Take the month off. Just report back with what you did

In a new spin of Google's famous '20% time' or the now commonplace 'hackdays' in many technology companies that both, (in different ways), provide free and unstructured or loosely structured time for employees to devise, experiment, imagine, and build new things, the software company 37Signals announced via a blog post last week that it is giving most of its employees, in June, an entire 'hack month'. What's a 'hack month'? Details here:

From the 37Signals blog post announcing the project:

This June will be a full month of free time to think, explore, mock up, prototype, whatever. People can go solo or put together a team – it’s entirely up to them. This is a month to unwind and create without the external pressures of other ongoing projects or expectations. We’re effectively taking a month off from non-essential scheduled/assigned work to see what we can do with no schedule/assignments whatsoever.

The culmination of this month of free work time is Pitchday – the first Thursday in July. That’s when everyone will get a chance to pitch their idea, mockup, prototype, or proof of concept to the whole company. The better the pitch, the more likely the project will happen.

Some people have already paired up and recruited others to work on an idea together. Some are going solo. And some are taking the time to work on a combination of smaller things they’ve been meaning to work on for a while.

I love the idea of companies letting go, even if it is for one day a quarter like many hack days, one day per week like the 20% time scheme, or even something more bold and potentially impactful as 37Signals' month-long experiment.  The key to these programs being more than just nice perks for an overworked and over stressed staff is the 'pitch' that happens at the end of the hack time. The pitch, since it typically has to be delivered in front of all their peers as well as company leadership places extra responsibility in the employee's and can serve to illustrate some really useful elements for company leadership in both staff skills and capabilities, as well as motivation and engagement.

Some of the benefits for company leadership of these kind of hack day programs that are often harder to come by during the course of 'normal' business:

Figure out who is all in - some people and teams will push really hard in these programs, will exert extra time and effort to make something great, to 'win', and to be recognized. Others, well, not so much. And the good thing is in the pitch meetings, all this plays out in public.

Figure out the untapped or unrealized talents in the organization - the inherent freedom to choose your project allows staff to experiment with skills and technology that they might enjoy, or at least be very talented with, but for some reason the 'real job' does not utilize. You will almost always be surprised what someone is really good at.

Find out which people are willing to learn new things - the jury may be out on so-called stretch goals, but observing which employees seem to embrace new things, to try and take advantage of the free time to learn new skills can be an important and illustrative predictor of who might be ready for a new project or a more challenging type of 'real' assignment. 

Sense where natural teams form and whether or not they work - A great aspect of hack day programs is that they allow and encourage teams to form across the organization often where the normal course of business does not require. Seeing where teams and groups form, and also who decides to work solo, can give leaders some clues towards project team composition, and creates opportunities for people from different functions to offer different insights in areas they usually would not see.

You can probably tell I am a huge fan of the hack day idea. Maybe extreme examples like the 37Signals hack month are not reasonable, or even wise, for most organizations, but certainly just about every organization could benefit from taking at least some time every few months to open up, let go of the reins, and see what the employees can really do. And the pitch day with the entire team assembled? That is money all day.

What do you think - does your organization have similar hack days? And if not, why not?

Happy Monday!

Off Topic - The Flames of Discontent

Spotted from the always inspiring 'If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats' blog:

Are you fanning the flames of disconent today?

Contributing to them?

Will you win?

Have a Great Weekend!

The skilled trades need a famous commencement address too

May is commencement time in the USA, and in conjunction with the hundreds if not thousands of college and university commencements taking place across the country we are treated to reports and videos of numerous commencement addresses delivered by a wide range of speakers ranging from famous business people, media personalities, politicians, and more. And each year one or two of the college commencement addresses resonates in some way, whether from the message itself, or from the combination between the message and the speaker him or herself, perhaps making the story more powerful by virtue of their obstacles overcame and ability to reach and inspire the graduating students. Jaime Escalante

My cynical nature tends to mostly ignore these commencement speeches each year, because to me, if you peel back the outer surface layers that differentiate the 'speaker life story/type of personal achievement' from each other and get to their core message, well, that message seems pretty much the same. Again I am a cynic, but after a while and the fourth or fifth re-telling, the admonition to 'be true to yourself, follow your dreams, everything is possible, follow your passion....' message seems to get a little bit stale. I spent enough time in higher education to understand why colleges hire, and make no mistake, most of the commencement speeches are highly paid gigs, a big time inspirational and famous speaker to give the same message the local public school principal gave in 5th grade, it's because the parents want to be entertained and feel like they are extracting the last shred of value for the hundreds of thousands of dollars they have shelled out for Junior's education.

I'll tie this back to two college commencement addresses way back in the day to see if the point can be better made with specifics. When I was just finishing my Junior year in college I hung around to attend commencement as I wanted to take advantage of all the parties witness many good friends of mine receive their diplomas. The commencement speaker was the legendary actor Jimmy Stewart. Most of the parents were really excited to see Mr. Stewart, as he was one of the most famous actors of the parent's generation and the one just prior. I am sure he said some interesting things, he had a great voice and delivery, even at that later stage of his life, and I seem to remember people being pleased with the choice of speaker.

The following year at my graduation the commencement speaker was the high school teacher made famous by the movie 'Stand And Deliver'. Not the famous actor, Edward James Olmos, but the actual teacher who inspired the story, Jaime Escalante, who was not very well known at the time, although via the moderate success of the film at least the story had some familiarity. Mr. Escalante's speech was excellent, and most importantly for then, as indeed for today, I think in many ways the choice of someone like Mr. Escalante more appropriate and relevant, (assuming you can make any kind fo argument for the value of any commencement speaker).

I was thinking about this for another reason as well, the recent release of the Manpower 'What Jobs are Hard to Fill' survey, (I know that is not the real name, but you know which one I am talking about). In the survey we see that some of the Top 10 hardest jobs for companies to fill today are in skilled trades, sales reps, drivers, mechanics, nurses, and yes, teachers. The Top 10 list is mostly those kinds of completely necessary, important for a modern society to function properly, are unglamorous, and typically are not the populations from which fancy college commencement speakers are chosen from.

And that is kind of too bad. While Mr. Stewart was a fine speaker and a good-natured guy, he, and most of the other commencement speakers don't really hold up too well as role models in the sense of graduates' career aspirations and plans.  The country doesn't really need many more aspiring actors or singers or Reality TV stars. 

According to the Manpower report however, the country does need lots more tradespeople, teachers, mechanics, and accountants. Maybe we should be hearting more from these kinds of professionals at commencement time.

Sadly, Mr. Escalante passed away in 2010, so he is no longer able to try and inspire young people to follow down this path.

Edward James Olmos is still alive though. Maybe he can play that role made famous in Stand and Deliver again. He at least still has some name recognition.

Onboarding for the rest of us

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is brought to you by Allied Van Lines, proud sponsor of the “2012 Workforce Mobility Survey”, designed to capture the voice of HR on topics related to workforce mobility. Allied has more than 75 years of experience in corporate, household and international relocation.)

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It's kind of fun at times, particularly if you are like most of us and are grinding it out in one of the thousands of mainstream, solid, and mostly anonymous organizations that quite honestly are most organizations, to read about the wild people practices and processes from Silicon Valley, or startup land, or any company that is young enough or successful enough to just do things differently. You know what I mean, famous places like Google or Zappos, or even less famous but still interesting places like the video game development company Valve, whose recent, irreverent employee handbook was leaked to the internet. If you missed the story about Valve it is worth a quick look, it is a written testament of sorts to that wild, loose, carefree, and unstructured work environment that most of us only dream of inhabiting.Onboarding at Valve

But we know that most of us can't act like Zappos or Valve, even if we wanted to. We have more history, more culture, more of a need or requirement, (for better or worse), to have more structure, rules, and process around our people management practices. We, and most of our employees and new hires, would fail if we simply set them loose in the organization and told them to figure it out for themselves.

But instead of looking at that reality as a negative, I think there are opportunities to leverage more formal and expected processes as a strength. Take new employee onboarding for example, an area typically well-defined and with a structured process, but also one that may not be producing the desired results in driving faster time to productivity, cementing the relationship between employer and employee, and ensuring a continuing supply of fresh talent in the organization. If you are like most employers, you say you already 'do' onboarding, i.e., collect the requisite forms, conduct an intake or orientation, offer some opportunity for the new hires to acclimate to culture, process, and work styles. 

But like any long-term, long-time, been-doing-it-so-long that you think you know how to handle it, there are probably some opportunities for you to improve your game. Thanks to the Workforce Mobility Survey (details here) sponsored by Allied, we've got some actual data about the state of onboarding, and some insights into what the companies that are best in class are doing, (and notably not doing), in the more important than we like to think area of onboarding.

The chart on the right gives the rundown of what survey respondents are employing in onboarding, andSouce - Allied Workforce Mobility Survey since you are probably like most, and already handling the essentials, it is probably a better idea to take a look deeper into the chart, (and certainly at the complete survey results here), to look for areas where you can raise your game. Maybe it is more social events where new hires get to mix with veterans and company leaders or perhaps setting more concrete goals for the program, or it might be getting more senior level management stake in the game.

Either way I think the lesson to take away is that you can still add value and make an important impact in the success of the organization while still being your boring, traditional self. Sort of. The key is doing what makes sense for your organization, resonates with the people you are bringing in to the team, and connects them with their peers, managers, and the mission of the organization overall.

And sure, making it a little bit fun probably won't hurt.

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If you would like to learn more about Allied Van Lines, please check out their website or blog. And if you would like to get more information from the Workforce Mobility Survey, you can click here. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Spreading risk, shirking responsibility?

One of the most commonly repeated business maxims of the last two decades or so is one that goes something along the lines of 'Focus on our core competencies', i.e., that tying to do too much, to expand into lines of business that don't really leverage the key strengths and value-add capability of the firm are simply not worth doing, or at least if they are necessary to provide the finished product or service, should be outsourced or offshored. Whether it is the high-tech, mass-production supply chain of Apple, or other popular manufacturers, the outsourcing of common and non-differentiating administrative functions like employee benefits, or even simply the offshoring of customer support and service call centers by financial, insurance, or other consumer companies, there definitely continues to be an almost relentless drive towards this kind of 'core competency' structure.

As Apple has recently and famously seen, sometimes the tension that arises from these kind of arrangements, and reconciling and rationalizing how much responsibility the firm has for the business practices, processes, and even ethics of its sub-contractors and value chain partners can be incredibly complex to navigate. How much, if at all, should Apple, or any other firm that engages in these kinds of widespread and high volume outsourcing of its operations, be held to task for the kinds of problems, some dramatic, others more routine, that inevitably arise in the course of the manufacture of products or the delivery of services?

While the Apple story and its relationship with one of its prime manufacturing partners Foxconn is widely known, last week the PBS Frontline series ran a segment about a similar set of problems in the Unites States wireless communications industry, while less well known, are no less troubling and illustrative of the moral and ethical dilemmas that sometimes arise in these arms length outsourcing and contracting arrangements.

The segment, titled 'Cell Tower Deaths', investigates the dramatic rise in the number of deaths associated with the wireless industry in the United States since 2003. Since that time, nearly 100 workers have been killed on the job, and on the towers that allow wireless service to function.

(The first segment of the Frontline report is embedded below, email and RSS subscribers may need to click through)

Watch Cell Tower Deaths on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the death ratio for cellphone tower workers is 184 out of 100,000, putting the job at the top of the “Fatal Job” list. For example in 2006 alone, 18 people were killed on the job.

Some of the reasons are kind of obvious - the rapid expansion of wireless devices and smart phone use, the creation of an entire new class of devices (tablets), that connect wirelessly to the internet, cutthroat competition between carriers to build out the most complete coverage networks the fastest, and lastly, the ability and common business practice of providers to hire sub-contractors, (who often hire their own sub-contractors), to do the dangerous work for which they never have to take full responsibility.

We see in the Frontline piece, that often the workers at these small, local, very loosely supervised and managed sub-contractors receive less than adequate screening, training, and even safety equipment before they are thrust into an incredibly dangerous, tense, and demanding environment. We also learn that the major service providers are able, due to the fact that their contracts are three or even four steps removed from the firms that actually build and maintain the towers, to generally hide from responsibility for these business practices that, all too often, have led to injury and even death of usually low-paid, inexperienced workers.

Should the carriers, (AT&T specifically gets talked about quite a bit in the Frontline piece), have to own more of the process, if not directly in the form of actually employing the tower workers, at least in having more oversight for training and safety practices of those firms it hires to do work on its behalf? 

For that matter should Apple, Microsoft, Dell, et al, shoulder more of the load for the working conditions in their manufacturing partners facilities around the world?

While the Apple story is familiar, it has that other characteristic of being distant - the workers in China, are well, workers in China. We don't know any of them and we're likely never to meet any of them. We can still keep a comfortable separation, at least in our minds.

As the Frontline piece so poignantly describes, the workers that have perished working on cell towers are quite a bit closer - Indiana, Iowa, Tennessee. Whether that does or should make a difference to how we feel about this, I will leave up to you to decide.

What do you think - how much responsibility does any large firm have in the behavior, practices, ethics, and working conditions of the sub-contractors it hires?