Every environment has too much information to process

Most of the folks reading this will probably agree to both of the following statements:

1. I am a frequent multi-tasker.

2. I think I am pretty good at multi-tasking.

Because we pretty much have to be, right?

There is always too much going on, too much work to do, too many family and personal commitments (I bet someone is reading this post right now on their smartphone while 'watching' one of their kids play soccer or in a dance rehearsal), too many things to read, too many social networks that need attention - you get the idea.

And the truth of it is that in just about every situation we encounter (save for any time spent in long-term solitary confinement), we are always juggling, choosing, focusing on some, and trying to eliminate other messages and stimuli in our environment. Think about the simple, everyday act of driving a car for example. You are simultaneously monitoring road conditions, gauges on the car's dash, the weather, traffic signals, other drivers, pedestrians, those idiots on their bicycles that give you dirty looks when they're the ones who are the menace, and more. 

And some of you have become so good at it that you can add applying makeup or carrying on a Twitter chat (not recommended), while behind the wheel.

But I think the driving example is a perfect illustration of how we trick ourselves into thinking we are actually much, much better at multi-tasking that we really are. We get deluded into thinking we are good at it, or we simply accept the fact as a given that we have to be good at it, and continue onward in fruitless quest to be great, (or at least pretty good), at everything at all times.

And now there is new research that suggests that not only are we not as good at multi-tasking as we think we are, that prolonged multi-tasking actually makes us worse at multi-tasking itself - kind of a counter-intuitive spin on 'practice makes perfect.'

Check this excerpt from the Priceonomics blog - a look at some recent Stanford University research into multi-tasking and it's effect on task completion and task juggling.

People generally recognize that multitasking involves a trade-off - we attend to more things but our performance at each suffers. But in their study “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” Professors Ophira, Nass, and Wagner of Stanford ask whether chronic multitasking affects your concentration when not explicitly multitasking. In effect, they ask whether multitasking is a trait and not just a state.

To do so, they recruited Stanford students who they identified as either heavy or light “media multitaskers” based on a survey that asked how often they used multiple streams of information (such as texting, YouTube, music, instant messaging, and email) at the same time. They then put them through a series of tests that looked at how they process information.

People generally get better at activities they do often. But that may not be true of multitasking. Since heavy multitaskers often switch between research and emails or Facebook chats and work, we'd expect them to outperform the light multitaskers at switching back and forth between the two tasks. But they actually performed worse as their delta was higher than that of the light multitaskers.

The professors conclude that frequent multitaskers seem to “have greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment, [be] less likely to ignore irrelevant representations in memory, and are less effective in suppressing the activation of irrelevant task sets (task-switching).” More colloquially, the multitaskers were more easily distracted from a single task and worse at switching between tasks.

Let that sink in - we get worse and worse at multitasking the more we do it.

If the conclusions from this study are at all accurate, then that does not bode too well for those of us that have conditioned ourselves to be constantly hopping from one thing to the next. And technology, it seems to me, isn't really helping in this regard. Rather than trying to exploit technology to make things simpler, more clear-cut, and maybe more efficient, I think most of us are simply using it to consume more, interact more, do more, and attempt to be (virtually) in five places at once.

So let's re-visit the two statements that led off this post and re-word them a little.

1. I am a frequent multi-tasker. (ok that one will probably still be valid for a while)

2. I think I am pretty good terrible at multi-tasking, and the more I do it the worse I get.

What tips or ideas do you have to combat the seemingly overwhelming urge to multi-task?

PODCAST - #HRHappyHour 169 - The Crowdsourced Performance Review

HR Happy Hour 169 - 'The Crowdsourced Performance Review'

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, hosts Steve Boese and Trish McFarlane welcomed Eric Mosley, who co­founded Globoforce in 1999 with the goal of reinventing the employee recognition industry for the global, multicultural, multigenerational organizations of the 21st century.

As CEO he has led Globoforce to its place as a leading provider of social recognition solutions, redefining how companies understand, manage, and motivate employees. 

Eric is also the author of the recent book, The Crowdsourced Performance Review, a resource for HR and Business leaders that want to transform their traditional, annual, and ineffective performance management processes to a more enlightened, modern, social, and collaborative way of engaging the organization, and improving outcomes.

We talked with Eric about how the traditional process for performance management is outdated and almost universally hated, how modern technologies like social networking and mobile access are impacting modern employee needs and expectations, and how thinking about performance management as an ongoing, real-time, and in the moment process can help organizations make the leap from the 'old' way of managing performance to something much better.

We also (of course) reminded folks to make sure you make plans now to attend the upcoming HRevolution event taking place in Las Vegas on October 6, 2013, and the HR Technology Conference immediately after, on October 7-9, 2013.

You can listen to the show on the show page here, using the widget player below:

New Business Podcasts with Steve Boese and Trish McFarlane on BlogTalkRadio

Thanks to Eric for the time and the insight about performance management can and should change for the better - enabled by techology, and supported by the wisdom of peers, colleagues, and even customers and partners to create a better and more impactful process.

It was a really fun and interesting show and I hope you check it out.  

And, and you can register for HRevolution 2013 here: 

Past performance is not indicative of...

Quick shot for a Wednesday that feels like a Tuesday in the middle of what I promise you will feel like a really long week instead of a short one come Friday.

Recently Business Insider ran a piece on the retirement and parting thoughts of Gerard Minack, formerly at Morgan Stanley. In Minack's last investment note, the long time investment pro offered his take on why professional investors and advisers usually do better at 'beating the market' than do amateur, or retail investors - also kind of unusual when careful investing in broad market index funds offer the amateurs among us a pretty decent alternative that will generally at least match market returns.Triangles

Here's Minack on why the pros possess an advantage over the amateurs:

The good news for the professionals is that many amateurs persist in trying to beat the market and, in aggregate, they seem to do a significantly worse job than the professionals.

The biggest problem appears to be that – despite all the disclaimers – retail flows assume that past performance is a good guide to future outcomes. Consequently money tends to flow to investments that have done well, rather than investments that will do well. The net result is that the actual returns to investors fall well short not just of benchmark returns, but the returns generated by professional investors.

In the investing context that's was of interest to Minack, amateurs tend to overweight funds and stocks that have been doing well, and underweight, (or even miss entirely), those funds and stocks that are poised to do well in the future. And to him, the mantra of past performance being a good indicator of future performance, (or even the best indicator), was the main reason.

It makes sense in this context. Just because Apple stock kept going up and up and up seemed to indicate it couldn't go down. Until it did. And took a lot of investors with it on the way down, (admittedly many of the same ones who rode it up as well).

But outside of finance and investments, I wonder too, if lots of us fall victim to the 'past performance --> future outcomes' bias too often as well. It's easy to feel that way I suppose. It feels safe. It's hard to argue against usually. When you don't know what will happen next, or know what a person will do next the easiest thing, (and sometimes the only information you have), is too examine what just happened and assume it will continue.

I once wrote something about being a true visionary or innovator means imagining the future as something wildly and incredibly different and not just an incremental shift of the past. But that is really hard to do, as Minack's observations about investing remind us.

WEBINAR: How smart managers are employee agents

Yep, it's time for me to pitch the next installment in the Fistful of Talent free webinar series, this one titled Get My Agent On The Phone- How Smart Managers Position Themselves as Agents Via Performance Goals, which is set for next Tuesday, May 21st from 1:00PM  - 2:00PM EDT, and is sponsored by longtime friends of FOT and of mine, Halogen Software. 

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.

Spring Break Rewind #1 - People, Process, and Productivity Killers

Note: It is Spring Break week here in Western New York, (for the school-age kids anyway), and while I will still be working and traveling to New York City to present at a conference, this week will be busier than most. So this week on the blog I'll be re-running some pieces from the last 12 months or so. Yes, I am being lazy. Cut me some slack. Anyway, if you are on Spring Break this week, I hope you have a great little vacation!

This piece - 'People, Process, and Productivity Killers', originally ran in May 2012.

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Last week an interesting piece called '5 Ways Process is Killing Your Productivity', ran on Fast Company, a look and take on how overly rigid productivity systems, (like Six Sigma or TQM), can potentially have a detrimental effect on organization productivity and potential for innovation. As someone that has always balked or at least held a cynical point of view when productivity systems based in traditional manufacturing models were attempted in non-manufacturing environments, I thought the piece raised some excellent arguments, particularly when we think about the application of soft or people processes inside organizations, whether for performance management, development, or even for methods of collaboration.

I won't re-cast the author's entire point of view here, I'd recommend reading the full piece on Fast Company, but I do want to pull out the five productivity reducing ways that over-reliance on process methodology can have on performance and productivity, and ask you to think about them in the context of your organization and your initiatives, challenges, and opportunities as a talent or human resources professional.

1. Empowering with permission, but not action

HR example: Tell employees 'they own their career development', but offer no support at all, (time off, funding, guidance, suggestions), as to how they might pursue development opportunities

2. Focus on process instead of people

HR example: Did all the mid-year performance reviews get done? 100% in? Success!

3. Overdependence on meetings

HR example: Actually this is not limited to HR, most organizations still rely on the formal meeting, with way more than necessary attendees, to move along projects and initiatives. Just look at it this way, how do you typical react when a meeting suddenly gets cancelled? If you are like most, you revel in the 'found' hour or two back in your day. Meeting cancellation is like a mini-Christmas.

4. Lack of (clear) vision

HR example: Sort of a larger point to try and cover here, but certainly you can relate to being buried in the process or function of people management, legally required and self-imposed, that we simply miss or fail to articulate, (and then act upon), a bigger vision for how we can enable people to succeed and execute business strategy. This is the 'in the weeds' feeling you might be experiencing since it is Monday. But does it really ever go away?

5. Management acts as judge, not jury

HR example: Obviously, earned or just unfairly ascribed, the position of HR as police or judge has a long and not easily remedied place in many organizations. HR can't and shouldn't always be an advocate for the individual employee at the expense of the needs of the organization, but when the function is viewed as simply punitive, or even just indifferent, the chances for HR to effect meaningful and positive impact on people is certainly diminished.

I think one of the essential conflicts that arise in interpersonal relationships is the conflict between people that prefer or need strict rules and order, and the more free-spirited folk that see rules and strictures at best as more like broad guidelines, and at worst as mandates set by people that lack their own creativity and vision and can be safely ignored.  Or said differently, between people that have to clean all the dinner dishes before bed and those that are happy to let them sit in the sink overnight. Both are 'right' of course, which leads to many of these kinds of 'process vs. freedom' kinds of arguments. 

What do you think?

Have processes or set-in-stone rules you may have imposed in your organization helped?

Have they allowed people the room they need for creativity and innovation?

Do they keep you in the role of HR police far too much?

Happy Monday!