Lisette Howlett, managing director of www.hirescores.com notes:
Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/12/lies-trust-and-chocolate.html
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There are some other great posts there too. I was particularly pleased to see this comment on BrainBlogger:
Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/12/carnival-of-trust.html
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in 'What holds the modern company together?', they make the point that culture is community:
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Several different events I attended last week got me thinking about leadership and the increasing need for this to focus on horizontal rather than just vertical relationships in organisations.
Henry Mintzberg on Communityship
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For example, in recruitment, HR can
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Li and Bernoff believe that the evolution of social computing is creating a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works, in which people use technologies to get things from each other instead of from companies.
Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/10/hype-or-groundswell.html
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So what did you think of the webinar if you attended it? It would be great to have some comments and / or questions here...
But do these opportunities really exist, or am I just falling for the hype / bubble around web 2.0?
Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/09/web-20-hype.html
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I'm beginning to get my ideas on social capital a bit clearer and on 2 October will be sharing them on this Kennedy Information webinar.
In particular, I'll be covering:
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The article combines Goleman's thinking about about social intelligence (the bottom two squares in Goleman's model of emotional intelligence) with Boyatzis's ideas on how leaders can create resonance with others by becoming attuned to the needs and dreams of people they lead.
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If you were on yesterday's webinar, over at Knowledge Infusion, I hope you enjoyed it.
If you weren't, the slides and recording (available until 26th September) are here (if you're not already registered at KI's centre of excellence, you may have to do this first, but then if you're at all interested in HCM, you need to be on there anyway). And I know there'll be some more discussion on the COE, that I'll be joining in with, over the next few days.
Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/09/linking-social-connections-social-media.html
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I talked briefly about prediction markets in yesterday's Digital HR webinar, delivered with Knowledge Infusion (and I would have discussed crowdsourcing as well, if I'd had time!).
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I've just been reading an excerpt of Jeff Howe's new book, 'Crowdsourcing' on wired.com.
Howe defines crowdsourcing as the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people using the transformative power of today's technology which allows communities to be formed by shared interest rather than vicinity. This enables the power of the many to be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialised few.
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Good session at the RSA last night looking at greed and inequality in Britain today.
The session was opened by Polly Toynbee, author of a long-term favourite text of mine, Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain, and who has just co-authored Unjust Rewards with David Walker.
Among the various facts that Toynbee presented were that although half of earners earn under £23k, only 10% earn over £45k. But these people still don't feel rich.
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While in Dubai recently, I had an opportunity to catch up with Steve Vaile at H2O New Media, a UAE based and focused web development company (the contact was suggested through a comment on my blog).
Steve gave me a good summary of social media and its use in the UAE:
Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/09/h2o-social-media-in-uae.html
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Bersin also notes that many social software providers have formed partnerships with Microsoft around its SharePoint product, allowing the two applications to compliment each other.
In some ways, Sharepoint is a competitor to these systems but the vendors have realised that Sharepoint is so ubiquitous that it makes sense to coopt it rather than compete against it. In addition, Sharepoint is being positioned as a business productivity rather than a social application.
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I referred earlier to Bersin's new report on social networking and a little while ago, I attended their new principal analyst, David Mallon's webinar on the report.
Bersin's research contains a good overview of social networking tools / providers and of their variety. As Josh Bersin explains on his blog:
Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/09/bersin-social-networks.html
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Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/08/trends-in-digital-hr.html
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I've posted on HCI's / IBM's new talent management research on my HCM blog. IBM found the factors that made the biggest difference to organisational performance are whether organisations understand and address workforce attitudes and engagement levels, and whether employee and workgroup incentives are aligned with appropriate business goals.
However, another factor that appears to quite important is collaboration (I also suspect that the importance of this element is currently being undervalued, and that it will grow over time). The research finds here that only about half of organisations believe that their employees are collaborating and sharing knowledge with other employees. These organisations believe that doing this helps promote organisational goals and results.
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I think Orange's new ad provides quite a good description of ubuntu:
"I am my mum and my sister. I am my best friend Mike who I've known since school. I am Kate who's still somewhere in Thailand. I'm all the girls I've ever kissed, and the girls I will. I am the teacher that failed me, and the one who spurred me on. I am my bosses, and every one of my friends. I am a bloke I'll meet travelling, who'll teach me the guitar. I am the places I'll go to with mates, and the jokes I'll share with them. I am the people who put me down, and the ones who'll pick me up. I am who I am, because of everyone."
Although this blog focuses on developing social capital in businesses, much of the learning that can be used within organisations comes from society at large. And there's an interesting speech by Michael Gove on the Conservatives website, explaining how the party's social policy is designed to deliver progressive outcomes.
It refers first of all to Bill Clinton's use of the Bantu word Ubuntu which, broadly translated, means 'I am because you are'.
Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/08/ubuntu-changing-social-thinking.html
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The Aberdeen Group report provides a number of interesting findings too. The report defines workforce collaboration as "connecting employees and sharing knowledge to achieve identified goals".
It is therefore one outcome of both connection (through social networking) and knowledge sharing (through web 2.0).
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There were several interesting reports on web 2.0 / social networking published last month, including by McKinsey, Aberdeen Group and Bersin (I will be reporting on my won research shortly).
The McKinsey report provides an update on last year's research and finds increased use of web 2.0 tools which are still being used more frequently for internal than for external purposes (internal applications include managing knowledge - 83%; fostering collaboration across company - 78%; enhancing culture - 74%; training - 71%; developing products and services - 67% and internal recruiting - 54%).
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I am quoted in an article on social networking published by the IOD's Director magazine, 'Social Workers' - see my HCM blog for details.
According to Management Today, new GSK chief exec Andrew Witty has proposed that "instead of the existing seven large global centres, GSK’s hunt for new drugs should be tackled by many more, much smaller teams – a maximum of 80 scientists per group, in fact".
The rationale is apparently that:
"The new model is based on the assumption that smaller, more dispersed teams will naturally tend to pursue a broader portfolio of products. Each of them may be rather less lucrative than one of the old blockbusters – which are anyway getting much harder to find – but the damage caused by one of them failing will also be a lot less traumatic. Less of a roller-coaster, more of a gentle drive in the country."
That makes sense, although I think there's something about the smaller number too.
When I was an HR Director at Ernst & Young, we started to organise our audit teams into groups ('stables') of 50-80 too, in order to improve collaboration within teams. A group of 80 would include up to 10 managers and we felt that this was about the maximum number of people who could work well together, and through them, bring the full group of about 80 people together into a cohesive team.
Dunbar's analysis may suggest we can network effectively with a slightly higher number of people that this, but I think for real, effective focus and team working, 80's about right.
Theresa Welbourne at eepulse (see also Energize Engage) reports finding that relational capital (here defined as relationships with all stakeholders not just employees) is more important than human capital for building long-term competitive advantage in an organisation.
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I've only just come across this research via Steve Roesler's All Things Workplace.
“Meetings Around the World: The Impact of Collaboration on Business Performance”, published recently by Microsoft, Verizon and Frost & Sullivan, measured companies' “collaborativeness” through an index consisting of the quality (the nature and extent of collaboration that allows people to work together as well as an organisation’s culture and processes that encourage teamwork) and capability (an organisation’s orientation, infrastructure and technologies) of collaboration.
Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/07/collaborating-for-business-performance.html
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This article in the same edition of Harvard Business Review is quite interesting too:Why did we ever go into HR?:
In particular;
"HR is poised to become the Facebook of the modern corporation. Many knowledge-management initiatives have failed because employees weren’t inspired to use them. Yet the rise of social-networking sites points to a widespread desire to connect with others who share your goals and interests. HR is uniquely positioned to connect people—and therefore knowledge, expertise, and mentorship possibilities—across an organization. For instance, leadership-development program alumni can participate in annual reunions hosted by a firm’s top brass and serve as advisers to current program students. Follow-ups such as these—and the programs themselves—help build networks of people from disparate parts of the organization and with vastly different areas of expertise."
I think the examples are a bit week, but I agree with the sentiment, the general importance of social networking, and HR's key role in making this happen.
This blog has recently been focusing on web / enterprise / HR 2.0 but the reason that I've called it 'The New Social Business' is that I want to focus much more widely on all the other non-technological factors and activities which are supporting and enabling major social changes in the workplace.
So I was interested in an article in this month's Harvard Business Review on Managing Corporate Social Networks (Adam Kleinbaum and Michael Tushman).
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After having discussed the main business impacts of operating in the networked world, today's session then went on to explore the use of web 2.0 to support the changes that are necessary.
A highlight of the conversation for me was a discussion on the importance of face-to-face communication and the need to use technology to optimise this:
Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/07/web-20-in-professional-services-legal.html
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This morning, I spoke at an event on the impact of the networked world in professional services (with a fairly heavy emphasis on legal firms) organised by Winmark’s network for firm managing partners, NetworkMP (as well as some representatives from their Marketing Director and IT Director networks.
The event was chaired by Phil Williams at Rocketseed.
We started with a presentation by Phil Walker, VP at Capgemini, who talked about he main trends impacting professional services. One of these is that everything and everyone is connected (although this only applies to developed economies – 60% of the world still needs to be linked in). Relationships within the connected world are increasingly important and need to be nurtured – this requires person-to-person interaction as well as via a computer. Capgemini have introduced ‘talk to me on Friday’ - in which people who are in the building are encouraged to talk to each other rather than sending each other an email – and which has led to other networking activities for example, coffee clubs.
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I posted last month on April's Harvard Business Review article explaining that an old employer's social capital may go up after an employer leaves.
This dealt specifically with the increase in patents a firm might experience after the departure of an inventor to another company. The point is that the old firm tends to gain knowledge from the new company (through an increase in social / relationship capital) as well as the new company gaining knowledge (in the form of human capital) from the old firm.
Well there is also some research reaching very similar conclusions in this Summer's MIT Sloan Management Review.
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Chief Learning Officer magazine ask which function (HR, IT, corporate communications, knowledge management or learning and development) should own an organisation's approach to social networking.
Their answer:
"HR is more likely to own any internally facing social network, but that arrangement isn’t common enough to be considered typical.
When you look internally at an employee-oriented community, you’ve got a number of benefits or goals that you’re looking to achieve with social networks.
They help create a corporate culture of sharing and teamwork. They help increase intracompany communication and collaboration. They facilitate the identification of subject-matter experts. They can improve employee retention because technology is creating new bonds among employees and between employee and company, and that adds a human element to the company.”
Commenting on a recent post on web 2.0 for recruitment on my HCM Blog, one reader noted that HR's use of the available technology tends to be quite poor.
I think that's largely true.
The CIPD's web 2.0 in HR report notes that:
"More than 30% of the population (UK) have read a blog, 10% have created one and nearly 7% subscribe to an RSS feed."
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The CIPD have published a short, initial discussion document on 'HR's use of web 2.0 for strategic business impact' (disclosure: I bid for this work but didn't get it).
The report includes case studies provided by Pfizer, 3 government departments and T-Mobile.
I'm pleased to see that the CIPD recognises that web 2.0 provides 'the potential to change the way people interact and work' which 'offers HR a new way of making a significant contribution to an organisation's strategic and operational goals'.
However, I'm not sure the report offers much to help us do this (and to be fair, I don't think that's its objective either).
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There’s a great example of best fit people management in this month’s Harvard Business Review. The article proposes that Toyota’s ability to manage contradictions (along with the Toyota Production System) is the main source of the company’s success.
I don’t deny that dealing with paradox is an important capability, and in fact it is increasingly so, but my reading of the research identifies Toyota’s development of social capital as the engine of the company’s growth.
So I could have posted on this here, but the case study is a great example of best fit HCM as well so I actually did so here.
Do take a look.
Contrasting with the Microsoft case study, this was an example of social media being introduced ‘under the radar’.
I’d come across the case study earlier on Melcrum's blog and have also subscribed to Richard's.
The case study means quite a lot to me because of some earlier involvement in BT, which included writing some content on performance management for their intranet. I also had several conversations with Margaret Savage while she was at BT about liberating employees from over controlling managers – social media seems to have been one way that BT has been achieving this. (I would have said achieved if it wasn’t for the 20 calls and 3 different attempts to get a BT phone line installed recently)
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I thought this was a great case study of social media implementation - and the opposite of the "sneak it in" approach.
3. Trust your people and use social media
Presenters gave some great examples to show that organisations have lost control of the conversation. Employees are going online to join interactive conversations about our companies – we need to enable this.
The best web based communication combines web 2.0, the research web by giving people access to data; web 2.0 - the social web by giving access to tools, and what Steve Crescenzo termed web 3.0 - the multimedia web by entertaining people.
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Here are the rest of my key learnings from the Internal Communication Summit that I have been attending over the last two days.
One point that was made several times is that there are increasing challenges in delivering communication that gets read by, and leads to new understanding or actions by employees. Firstly, it is growing harder to get people’s attention, particularly when they are picking up their emails on blackberries and other devices. Secondly, there is increasing cynicism over use of business-speak. People are sick of hearing from ‘suits’ who aren’t seen as authentic and end up playing bullshit bingo.
Organisations can respond to this new environment by:
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A couple of days ago I was listening to an interesting Business Week podcast featuring the journalists who recently updated the magazine’s article Blogs / Social Media will change your Business.
Talking about IBM, the journalists explain that the firm is developing their own versions of social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and Wikipedia to develop not so much an intranet, but an intra social net. They see the key to getting their 400,000 people on this as making the tools corporate without loosing the magic and appeal that comes with using them when they’re outside and free.
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I’m attending Simply Communicate’s Employee Communcation Summit today and tomorrow.
It’s an interesting conference, and I sort of wish I’d decided to live blog it (when I’ve done this before, at last year’s CIPD conference, I’ve found it very valuable to my learning as it forces me to internalise each presentation and articulate my perspective on the topic that’s been presented).
I’m not live blogging this conference however, possibly because I’ve got lazy, but also because I don’t find I’m yet as clear in my own thinking on communication and web 2.0 as I am on HR.
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A bit late on this but there was a really interesting article on some research into social capital in April's Harvard Business Review.
We know that moving to a new organisation will generally increase an individual's social capital (if they retain contacts with their last employer / colleagues). And that this should mean the new employer's social capital also increases.
But did you know that the old employer's social capital may rise by the employee leaving as well?
"An inventor who switches companies obviously brings previously acquired knowledge the new employer. We also found, though, that after an inventor moves to a new firm in a different country, subsequent patents from the inventor's old firm are 36% more likely to cite patents granted to people at the inventor's new firm than to cite patents granted to people at other comparable companies. In effect, the old firm gains knowledge from the new firm. However, this phenomenon is not evident for inventors who move within the same US metropolitan region or the same foreign country. That's probably because in those circumstances, the old country and the new firm are likely to have other existing ties, such as shared customers, suppliers and acquaintances."
So what am I trying to do on this blog?
Well, I don't think I had ever come across web 2.0 when I wrote my book on HCM (human capital management - or the management of people in a way than enables the accumulation of human capital). If I had, I think I would have tried to write it in a very different , and collaborative way. And I think this need is particularly strong when writing anything to do with social networking using web 2.0.
Please note, I'm not thinking of writing a book on web 2.0 - there are plenty, absolutely plenty, of people who know much more about this than me. I am, however, thinking of writing something on social capital, and I will need to refer to web 2.0' significant impact on this.
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Anonymous commented on my post 'social connecting in business', suggesting that 2.0 is a bubble and that I should "pontificate new collaboration / interaction models in HR without bringing up web 2.0".
I don't think that 2.0 is a bubble, but I agree that other approaches are as important (possibly more so). I believe that if organisations see 'connecting' as the key issue, then this will guide their choices in technology and other areas, and avoid over-investment due to marketing hype.
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Hello to everyone I met at today's Learning & Skills Group conferencette. I hope you'll get time to take my social connecting / web 2.0 survey (top right-hand corner of my blog).
And especially to Jane Hart. Jane, I hope you're not too shattered now after your two sessions on learning tools.
I've already posted a series of updates on social networking and web 2.0, as well as enterprise 2.0, management 2.0 and knowledge management 2.0.
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Knowledge management 2.0 is expressed well by David Gurteen:
“Another label for KM 2.0 might be “Social KM”. It is an emerging social model of KM. To my mind it is a very powerful model as it clearly places responsibility for knowledge sharing and making knowledge productive in the hands of the individual.
And so in the world of KM 2.0 we have two categories of social tool – soft-tools such as after action reviews and knowledge cafes and techno-tools such as wikis and blogs – an incredibly powerful combination.
So if the central question asked by managers in the KM 1.0 world was “How do we make people share?” the question of the KM 2.0 era is “How do we better share, learn and work together?” And is asked by everyone!
KM is becoming social.”
Management 2.0 comes up in Gary Hamel’s book, ‘The Future of Management'. Hamel argues that management will evolve to look a lot like web 2.0, and will therefore be more adaptable, innovative and engaging. He lists the key criteria of both web 2.0 and management 2.0 (which I think apply to all real enterprise 2.0 approaches) as:
Enterprise 2.0 refers (at least in the way I use the term) to the web 2.0 enabled organisation: one, which like web 2.0 (the social web) is likely to be open, collaborative, democratic etc.
The term was introduced by Harvard professor, Andy McAfee in a Sloan Management Review article, Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.
McAfee uses the term slightly differently to me – to “focus on those platforms that companies can buy or build in order to make visible the practices and outputs of their knowledge workers”.
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The title of this post is taken from Business Week’s article published this February, Social Media will change your Business (an update on what was apparently an iconic article on blogging published in May 2005 – well before I started getting interested in blogging and social media in general).
I think this article provides a useful summary of social networking and web 2.0, and the update from the previous article shows very clearly how much business application of social media has advanced in a very short period of time. (My own learning about social media continues to advance as well - a particular hat tip to the Podcast Sisters for this).
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Although these terms are often used imprecisely and interchangeably (with each other, and with other terms such as social media and social software), I believe 'social networking' and 'web 2.0' do refer to different things.
The way I separate the two is by explaining that:
social networking focuses on connecting people to each other, whereas
other web 2.0 applications focus on connecting people with the content that has been generated by other people.
So I might connect to someone via Linkedin and then subscribe to his or her blog to access the content this person has generated. (Of course, it is not quite as simple as this, as I may often subscribe to a person’s blog because I value them and their thinking, not just because of what they are currently writing about – in many ways I am in fact subscribing to the person, not just their content.)
So the points in my previous post about connecting apply in particular to social networking. In many ways, social networking is only a technology enabled way of doing what good networkers have always done, but this can now be done by many more people, and on a much broader scale
See also my previous posts:
Social connecting in business
HR 2.0 survey.
Take my 'Social connecting in business' survey here.
This post refers to my new survey on HR 2.0. I don’t want to influence anyone’s answers to this, either one way or the other. So you may want to take this survey before continuing to read on. The survey is available at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Pr2WYysTiyb3DM6a8mW7WA_3d_3d.
Referring to the CIPD’s current research, the elearning network define web 2.0 as ‘the second generation of web-based 'social and sociable' technologies that gives people more voice in matters that affect them, encourage conversations, interpersonal networking, personalisation and individualism’.
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The elearning network are running a survey on organisations' use of social networking / web 2.0 initiatives, on behalf of the CIPD.
I think this is a great initative and I look forward to hearing about the results of the survey at the CIPD's HR Software Show in June.
However, I do think they've missed a trick by approaching this from the viewpoint of the initiatives and the technology. After all, we all know that the technology behind e-learning doesn't matter; it's how this is used as part of a blended solution to achieve certain learning and business outcomes that counts.
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Another thing that came up in both Singapore and Dubai was head farming. I've already posted on this briefly, but develop on the idea here (it also explained further in my book, with a case study from Ernst & Young).
Basically, instead of waiting for a particular vacancy to arise, and then needing to find a particular individual who might fit (as in traditional head hunting), search firms and employers can work out who it is they want, establish relationships with these people, and then wait for the right opportunity (based upon particular business needs - but also the career needs of the individuals concerned) for the person to join the organisation.
Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/04/recruitment-20-head-farming-vs-head.html
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Despite my previous post, I do tend to come down on the side that thinks there are key cultural differences in abilities and behaviours between older and younger generations in the workforce.
This is partly based upon working alongside some of them at Buck (until recently, a part-time employer). And partly from the descriptions provided by others (I'm a big fan of Tammy Erickson's Across the Ages for example).
Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/03/more-on-google-generation.html
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I spent a day at the British Library last week doing some background research on social media sort of stuff. I picked up a newsletter that amongst other things, referred to a report, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, written by CIBER at UCL.
The research challenges many areas of common wisdom about Gen Y:
I think 2.0 makes a lot of sense.
The basic internet did bring a lot of change. The ability to search and communicate in real-time across the world felt like a momentous change, and I still think it was. So 'basic' is probably the wrong word.
But the new opportunities that web 2.0 provides to collaborate could be even more significant. It can change the way that people work, so enterprise 2.0, knowledge 2.0, HR 2.0 etc all make a lot of sense.
Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/01/and-what-about-30.html
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I also recommend:
For HR 2.0, see http://mcarthursrant.blogspot.com/.
And for an explanation of everything 2.0, there's a great video on enterprise collaboration software vendor, Jive Software's website (Sam Lawrence on Collaboration 2.0): http://www.jivesoftware.com/products/clearspace/features/videos.jsp
Sorry I've been a bit quiet here, there will be lots more soon.
Anyway, I've just picked up David Gurteen's Knowledge Newsletter for January and viewed David's latest Knowledge 2.0 presentation, IBM Knowledge Management goes Social presentation on slideshare. It's a great slideset, well, worth a look.
And I absolutely love Sibylle's comments on metrics in Knowledge 2.0:
"Most of us agree KM is about the SOCIAL so if we want a picture of what is happening in our SOCIAL environment we have to use SOCIAL tools, ie/ interviews, stories, theme analysis, anthropoligical observations - all tools researchers in the humanities like history and sociology have been using for years. Let's not take the easy way and give in to the bean counters in organisations with their need for meaningless number but rather educate them on how these techniques will give us understanding of what is really going on. Its only when we have an understanding of things like relationships, human networks, people' own perceptions of what knowledge they need/have etc, as well as the lack or flow of knowledge in their groups that we can create a path of action to improve that which we are trying to improve. Otherwise you'll just have one more KM metric presentation that bores the pants off everyone and contributes nothing to our intended path."
