Are you wearing a wire? Tracking Employee Interaction Digitally

These days it seems most organizational leaders have bought in at least conceptually to the idea that improvements in employee collaboration - discovery of ideas, sharing best practices across internal silos, unearthing insights from the far corners of the firm, and so on, is likely to increase in importance and urgency in the coming years, as almost all organizations try to do more work with less people.The Sociometric Badge - no you don't have to tape it on under your shirt

Sure, a raft of technologies have emerged in just the last few years to facilitate and support employee collaboration, (Yammer, Jive, Socialcast, etc.), and while these tools and others like them all have some excellent features and capabilities, they are limited in scope by their digital nature. We can use tools like these to develop, share, track, and interact, and we can measure and report metrics about those interactions, but as systems that rely (mainly), on computer-generated and supported inputs, (individual status updates, shares of a document, group edits of content, etc.), they still miss capturing a key aspect of employee collaboration, namely actual meetings and conversations between peers and in group settings. 

A new approach towards better understanding these 'real-life' employee (and customer) interactions, created by a company called Sociometric Solutions a wearable device called the 'Sociometric Badge' attempts to bridge this gap between analog conversations and digital collaboration tools and data sets by recording and assessing the information captured in a proprietary framework for further analysis and action.

More information about the capability of the Sociometric Badge from the Sociometric Solutions website:

Using a variety of sensors, the Sociometric Badge is capable of, among other things, capturing face-to-face interactions, extracting social signals from speech and body movement, and measuring the proximity and relative location of users.

The process seems pretty straighforward. Turn up at the office in the morning, check your email and voicemail, then just before heading over to the office pantry for a cup of thin, industrial coffee, place the Sociometric Badge around your neck and the badge will begin recording how much you talk (versus how much you listen); it will gauge how much you sit versus how much you move around; and an infrared sensor will track how often you're facing other people also wearing the badges.

After a period of data collection, about a month or two, the folks at Sociometric Solutions will use their analytics platform that combines Sociometric Badges information, e-mail traffic analytics, and other proprietary data collection methods to provide individual and group visualization dashboards. The idea being that these dashboards will provide organizations a more complete view of collaborative behaviors and interactions, than simple monitoring and metrics of purely digital forms of communication like shared wikis, activity streams, or email alone.

Sociometric Solutions points to a case study from Bank of America where that found that call center workers who interacted more with their colleagues felt less stressed, handled calls more quickly, but had equivalent customer approval ratings to those who didn't interact as much. Addtionally, Bank of America scheduled employees' breaks so that they could interact and talk with one another more often throughout the day. 

It is an interesting, if possibly instrusive approach, but one that makes perfect sense that people have been collaboratively solving problems, determining solutions, and generating innovative new breakthoughs for ages by simply talking to each other.

It could be the next great breakthrough in harnessing the collaborative power of the enterprise won't be limited to rolling out the next 'Internal Facebook' tool, it might be simply gaining a better understanding of the informal, verbal, and offline interactions happening all the time.

What do you think? Would you wear a workplace 'wire'?

Self-checkouts, Self-service, and Customer Experience

This CNET News article caught my attention last week: Major grocery chain gets rid of self-checkout.

Here is the backstory: Albertsons, a major USA grocery chain has elected to remove the customer self-checkout lanes from its 217 stores.  From the original piece in the Seattle Times that first reported the Albertson's decision:

For Boise-based Albertsons, self-checkout no longer fits with the customer-service experience it wants, spokeswoman Christine Wilcox said.

"Our customers are our highest priority, and we want to provide them with an excellent experience from the time they park their car to when they leave," Wilcox said.

When Albertsons installed self-checkout lanes nearly a decade ago, "it was in response to a growing trend in retail for stores to be even more self-service" than ever before, she said. Albertsons is replacing the self-checkout lanes with regular lanes and opening more staffed lanes during peak shopping hours

A decade ago Albertsons, (and many other retailers, certainly), began to experiment with self-checkout lanes to provide more technically inclined and self-sufficient shoppers with what should have been a more efficient and simple check-out experience compared to the time-tested, (and kind of slow), 'place everything on the conveyor belt, make sure to plop down the little plastic item divider from the guy behind you, and answer a battery of questions from a sometimes too-perky check-out person'. 

'Did you find everything that you were looking for?'

'Do you want paper or plastic?'

'Do you want a bag for your milk?'

And so on.

So to avoid the process, particularly for shoppers with smaller orders, self-checkout lanes started to pop-up in all kinds of retail establishments. They were meant to solve (perceived) customer problems, offer some choices, and certainly shave some costs over time - stores would typically post one service rep to look after several of the self-checkout registers at a time, to assist customers who had issues scanning items, entering payments, and so on.

But as it turns out, most self-checkout experiences in grocery stores kind of stink. The machines are large, more complex than customers want them to be, and the thousands of items that a typical grocery store stocks often present customers and the technology with glitches and issues that eventually do require some assistance from the one service rep assigned to look after the process. Beyond that though, it is quite possible that using the self-checkout machines simply was not a good experience overall for most Albertsons customers, and most were willing to forego the potential time savings and awkward banter with the check-out person to use the traditional check-out process.

Lessons?

Pretty simple I think - implementing systems or imposing technological 'improvements' that exist primarily for the benefit of the service provider and not the customer can't survive indefinitely. Customers, be they the Albertsons shoppers, or the employees of your organization that are the consumers of your HR services and HR Technology solutions, eventually discern the value (or lack thereof), to themselves of whatever fantastic solutions you have developed and deployed.

I know what you're thinking, our Employee and Manager Self-Service solutions are fabulous - everyone just loves using them. We have had them in place for 10 years, and they save a gajillion dollars a year.

But ask yourself this question, if employees and managers had the choice, like Albertsons shoppers have had, to use the supposedly faster, better, modern 'self-service' option, or have their issues and concerns handled the slower, analog, behind-the-times 'old-fashioned' way, what do you think most of them would choose?

Are you really delivering a great solution and customer experience?

Postscript - I hate the self-checkout lane. Except when I get stuck behind someone that decides to pay for thier groceries using an out-of-state check. We really need to do something about those people.

Moving the mundane to the cloud

Yesterday the cloud-based content sharing and collaboration platform company Box (still most commonly referred to by its web address Box.net), announced it's largest enterprise deal to date - an agreement with consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble to deploy Box's file sharing and content collaboration solutions to as many as 18,000 of P&G's 127,000 worldwide employees.

If you are not familiar with Box, (shame on you, the service rocks), it was created in 2005 on a simple idea - that individuals, small businesses, and increasingly, large enterprise customers should have a way to access and share their content and files from anywhere.  Box offers a free plan for individuals that provides up to 5GB of storage space, and over the last few years has added an array of features and application integrations (Google Docs, LinkedIn, Salesforce, NetSuite, etc.), that appeal to the enterprise user. As the SaaS deployment model and cloud-based solutions for the enterprise have become more firmly established in the enterprise space, particularly in the HCM arena, organizations like P&G are continuing to explore the benefits and potential of this model in decidedly mundane process areas like simple file storage and sharing.

But for most knowledge workers this simple process - create a file, save it somewhere others can see it, manage access and changes, make sure everyone is up to date on the latest version, and so on - often proves to be a painful, laborious, and altogether productivity-sapping exercise in frustration. So just like the modern era of popular SaaS and cloud-based solutions like Salesforce have shown, Box (and a few others), are proving that there are benefits to be found, even in large traditional enterprises, in the simple file storage/sharing space.

At its core, the Box service is as simple as the network file shares that almost all enterprise users have grown up with. Connect to Box, create a project name or folder, upload your files, and access them from any internet connected device from there. But what Box brings in functionality beyond the tired old file share you are used to is access to the content from iPads, iPhones, Androids, and BlackBerry; advanced (and easy to use), sharing and collaboration capabilities; ways to easily preview files; full content search capability; and more.  And all this advanced functionality for enterprise users requiring very little if any involvement from corporate IT departments.  

The Box/P&G announcement is likely just one of the first in what are likely to be many such deals announced in the coming months/years.  For many enterprise users, the realization that the Cloud is now a fundamental part of the corporate experience won't come from the once or twice a year they access their Talent Management suite provider's cloud-based performance review process. It will be when they save, access, modify, share, embed, link, and otherwise interact with the mundane - Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Acrobat files - but instead of living on their desktop and in the labyrinthine file system on the departmental shared drive, these files and the actions that are taken upon them will be in the cloud, more visible, more accessible, and ultimately more powerful.

Kind of a dull post for a Friday I know, but I guess that is the point. When even dull processes can be improved and transformed, well I think that is a kind of real progress and benefit to all this cloud talk.

Have a great weekend!

Why aren't computers more human?

“What would you like your computer or the Internet to do that it can’t do right now?” 

This morning in the email inbox, wedged in between a press release promoting talent management technology vendor Kenexa's new partnership with leading video interviewing provider Green Job Interview, (kind of interesting), and a blind pitch to run a guest post on my blog about '25 Tech Tools for HR Professionals', (trust me, not at all interesting), came notice of a press release promoting  the results of a study titled 'Children's Future Requests For Computers and the Internet' (pdf link).Wish: a computer that gives real-time help and encouragement

The study, from the international research consultancy Latitude, was meant to gain insight around potential future technology developments and trends as envisioned by children, and was conducted in 2010. According to the release on the study findings:

(Latitude) asked more than 200 kid innovators, ages 12 and under, from North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, South Asia, and Australia to submit drawings of something they’d like their computers or the Internet to do differently. Researchers then scored and analyzed kids’ inventions based on the presence of specific, future-oriented technology themes.

As expected the children that participated in the study offered some clever and innovative ideas about their vision of the future capabilities of technology, and in a way, their expectations of the same. As Latitude broke down the findings, (which had to be a bit challenging, since the kids participating in the study were asked to 'draw' their responses), some consistent themes emerged around what these kids hoped for in terms of the evolution of technology and the internet.

To me, the most interesting theme seen in the kids' responses was this - 'Why Aren’t Computers More Human?'.

 Again from the Latitude study write-up:

The majority of kids (77%) imagined technologies with more intuitive modes of input (e.g., verbal, gestural, and even telepathic), often capable of human-level responsiveness, suggesting that robots with networking functionality and real-time, natural language processing, could be promising areas of opportunity for companies in education, entertainment, and other industries.

So the a collection of 12-year olds from around the world want systems and technologies that are more responsive, intuitive, natural, and work more with them, in the contexts of the 'real' world in which they live. They want to interact with technology, and have their tools and gadgets react to them in ways that seem very much in tune and in line with their real-life interactions as well. Tactile, verbal, aural - and the ability for technology to recognize and react to the same, these kinds of things we associate with 'real' interaction - are some of the main wish-list items from the study participants.

The funny thing is I bet these are broadly the same kinds of things that most of us adults want from our technologies, whether enterprise level ones, or those we use for fun, utility, or connection in our 'real lives'. Technologies that seem like a natural extension of the way to talk, listen, see, hear, touch, engage, and react.  Makes perfect sense that the kids want their computers to seem more human.

In fact I am sure most of us grown-ups want that too.

You can read more about the Latitude study here, and check out some of the drawings that the participating children in the study created on this Flickr set.

What do you think - why aren't computers more human?

Postscript - Ironicially the Kenexa-Green Job Interview partnership I mentioned at the top of the piece is a small step in 'making enterprise systems and processes more 'human'.

Just Five out of a Thousand

Often we underestimate the power of a small change or the potential for a tight but empowered collection of individuals to effect significant change to a level far more enduring than their small numbers suggest, or for seemingly minor but well-positioned and targeted interventions to have massive impact.Look familiar?

Case in point - studies of traffic congestion on German expressways have determined that a modern, real-time, and networked traffic monitoring system, that feeds information from cars on the road to each other and back to a central traffic monitoring center, can successfully and meaningfully reduce congestion, waste, and the associated societal angst that comes from incessant traffic jams with as few as five cars out of a thousand actually connected to the network, and providing traffic and road condition information back to the base.

More details from the Fast Company article that described the study:

The project consists of automobile-mounted, Wi-Fi-enabled sensors, which relay traffic data from car to car until they reach a roadside base station that sends the info to a control center, where engineers can monitor traffic jams, accidents, and construction zones and mount responses in the form of radio alerts and text messages. The surprising discovery is that even when such an automotive web is loosely knit and full of holes, connecting as little as .5 percent of cars on the road, the information it provides can help traffic managers ease congestion, potentially saving hundreds of millions of dollars in fuel costs--not to mention reducing the stress and anxiety of drivers, whether their rides are Wi-Fi-enabled or not

It seems like a simple, yet powerful mix of ingredients - a problem everyone would agree needs to be attacked, the smart application of technology and brain power to address the issue, and a solution flexible enough to realize that it won't be feasible or practical to get even a majority of drivers on-board to successfully implement, much less every driver. To me, that is the key to the story - the potential to effect change and likely significant improvement for all the actors involved, (drivers, businesses, families, the environment), while only recruiting so-to-speak a tiny minority of the players that in theory are engaged and passionate about the problem to be solved. 

Other potential lessons to take from the 'Five out of a Thousand' story? How about to reinforce the idea that in any complex, multi-player system consisting of a collection of individual motivations, attitudes, capabilities, and desires that effecting change or even incremental improvements might not always require a kind of universal buy-in and commitment in order to succeed. I think sometimes we can get caught up in making sure that every new system or process improvement reaches all the far corners of the extended enterprise or ecosystem, and can often spend enormous time and energy 'selling' to a portion of our constituents that are never going to come on board, and quite possibly won't even impact the overall success or failure of the initiative all that much either way. Perhaps you can think about using the precepts of Social Network Analysis inside the organization to better focus change initiatives and more quickly determine the right 0.5% for your efforts to target?

Admittedly most organizational or societal transformation projects will need more than 0.5% participation to be connected and engaged, but certainly 100% participation is usually not needed (or even possible).  

The trick is of course, finding the right 'Five out of a Thousand' that will make your project or passion come to life.  It's too bad people are more complex and harder to read than cars on the expressway. 

Aren't they?