Workplace Romances – Jared Woods

Simple Rules For Being A Better Employer

// March 4th, 2010 // No Comments » // Employment Branding

1. Recruit for the future. Being able to do the job today is only half the requirement. The person you hire needs to be able to do the job that the business needs them to do tomorrow, by tomorrow.
2. Remember that the H in HR stands for Human. People are irrational, emotional, creative and different. The more you try and standardise them, the less your standard applies.
3. Accountability, not blame. Blame is accountability plus defensiveness and emotion. Ownership of the error should be about who learned from it, not who caused it.
4. There’s no hierarchy on ideas. If anyone can invent an idea, a process or a tool that makes the business better, you need to make sure everyone can be heard.
5. Leadership, management and supervision aren’t synonyms. Look at the ratio of leaders to managers to supervisors, and make sure your leaders are in the right space for the business.
6. Measure everything. There is no point at which you’d like less data on how people engage, interact, learn, grow and deliver back to the business. Every process which can be measured, can be optimised.
7. Take courageous leaps. Having the chutzpah to try, knowing you may fail, is going to deliver more lessons in what to do (and avoid) than a thousand seminars.
8. Design your experiences. Build systems for conversation and feedback, and be prepared to listen, so you can build on the strengths and reduce the weaknesses.
9. Source opinions without being ruled by them. As the saying goes, fixing all the problems people had with the horse and cart wouldn’t have given us the car.
10. Redefine your internal definition of failure. Did you learn something? Did you find a different path? It’s never the first prototype that becomes the final product, but that doesn’t stop people from building prototypes.

7 Things HR Can Learn From Video Games

// March 3rd, 2010 // No Comments » // Employment Branding, Internal Communications

I love video games. I have loved them since I first had a computer that required a knowledge of BASIC to get the games running, It had a cassette drive. I’m not kidding. I’ve played habitually on almost every system, and enjoyed some of the tastiest fruits that the gaming tree had to offer. While the gaming industry thrives on entertainment, there are certainly some good lessons to be learned. Here’s just a few;

Pretending to be a nice guy will only get you so far. (Frank Fontaine, BioShock)

In BioShock, the historical story tells you of Frank Fontaine, a man who came to the fictional city of Rapture, Rapture, built on Ayn Rand’s principles of objective realist capitalism, was a city with no religion or socialist agenda. Fontaine established himself as God-fearing and concerned with the workers, which earned him points with the general population. Fontaine eventually revealed himself as a conman and sadist, so eager for control that he led his followers in a war against the status quo, sacrificing them for his personal glory. Even as the city lay empty, dying and filled with the insane, domination was more important than the thing he was dominating. His lust for control overcame the reason the thing he wanted to control existed, and quickly changed a vibrant metropolis into a dormant, dysfunctional dystopia.

If (like Frank Fontaine) your goal is personal glory, have the courage to admit it outright. Pretending your goals are corporate altruism or team play when they aren’t doesn’t just make you a liar. Eventually, it makes you unemployed.

Teams of Different Skills Can Be Hugely Effective Against Contingencies (X-Men, Warcraft, Command & Conquer, Overlord, etc)

Games that employ more than one potential protagonist are built around the premise of ‘specific skill for specific challenge’. Archers are good against footsoldiers, cavalry good against archers, etc. These games, while teaching us that each sub-set of your overall force has a specialty, also teach us how best to combine those specialities into a dynamic effort. Particularly when the problem you thought you were attacking turns out to be something else entirely. Teams with different skill sets offer different perspectives and advantages, but also give us quick resources when the game changes. They teach us that analysing your challenges and strategies isn’t as much about finding the right tool for the job as it is about finding the right tools for solving the problems around the job as well. It’s one thing to plan for when things go right, but another to have the right people on the team if something unforeseen happens.

It’s Not Your Competition You’re Up Against. It’s Expectation. (Every racing game with a time trial mode. Ever)

In a lot of racing games from the early to mid nineties, the goal was just to win. Complete a course in the fastest time and avoid crashing, and you’re in line for champagne and enormous crockery. As console gaming started getting smarter, the idea that it was your opponent you were racing started to change. It isn’t. It’s the best possible outcome that you’re trying to beat, or at least match. Other competitors crash in the same way you do – they miss turns, take bad corners, hit rails and (occasionally) pile into fences too. It’s the ghost time you’re trying to beat –the best possible application of skill on a particular challenge. Beating someone else who is as fallible as you are might have been enough when being better than the others was a good marketing strategy. These days, it’s about beating expectation, about beating the perceived ideal. And that’s a lot harder.

Move or die. (Frogger, and the million variations thereon)

Frogger is one of the all time greatest games for simple entertainment. The goal is simple – move, or die. There are a million threats waiting to take you down as you navigate from the bottom to the top, again and again. And in fact, the game isn’t about making it to the end, because you have to do it over again and again. Frogger is about making small moves in the right direction, sometimes lateral, sometimes forward, to get where you’re going. And the only sure way to die is to stand still when you need to make a move.

If It’s Easy, It’s Not Going To Be Satisfying (Ninja Gaiden, G-Police, Battletoads, Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, Contra)

Videogames can induce swearing on an unprecedented scale. Also controller throwing, TV breakages and serious psychological meltdowns. Why? Because they’re TOUGH! Games like those listed above were games that required every ounce of skill, focus and determination to get through. You fought the same challenges over and over again because, if you got through one level (ONE LEVEL!!!) of these games, you were proud. The first gamer reputations began when people would crowd around arcade machines to watch the best players finish a game previously thought unfinishable. They were gods.

If it’s not challenging to beat, it’s almost certainly not going to be satisfying for you. If you’re not having trouble completing a challenge, it’s time to step it up a notch. Good management involves (at least to some extent) pushing the envelope of your skills. If you are doing something that’s unsatisfying, you need to up the difficulty level. Sure, you’re out of your comfort zone. The reward for flourishing there is so much stronger than fighting a battle you know you can win with one hand.

Reward is important (Mario Bros)

Every time you finish a mammoth trial in the original Mario Bros franchise, you heard the same old thing. “Sorry – our princess is in another castle.” Effectively – ‘Thanks for all the effort you put in. You’ll get a reward next time, I promise. Now, back to work!”

I don’t think this needs to be spelled out, do you? (Also, for Portal fans – the cake is a lie. Don’t promise me something I’m not going to get.)

Innovations are gateways to new opportunity. (Half Life 2, Portal)

In both the games above, plus hundreds more, devices change the way you interact with the world. Technology changes your focus, from seeing things as background, unnecessary items to potential weapons, different ways of navigating obstacles, and even an extra dimension to a story. In these two games particularly, the new technology adds an extra dimension to the game, and changes the way the player sees opportunity. As we interact more through technology, publish more and connect more with each other, embracing technology isn’t just keeping up with the pack – it’s about leading them, and finding new ways to challenge traditional thinking. I’m not done – just done for now.

Using The Light Touch In Employer Branding

// March 3rd, 2010 // No Comments » // Employment Branding

There’s a phrase I use here to describe what we do to make being an employee a better experience. “When you’ve done it right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” Yes, it’s from Futurama. That doesn’t make it less true.

Your EVP (and your employer brand) should be an echo. It should be an echo of how people feel every day about working for you, about how you treat them as an employer, about how working with you adds to their lives. It should not be propaganda, which sets out to convince. It should not be a campaign for change or revolution. It should be the quiet affirmation of something people may not already realise – this is how it feels to be a part of your business. (I can’t over-emphasise the word feels enough either- the EVP isn’t about what reason, but emotion).

When you’re applying the brand, it should be with a light touch. It should feel like an accent. Whether you’re taking it as far as some (designing forms and technological interactions to connect more meaningfully with people) or simply implementing an EVP at the basic level, the rule always applies. You don’t need the town crier. You need a quiet ‘yes’ whispered in the ear of your staff. That’s why it works – because you’re not selling them, you’re reminding them.

Externally, a heavier touch is needed, but still nothing excessive. People are convinced by emotional connections – you’re not offering them a bargain-basement deal, so don’t advertise like you are. Go out for talent by using different means of creating an emotional impression. Draw them into conversation, so that their interaction with you becomes a human exchange. After all, this is the brand that’s made up of people, so it’s much easier to be conversational and honest. Talented people looking at your organisation should see no difference between the story you’re giving them and the way you conduct yourselves (both on and offline) with other talent. They should see that this is who you are, and, once they’ve joined you, see that this is STILL who you are.

Most people won’t notice that you’ve made your intranet more user-friendly, or that you’ve made it easier to change their details themselves, or that you’ve restructured your career development framework. The won’t notice the specifics – they’ll notice that when they interact with the business as employees, it feels like they expect it to feel.

There’s another post coming up about how this applies to your employer brand in social media, but for now I’ll say this – your EVP is supposedly the aggregate of every thought your employees have ever had about what it’s like to work for you. Social media lets them publish those thoughts. Now, if you could read every conversation every single employee of yours had online about working for you, would they match?

Employee Behaviour And The Social Web

// March 1st, 2010 // 2 Comments » // Internal Communications

Last week, I spoke at Media140 about employee behaviour on social media. There’s been some great feedback from people about how we’ve reached the point we have reached as a business, and about whether the online conduct policy represents an effort to control staff behaviour.  I thought, in the interests of providing a bit more information, I’d expand on the topic (for those who were there) or give an overview on how I think this works (for those who weren’t).

The behaviour of employees, unchecked and unmonitored, can be tremendously damaging to a brand. An employee whose identity, online or off, is linked to a brand, can through their behaviour bring the brand into disrepute, lose clients for the business, land clients in actual legal trouble and have a significant impact on the ability of the business to attract talent and clients.

I’m not suggesting every employee will. Nearly every employee will behave in a manner consistent with your corporate values. Hopefully, you hired them because they believe in the same things your company does anyway. However, if ‘common sense’ was as common as the title suggests, we wouldn’t need anything like these policies. And because it isn’t, we need to be prepared.

There are two distinct groups of people – those who believe that adults, unchecked and self-monitoring, will always act like mature, responsible people who avoid public outbursts and irrational arguments, and those that have spent a bit of time on the internet. Let’s face it – employees are just people, and people are capable of behaving in ways we can never predict, both online and off.

So our solution is this. On one hand, you build a policy. A legal framework that identifies which behaviours are outside the company’s tolerance for appropriate behaviour as linked with the brand. This is no different to a professional conduct policy, which most businesses have in one form or another. It spells out what is acceptable behaviour, and what is not. Hopefully, you never have to use that. And it doesn’t have to be extreme – Nick Hodge tells us that Microsoft’s is a list of bullet points. It needs to be the company’s back-stop against behaviour which is detrimental.

On the flip side of that, you educate staff. You explain to staff that there is a policy, which they should read, about what’s good behaviour online. As a business, you offer to train them in creating successful and lucrative social presences. You invite them to become advocates and spokespeople for the brand on company-sponsored forums. You give staff the benefit of the doubt, and some tools to help them steer clear of potential mess.

This is not control. This is risk management. You don’t assume that people driving your company cars have current licences – you check that they know what they’re doing before they take a fleet car out for a spin. Control is an active interest and ongoing program of involvement. Management is a system which involves monitoring, and adjustment where necessary of existing processes. Particularly with an audience to whom this technology is new, difficult to get used to, and requires the use of skills that haven’t been developed previously. (In our case, additional care has to be taken, because our employee base is highly technical. They like tolerances and technical limits. You can’t speak in generalities to engineers – the laws must be rigid.)

So at this point, here’s the situation. Any employee is free to exist on any social network they choose. They are free to network with anyone they like. They are free to post pictures, upload videos, chat with people and undertake any social networking activities which fall within our Use of IT Equipment policy. The only codicil is that if they are going to wilfully engage in (or have been found to engage in) behaviours which contravene the conduct policy, they remove their association with the business from their active profile.  This is a choice to honour a behavioural code which aligns with our values, or to ignore that code.

Essentially, the company is saying “If you’re going to act this way, we don’t want to be associated with you.” The same as the company would if an employee ran around the city in corporate livery attacking foreigners or molesting girls in nightclubs. Engaging in that behaviour is the responsibility of the individual. The brand needs to stand up for the values which support it, and behaviours which fall outside this should be separated from the brand. (There is an argument that an employee who plans to engage in these behaviours is probably not someone you want to employ anyway, but we’ll save that one.)

This is not control. We are not dictating your behaviour. We are saying that you, as a professional who understands the consequences, needs to act in a manner which supports the public values of our brand. If you choose not to, your association with the brand must cease – you are damaging an asset. We are saying that you have a choice. And if you choose to behave that way while representing the brand, there will be consequences. As I said earlier, most of the time, this isn’t even an issue. Depending on your brand values, most employees already adhere to an unofficial code of conduct – it’s a community-set standard of behaviour.

And yes – people will always argue that you aren’t an employee 24/7. No, you aren’t. However, the global web makes no distinction. It doesn’t care when you logged off and went from being an employee to a private citizen. It sees your employer name in your profile, and you represent that employer – in spirit, at the very least.

I’d love to hear more about what other organisations are doing in this space. If you know of any great case studies, please comment, or get in touch!

Designing The Employee Experience

// February 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Employment Branding, Internal Communications

Recently, I’ve been reading up on user experience design. Largely, it’s been driven by the part of my role which includes redesigning our corporate intranet to deliver better information to our staff. So like a good little boffin, I read about web design, and SharePoint design, and building for user value, and creating meaningful interfaces. And something funny happened. I tried to apply it to being an employee instead of just using the intranet.

Your EVP and your employer brand are ideally connected to the employee experience. Not just as the result of it (which you gained through research and focus groups and surveys and such) but a continual cause-and-effect. Your brand is at its most effective when it is used to influence how employees feel about working for you, and how they connect with you. For many companies, this is about internal reinforcement – you told us you work here for X, so we’re going to provide more of X. X is great! Hooray for X, which we provide!

However, I think there’s a more active way to do this. Every interaction your employees have with your business (and particularly your HR department) is an interaction with the experience they’ve chosen to invest in as employees. When you’re doing performance reviews, when you’re communicating changes to the corporate structure, when you’re getting employees to fill out timesheets – all of these are aspects of the product that is the employment experience. It’s the product that you as a company deliver to your employees. It’s what they get because they’ve choosing to work for you.

So why not make these interactions more meaningful? Why not apply the principles of better user experience to employment? Look at whether processes add value. Look at whether interactions (via technology or otherwise) sit alongside the brand principles you have. Talk to staff and ask “How could we make doing this task a better experience for you?” Build processes and product experiences that are meaningful – that empower employees, and that tie in with their emotional connection to the business.

I’ll give you an example. There’s a company that does an internal survey every two years, asking employees a range of questions about the business; where it’s heading, what they need to do more of, manager behaviour – it’s a comprehensive survey. And moreover, it can precipitate real change in the business as a result of the feedback. In preparation for the next survey, it’s previously been their tradition to put out a simple list of the things which have changed as a result of the last survey, in an all-staff email, to be read (or ignored) by staff, before the next survey comes along.

This year, said company chose to do something different. They built a game, a game of Spot The Difference, between two images. Image one was the office two years ago. Image two was the same image, with all the improvements made as a result of the last survey. More desks. More training. Environmental awareness measures. When you clicked on the difference in the second shot, a little blurb came up detailing the change, and the effect it had on the company as a whole. As an incentive, they held a competition for three iPhones. All you had to do to enter was find the ten differences they’d included in the game, and register your email address on the internal server, and you‘re were in the draw.

The response was brilliant. Not just from a numbers perspective, but also from qualitative feedback. Everyone who entered the competition said that they enjoyed this – because it made the changes recognisable, and because it gave them a challenge: to see what had changed in their time as an employee. The team who built the game designed the experience so that, when it came time to do the survey, those who had played the game had thought about what changes would come from their answers. And the percentage of completed surveys jumped about 15% as a result.

When you’re looking at communicating to employees, or implementing a new process, or engaging new hires on induction – think beyond what the company wants to say, and focus on how it makes your audience interact with the company and feel about the brand. Every positive experience, every meaningful experience, contributes to a stronger emotional investment. And that leads to better retention of the right people, and more discretionary effort. And those are never bad things.

Recruiting hearts, not minds

// November 26th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Employment Branding

What used to be called “the war for talent” isn’t far from starting up again. The terminology is misleading, because wars have an end, and this is now a permanent market condition. There’s no war to be won – talent is scarce. Whether it’s graduates or experienced hires, your skills pool is shrinking, and you’re going to have to be more flexible, proactive and attractive to snare the people who’ll deliver your future.

Traditional sourcing methods are still delivering good candidates, everyone’s talking about social media and its “potential” as a sourcing tool, newspaper ads (like the newspapers themselves) are dwindling, and more and more people are looking at referrals, alumni programs and human-contact sourcing as viable, cost effective alternatives.

As the talent pool shrinks, there are seemingly two schools of thought about how to tackle the market: (a) talent as an acquired commercial asset and (b) talent as an investment in human potential. Each has its strengths and ROI, and each is viable as a resourcing business model. One recognises contribution to the bottom line, and one is more about contribution to the business culture.

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Is It Your Job To Protect Employees From Themselves?

// October 13th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Internal Communications

There’s some interesting discussion going on (at least in-house where I work) about how far a company should regulate social media usage. I’ve done a lot of research on industry practice and written a couple of position papers for the board on how we should approach this, as I believe it’s firmly attached to our EVP. In my opinion, you can’t support the free exchange of ideas and foster a culture of teamwork and collaboration, then muzzle people who dare to talk about something other than work. And luckily, the board has agreed.

However, this raises another question. We know (from sites such as Lamebook) that people are becoming more likely to share content which reflects badly on either themselves or the company on social networking sites. We’ve all seen the stories of people fired for criticising employers online. Does our duty of care as an employer extend to educating staff on how to protect their online reputations, and by extension, our own?

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Generating Names Or Making Connections?

// September 23rd, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Employment Branding, Recruitment Marketing

This morning, I saw an email offering to teach recruiters how to identify talent using Facebook, Twitter and a few other social networks, by doing site x-rays for search terms. It’s not a bad way to identify what people do for a job, assuming they’ve put that in their information. Here’s my problem – those people aren’t candidates. They aren’t looking for you. And in finding (and potentially approaching) them through a technological means, are you putitng your brand at risk?

Internal recruiters are the mouthpiece of a brand, not just an opportunity. When you’re in-house , your job isn’t just to fill a role, but to add to an existing team that’s already a part of your business. There’s a fundamental difference between agency recruiting and in-house recruiting. In house, you see your mistakes every day. Your bad placements are there, being performance managed or managed out, and it sticks to your reputation. No one within the business remembers the names of their agency recruiters with the same tenacity that they remember the guys sitting down the hall.
Which means in-house, you’re recruiting for a culture, not just the job itself. You know the culture better than anyone else, and so it’s a massive part of what you’re looking for. You know the fit you need for the team. You know your value proposition. And you know your brand, and how valuable that is in market, because it’s what gets people to love you, or leave you.

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The Key To Recruiting on Twitter

// September 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Recruitment Marketing

As mass-media outlets everywhere start to talk about (or ridicule) Twitter, it’s interesting to watch the marketing applications begin. Whether it’s auto DMs (which can be annoying) or just the sell-sell-sell of repeated postings, the desire for people to use Twitter to generate an income, a sale or a purchase is becoming really keen. And given the space I work in, it’s hardly surprising that I can see recruiters moving in for the kill.
So here’s a tip. Just a little one. Stay human.

Twitter at its best is about interpersonal connection. I chuckle whenever I read that Twitter, Facebook et al are about narcissism. It’s not narcissism to believe that you have an opinion worth sharing. Five minutes interacting on Twitter shows you that Twitter’s real value isn’t about broadcasting. It’s about connecting, about finding a balance between listening and talking. To broadcast on Twitter is to tacitly assume that your audience has nothing to say of interest to you. Don’t we already have enough websites that can do that?

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Want To Engage Gen Y? Start By Calling Them Something Else

// September 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Employment Branding, Recruitment Marketing

I’ve spent this week introducing our managers to our graduate marketing program. It’s a program that has been hand-built by me and a very dedicated team of designers and developers. It’s frankly awesome.
In nearly every meeting, these managers (who are largely technical types) have asked if the way we communicate – personal, informal, friendly – is a “Gen Y thing”. Because, you know, Gen Y love that stuff. And at every opportunity, I’ve taken pains to point out that no, it isn’t. It’s a people thing.
The people we want (and I suspect this applied to you too) don’t like being generalised. They don’t like being categorised. They like being individuals. They like having this recognised, too. People respond well to being singled out for the things they pride themselves on. In other words, people respond well to being recognised as a person.
Those Generation Y’s that managers are always complaining about have a reasonable point to make. As long as you keep seeing them as a generation, and not as individuals, you’re alienating them. Every person within generation Y has the same level of individuality in communication style, work preference and background as anyone else. They are as susceptible to cold, hurt, excitement, honesty and fear as anyone else.
Generations are a way of making broad classifications. They are a way of seeing. And every way of seeing, is a way of not seeing. If you continue to define people by their generation, you paint them with the ‘average’ of their collective public perception. You brand them based on the collective psychological impression the chronological group they belong to has given you. In short, you marginalise their humanity right from the start.
Need something to call your new graduates? Try their names.