The Downside of Finding Exactly What You're Looking For

Last night it was 4th grade homework time at Chez Steve, and the spelling/vocabulary assignment entailed looking up a set of words in the dictionary, taking note of their definition and part of speech, and providing some reference information about the selected word's position in the dictionary itself, (page number, guide words, etc.).

As we, (really Patrick the aforementioned 4th grader), worked through the assignment, he made the expected observation of a modern 10 year old, one that is pretty savvy as to the power and value of the web to help us all navigate through life's little challenges. Per Patrick, 'Why would anyone use a real dictionary if they had a choice? Wouldn't you just use Dictionary.com? It's way faster.'

And he was right, at least to a point. Paging though a giant, old, slightly moldy book searching for 'reign' and 'colonel' must have seemed like a pretty unenlightened waste of a precious few minutes, when the fast, easy, and generally accurate (or certainly accurate enough), information could be found at Dictionary.com.  After all, using the online service would have taken him exactly to the result he was looking for. Type the word into the search box, click 'go', and you're there. No wasted time, no tedious searching around. Just results.

But since the assignment had very specific instructions, 'Use a real dictionary, you know, a book', Patrick was forced to kick it old school, and page though the volume, checking the guide words at the top of each page, doing a little mental alphabetizing to try and efficiently find the words of interest.  Definitely a slow process, certainly not one in synch with our modern (even, perhaps especially for a 10-year old), need to have instant, immediate, and complete information with the click of a mouse.

What we found out though, which is sort of obvious for those of use who remember fondly relics like real dictionaries and (shudder), printed almanacs and encyclopedias, is that much of the fun, and the excitement, is discovering things we were not actually looking for. On the dictionary page for 'colonel' we found 'colossus', 'colophon', and 'Colorado potato beetle'. All awesome and amazing words indeed, all deserving to be found, even if they did not have the good fortune to be included on this week's list of 4th grade vocabulary words. Words that would have remained undiscovered mysteries without using the old book.

Does it matter that we are, increasingly, trading exploration and discovery for efficiency and productivity?

Is it important that we tend to prefer to leverage whatever solution gives us the 'right' result in the fastest possible manner?

Certainly the internet and the connected world have given us all remarkable, tremendous, and unprecedented access to knowledge, insight, and expertise - most of which is just a few searches and clicks away. But if we leverage this resource to tell us only exactly what we are looking for, well then, in a way we have simply replaced one dictionary for another, albeit a larger and more colorful one.

A dictionary that opens immediately to the word we seek, without letting us trip on colophons or Colorado potato beetles along the way.

Mass Customization

Have you ever designed your own, personalized M&M's candies?

It's a pretty neat idea, choose the colors and combinations you like the best, have your own personalized message printed on the candy, have your creation shipped to your door.  Sure, it costs a bit more that simply heading over to the grocery store and buying 'standard' M&M's, but you end up with exactly what you want.  The end result, while sharing some essential commonality with all other M&M's candy, (they are not changing the recipe for you), has just enough personalization to be simultaneously distinctive and recognizable. The folks at M&M's are able to design for this ability to customize and personalize by carefully controlling just exactly what aspects of the product offering are personalizable, (color selections and messages), and what are not, (size and shape of the product, ingredients).

By offering this personalization service, M&M's can take some small steps towards making a commodity product into something more, and in so doing, forge closer connections with customers for which this ability to participate in the design of their M&M's is worth the price premium the company requires. At a transactional level, everyone wins.

Increasingly consumers appreciate, and in some markets and product segments, are coming to expect the ability to tailor and customize product offerings. A recent post on the Forrester Consumer Product Strategy blog argues that, 'Current and emerging digital technologies are turbo-charging mass customization, breathing new life into the product strategy', and that 'The time is now for product strategists in all industries to consider adding mass customization – including true build-to-order products – to their product portfolios.'

Forrester then offers a four-step framework that product designers and marketers should consider following in order to ensure that their personalization strategies are both meeting customer's needs, as well as being sustainable, supportable, and profitable for the organizations. You can read the Forrester piece for more details on the framework, but essentially it consists of:

1. Determining the context for personalization - what can and can't be defined or altered by the customer.
2. Creating a great user experience that allows customers to see and understand their options, and the consequences of selection from among their choices
3. Designing to solve a real need, not just the perception of a customer need
4. Remaining flexible to adapt to changing conditions, and to predict what customers will want for personalization options in the future

Whether or not Forrester is correct in predicting an increase in product personalization capability through more powerful web technology, and in their advice to organizations to consider pursuing personalization capability more broadly remains to be seen. But if they are right, or at least directionally correct, could there be implications more broadly for organizations, specifically in the design of work and in the value proposition employers make to employees and candidates.

Traditionally employers offer the 'job', the discrete unit of duties, responsibilities, etc. that they expect and require employees and candidates to meet and (mostly) fulfill. The components of the job tend not to vary too much over time, and are generally not particularly malleable or personalizable.  In recruiting, organizations tend to match the requirements of the job with the documented and demonstrated capability of the candidate, while considering whether or not the 'gaps' in experience or skills are significant enough to move on to the next candidate. Fail to have enough of the required traits, or even one of the most critical ones, and well, no match. Move on to the next candidate.

We tell candidates that we will keep their resume on file in case something more suited to their skills turns up, but in reality in the majority of circumstances that 'miss' represents their one and only chance. 

But what if the organization approached the recruiting and job design process more like our friends at M&M's, and if Forrester is correct, how more and more product marketers will address their markets? What if we could identify for a role, or really a role type, some essential and non-negotiable components or skills (size and shape of the candy), and then a more flexible and fluid set of variables (color, messages), that could be combined to create a more customized, personalized opportunity for the candidates? Might this be a step in addressing the 'skills gap' that might not actually solely a skills gap, but the results of a lack of institutional flexibility?

If a company could figure out a way to do this, they might get the benefit of discovering more committed and engaged candidates and employees (since they had some input into the design of the job), and also to lose less of their really talented candidates and employees because of really kind of slight and relatively unimportant mismatches between skills, interests, and job requirements.

Is it crazy to think organizations could be mature enough in their understanding of workforce capability needs to offer the ability for more personalization in the design of work?

Is it crazy that I can order twelve pounds of orange M&M's that say 'Steve is my hero?'

HRevolution Sponsor Spotlight - PeopleMatter

Note - The third HRevolution Event for Human Resources professionals will take place April 29, 30 in Atlanta, Georgia. This post continues a series where we recognize and thank the generous sponsors that make the HRevolution event possible.

PeopleMatter provides talent management software for the service industry. PeopleMatter's software tools help their customers in the service industries like hospitality, convenience stores, restaurants, and grocery stores to manage the processes for hiring, scheduling and engaging their talent - all from a single, integrated platform.

I first met Nate DaPore, CEO of PeopleMatter at the HR Technology Conference last fall.  Nate, along with his colleague Charles Wyke-Smith were kind enough to take some time to talk with me about PeopleMatter's Talent Management solutions, and to review some of their ideas and vision for the HR technology space, and more specifically, where they felt PeopleMatter could continue to innovate to deliver leading-edge talent management solutions for their customers.

PeopleMatter focuses squarely on developing solutions to meet the need of the service organizations; the type of customers that have significant talent management challenges. Traditionally high turnover, seasonal swings in talent and staffing requirements, the need to quickly and efficiently onboard high volumes of new staff, while simultaneously meeting myriad regulatory and legislative requirements for filing and reporting. Anyone that has tried to work in HR in these kinds of environments will attest to these conundrums.

Think about the importance of talent management to service providers like restaurants or hotels - their employees are face-to-face every single day interacting with customers, customers that often have lots of choices about where to spend their time and money. For service providers, having the 'right' employee, properly trained, and engaged enough to deliver superior customer service, can make or break the customer experience. And in the age of social media, we all know what one bad customer service experience can do to a brand. One tweet, one YouTube video, one ranty blog post and boom - years of hard work and accumulated capital and goodwill gone. PeopleMatter helps their customers better manage this challenge and uncertainty with their suite of integrated tools for hiring, onboarding, and engaging staff.

Nate DaPore, CEO of PeopleMatter will be attending and presenting at HRevolution next week, and if you are attending, be sure to connect with Nate. He is a super guy and has some great ideas about how to improve the talent management space that just might make that next trip to Starbucks or 7-Eleven a better one.

Thanks Nate, and to the team at PeopleMatter for your support of the HRevolution 2011!

Connect with PeopleMatter on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Freedom of Choice in Workplace Technology

There is a growing technology trend in workplaces both large and small called 'Bring Your Own Device', sometimes abbreviated as BYOD. Bring Your Own Device simply means that organizational IT departments are allowing individual employees to use their personal or preferred 'devices', (smartphones, tablets, laptops), to access the corporate systems and tools they need to accomplish their work.

BYOD, while certainly more complex for centralized IT teams to support and administer, is an admission and realization that often an individual's attachment and bond to their personal productivity tools is so powerful, that forcing them to adapt and adopt to the corporate footprint is counter-productive and even deflating.  Think about it, if you hire a new sales executive, that has years of his or her industry and corporate contacts resident on their iPhone, or saved to a cloud-based service they access via an Android app, does it really make sense to hand them a new BlackBerry and tell them to 'deal with it, because that is what we support.'

Proponents of BYOD will contend that allowing employees to bring their own devices can reduce training costs as well as the amount of IT support calls on an ongoing basis. Despite supporting 'more' devices, the argument is that each employee already knows how t use and manage their preferred device. As in the example of the new sales rep above, not having to transition from a device and set of tools to a new 'official' platform, can make employees more productive, and reduce time to achieve desired performance levels. Finally, they make employees happier. People LOVE their iPhones, Androids, iPads, whatever. Making them break those ties when they come to the office is painful for many.

The arguments against BYOD typically center around data security, lack of resources to deploy and support a myriad of devices and platforms, and cultural drivers that tend to resist the kind of openness and freedom that BYOD programs foster.  But it does seem likely that as we see the major shift in consumer preferences towards iPhones, iPads, and Android devices; and away from the traditional enterprise deployments of BlackBerries and Microsoft-based PCs, that progressive organizations and IT leaders will simply have to embrace these shifts, and figure out a way to support what their employees really want, while balancing their need to maintain IP and data security.

Recently Clorox, an 8,300 person strong maker of consumer cleaning products adopted a kind of modified BYOD program, by offering its workers a choice of corporate-supported smartphone. Previously, BlackBerry had been the corporate standard. Workers could choose from iPhone, Android, or a Windows7 device. The result - "the company has issued 2,000 smartphones, 92% of which are iPhones. About 6% of the smartphones chosen were Android-based while 2% were Windows Phone 7 devices."

This isn't a knock on BlackBerry, I personally am a happy BlackBerry user, but rather an observation that prior to having a choice of device, almost all of the employees at Clorox were not happy with the 'provided' device, and given the opportunity to move to something more aligned with their preferences, they jumped at the chance. Clorox didn't make this decision to be nice or kind to staff, they balanced the value of the increased effectiveness and engagement of staff against the cost to procure and support the suite of devices and have determined that rather than being a perk to employees, it is simply just a good business decision.

I think we will see more BYOD programs taking hold in the coming years as new entrants to the workforce carry in their tools and preferences and expect them to be supported in the workplace.

I wonder if the next trend might be BYOHRT, Bring your own HR Technology? What might that look like?

Looking for the positive, (and Phil Collins songs)

The crew over at Sonar6, a Human Resources Technology solutions provider, have released a new 'color paper', (kind of like a whitepaper, but in color, and way more fun to read), called '(you've got to) accentuate the positive'. This color paper is all about how as managers, and as humans, we tend to focus on the negative. We have performance conversations with employees that fixate on the one or two 'problems', while ignoring, or at least de-emphasizing the areas in which the employee excels.Phil Collins

And for the employee, this overweighed attention to the negative aspects of their performance can leave them frustrated, de-motivated, and perhaps even doubting their own ability and value as a member of the team.  The need to look for the positive and to end any performance related coaching conversation by 'closing upbeat' was also one of the themes in a webcast I participated in last week with Mike Carden from Sonar6 and Kris Dunn from Kinetix.

In the webcast Kris indicated a 3 to 1 ratio of positive feedback to negative (but constructive) feedback was probably the sweet spot for coaching team members whose overall performance was generally solid, but from time to time may need a tweak or a nudge to correct a behavior once in a while. Your mileage may vary, but I think most of us would admit, a relentless focus on what we are doing wrong, and why we stink, eventually drives us to the point where we would either shut down, rebel, of simply walk away.

So why was Phil Collins mentioned in the post title?

I recently came across an article (apologies but link to the original post is now dead), in which the author had a kind of litmus-test question he asked of people he met, that he might work with, or perhaps even hire on to his team. He would ask them to list their Top 5 Phil Collins songs. The idea being that Phil Collins has a large and wide enough catalog that just about anyone should be able to find at least something positive in what is considered by some a morass of negative.

This question, while certainly not scientific, provides some insight into the way a person thinks. Can they really find something to like, to single out for praise, and are they generally inclined to see things and situations in that manner. It stands to reason if you believe that in performance coaching in the workplace, that finding and accentuating the positive aspects of a team member's performance is one of the keys to making lasting improvements, then you had better have managers that can actually find the positives, even, as in the case of the Phil Collins catalog, they can be hard to uncover.

What do you think? Would you ask a managerial candidate to name their Top 5 Phil Collins songs?

What's your Top 5?

1. Easy Lover

2. Sussudio

3. Fill in the rest in the comments...