HRE Column: How Can We Make Email Less Terrible?

Here is my semi-frequent reminder and pointer for blog readers that I also write a monthly column at Human Resource Executive Online called Inside HR Tech that can be found here.

This month, with a nod to it being the middle of summer when we are/should be taking a little bit of a respite from 'normal' work, I decided to take a look not at HR technology specifically, but at the most ingrained and ubiquitous workplace technology of them all - Email.

If you have followed this blog for any amount of time you will recognize some of the themes - email is terrible, it keeps us from doing more creative and fun work, and yet we can't seem to lessen email's grip on our work lives. But as I examine in the HR Exec column, there are plenty of opportunities to make email better, and many of the world's largest tech companies, (Google, Microsoft), are investing in improving email. 

Here is an excerpt from the HRE column, Rethinking Email:

Email is likely the first and last workplace tool that HR and employees open every day (not to mention the 395 other times during the day you are either reading, managing or composing messages). It is, without question, the most important employee communication technology in the vast majority of modern workplaces.

So why doesn’t HR think more about how to make email better?

Well, some technology companies are thinking about and doing exactly that. Take the following three examples; in at least one case, the technology is has the potential to dramatically reduce the importance of email as a workplace tool. All of these examples are instructive and—even if you, as an HR leader, don’t have direct authority to change or update your enterprise email technology and strategy—all of them offer HR insights into how employee communication preferences are changing, and how your communication strategies can adapt.

Get better management of your workflow inside email.

If you are a user of Gmail, you might be familiar with Google’s newest smartphone app for Gmail called Inbox. Inbox transforms email management in several ways, chief among them by “learning” about how you use email, and then helping to better triage incoming emails into relevant categories based on your usage patterns, relationship with contacts and message-management preferences. It takes a little getting used to, but Inbox devotees claim it saves hours each week in the time it typically used to take them to manage, sort and classify incoming messages. That said, I think the best feature of Inbox is the “Snooze” feature, which resurfaces a message you’ve opened but don’t have time to properly respond to at that moment. In fact, Inbox even looks for clues in the message (references to due dates, event dates, etc.) to auto-suggest the optimal time to resend you the message so that you won’t miss an important deadline. For HR leaders, a simple takeaway here might be to be sure to include relevant due dates or deadlines in the subject lines of emails, rather than buried in the email body. So “Benefits Open Enrollment” gets replaced with “Benefits Enrollment Open from Oct. 1 through Oct. 15,” allowing employees to better manage their workflow and to-do lists....

Read the rest over at HRE Online 

Good stuff, right? Humor me...

If you liked the piece you can sign up over at HRE to get the Inside HR Tech Column emailed to you each month. There is no cost to subscribe, in fact, I may even come over and wash your car or cut the grass for you if you do sign up for the monthly email.

Have a great weekend!

This is why we can't have nice things (HR and Talent Edition)

If you follow the news, particularly the news relevant to the workplace, HR, and Talent Management, you probably caught a couple of recent stories that have been pretty widely reported, circulated, and dissected.

One having to do with compensation - Gravity Payments Raising Minimum Salary to $70,000

And the second, a straight up benefits story - Netflix To Offer Unlimited Parental Leave

Both of these stories, one about how one company is raising its minimum salary to a pretty high level compared to local and national statutory minimum wage requirements, and the next, about how another large US company is extending and enhancing a much-needed employee benefit (parental leave), were initially met with positive or at least neutral reactions.

But then, predictably, the backlash and criticism of both of these policy changes, and from a wide assortment of commentators began.

The decision by the Gravity Payments CEO to raise his company's minimum annual salary to $70,000 was the easier mark. Outlets from the New York Times all the way to the site I contribute to Fistful of Talent, took apart the Gravity plans. Unworkable, unaffordable, unfair to top performers - the list of holes that were poked in the Gravity plan are too long to recount. 

Netflix' decision to extend parental leave to an unlimited amount for an entire year has been met with relatively less criticism, but at least one major publication, the Washington Post wasted little time in alerting the rest of us that in fact Netfilx' innovative policy was likely "a bad idea for your company."

Whether it is these recent stories from Gravity and Netflix, or older and more familiar stories about novel, innovative, and worker-friendly policies from companies like Zappos or Google, there is always one element they have in common. No matter what the specific issue is, (increases in pay, enhanced benefits, more worker autonomy, etc.), once the news makes the rounds almost immediately thereafter commences the chorus of commentary that strikes a familiar, and tired, refrain. 

And these critiques are always the same. They are always some combination of 'This is a terrible idea/bad Talent Management' along with its corollary 'Sure, this might work in Silicon Valley, but it will never work for you'.

And I have to say I find that pretty depressing. 

Why do we have to immediately and forcefully look to take down or at least diminish the significance and importance of new ideas that are clearly intended to improve work, workplaces, and the lives of workers?

Why do we instinctively look to marginalize the significance of any employee welfare improvement initiative that comes out of some Silicon Valley tech firm as something that could only work in that progressive environment, and not at any 'grown up' company?

Why do so many HR and Talent folks immediately look to identify why they can't look to follow some of these leading organizations like Netflix and Google and the like, instead of admitting that they might be able to learn/steal from their ideas?

Look, I understand the arguments knocking the compensation plan that Gravity is trying to implement, and the realities of costs and budgets that make offering up to a year of paid parental leave hard if not impossible for many companies to copy. The criticisms are often valid and well-reasoned.

But the problem is that they usually just try to shut down the conversation, and don't offer any insights into how these modern, innovative, (and certainly outlier) ideas can be adapted to work in a more mainstream and widespread way. Instead of saying something like 'You can never copy what Netflix is doing', how about we try 'You may not be able to do exactly what Netflix is doing, but here are some ideas on how you can leverage these ideas in your shop'.

But instead we almost overwhelmingly react negatively. As if raising the minimum salary in an organization to $70,000 is an abomination, and giving new parents unlimited leave for a year are concepts that if adopted in the mainstream would somehow crack the foundations of modern business, and of HR/Talent Management. As if somehow these ideas threaten us.

What are we afraid of, really?

CHART OF THE DAY: Surging Investments in HR Tech

Really a simple and self-explanatory Chart of the Day for a busy Tuesday, this one courtesy of the Wall St. Journal. Take a look at the chart of venture capital investment in the HR and Recruiting technology market from 1998 to the present, and as you expect and demand, some FREE commentary from me after the data.

Some quick takes:

1. First, to level set, the first half of 2015 with investment of about $811M is almost greater than the highest-ever yearly total of $859M back in 2000. Ah, 2000. The 'dot-com' era.  Good times.  But looking at the data you could argue that the HR tech market for VC investment really did not recover from the dot-com crash until very recently, like last year. So it could be that a prolonged period of under-investment is partially to account for the dramatic increases in 2014 and so far in 2015.

2. Let's go ahead and assume that most VCs have plenty of options and opportunities for investment. If that is the case, then this windfall of money flowing into the HR tech space is good news for a large array of industry players - folks who can sell HR tech solutions, marketers, analyst firms, HR conferences, and even little 'ol bloggers like me, who have lots of products to see, think about, and potentially write about.  It is a sure sign of an industry that is primed for growth when the investment levels are surging upwards as we see in the WSJ. It's like the dot-com years all over again. At least let's hope we don't crash like we did from '02 - '04.

3. What does this mean for the really important players in the HR tech market - the actual customers? Well in the broadest strokes it is mostly positive. More investment creates more competition which leads to better products and more customer choices. And while sometimes it seems like in HR tech that the bigger, more established players have gobbled up via acquisition many of the new entrants, I can assure you that judging from the number of HR tech startup demos I have been doing that there is no shortage of new ideas and innovation in the space.  This is a great time to be a customer of HR Tech, even if the market can be a little tricky to navigate.

But like I said, good times all around - for the VCs, for the startups, and most importantly, for the customers and HR leaders who have access to an ever-expanding set of tools and technologies to help them improve results in their organizations.

Job Titles of the Future #13 - Video Game Coach

Last September I posted 'Job Titles of the Future #11 - Minecraft Coach', essentially referencing some speculative pieces on whether or not parents would one day, (and soon), look to hire professional Minecraft and other popular video game coaches for their kids, much like parents hire tutors or sports coaches today. The conclusion of the piece I cited, as well as my own take was that yes, Professional Minecraft Coach would probably become a real job, and fairly soon.

Fast forward just a few months, and I present for your consideration this recent piece from Fortune, 'You can make $50,000 a year as a video game coach', where we see that in this short time, video game coaches are becoming true, real gig. 

From the Fortune piece:

As the world of e-sports heats up, and players battle for prize money that can reach into the millions, the activity has given rise to a field of coaches who want to cash in on training these keyboard-using champions.

An e-sport coach can make anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 a year, which is pretty much in line with a minor league baseball coach, according to The Wall Street Journal.

One assistant coach of a group called Team Liquid, which competes in the “League of Legends” tournaments, told the paper he makes in the mid-$30,000s annually plus a performance bonus and health insurance. That’s not too shabby when you consider that the annual income for all coaches and scouts in 2012 was $28,360, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

E-sports are a growing industry that is showing no signs of slowing down - in fact with millions of fans, higher and higher amounts of prize money and player salaries, and even PED testing for the top E-sports competitors, it is getting harder and harder to make a logical argument that E-sports really aren't just 'sports.'

And we know how sports has always had coaches and consultants and gurus - an entire set of professions around trying to help athletes to perform their best and to guide teams to championships. And E-sports seem to be evolving in a similar manner - celebrity gamers, high-profile and lucrative competitions, drug testing scandals, and yes, people whose job it is to train, coach, and develop game players.

So considering all of the evidence, and the growth of E-sports, it is probably time to re-classify 'Video Game Coach' as a 'Job Title of the Present, and not something we think will happen in the future.

Man, why didn't we have this for Ms. Pac Man or Galaga back in the day? My whole career could have taken a different path.

Have a great week!

PODCAST - #HRHappyHour 218 - HR in an On-demand World

HR Happy Hour 218 - HR in an On-demand World

Recorded Wednesday July 29, 2015

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Listen HERE

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, Steve and Trish talked about Steve's trip to China, the myriad of HR issues surrounding Uber and other companies in the 'on-demand' economy, and how the workplace and HR will be changed by these trends. It seems like every day another story drops about the HR implications of these classification issues for companies like Uber. What does HR look like in a world where more and more of the talent the organization relies upon are not actually regular employees of the company?  

Additionally, Steve wondered if he could identify the state of Arkansas on a map, we talked about how cool St. Louis is, and Trish shared her favorite summer vacation spot, (hint it is in Florida).

You can listen to the show on the show page HERE, or using the widget player below:

Check Out Business Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Steve Boese Trish McFarlane on BlogTalkRadio

This was a really fun and lively conversation and we hope you enjoy the show!

Many thanks to our friends at Equifax Workforce Solutions for both their hospitality in hosting Steve out at the ball game in St. Louis and for their support of the HR Happy Hour show.

Remember to download and subscribe the the HR Happy Hour on iTunes, or using your favorite podcast app for iOS or Android - just search for 'HR Happy Hour' to never miss an episode.