Work Babble

Getting Your Arms Around Engagement: Some Q&A with Marnie Green of Management Education Group

By Tony Deblauwe

1.                  1. What trends are you seeing emerge between current job market conditions and current employee engagement levels?

The social contract between employee and employer has certainly shifted.  In today’s market employees do not expect as much from employers as we might have seen 20 or 30 years ago.  Because of the volatile market conditions, employees, in general, have lower levels of trust in their employers and thus are quicker to look for something new if their needs are not being met. The current dynamic is leading employers to recognize that high levels of employee engagement are something that require cultivation.

2.               2. How are you coaching your clients who are worried about retention?

I believe it is still about the individual relationship between the employee and their manager.  Employees will be engaged when they are offered a clear, compelling vision that makes sense to them.  Organizational leaders must provide hope, challenge, and encouragement by talking with employees about the future of the organization and by describing how the employee’s efforts contribute to that future.

3.               3. What are three things leaders can do to engage their people?

Leaders must:

·        Clearly define and communicate a vision for the future of the organization.

·        Share the vision simply, enthusiastically and often.

·        Talk with employees about their individual goals/needs and then link the employee’s goals to the future of the organization.  Employees need to know how they fit into the big picture.

4.               4. What are some effective ways leaders can use technology to leverage employee engagement?

One of the best approaches to using technology to engage employees is to let the employees tell you how to leverage it.  The worst thing I’m seeing leaders do today is to restrict the use of certain technologies because they believe can’t control how employees use them.  One organization I worked with prohibited the use of Instant Messaging, even though the younger workers were using it to communicate about work-related issues. 

Another organization implemented extensive filters which made it so that many Internet sites were inaccessible. Employees read these measures as a lack of trust.  To engage employees, ask them to identify the ways technology can be leveraged, rather than limited, for the benefit of the organization. And then, of course, use their ideas.

5.              5. Where can people find out more about you and the products/services you offer?

Visit my website at www.ManagementEducationGroup.com for a full description of services, clients, and team members.  The website includes management-related articles and an archive of my monthly e-tip that offers practical, timely suggestions for managers. You can sign up for the monthly tip at my website.

You can also find me on Twitter @Marnie_Green or email me at mgreen@managementeducationgroup.com. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Opportunities and Risks in M2M's Maturation

Guest post by Emily Nagle Green,
Author of Anywhere: How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business

As a fan of all things connected -- and I do mean, getting all things in our lives connected, as that's a foundational element of Yankee Group's Anywhere vision -- I have mixed feelings about the recent spate of network operator announcements in the marketplace about M2M (machine-to-machine connectivity) business strategies. If you don't know what I'm talking about, see this Sprint announcement, or this one from Verizon Wireless and Vodafone, or this one from Orange Business Services.

On the plus side, it's all good, because the wireless network operators must commit to M2M. While that industry has been full of dedicated evangelists tirelessly (and correctly) touting the benefits of bringing connectivity to all a business's assets to reduce labor and latency in its activities, the wireless industry contributed more lip service than actual effort to that vision in the past decade. But just in the last few quarters, M2M suddenly represents a critical solution to a common problem many wireless networks face: continued revenue growth. The explosion of mobile data consumption by smartphones is directly linked to a pricing strategy that doesn't give them linear growth in revenue from current mobile subscribers. And the flat-lining of the growth in mobile subscribers in maturing markets means trouble ahead, and soon. So: connect not just people, but things, too.

Welcome aboard. As wireless operators get serious about the fact that a greater diversity of connected devices in the world can benefit from their network infrastructure, it will actually help spawn that diversity. The operators create divisions with skilled, committed leaders like AT&T's Glenn Lurie and Sprint's Danny Bowman chartered to drive revenue from these new sources. These execs force their firms to create offers that are more appropriate for devices other than phones, and develop partnerships with other tech firms that can add to their networks' IQ in supporting M2M applications.

But -- I see some risks ahead.

The short version of the peril is this: recent conversations I've had with a number of wireless networks suggest they are approaching their it's-2010-now-we're-serious commitments to M2M with a similar general strategy, in which these dedicated divisions immediately organize their resources and focus by industry. A team to develop, market, and support M2M solutions for transportation, another team to develop, market, and support M2M solutions in healthcare, yet another for the applications in consumer electronics like the Kindle and its e-reader brethren. 

There's certainly a logic to this, as well as an elegance. The sense of it stems from the incredible diversity in M2M applications, so much diversity that the term itself is hardly meaningful because it spans such a breadth of activities and technologies. Is reading an e-book on a Sony Daily Reader an M2M application? Is tracking the location of a lost IV pump across a multi-building hospital campus an M2M application? To be able to collect such diversity under one organizational roof at a network, it stands to reason that you'd quickly want to get some focus on the unique challenges in healthcare (including a thicket of regulations, union rules, and extraordinarily sensitive and expensive devices to connect) versus those in consumer electronics (unit scale in the millions, rapid product lifecycles, and virtually zero attention span in end-consumers of those products for any complexity in their connectivity).

And the elegance of the vertical approach to operator M2M strategy is in the very simplicity of the org charts it induces. Want to add another vertical to your burgeoning M2M division? Just add water, plus the requisite number of industry specialist salespeople, system engineers, and third-party partnerships. Presto: the division's business plan produces another line-item of revenue from a whole new swath of customers. Call Wall Street -- this stock is hot.

The problem brewing here, though, is this: It's too soon for this leap. Even as the M2M industry labored for the past decade to develop technologically and economically viable applications to win its first pioneering Anywhere Enterprises, encouraging other firms eventually to cross that chasm themselves, it's just too soon to be landing on this cookie-cutter approach at the wireless operators to spawn rapid growth in network revenues from M2M's maturation.

It's as if, having just seen the first working internal combustion engines, Ford and his cohorts decide to build a bus factory, a car factory, a boat factory, and an aircraft factory, all in rapid succession. Just add water, and the right engineers to adapt the engine to the type of vehicle it's going to be inserted into. But the actual technology required decades to mature and spawn appropriate variations to be successfully applied in such a wide variety of products.

And I've seen this movie before. The last time I heard network operators talk with enthusiasm about exciting new sources of revenue beyond their mature operations, it was the early days of the consumer love affair with on-line services and the open Internet. AT&T, among others, devised a plan that in Powerpoint form looked eerily like the M2M vertical org charts I'm seeing today. The accompanying script went like this: "We see the on-line world hosting a diversity of consumer activities, from financial services, to travel, to health information, and much more. So we're going to build an online financial services experience, an on-line health information experience, an on-line travel center, and more. Today, of course, we're just announcing the on-line travel offering, but we expect to be rolling out these additional verticals at a rate of about one or two per year. And it's only with the tremendous resources of a global network operator that a firm can imagine the diversified revenue opportunities that will ensue from an expansion of this magnitude . . . "  OK, maybe those aren't the exact words I heard in 1996, but it's pretty damn close.

And we know how that movie ended. AT&T and the other network operators, notwithstanding their size, resources, and diversification imperatives, were ill-positioned to rapidly develop a broad set of vertical silos for new online revenues. For almost too many reasons to count, but several that matter to our M2M thinking today: the network itself wasn't sufficiently mature, the time required to build out credible offerings was longer than anticipated, and the network's customers weren't ready for completely silo'd offerings; they were still exploring in unpredictable and heterogeneous ways.

Let's take that last point -- because it's the one that is most often cited by the wireless operators today as the very reason they must focus by sector: their customers need it. Do they? Do they need the comfort of talking to a sales exec very knowledgeable about healthcare -- or do they need the comfort of talking to a sales exec who is very knowledgeable about how connectivity added to important enterprise assets saves labor expense in a very cost-conscious operation?

At a recent M2M conference hosted by Axeda, a partner to several wireless operators that provides middleware to ease the development of applications across verticals, an exciting variety of businesses gathered to examine why and how to extend connectivity in their enterprises to reach more of their assets and activities.

If the customer-needs-it rationale to vertical operator M2M strategies was correct, you'd have expected to only see healthcare sector attendees in the Abbott Labs presentation, and only financial services sector professionals in the discussion by Diebold of its mission to equip its ATM product family with remote diagnostics. But in talking about the challenges and the solutions they each experienced in adding connectivity to their products, both presenters talked about the same core issues. How to assemble a comprehensive solution from the elements the connectivity sector has on offer today. How not to bite off more than your team can chew. How to measure ROI, what metrics matter. How to deal with the assault of exponentially larger quantities of data coming at them with the remote instrumentation of equipment. And the topic that might have garnered the most energy in both presentations: how to organize internally to win the support of other divisions to expand the activity after the first pilot successes.

The people that swarmed these speakers after their presentations weren't looking for industry-specific lessons, but advice and insight that span virtually every sector in which I have yet seen M2M concepts successfully applied. The Anywhere evangelists emerging within enterprises today, who must be supported by wireless operators and their partners to drive connectivity further into their organizations for mutual benefit, don't yet require highly differentiated solutions. There's a lot of commonality yet to build, and exploit, before the set-'em-up, knock-'em-down approach of vertical M2M strategies at the operators can be wildly effective.

What's the right wireless operator M2M strategy? That's something that requires more than a blog posting. But at the very least it's one that allows the richness and uncertainty in the current M2M space to inform all its industry offerings -- one that accretes experiences, solutions, insight, relationships across its early customers before identifying where the real need for specialization comes in their efforts. 

The advantages of delaying the specialization of an M2M operation by vertical could included more cross-fertilization by account teams of successful client applications, earlier insights on the additional substrate that the network requires to be valuable across sectors, and lower costs in sales and marketing stemming from a more leveraged investment in M2M offers.

In the end, I want to see the operators' M2M efforts succeed as much as they do. I just hope I don't end up seeing a repeat of the Internet silo strategies of the late '90s.

© 2010 Emily Nagle Green, author of Anywhere: How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business

Author Bio
Emily Nagle Green is president and CEO of Yankee Group, a leading firm in researching global connectivity change. Yankee Group supports businesses worldwide that use, operate, or help build networks with powerful ideas, forecasts, conferences, and strategy consulting. Green is also vice-chair of MITX, the largest association for digital marketing and media technology in the United States. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

For more information please visit http://anywhere.yankeegroup.com.
Become a fan of Anywhere on Facebook, and follow Emily Nagle Green on Twitter. 

Job Enlargement vs. Job Enrichment: 3 Tips for Success

By Tony Deblauwe

As the economy picks up, more job opportunities are becoming available. We’ve already started to see many companies like Cisco and Intel open jobs that were absent through much of 2009. Internal opportunities are surfacing as well with many employees looking to make a change within their current company. Unfortunately for many, the change they seek may not be in the form of a promotion with new challenges; rather the new role is merely a piling on of additional duties to an existing job.

Job Enlargement
Job enlargement increases an employee’s scope (and workload) to accommodate a business need. That need can mean increasing competences against a new customer or industry demand, or to offset lack of resources brought about from lack of hiring or turnover.  The employee on the receiving end may interpret the added duties as positive at first, but often the change is not accompanied with any reward or removal of other tasks  The employee gains more responsibility but remains largely in the same role.

Job Enrichment
Job enrichment takes a different stance. Rather than simply adding duties, an employee’s talents are leveraged to address various business challenges. Meaningful tasks are assigned to an employee based on their interests and performance history. This could include researching trends, project managing a new program, doing a job rotation – basically anything that aligns what the employee wants to do, and is good at, against a business deliverable. Enrichment is the true win-win for a company and its employees.

Why the Disconnect?
After a year of little movement or change, the level of employee engagement is suffering. Surveys from Gallup and the Conference Board, show employee motivation, morale, and high performance output, is at an all time low. Even with merit budgets slightly de-thawed, this latest round of increases has not perked people up to pre-recessionary production levels. Workers are still interested in having a job of course, but they want more. They crave challenges that show off their abilities and yield real rewards. Companies are beginning to see the effects as people seek outside employment rather than be assigned more duties disguised as a benefit.

 

Finding the Balance

It’s not an exact science finding the intersection of job enrichment versus enlargement. Many factors are at play including employee’s perceptions of what constitutes tasks that they feel utilize their talents well versus help the company’s interests only. As with most workforce planning and career development programs, open communication and aligned needs and interests becomes key. Here are three tips management and HR can do to strike a balance:

1. Have a talent matrix
Many problems around job duty changes, task re-direction, and career growth stem from a missing talent management plan. A talent matrix is an organization’s accounting for the skills that exist – both in skills that aren’t immediately used in the business and those that are critical. All of the skills are captured from individual growth plans, resume data, and conversations with employees. A good matrix shows who is good at what, and what people want to do. With this data it’s easier for managers to know who to assign to what when the opportunity arises. Click here to see an example presentation including a simple matrix form from Knowledge Infusion consultants.

2. Conduct career development discussions
People processes are as important to maintain engagement and connection as being a solid task master. Under stressful conditions, like the survival mode many companies have faced in the last several months, paying attention to employee growth needs takes a back seat. This is a mistake. A regularly planned discussion with employees demonstrates a commitment to talent regardless of the business conditions.

 

Most people are not entitlists – they can see conditions are poor and don’t count on promotions or enrichment offers. What they do care about is communication. When managers ignore or abandon a career development discussion, that’s when employee’s think they’re not cared for or feel valuable. It’s important to set-up regular quarterly check-ins to make sure employees know what the conditions are and that they are heard in terms of what they want to do and where they want to go. Click here for sample guidelines about career development programs in the workplace.

 

3. Tie practices to strategic value
Just having data about your talent and talking about career development isn’t enough. A corporate philosophy has to surround these practices because it benefits the company.  This concept seems simple enough but many companies insert “be happy you have a job” as a measure to job enlargement or enrichment. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing exactly what you should be doing in your job duties – we’re paying you to work and that should be enough.

 

It may not be communicated in this overt style, but behaviorally from management, the subtly is there in the form of no commutation or action. That’s why management and HR have to show the value of these programs. The data has to connect with competitive advantage that also leads to increased productivity and job satisfaction. Click here for some ideas on workplace planning strategies from Washington State’s Department of Personnel.

Building business-relevant connections with employee talent and interests will continue to be a vital tool for company’s to survive the economy and maintain competitive advantage. Creating the right motivational foundation through carefully planned job enrichment and enlargement practices will mean the difference between dealing with retention issues due to turnover versus an engaged workforce.

Please share your opinions and links regarding job enrichment and enlargement!

Author Panel: Social Media at Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance

By Tony Deblauwe

In this episode of the Work Babble Author Panel, the authors of the new book, Social Media at Work, describe their experience defining how best to use social media to drive organizational effectiveness.

As many companies slowly thaw from the cold grip of economic uncertainty and stunted growth, the need to innovate and share knowledge rapidly is more and more critical. The workplace has gone through significant change as well and creating points of collaboration and connection between individuals and teams is much harder. Fortunately many software tools have emerged that offer solutions to effectively leverage the skills and competencies of employees no matter where they do business.

The problem is, many organizations do not know how to effectively harness social media tools internally and derive the benefits. In their new book, Social Media at Work, co-authors Arthur Jue, Jackie Alcalde Marr, and Mary Ellen Kassotakis offer their insight on how companies can use social media tools to their advantage. Their research with companies such as Nokia, IBM, Starbucks, and Cisco, draw out methods and examples of how teams use these tools to lead change and foster more engaged cultures and ways of working.

For more information about this book visit:

Wiley Publisher Website

Offer your opinion, insight or ask questions at the Social Media at Work blog.

Available in bookstores and Amazon
Retail: $29.95
ISBN: 978-0-470-40543-7

Newsweek article on Layoffs

By Tony Deblauwe

This is a powerful image for those impacted by recent layoffs. The article published in the Feb 15 edition discusses why layoffs are bad for business. In particular the author, Stanford professor, Jeffery Pfeffer summarized a few top reasons why layoffs don’t work.

Doesn’t give the returns expected. In terms of stock, Pfeffer points to research that shows stock prices go much lower compared to peers who struggled but did not layoff. The cost of rehiring and retraining employees down the road, plus the severance packages awarded, also don’t reduce the overall cost of the action.   

We export jobs as a result. Many countries grow as a result of taking down our workforce. India has seen this the most. Often it’s a 3-1 fill rate for a given job requisitions. It used to be six, but the gap is narrowing. Pfeffer explains that many companies are looking to model our tactics.

Morale and productivity shifts. For those that have to stay and take on extra work, or deal with the emotional loss of co-workers, has a big impact on business operations. How businesses handle layoffs is key as well as how expectations are set with those who stay. Pfeffer also mentioned research that shows benefit costs increase as a result of layoff.

The big point Pfeffer mentions is that layoffs have become part of doing business – not as survival tactic, but as a matter of regular cost reductions. The myth that companies are immediately better off due to layoffs has grown so widely that the practice is considered normal even if the business is doing ok. Furthermore, in the last year due to so many business closures, companies felt the pressure to copycat and have some kind of layoff to show they are “with the times.” No matter how you look at it – layoffs should remain as they always have been – a last resort to keep a business afloat, not a feeble attempt at strategic ROI.

 

Click here for full article