More proof that lots of us are horrible people who haven't grown up

The things we did at the age of 12 or 14 or even 18, while potentially cringe-worthy when thinking back on them, we like to think are safely left in the past and can be chalked up to and rationalized away by some combination of youth, peer pressure, insecurity, and simply not knowing better. We all did dumb or cruel or even borderline criminal things at some point. But most of us, we think, have left that nonsense behind as we've grown up, become educated, pursued our careers, and maybe even had kids of our own, (who surely, won't make the same mistakes we did).

And I think that is mostly true. Even if you were a part of the 'cool kids' group in school and made fun of or hassled, or even just ignored the 'non-cool' kids, ('cool' and 'non-cool' being completely elusive and situational concepts, but I am sure you know which group you were a part of), you've moved on. Because the things or attributes that defined 'cool' and 'non-cool' when you were 15 are certainly not really relevant or meaningful in the adult world, and particularly in the workplace.  How someone dresses, their hobbies, even their physical attractiveness - all pretty important things in the social order in high school - don't really factor in to the day-to-day at work. Or at least they shouldn't.Ready-to-wear, Stuart Davis 1955

But perhaps they still do, in more ways than we care to think about, and in ways we'd prefer to ignore. 

Check the details from a recent study on the influence of attractiveness on what is termed as 'Counterproductive workplace behaviors' by professors at Michigan State and Notre Dame:

People who are considered unattractive are more likely to be belittled and bullied in the workplace, according to a first-of-its-kind study led by a Michigan State University business scholar.

“Frankly, it’s an ugly finding,” said Brent Scott, associate professor of management and lead investigator on the study. “Although we like to think we’re professional and mature in the workplace, it can be just like high school in many ways.

”While plenty of research has found that attractive students tend to be more popular in school, the study is the first to link attractiveness to cruelty in the workplace. The results appear in the research journal Human Performance.

The study surveyed a group of workers at a health care facility about their experiences with counterproductive workplace behaviors like being made fun of, being treated cruelly, or having hurtful things said about them. Then a set of unrelated people evaluated the worker's 'attractiveness' on a sliding scale. Mashing up the data the researchers found that "the unattractive workers were treated much more harshly than attractive employees even when other key factors were taken into account, including age, gender and how long they had worked at the health care facility."

Not all jobs are fun. Most jobs are not all that noble. Not many jobs pay as well as we'd like. That's life and that's work. And there isn't much we can to to make a cashier job at the Walmart all that more appealing.

But every job, or rather every person that shows up to work, deserves an environment where they won't be subject to the kinds of cruel treatment that more and more we are not even tolerating from teenagers or kids.

Take ten minutes this week at your shop - once you get past the transactions and documents and emails and all the stuff that seems to keep coming at you in relentless waves - and think about this one point - if people in your organization are being treated poorly at work simply because of the way they look, you can be sure it didn't suddenly start when they came to work for you.

No, it is a pretty safe bet they have been picked on, pushed around, and belittled for a long, long time. Maybe even their entire lives. Maybe they thought, or hoped, that once they 'grew up' that the jerks would grow up too, or at least they wouldn't have to be forced to deal with them.

Maybe they thought or hoped that 'going to work', while no picnic all the time, would at least be somewhere safe or maybe even pleasant.

Is it 'your' job to protect or at least stand up for these people?

Yes it is. It is all of our jobs. 

VIDEO: The robot would like a sidebar, please

How do you balance the demands of the modern workforce for flexibility around schedules, locations, and desire to not cut back on that white-knuckle ride on the daily commute, with many organizations desire to foster a collabortive and innovative environment that to many leaders only comes from workers 'physically being together?'

Meet your future colleague Ava 500, or rather, the robot that your future colleagues will be driving around the office or plant or store if the vision of the folks at iRobot and Cisco comes to pass.  Ava 500 combines the mobility and navigation capability from iRobot, with Cisco's teleprescence technology into a robot technology that can be used to teleport anyone in the organization regardless of their physical location to any other location that is equipped with an Ava 500.

Check the video below from iRobot to see Ava in action (Email and RSS subscribers may need to click through)

Pretty nifty, right? And did you catch that little feature with the 'robot' drags a couple of the meeting participants out of the room for a little private time? 

I think the long-term key for these kinds of telepresence robots to actually move past novelty and into more widespread use is that they have to seem less, well robotic, and more natural. They need to be able to move fluidly, be aware of their environment, and maybe have a little personality. 

The workers that teleport into Ava have to come across to their colleagues as close to 'normal' as is possible, and using the high-end Cisco telepresence tech is one way to try and achieve that. No one is going to want to interact with a person piloting an Ava 500 if the video feed resembles a dodgy Google Hangout from someone's dreary basement home office.

One thing the video didn't show, perhaps purposefully, is depict two different Ava 500's interacting with each other. In a way, if using a technology like Ava would be so fantastic for connecting one remote worker with their colleagues, then why not 2 or 3 or 20? 

Maybe the workplace of the future will be one that ends up being largely uninhabited by any people, but rather a fleet of telepresence robots that move from meeting to meeting while different workers take turns teleporting in from all over the world.

What do you think - is the Ava 500 coming soon to a workplace near you?

Off Topic: The Home Office of 2001

Even back in 1967, smart folks were thinking about work and life and how to balance the two. And as an aside, I get really annoyed when the work/life police go out of their way to constantly remind the rest of us that we shouldn't use the term 'balance', but rather something like 'fit' or 'blend' or essentially something they approve of. Quit it already. If the world wants to refer to the subject as 'Work/Life Balance' its you that need to adapt, not everyone else.

But to get back to the topic, or non-topic as the case may be, back in 1967 none other than the 'Most trusted man in America', news legend Walter Cronkite gave viewers a glimpse of what at least of the part of the future of work might look like, all the way in the distant future, the year 2001. 

Check the video embedded below for what Uncle Walter had to say about the home office at the turn of the century (Email and RSS subscribers will need to click through)

Some awesome points from the Kronk, (if you can ignore he is only referring to 'men' workers throughout the video). But think about it, back in '67 folks were already thinking about technology that would free the employee completely from the office. Throw in some connected computer terminals for news and weather reports, as well as one for catching up on your investments, (beats doing emails, right?). Mix in an odd-looking phone that connects to a video monitor to have video calls. Finally, yet another monitor for the business man of 2001 to see all the other rooms in the house, (and if you look closely, it seems like Walter is looking in on the Mrs. making the bed). 

The funny thing about the home office of the future as imagined in the video is it really doesn't speak much if at all to the business man doing any actual work. And it doesn't at all speculate that work itself might change dramatically, just that there would be fancier tools to assist in the effort. And lastly, it continues to assume, like probably lots of men did in 1967, that complex work that would benefit or even require all this cool technology would only be done by men.

Let's hope that those shortcomings or lack of vision from Kronk were just a product of a more old-fashioned way of thinking, and narrow point of view. 

Because we know that in 2013 and beyond, the technology of the future will not just make things easier and more convenient, it will help make the world a better, more open, more equitable, better place.

Right?

Have a great weekend!

Virtual HR, or, 'Did you ask the HR chatbot?'

While I and many, many others have blogged, talked, and pontificated about how the ongoing advances in technology, automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence continue to 'hollow-out' or eliminate wide ranges of jobs formerly and traditionally that are done by humans, I also often think that many folks don't see these trends as all that interesting or potentially threatening. Most of the people who read this blog, I imagine, see themselves as knowledge workers that bring imagination, creativity, and perhaps most essentially, an understanding of subtle things like culture and attitude to their jobs and careers. Most of us, (admittedly me too), say of think things like 'My job is just too complex and ever-changing for it to even be outsourced to a less-expensive human (much less a robot).'

Possibly. But it also seems likely that given enough time, access to ever-improving technologies, and the right economic incentives, there are enterprising people and organizations that even if they couldn't completely automate or robot-icize everything you do, chances are a fair amount of even what we creative types do is already routine enough that the robots could do a passable, if not better (and cheaper and will less of a bad attitude), than we do.

But again, I know you don't really believe me, as you are (probably) and HR person that is reading this, and automation in HR has only meant changing how the transactional work of HR, (forms, time-tracking, payroll, etc), from paper-driven processes to computer-driven ones, (and often, initiated by employees and completed by managers with little direct involvement from HR). The important work in HR and in many other organizational functions still, and perhaps for a long time yet, remains the exclusive domain of humans - which humans (see the self-service HR example above), matters less today than it used to. 

But automation is coming - not just to manufacturing lines or driverless cars or better algorithms and assessments that can screen candidates much faster and more efficiently than you can. Perhaps in HR automation will have to look a little different than what we expect, since so much of the profession is about people - talking to them, understanding them, evaluating them, and motivating them - and ultimately helping, (or concluding that we can't), help them.

Those kind of interactions, even at a basic level, can't be automated yet. Right?

Well, maybe not yet, but that doesn't mean they won't be one day soon.

Don't believe me? Then ask Ivy her opinion.

Who is Ivy? The latest in automation - this time form one of the country's largest employers, and right in your area of interest - the delivery of HR services.  Check the details from the Jobs at Intel blog.

Okay, the newest thing we’ve launched is a “virtual HR agent”. What’s that, you ask? You know when you shop online, whether it’s for new gadgets or it’s for a plane ticket to go somewhere or maybe it’s just for odds and ends, some websites have a virtual agent that will answer FAQs for you and guide you through the process. Our new virtual HR agent, we named her Ivy, is set up to do the same thing, but for our employees at Intel (so this is an internal tool.) If employees have questions about their pay, stock, benefits, or other HR programs, they simply bring Ivy up on the intranet and type in a question. Ivy uses a combination of natural language processing, artificial intelligence and optimized search to find the answer to the question. Also, magic. Okay, well, it’s like magic to me, so…  As of today, Ivy has 4,331 possible responses. How do I know that number so exactly? I led the team that wrote all the responses. You can bet we’re excited for the launch after all that work!

 Catch all that?

Ivy, or the virtual HR chat agent, has over 4,000 possible responses to any employee question about pay or benefits or other HR programs, and using the same kind of intelligence we've seen in a consumer or retail environment, provides HR services to Intel employees. As it is an internal-only tool, I'm not able to test it out, but it stands to reason that with over 4K responses, and the ability to 'learn' and adapt, that over time a tool like Ivy would be able to do more that respond to simple questions, and provide more complex answers to more difficult questions.

Yes, Intel's HR team has to provide the 'intelligence' for Ivy to work, and that, as yet, is still a human job, but what if employees at Intel begin to prefer dealing with virtual HR over real HR? 

I'll leave you with more from the Jobs at Intel blog about Ivy:

Ivy’s no chatbot and she’s not backed by a human “behind the curtain”. She’s all software. We’ve got lots of metrics in place to monitor her performance and our employees can give a star rating to each interaction. Using the performance data and star ratings, we can tune Ivy to make her even better. Beyond that, what’s weird is that she learns. Seriously. Her artificial intelligence gets better as employees ask her questions. Amazing.

The money line in that?

We can tune Ivy to make her even better. Beyond that, what’s weird is that she learns.

Can you say the same about the people in your HR organization?

Happy Tuesday.

What's your workplace's signature scent?

Ever walk into a high-end retail store or a fancy hotel lobby and suddenly feel compelled to think, 'What is that smell?' or ask someone nearby 'Do you smell that?'

It could be that you actually do smell something faint, lurking in the background, and it also could be that what you are smelling is a 'signature scent' that has been purposely released into the building by the owners in order to achieve a specific impact and effect. This olfactory technology, created by companies like ScentAir, allows businesses to add to or augment their customer experience by (in their words), 'connecting on an emotional and memorable level with customers' via the release of specific fragrances into the environment at specific times and for specific purposes.

I would not have heard about this if not for a connection of the ScentAir technology to the sports world - it seems like professional teams like basketball's Brooklyn Nets (a fresh smelling fragrance with citrus notes),  and the NFL's St. Louis Rams (cotton candy) have experimented with pumping in their own custom scents inside their stadiums. ScentAir offers solutions that scale to really large spaces like in these examples, but also smaller, more targeted scent solutions that can be deployed in more intimate business and office environments.

The idea, then, is that since we experience and interact with the world using all of our senses, that organizations can benefit from purposefully leveraging one that is often ignored - the sense of smell, to create more complete and memorable experiences. 

My question is, how about deploying these kinds of scent-delivery mechanisms into internal, or non-customer facing environments? What if you could set up a little personal 'signature scent' for your next all-hands meeting, product review, or even your managerial 1-1 meetings?

Wouldn't we at work also like to be able to also 'connect on an emotional and memorable level' with our colleagues, employees, and bosses? Could a subtle 'vanilla with hints of alder and lime' scent wafting in the air make that next really uncomfortable 'You are getting placed on a performance improvement plan' meeting you have to facilitate more complete?

Probably not. But I bet the vanilla and alder would be an improvement from what you normally smell in those kinds of meetings - 'despair, with hints of loathing and perspiration, and a final note of Copenhagen.'

What's your workplace's signature scent?