Your new favorite robot: One that fills your gas tank

I was born and raised in the great state of New Jersey and lived there until I was about 25 or so. Upon finally moving from the Garden State to warmer climes, there were two unsettling realizations I had to come to terms with about what life outside of ChrisChristieLand had in store.

One, at least at that time, it was just about impossible to get my hands on Taylor Ham, (also sometimes known as Pork Roll). If you are from NJ, and also the greater Philly area, you know what I am talking about.

And two, that I suddenly, regularly, had to pump my own fuel at the gas station.

You see New Jersey back then, as it still is now, is one of only two states in the US (Oregon is the other one), that do not allow for self-service dispensing of Class 1 Flammable Liquids at Retail. In other words, when you roll up to the gas pumps in NJ, an actual living, breathing person has to find out what type of gas you want, how much of it you would like, how you are going to pay for said gas, and then actually operate the gas pump, refuel the car, and finally process your payment.

While at times it is a pain in the neck for a motorist to have to be 'served' in this manner, by a person, (if the station is really busy or if the attendant is not terribly motivated, it can take a longer than desired time to get in and out of the station), there are other times, (in the rain ,the freezing cold, if you want to make a quick call or send a text, or if you just don't like smelling like gas for the next hour or two), that being able to wait in the car while someone else fills up the tank is actually pretty cool.

Well for all those folks in the other 48 states that have to suffer the indignity of pumping your own gas, soon help may be on the way in the form of Husky Corporation's new breakthrough - the Automatic Refueling System. 

Check the embedded video below, (Email and RSS subscribers will need to click through):

That is every kind of awesome, right? 

Reduces your refueling time by 30%, is cleaner, safer, and lets you stay snuggly warm and dry in your car no matter what is going on outside.

And, in a surprising turn of events in these kinds of 'robots are coming for all our jobs' stories, these refueling robots would not actually disrupt very many jobs, except some in New Jersey and Oregon.

What these robots 'replace' is the hassle of you having to pump your own gas, and activity which, after the 12,498th repetition has mostly lost whatever allure and glamour it once held.

But these automatic refueling robots do make we worried about the long-term fate of my home state, New Jersey. People are already leaving the Garden State in droves. Full-service gas stations are still one of the few reasons to stay. If those vanish by way of the robot, then what other reasons are there to remain in NJ?

And you can now buy Taylor Ham no matter where you live - shipped straight to your door.

Have a great weekend!

On positive reflection and workplace stress reduction

Quick shot for a 'I have about 7,817 emails to read/reply to Thursday' but want to put off that torture for at least 15 more minutes, (the time allotted to research, write, edit, and hit 'Publish' on this sucker).

Did you catch the HBR.org 'Daily Stat' item from this past Tuesday? If not, here it is in its entirety (please don't come after me Harvard):

Stress levels and physical complaints declined by roughly 15% after employees were directed to spend 10 minutes writing about three things that had gone well each day, says a team of researchers led by Joyce E. Bono of the University of Florida. At the end of the work day, the employees logged on to a website where they were asked to write about events large or small, personal or work-related, and explain why they had gone well. The findings suggest that this intervention could have important effects on employee stress and health, the researchers say.

SOURCE:  Building Positive Resources: Effects of Positive Events and Positive Reflection on Work Stress and Health.

Pretty simple right?

Take about 5-10 minutes at the end of the day and deliberately think about, and document, three positives from the day - work successes, some good news in your personal life, maybe even something simple like your favorite NBA team won the game last night. Do this every day and over time, at least according to this research, your overall stress level is likely to decline, and you will start to feel better overall.

Sounds like it makes sense, lots of us forget to think about thepositives in our work or personal lives and focus on the negative. If you are encouraged/forced to write down or log in an online tool somewhere only the positive things at the end of the workday I suppose that will help you 'shut down' from work in a generally better mood and mental place than you might otherwise. Especially if the final 'work' of the day was something unpleasant or difficult or simply just a pain in the neck, (like the task of reading all your email that I am currently avoiding).

What do you think, would this kind of intentional positive reflection make a difference in reducing your stress levels?

For me, I am not so sure. Maybe it is the cynic/pessimist in me, but the second I sat down to document the three positive items for the day, I would naturally look to pair or balance them with three negatives.

And then I'd probably be back to focusing on the negatives again and stressing and you know the rest.

But what the heck, I might as well give it a shot:

Three positives from yesterday:

1. Scored two First Class upgrades on my flights home from IBM Connect

2. My old reliable truck actually started after 4 days parked outside at the airport in mostly sub-zero temperatures

3. I made it home in time to watch KD and LeBron go at it in one of the NBA's best match ups

I guess all in all that makes for a good day.

I will let you know tomorrow if I feel less stressed. I still have all that email to read though...

Happy Thursday!

The three keys to success on the crew

I had a really fun and interesting couple of days this week at the IBM Connect event in Orlando, a pretty large and diverse event that showcases many of the technologies and ideas from what is a large and diverse company.

Amongst all the showy elements, (an opening mini-concert by the band American Authors and a short comedy set from SNL's Seth Meyers), and the deep dive sessions that focused on collaborative, social, and talent management technologies, I thought the most fascinating part of the show was a short meeting with one of the IBM/Kenexa customers, who shared some elements of her company's recruiting challenges, and how they were responding to these challenges.

The company in question, AMC Theaters, is a large operator of movie theaters in the US, (possibly elsewhere, I am not sure if that came up at all in the conversation), and like most high location high volume retail/service companies has to recruit for many thousands of front-line and entry level positions each year. In the case of AMC, each year means about 17,000 or so new hires for these front-line or 'crew' positions. Efficiently hiring that many folks is not simple, and presents any organization a number of problems. But for AMC, applicant volume is not one of them - with an estimated 750,000 applications for these 17,000 positions coming in annually. For these jobs AMC does not really have to 'recruit', they have to 'select'.

So when AMC set about making changes to the process in order to improve efficiency, ease the burden on theater management, and improve hiring outcomes, there was and is certainly a pretty large 'technology' component. You can't process that many people/positions without a solid tech foundation. But you also don't really get any better at hiring simply by organizing it more effectively in an ATS, you have to actually get better at hiring. And AMC was able to do that, again supported certainly by technology, by breaking down to three elements what it takes to be successful in one of these 'crew' positions. If you possess these three keys, then you were far more likely to be successful on the crew, to stick around longer, and would help drive improvements on the key metrics that AMC tracks.

According to AMC the three keys are that you are friendly, dependable, and you have some ability to sell. They test/screen applicants for these elements up front, (again assisted by technology tools that have helped them develop and validate the tests), give theater managers insight into a given applicant's test results in order to help shape areas to focus on during interviews, and finally make interview and hiring decisions based at least partly on them.

What was interesting to me was their ability to distill all the myriad attributes that could potentially contribute (or detract) from job performance into these three identifiable and validated elements. If you can do that, then you don't really have to waste candidates, recruiters, or hiring managers time trying to discern other nuances of a candidate's background ('So, tell me why you don't have a position listed on your resume from April 2012 to January 2013?'), or trying to teach interviewers some kind of personality assessment parlor tricks.

I dig the approach that AMC has taken towards improving the process for hiring 17,000 front-line workers, many of which have little to no 'real' work experience to draw from. As they have found out, it is likely that the previous experience, or lack or it, doesn't really matter that much anyway. If someone is friendly, dependable, and can sell a little bit, well then they have a good shot at success on the crew. 

And I left the meeting wondering if applying the 'What are the three keys for success on this job?' would make all kinds of hiring/screening challenges easier.

I'm wondering how much time we spend in the hiring process trying to determine the presence or lack of qualities that ultimately, don't matter much at all.

Thanks to the folks at IBM for inviting me down to IBM Connect!

WEBINAR: Don't Fear the Future - 5 Tech Keys to Raise Your HR Game

Tomorrow January 29, 2014 at 2:00PM EST I will be giving a Webinar sponsored by the fine folks at Silkroad called:

Don't Fear the Future: 5 Tech Keys to Raise Your HR and Game in 2014 and Beyond

This is meant to be a lively and hopefully interesting look at some of the most cutting edge or innovative technology trends, (robotics, wearable technology, etc.), talk about where these technologies are heading, why they matter, and then talk a little about how understanding how these technologies can and will be used in the workplace can help you raise your HR game in 2014 and beyond.

Here are all the pertinent details, including the registration link for the FREE Webinar:

While most of us with busy and chaotic jobs in HR are busily trying to get 2013 closed up -- there were some remarkable developments in the consumer, business, and economic arenas that you might have missed. Amazon introduced us to the concept of package delivery via a fleet of drones. Google wants to put a self-driving car in your driveway. And Rethink Robotics wants to supply you with your new office-mate, an eight-foot tall, fully articulated, and happy industrial robot named Baxter. Meanwhile, the workforce is getting older, entire industries are worried about finding the talent they need, and EVERYONE is fighting over the same superstar technical workers.

But you are a progressive HR, recruiting, or talent management pro (that’s why you’re reading this), and you know that in order to help drive your organization boldly into the future you’ve got to stay ahead of the rest of the pack and be the lead dog so to speak. And not only being aware of what is happening in the world outside of the HR office but how these technology and environmental developments will help inform and shape your talent management strategies.

You already get that the key to winning in 2014 (and beyond) is probably not going to be found in creating a better PTO request approval workflow, but you might not yet have the time and the bandwidth to think more deeply and creatively about how to leverage these changes in your organization and for your career.

That’s why Silkroad created their latest webcast – Don't Fear the Future: 5 Tech Keys to Raise Your HR and Game in 2014 and Beyond. Join us for this webcast, and we’ll give you a quick look at what these trends will mean for our work and workplaces, and more importantly, share some creative ideas about how to apply them to your HR and talent practice (and make you look like some kind of clairvoyant in the process). So make plans now to get your 2014 started in the right way - by getting your creative juices flowing and thinking about how your organization can be ready to win the future!

January 29, 2014
2:00 p.m. (Eastern)
1:00 p.m. (Central)
12:00 p.m. (Mountain)
11:00 a.m. (Pacific)

Date or time doesn't fit your schedule? Go ahead and register anyway. We will be sure you receive an email with a link to the recorded webinar following the event.

You can register here and I hope to see you tomorrow!

I don't see him like a robot. I see him like a person.

A couple of years ago when I know I was one of the few folks in the space regularly writing about robots at work and the potential impacts that were going to be realized from these developments, I used to get a boatload of Google search traffic simply from keyword searches on the word 'robot'. These days, I see much less of that kind of search directed traffic, even though I am probably writing even more frequently about the topic. 

But lately it seems like everyone in the HR/work/workplace blogosphere is talking, writing, and speculating about robots and the increasing automation of all kinds of work. While I do think that this increase and almost mainstreaming of attention on the topic is really quite needed, I also think that at some level we might be already getting a little tired of the topic, and are even beginning to tune out these messages.

So rather than run the latest piece about the newest advancement or application of robot or otherwise machine intelligence to a new form of work and issue off another warning about how you or your kids need to take this all very seriously as one day the robots will take all our jobs and leave us, well, trying to figure out what to do with ourselves, I decided to share a simple, short video about a specific application of new robot technology in the workplace, and let you decide what it might mean.

Embedded below, (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through), is a recent video from Rethink Robotics, the makers of the pretty amazing industrial robot known as Baxter. Baxter, you might have heard, represents an improvement to traditional stationary and bespoke, single-use manufacturing robots of the past. Baxter is flexible, can be easily programmed, and can work in very close proximity to people.

Check the video and pay particular attention to the comments of one of the plastics plant supervisors, a Ms. Martinez about what it is like working with (and supervising as it were) Baxter:

Really interesting, for a couple of reasons I think. Certainly the big, easy to remember line is when Ms. Martinez admits to 'seeing' Baxter like a person, like the person who would have previously had that job on the line that Baxter is now cheerfully, ceaselessly, performing. But we also hear some comments from the plastic factory leadership about how the cost savings and efficiency gains from automation are necessary to save jobs in the aggregate, even if the shift to Baxter(s) will cost at least some jobs in the process.

No matter if you take the 'robot threat' seriously, or think it all a bit silly, I think it does help to ground the conversation at least a little bit sometimes, and the experiences and observations of front line organizations, managers, and co-workers that are now, increasingly, co-existing with more and more advanced robotics are worth considering.

Note: I am down at the IBM Connections event in Orlando this week, maybe I can see if Watson has some comments on the subject.