen Farrelly Webslinger 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email |
