Employee Tracking Data and the Inevitable Pushback

Last week I had a piece about the development of a new set of technologies that are effectively designed to collect, aggregate, synthesize, and help management interpret every interaction, activity, and action that employees take in the workplace. The idea being that this ocean of data about employee activity - who they meet with, for how long, how many emails they send and to whom, even how often and where they take smoke/coffee/Instagram breaks - can be mashed up with other more traditional workplace measurements about productivity, revenue, performance reviews, etc. to arrive at a more enlightened if not optimal set of recommendations, (and possibly rules) to optimize work and worker activity.

Of course collecting this level and type of data about employee activity, if it indeed catches on in the workplace, will inevitably collide with employee notions about privacy first, and then once most if not all employees accede to this nature of data collection, (perhaps under threat as a condition of employment), to concerns about the 'fair' or proper interpretation of the data. What employee actions and activities are 'good' or 'beneficial' to overall performance of the organization as opposed to the individual's own performance will also be a bone of contention - it really is a big data version of the classic 'results vs. how those results are obtained' conundrum.

It is hard to say how these issues will develop in traditional workplaces, but to catch a glimpse of how it might work out, (and the potential for management vs. employee conflict), I naturally look to the world of sports, in this case NBA basketball.  In the league these days the collection and use of more and more advanced statistics and data about player and team performance are changing the way teams and fans evaluate player performance and attempt to optimize the use of their talent to improve results.

The specific example I want to call out is about David Lee of the Golden State Warriors. By traditional and historical measures, (points, rebounds, assists), Lee is a superior player - as evidenced by his selection to the NBA All-Star team earlier this season. But to those who closely observe the league, and supplemented by more advanced statistical and player movement video technology, Lee's poor play on defense all but cancels out his fine offensive performance - essentially rendering him about an average player on balance.

Lee, to his credit, admits his defensive play has not always been stellar, but his comments about the recent attention being placed on the use of newer data sets and analyses to question his overall contribution is interesting and perhaps a bit instructive -

“At this point I could care less. I’ve worked hard to improve my defense. I think I’m a much better defensive player today than I was a year ago and definitely to start my career. There’s a lot of different numbers to support a lot of different things. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say me putting up 20 and 10 doesn’t matter because ‘numbers don’t matter,’ but at the same time, ‘charts at MIT matter.’ You can’t have it both ways.”

And that part of the quote in bold above - 'You can't have it both ways' - is really at the heart of the problem for the Big Data in the workplace movement as it marches inexorably into the future, (and as in the NBA, the present), of the workplace.

Having more data about employees doesn't necessarily make us any smarter or able to understand that data, and how it might be applied to improve workplace performance. And it definitely doesn't make us any wiser as to how to handle the inevitable employee pushback when our interpretation of performance, backed with the data we think is important, doesn't align with theirs.

With more data we can tell more stories, but we can also find data to justify any story we want to be heard.

David Lee wants us to emphasize the data the paints him in an All-Star light - 20 points and 10 rebounds a night. His detractors want to point out that he is an ineffective interior defensive player - and can point to a new, hardly understood set of charts and graphs to back that up.

The truth is probably somewhere in between, along with one other truth - more data about your employees probably won't make your job as a Talent pro any easier.

Have a great week!

Off Topic: When you run out of interview questions

Time for my semi-regular 'I have not done a sports post in a while, and I need to make sure the 2013 of The 8 Man Rotation E-book will have lots of SFB content.  Did you catch that, Matt 'akaBruno' Stollak? 

Any by the way, please congratulate The Professor and his family on the recent birth of twins - Mia and Micah!

Back to the point - or what will pass for a point on a Friday.

Book, can, drum, mirror, door. (I will come back to this later, but try and remember this list).

Recently, the National Football League, (where they play....... for pay), conducted its annual Scouting Combine - a several day long series of events, interviews, feats of speed and strength, etc. designed to give its member clubs a chance to assess and evaluate lots and lots of potential draftees, (job candidates), in one place, and under consistent and controlled conditions.Gary Hume, Girl Boy, Boy Girl

The hopeful candidates run 40 yard dashes, do the broad jump, perform bench presses, and in addition to these physical tests, (again, which provide a really solid way to compare the performance of players), also undergo some mental and cognitive assessments, (most notably the Wonderlic test).

But having the same information as all your competitors, (40 times, bench presses, etc.) doesn't really help a team gain a recruiting advantage - none of the information is powerful since it is completely open and free. For a team trying to decide which players to draft - they need to get past the size and speed and test scores, and really get some unique insight into the player. What motivates him, does he have passion for the sport, is he likely to be a 'good' teammate, and not be a 'me-first' prima donna.

And if you are the Cincinnati Bengals, you also want to know if the player can remember five random words in order. 

Check this excerpt from a recent piece on Deadspin, on the Combine experience of draft hopeful Lane Johnson - 

"One thing caught me off guard. I was meeting with Cincinnati, and I went in there and they told me to remember five things. They just listed five things like a bear, a flower, a tree, a man and like a dog. And they told me to remember those terms, at the end of the meeting to see if I could remember them. And from that point on, they listed numbers. They said, like, 9167, and then told me to repeat them in reverse order. So that was probably the weirdest meeting I've ever been a part of."

Nice. And classic Bengals in a way as well.

Now there could be some real validity in asking a question like this - a check on a player's concentration, their short-term memory, ability to pay attention to instructions, etc. that might have some validity and value in the assessment process. Maybe the performance on a question like this is highly predictive of future success as an NFL player. 

Or maybe it's just a random question, full of weirdness and confusion, signifying nothing. But if you do find yourself at a loss for any more clever interview questions the next time you have a candidate in for a chat maybe you can try it out and see what happens.

Remember the five things?

Google Reader: The shelf-life of formerly good advice

I've been having a instructive and fun time this week out at Ultimate Software's annual user conference called Ultimate Connections. It is always great to learn more about what one of the major technology providers in HR space is doing, to hear from and meet some real customers and practitioners, and even attempt to share some of my own ideas with the attendees.

Yesterday I had that chance, along with the great John Sumser from HRexaminer and Ed Frauenheim from Workforce.com (and perhaps more famously of the Frauenheim Disclosure), in a conference session titled 'How to Stay Current on HR Trends'. The session was meant to be a kind or survey of tools, sources of information, time management approaches, and overall recommendations for the busy HR pro on how he or she can try to keep up and remain informed about the industry when faced with the simultaneous crush of mountains of content combined with a 'day job' that gets more time-crunched by the week.

In the session, which was yesterday at 1:45PM Pacific Time, both John and I sung the praises of feed readers, specifically Google Reader, as a fantastic tool for the busy HR pro to try and sort, filter, scan, and consume professional content. I even tool it a step further, calling out smartphone apps like Flipboard and Zite, (my personal favorite), that help curate news and information and package it up attractively for on-the-go reading. Both of these apps are much more valuable and relevant when they have a Google Reader integration to provide a rich source of content that these apps find ways to make much user-friendly and provide a great interface.

At 1:45 PM I was advocating for the HR pros in the room to give Google Reader a chance. At 5PM when I got back to my room, turned on the laptop, and IMMEDIATELY fired up Google Reader and BOOM - this message smacks me in the chops -

Clicking 'Learn more' took me to a short blog post on the the Google support site that basically said Reader is being shut down on July 1, and had a link to another Google post that cited a decline in Reader usage and the company's desire to focus more energy on fewer products as the drivers behind the decision to kill off Reader.

Reader has been around a really long time by Web standards, since 2005 or so, but (and as we saw in our session at the conference where very few attendees said they used Reader), never really caught on with the mainstream web users. And with the incredible growth of Facebook and Twitter, (and more and more LinkedIn), as sources of news and information, setting up and maintaining a deep, diverse, and relevant set of Reader subscriptions probably seemed like to big a chore for most users, and really boring for others.

Either way, Google Reader is going away, and probably at least a few of the apps and services that had come to rely on a user's Reader subscriptions for the bulk of their content. Sure, there are other feed reading tools around - and perhaps even some new innovation will hit the space that Google is leaving, but make no mistake even in decline, Google Reader was the 500 pound gorilla in the space.

I feel bad about the impending loss of my favorite tool on the web.

I feel even worse that about 3 hours prior to the announcement, I advocated in the most strident way possible for a room full of hard working HR pros to get their Google Reader set up.

That was good advice at the time I gave it.

Now it's just formerly good advice.

I hope the rest of the things I said in the session will stay relevant a little longer.

More on the Danger of Hiring for 'Fit'

Late last year I posted 'Work, Play, and Hiring for Cultural Fit', a post that referenced a recent study on hiring published in the American Sociological Review that suggested, essentially, that people tend to hire people that are like them, and they 'get along with', as well as some comments made by some front-line HR professionals at a conference I had attended. While the study, and the thoughts of the HR pros I spoke with last year were both enlightening, I think the ideas expressed in this piece, 'What Your Culture Really Says' on the Pretty Little State Machine blog frames the 'Hiring for Cultural Fit' discussion in the best way that I've seen yet.Pop art American Greyhound - Carol Lynn Nesbitt

It is written specifically to address the challenges and problems common to tech start-ups and other Silicon Valley-type firms, but still resonates more broadly I think. It also is a long-ish piece, and you should take some time to read it all, but I'll pull out the key part about the danger of focusing too heavily on the nebulous idea of 'fit' in the hiring process:

We make sure to hire people who are a cultural fit

What your culture might actually be saying is… We have implemented a loosely coordinated social policy to ensure homogeneity in our workforce. We are able to reject qualified, diverse candidates on the grounds that they “aren’t a culture fit” while not having to examine what that means - and it might mean that we’re all white, mostly male, mostly college-educated, mostly young/unmarried, mostly binge drinkers, mostly from a similar work background. We tend to hire within our employees’ friend and social groups. Because everyone we work with is a great culture fit, which is code for “able to fit in without friction,” we are all friends and have an unhealthy blur between social and work life. Because everyone is a “great culture fit,” we don’t have to acknowledge employee alienation and friction between individuals or groups. The desire to continue being a “culture fit” means it is harder for employees to raise meaningful critique and criticism of the culture itself.

There's lots more in the piece worth reading, and also taking a few minutes to think about your own experiences in your career, and how your organization evaluates cultural fit, relies on employee referrals to staff open jobs, or tends to recruit from the same few universities year after year.

When I first broke into the workplace more years ago that I care to admit, people talked a lot about 'culture' and 'fit' then too. It also had another name - the 'Good 'ol Boys Club'.

Happy Wednesday.

Job Titles of the Future #2 - Hacker in Residence

Over the weekend while cleaning out the files of 'Stuff I meant to blog about, but never got around to it', was this piece from Fast Company - 'How LinkedIn's "Hacker_In-Residence' Transformes an Ordinary Job Into a 'Dream Job'.

The piece is a brief interview with LinkedIn's Matthew Shoup, the afore-mentioned 'Hacker-in-Residence' for the professional networking leader. And yes, that it his real title - check out Mr. Shoup's LinkedIn (natch) profile here. The Fast Company piece is set up to take us through how his role at LinkedIn evolved over time, he was hired into the much more sedate and traditional title of 'Technical Marketer', and to give some insight into the unique ways he approaches his role as H-I-R, (his 'office; is a picnic table outside, he measures interactions with colleagues like a marketer would - impressions, clicks, and conversions, etc.).

But the individual employee evolution and the quirky new job title is only part of the appeal I think. What is more interesting and meaningful in a general sense is the idea of transformation that is inherent in the story - both as an individual (moving from 'Technical Marketer' to 'Hacker-In-Residence') and organizational, (a company that is wildly successfully and growing rapidly and like many before it, is certainly in real danger of losing the speed, agility, and innovation capability that is a strength of begin really small).

How does LinkedIn manage this?  Shoup attributes this to the idea of transformation:

LinkedIn gives employees the ability to transform their careers in order to do things they’re super passionate about. There’s a culture of transformation and innovation at LinkedIn, and that's one of those things that keeps employees engaged.

When you think about it, it seems incredibly simple for organizations to describe, but for some reason(s), harder to execute. And usually when founders, early employees, or other 'stars' leave growing companies it gets chalked up to 'Well, the same skills that are needed to start a company are not the same ones needed to help run an established company.' Mix in the ever-present growth the bureacracy and administration and rules, (about job titles, pay grades, office locations, PTO, and on and on), and for truly innovative types (and hackers), life as a corporate drone seems pretty unappealing.

But even established companies like LinkedIn still need these kind of people, maybe more than ever. And chances are your company needs some of them too.

How to make a start? How about crafting your own Hacker-In-Residence role, or re-writing the job description of the most creative person you have and include something like this:

'The common thread between all of the hats you will wear is that you will get to traverse multiple disciplines to solve business problems with creativity, and bring innovative ideas to life.'

Sounds like a cool job to me, and one that the people you never seem to be able to find (or keep), would be a perfect fit for.

Happy Hacking out there.