Have an Idea?

One of the benefits of writing an HR Technology blog is that from time to time I get alerted to new products in the HR Technology space.  Recently I heard about, and had the chance to try out Kindling, an online solution for capturing employee ideas or suggestions, a mechanism for other employees to vote up or down submitted ideas, an approval process for ideas, and finally a way to allow employees to 'volunteer' to work on approved ideas.

I took Kindling for a quick test drive, assisted by Ben Eubanks from the Upstart HR blog, (thanks Ben for helping out).

Step 1 - Submit an Idea

The first step in the process of for an employee to submit an idea. The process is incredibly simple, they enter a title, description, tags, and optionally an attached file to their idea.

Other employees can also add comments and questions to ideas, so a conversation and dialogue can form around any individual idea.

Step 2 - Vote on your favorite ideas

Once some ideas get submitted, each employee is allotted 10 'Votes' to indicate which ideas they like. Votes can be all allocated to one or two ideas, or they can be spread around many ideas. But an employee can only use 10 'votes' at any one time, once an idea is approved or rejected, they can 're-claim' any voted used on those ideas. 

It is a simple concept really, ideas that receive the most employee votes are popular, and potentially deserve some managerial review for possible implementation.

Step 3 - Approve ideas

Once ideas are submitted and voted upon, the system administrator can 'Approve' or 'Reject' the ideas.  Once an idea is approved or rejected the votes for those items are released back to the employees and can be re-used on new ideas.

Step 4 - Make it happen

The last step in the Kindling process is for an employee to 'volunteer' to make an idea 'happen'.  This can mean different things to your organization, but essentially the idea is 'assigned' to the volunteer as this point.

Pricing

Kindling offers three subscription levels, $49/month for up to 40 users, $99/month for up to 100 users, and an 'Enterprise' level that has negotiated pricing for more that 100 users. All plans offer a 30-day free trial. Some additional features that are offered are e-mail digests of idea related activity, RSS feeds, and simple usage reports. 'Enterprise' users can also map a custom domain and implement custom skins for integration with a corporate look and feel.

Value Proposition

Kindling offers a tight set of functionalities in a clean, simple, and easy to use manner. Capturing employee ideas for new products/services, for improvements on existing processes, or for ways to cut costs or improve productivity are all potential uses of an idea platform.  The additional features of employee voting and commenting on ideas helps to foster a sense of inclusion and openness.  Basically, platforms like Kindling provide a modern and enhanced view of the old company 'suggestion box'.  If your organization is interested in trying to more effectively harness the ideas in the workforce, and to give your people more of a voice and a view into decision making, then Kindling may be worth a try.

New Series - HR Tech for the small business

The relentlessly bad economic news continued this morning, just a few snippets:

Caterpillar to lay off 20,000

Home Depot axes 7,000

Sprint to hang up on 8,000

Seemingly no end in sight, major corporations shedding workers like my dog sheds in the summer.

Seems like this could be a bad time for folks in my space, HR Technology to be thinking, writing, and talking about new technology and advocating to folks to convince their organizations to invest in new technology.Flickr - cobalt123

But actually very strong arguments can be made that times of crisis are EXACTLY when organizations need to ensure that their HR Technology can support their strategy, yes, even if the strategy is 'let go of thousands of people and hope we survive'.

But I'm not going to try to 're-make' that argument here, I am going in a bit of a different direction.  I am going to kick off a new series of posts specifically focusing on HR Technology solutions for the small business.  I don't know if the small business space is any more healthy than the giants who are hemorrhaging jobs, but since some of the solutions and technologies I am going to highlight are dirt cheap (some even free), I figure they all have a better chance of remaining relevant to the typical small organization than big, expensive, or out of reach talent management or collaboration platforms.

I have not decided how many or which technologies to write about yet, (and actually last week's post about Rypple could be viewed as really the first in this series), but I will write a few technology solution profiles, and let comments and feedback determine how far I go with this.

So, that's my plan, devote some time and energy bringing to light some tools and solutions that are inexpensive, accessible, easy to implement, and possibly beneficial to the small (or medium-sized) organization.

Any suggestions, links to vendors or solutions I should research and write about are really appreciated.

HR Technology Conference

The 11th annual HR Technology Conference is underway in Chicago.

Sadly, as I am right in the middle of the Fall Academic Quarter I am not able to attend this year.

There are scores of product announcements made each year at HR Technology, but I thought I would point out two of the most interesting announcements from this year's conference:

Cornerstone OnDemand  

Cornerstone OnDemand is adding a new social networking platform to its integrated talent management suite of software and services. Cornerstone Connect helps organizations reach both internal and external audiences via Web 2.0 features ranging from communities of practice, blogs, wikis and user profiles, to rating/sharing content, knowledge management (including alumni), podcasts, RSS feeds and more. Using Cornerstone Connect, organizations can improve employee performance, foster connections, cultivate informal learning, and engage customers and partners to drive innovation and lower support costs.

Softscape

Softscape will introduce the new science of Talent Management – Softscape TalentGenetics™. This latest innovation from Softscape provides a new level of talent visualization never seen before to capture and share employee knowledge. The platform also offers embedded social-networking and expanded functions for social knowledge sharing.

What I find interesting about these, is the emphasis on the integration of Web 2.0 features into 'classic' Talent Management platforms.  These vendors are among the very early adopters of this approach, to try and merge these features like social networking, tagging, RSS etc. into traditional, typically dull applications.

This integration of Web 2.0 features into existing HRMS applications is a growing trend, and one that I think more vendors will try to get in on in the coming 12-18 months.

I am looking forward to seeing the results of these product launches, and hope to get to demo them in my HR Tech class very soon.

Flowgram

I made my first Flowgram today. 

Flowgram is a web-based tool for developing demonstrations with narrative that can include web pages, videos and photos.  The Flowgram tools allow you to explain your concepts, web pages and photos.  Potential uses include training type demonstrations, adding depth and context to 'flat' content such as photos, or creating a more interactive way to describe web information.

Here is the results of my first efforts at Flowgram, it is a very brief overview of our faculty wiki:

Honestly, I found the tool fairly easy to use, but I do wonder how much value I can realize from it in the context of my class.  I do not think I would assign my students any type of project that would require Flowgram.

Anyone else seen or tried this out?

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