You can listen to the show on the show page here, using the widget player below, and of course on iTunes - just search the podcasts area for 'HR Happy Hour'.

It was a fascinating conversation with Jennifer - bullying has become such an area of focus for parents, schools, and certainly even leaders and HR professionals in the workplace. You'd never guess just how prevalent bullying behaviors have become.

Jennifer shared ideas on how to define and identify bullying, insights behind the root causes of these behaviors, and some specific and relevant ideas about how the victims of bullying can deal with bullies.

Chances are someone you know, maybe even your own child, or a colleague at work is facing these kinds of challenges. Or you are an HR professional that has to make sure your workplace is free from these behaviors. Either way I think you will find some great ideas and tips for how to address these situations from the show.

It was an interesting and enlightening conversation, and I hope you will find it valuable as well.

Also, in June and July Jennifer is offering a 6-hour course titled 'Workplace Bullying for HR Professionals' and you can learn more about that program here.

Thanks to Jennifer for a great conversation. 

NOTE:

Finally, for listeners of the show a quick reminder. For the next little while anyway, co-host Trish McFarlane and I will be doing the HR Happy Hour Shows more as a traditional podcast - recorded in advance, perhaps a little shorter than the live shows were, and hopefully posted to the site every other week. With our schedules and lots of travel on the horizon this year, doing the shows 'live' on Thursday nights has become increasingly challenging. Trish and I hope that by changing how the shows are produced it will allow us the opportunity to continue doing the show/podcast in a way that will work with our schedules as well as our future guests.

Have a great weekend!

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?

Whether you think driverless cars, (and trucks, and eventually even planes), are dangerous, unreliable, or even scary, the truth seems like they are coming - and probably sooner than most of us think. 

Similar could be said for some of the other latest advances in technology. Take Google Glass for example. Just a year or so ago the idea of a wearable, always-on, internet connected, and voice activated computing device seemed pretty far-fetched. Today the initial wave of beta-testers are using the device, developers are building new and purpose-built apps for the platform, and a slew of 'experts' (including me), have offered up advice and opinion about the implications and use of Glass in work and business. I saw another slightly different manifestation of wearable computing this week when my pal Lance Haun rocked a Pebble smartwatch at a recent event.

What do driverless vehicle technology and wearable computing tech like Google Glass have in common?

Probably a few things, but the one element I want to call out is this - they are technology breakthroughs that are not directly responding to some express need or desire on the part of either existing customers or the general public.  They are for the most part - green field, blue ocean, 'insert-your-favorite-hack-expression-for-something-brand-new-here'.

This week I've been at the SilkRoad Connections event - a conference for the company's customers, partners, and some media and analysts.  At the event, keynoter Dan Pink, (famous for the book Drive), offered, almost as an aside from his speech on motivation, what he thought was going to be the most important skill in the future, (paraphrased in my tweet below)

The ability to give people something they did not know they were missing is the core cognitive skill today- per @danielpink #srconnections13

— Steve Boese (@SteveBoese) May 20, 2013

Glass, planes that fly themselves, the next incredible technological or business breakthrough - the common factor will be that none of them will be really based on listening to customers or conducting focus groups.

They will spring from the imagination of innovators and from people savvy enough to 'discover' needs that today don't exist.

It's wonderful and important to spend your day thinking about and helping to solve people's problems. But even there, advances in computing threaten to turn 'problem solving' into a game for the robots and super computers.

If you want to be really memorable and outlast the rest, you have to solve problems that don't even seem to exist and to give people things that they never knew they needed.

Do I need this? I don't know, really.

You probably also see on the phone some kind of 'network' indicator as well - it could be something like 3G or 4G or LTE - that kind of thing. And while we recognize, or at least assume, that '4G' has to be better than '3G', after all it's a whole additional 'G', once LTE or LTZ or any other tiny technical code gets introduced to the equation, well then it gets much tougher unless you are really into this kind of thing, what is better or worse and how much better or worse. I suppose there are folks who have upgraded their devices or switched carriers in order to obtain that additional 'G', and have some direct and hands-on experience that allows them to more precisely judge the addtional benefits of the extra 'G'. But most of us, and for sure most non-technical folks, or as they are sometimes called 'normals', we only know that 4G is better, somehow, and we think we should want it. 

A message certainly, reinforced by millions and millions of dollars of carrier and device manufacturer advertising. If you don't think so, just think about the AT&T TV spots with the little girl going on and on about 'more' and 'we want more.' I'm sick of that kid.

But 3G or 4G or even the things like coverage maps that the carriers talk about all the time aren't really why anyone has a smartphone and pays for a data plan. The 'G' level is just a feature. It matters to engineers and I suppose marketers, but not to probably 95% of the actual smartphone users. What matters is what additional work or entertainment or fun that the extra 'G' will provide. What matters are the benefits of the technology.

Almost no one not directly involved in the creation of a technology cares all that much about features.

But just about everyone cares about benefits.

Even the little girl who can't stop talking about 'more'.

I think that reason, largely, was why the commencement address given at Bard College by Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke got so much play over the last few days.

We are used to, and expect, economists like Bernanke to focus on the nuts and bolts of economic policy. Interest rates and inflation. Money supply and surpluses and deficits. The kinds of eyeballs are glazing over topics many of us have last thought about in Economics 101 and then spent years trying to forget. The brain only has so much room for stuff, and did you hear a new season of Arrested Development is getting made?

But what made Bernanke's speech interesting was I think two things - that is wasn't really, primarily what we are used to hearing from him; and secondly, that the essence and importance of the entire message is relevant not just for 21 year-old new grads about to return to Mom and Dad's house, but for all professionals that need to come to terms with how work, workplaces, and careers are changing - mainly driven by technological advances.

Here's Bernanke's money quote:

"During your working lives, you will have to reinvent yourselves many times. Success and satisfaction will not come from mastering a fixed body of knowledge but from constant adaptation and creativity in a rapidly changing world. Engaging with and applying new technologies will be a crucial part of that adaptation."

 I'd suggest that his advice - about adaptation, creativity, and mastering, (or at least coming to terms with), the changing nature of human-technology relationships in the workplace (and in society), are crucial not only for people just starting out in their careers, but perhaps more acutely, for mid-career professionals as well. 

Change, especially change to the definitions, organization, and execution of work and industry impacts the people caught up in the middle much more that the new grad that often is still on outside looking in.

A new grad might spend the next year or three on the sofa at home coming to terms with the fact that the shiny, expensive degree they went $86,000 in debt to obtain doesn't really matter to many employers, or that the all-knowing market and its career-selection process seems to equate their skills, experience, and degree with 'barista'. That kind of stinks, but it isn't, at least not yet, a fatal outcome. When you are that young you still have time to react, to pivot, to try out a Plan B or C even. 

At least until Mom and Dad kick you out, you lousy freeloader.

But if you are say, 44, been working for two decades, have a house, mortgage, big SUV, kids that need new iPhones - well getting caught up unprepared for the kinds of dramatic shifts we are seeing and will continue to see in the workplace is a much more serious matter.

While it seems like the game is more and more getting rigged to the detriment of the new college grads at least they have something that the mid-career pro doesn't - lots and lots of time. And also, often, the luxury of being able to make a mistake or two.

Bernanke's address really isn't that remarkable on it's own. But instead of giving it to the class of 2013, it should be read at all the 20 and 25 year class reunions coming up. Those folks need the advice more.

Have a great week! 

It was a fascinating conversation with John - as the founder and CEO of a leading RPO firm, he had lots of particular insight around the key talent acquisition challenges facing all kinds of organizations today. John shared some interesting and relevant ideas about how organizations are having success in today's competitive enviroment, how much (or little) companies are looking to temporary or contingent markets to find talent, and when and why RPO makes sense or is a good fit for an organization.

You can listen to the show on the show page here, using the widget player below, and of course on iTunes - just search the podcasts area for 'HR Happy Hour'.

In a HR Happy Hour Show from earlier in 2013, industry legend and thought leader Gerry Crispin talked about the increased use of RPO by small and midsize firms to be one of the most important trends to look for in talent acquisition in the next 1-3 years. As Gerry described then, and as you will John talk about as well, when done right, RPO arrangements do offer customer organizations a compelling mix of service, access to technology, and understanding of broader industry and market trends that can certainly augment internal recruting teams. So check out the podcast, let me know what you think and please connect with John as well.

Thanks to John and the folks at WilsonHCG for taking the time this week - and a shout-out to HR Happy Hour Show co-host Trish McFarlane, who was on the road this week and could not make the show.

NOTE:

Finally, for listeners of the show a quick reminder. For the next little while anyway, Trish and I will be doing the HR Happy Hour Shows more as a traditional podcast - recorded in advance, perhaps a little shorter than the live shows were, and hopefully posted to the site every other week. With our schedules and lots of travel on the horizon this year, doing the shows 'live' on Thursday nights has become increasingly challenging. Trish and I hope that by changing how the shows are produced it will allow us the opportunity to continue doing the show/podcast in a way that will work with our schedules as well as our future guests.

Have a great weekend!

For whatever reason the people in the organization that get to decide the 'what' of what people do are more important and 'strategic' than the people that (largely) are responsible for finding and hiring those people in the first place (HR), and identifying, procuring, deploying, and maintaining all the technologies that the people rely on every day (IT). That is probably true in most organizations and it's also true that it's unlikely to change unless HR and IT start to think a little differently about the problem.

I was thinking about this over the weekend when I read this piece in the New York Times, Solving the Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data, about a new method or process where Hollywood film scripts are evaluated, and suggestions for improvement given, based on data-driven analysis. How does the process work? From the NYT piece:

Netflix tells customers what to rent based on algorithms that analyze previous selections, Pandora does the same with music, and studios have started using Facebook “likes” and online trailer views to mold advertising and even films.

Now, the slicing and dicing is seeping into one of the last corners of Hollywood where creativity and old-fashioned instinct still hold sway: the screenplay

A chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese — “the reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,” in the words of one studio customer — has started to aggressively pitch a service he calls script evaluation. For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?

Pretty interesting and still in this age of data trumping everything kind of unusual. Although even as I recently wrote about here, data and algorithms and machine learning approaches encroaching on formerly 'creative' endeavors are starting to pop up more and more.

Applying intelligence, Big Data, and more powerful technologies for improving movie screenplays does more than just fix up the dramatic scene in Act III, it allows a guy like Vinny Bruzzese, who as far as we can tell had no 'real' movie experience, to become an influential participant in the movie-making process.

His data, team of analysts, and statistically-backed conclusions and suggestions, now put him more and more 'at the table' (sorry), where formerly only writers and movie producers used to meet. It doesn't really matter that he didn't go to film school or he didn't spend the 80s directing episodes of Full House, his data-driven solutions make him a Hollywood player.

Influence in business seems to be becoming more about who can gather, assess, and make data actionable, than who has the 'right' degree or experience. And the background of the people who can do that might be a lot different than who normally used to have that kind of influence. 

You can register for the free webinar here.

But why should you?

Because chances are at your organization either performance management, goal setting and tracking, or the capability of your front-line managers to really manage employee performance and inspire and encourage development need some help.

Because your company is probably like 98% of companies out there that are not getting enough - enough improvement, enough accountability, enough understanding of who the best performers really are - out of your performance management process.

Because despite the hype and buzz about 'scrapping performance reviews' you know that will never happen anytime soon where you work, and that you as a talent pro have to find ways to make the system work for you, and not try and invent something entirely new.

And last, because you secretly know if your organization doesn't continue to improve and innovate and stay one step ahead, there are 4 dudes who just dropped out of Stanford that have already figured out a way to do what your firm does, only cheaper, faster, and using only an iPhone app. 

So what will you learn from  Get My Agent On The Phone- How Smart Managers Position Themselves as Agents Via Performance Goals?

Simple.

Making sure the goals you set represent the Five Most Important Things (5MIT) for the employee in question. What are the most important things your employee has to focus on this year? If you can only talk to them about five things, what would those things be and why? Smart managers skip discussing the busy work and get to what's going to change the game - for the company and the employee. We'll give you the 411 on how to do that.

Offering up ways each of the Five Most Important Things might be measured in the months that follow. You want measurements - we get it. The key in offering up how you’re going to measure the 5MIT in question is not to limit yourself. The more you box yourself in, the less innovation you get. We'll show you how to set the expectation your direct reports are going to be measured without actually taking performance off the table. PS - They'll love you for this if you deliver it in the right way.

Having Thoughts on what “Good” and “Great” performance looks like in each area. That’s right – we’re going through a goal setting process not because HR told us we had to, but because it can set us up to be a great performance coach for the rest of the year. Nothing sets you up as a coach more than owning the difference between “good” and “great”. We'll tell you how to reserve the “great” tag for employees who really innovate, drive change or add true value in the job they’re in.

Including a section that details “What’s In It for Me?” for each area of focus. Being an agent is about talking about how chasing great performance in the area in question could be great for the employee’s career. We'll show you how to frame this as the agent/coach. It's the most important thing you can do.

Putting it all in an easy to follow, informal format. If you go beyond one page, you’re making goal setting too complex. List everything we’ve described to this point in one page, and make the headers conversational in nature, and you win. We've got some format to share with you.

Look you and your managers want to be viewed as career agents for your employees rather than a run of the mill corporate bureaucrat. The robots are coming for those jobs. Trust me on that.

Join FOT for "Get My Agent on the Phone"  on Tuesday, May 21st from 1:00PM  - 2:00PM EDT and we'll show how the secret sauce to goal setting and follow-up conversations can dramatically change the positioning of what you do in performance management.

As always, the free FOT webinar comes guaranteed - 60% of the time it works every time.

So here is the map, and then we can discuss what, if anything this should mean to those of us in the Talent game.

So for the US-based Talent pro, this might be kind of surprising, I know it was surprising to me. We know that the world is supposed to be shrinking, but in a way this map doesn't really bear that out. Rather it shows pretty simply that the center of population is on the other side of the world, and packed into a relatively small area. 

So what might this mean, or what might you need to be thinking about with this map in mind?

If you are an older, established company that is having a hard time finding opportunities for growth in your domestic market, then if you are not looking to play inside the circle in some way - then you are effectively cutting out half of the world's population and potential customers.

If you are a newer Talent pro, then chances are sometime in your career you will either need to understand the talent pools inside the circle, or perhaps even have to spend some time working inside the circle yourself. Maybe not today or tomorrow, especially if your shop is in some kind of truly local business. But do you really think you will be working there forever? No time like the present to start preparing for both of those possibilities. 

Last, if you are a parent, or perhaps plan to be a parent one day, this map is just another representation of the fact that the world our children will inherit and have to make their way in will be substantially different than it was even one generation ago. That has probably been true of all generations, but that doesn't give you a pass to ignore what is happening in the world today and to think about how best all of us should be preparing those rock and roll loving young whippersnappers.

So take a look at the map, think about (at least for a few minutes), what it might mean for you. Then, if you must, resume tweeting about how companies need to be more social and how employee engagement is good. 

Somehow, I think all that stuff will mean very little when compared to some of the really big changes happening in the world.

Note: If you need or care about the rough population estimates that back up this conclusion here they are:

World pop: 7+B, so the circle must have more than 3.5B people in.

By now we are all familiar and possibly reliant on the crowdsourced reviews and ratings paradigm popularized by sites like Yelp for restaurants and bars, TripAdvisor for travel destinations, and certainly Amazon.com for books, music, heck just about everything. There continues to be tremendous popularity and value for sites to gather, interpret, and categorized real live customer experiences with products and services for just about anything that can be purchased. But while consumers and users love these sites, as they generally provide neutral, unbiased, and sometimes massive amounts of information about the quality and value of a product/service, many suppliers have come to fear and loathe these sites, as one or two poor reviews can sometimes cause serious damage to a business' reputation and sales.

But for whatever reason despite there existing a 'Yelp' equivalent for seemingly just about everything, there really isn't a large, successful manifestation of the crowdsourced review and ratings site for Enterprise Software. That is the gap that G@Crowd is trying to fill, providing a platform and frameworks for enterprise customers and users of technologies like CRM, ERP, Accounting, and yes HR Technology as well, to enter product reviews and ratings just as people do for the local BBQ joint on Yelp.

The process to create a software product review on G2Crowd is familiar to anyone who has used Yelp or TripAdvisor, but with one important difference - G2Crowd requires the reviewer to log in with their LinkedIn credentials, which serves a few important ends. One, (with limited exceptions), reviewers identities are not anonymous; two, G2Crowd 'knows' based on the LinkedIn profile, at what company and in what role the reviewer was working in at the time of the review; and three, G2Works can police phony reviews left by people working for or against any of the software companies themselves.

The idea is simple really, a set of unbiased ratings and reviews of enterprise software solutions like Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, etc., that can be aggregated, (over time, and if enough scale is achieved), produce a valuable and previously unavailable resource for organizations that are evaluating software for themselves. In addition to the individual product reviews, G2Crowd has started to create, based on the review data, their own version of the 'analyst grid', positioning competing firms in a given market segment in comparison to each other, the most famous of which is the Gartner Magic Quadrant. But rather than a Magic Quadrant that represents, in the end, the opinions of one or a few analysts, the G2Crowd grid would reflect the collective experience and opinion of potentially thousands of users. In theory not necessarily a 'better' way to compare vendors, but certainly a different one, and one that if G2Crowd can continue to keep the reviews clean, would potentially be more important, (and accessible), than what the traditional analyst firms create.

Will G2Crowd catch on with enough users and customers to generate the kind of scale it needs to be a truly valuable resource to the enterprise software buyer?

Hard to say. It is a new site, and there seems to be some decent traction and volume on the CRM market. If you spend some time checking out the HR software reviews you will see they are a little thin.

But how about this? How about if everyone who reads this blog and is a current user of one of the big HR software solutions heads over to G2Crowd this week and drops a product review?

That might be a way to get this kind of endeavor a little more attention for the HR market, and perhaps also show how all of you as users of these solutions really do have the power to influence the market.

What do you think - would a site like G2Crowd be helpful to you and your organization?