PODCAST: #HRHappyHour 304 - LinkedIn, Talent Insights, and Data Science in HR

HR Happy Hour 304 - LinkedIn, Talent Insights, and Data Science in HR

Host: Steve Boese

Guest: Dan Shapero, Vice President of Talent Solutions, LinkedIn

Listen to the show HERE

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, we welcome Dan Shapero, Vice President of Talent Solutions at LinkedIn for a discussion about data science, machine learning, and how new tools and technologies are providing information, insights, and value to HR and talent management and acquisition leaders to help them make better talent decisions.

Data is increasingly being leveraged to help employers decide whom to interview and potentially hire for open roles, to have better understanding to answer questions like 'Where should we locate the new offices?', and how to best reward, develop, and manage talent in the organization. 

Enterprise systems are changing - in the past they only stored information. Today modern tools and technologies help organizations better understand that data, glean insights from that data, and make informed decisions as the systems learn more about the data and about the business.

Dan shared ideas on how HR and talent leaders can begin to adopt these new approaches and technologies in their organizations, how to start the process or journey to becoming a 'data-driven' HR function, as well as some of the new technologies and capabilities that LinkedIn has been developing in these areas.

Additionally, we learned that Dan knows recent HR Happy Hour guests Dan Heath and Sjoerd Gehring and that Steve still has not launched his all NBA show Bounding and Astounding.

Listen to the show on the show page HERE, or by using the widget player below:

Thanks to Dan for sharing his time and insights.

And of course, thanks to HR Happy Hour Show sponsor Virgin Pulse - learn more at www.virginpulse.com.

Subscribe to the HR Happy Hour Show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, or your favorite podcast app - just search for 'HR Happy Hour'.

WEBINAR: From Employee Engagement to Employee Experience

Quick pitch for a FREE Webinar that I am co-presenting along with the nice people from Globoforce this Tuesday, Feb. 23 (that's TOMORROW), at 1PM EST titled Changing the Conversation in 2016: Moving from Employee Engagement to Employee Experience. 

Here's the quick pitch (as if you needed one to get on board with this idea):

Surveys consistently show that only about 30% of employees consider themselves 'engaged.’ And improving engagement in a meaningful way has proven elusive for many organizations. What if instead HR started focusing more on the overall employee experience?

It’s time we stopped treating branding, onboarding, coaching, and development as separate entities. By approaching these employee interactions in a more holistic manner, we have a huge opportunity to really “wow” our employees.

Join Steve Boese (that's ME) and Lynette Silva from Globoforce as they discuss how recognition plays into engagement and some useful metrics for measuring the employee experience.

What you’ll learn: 

• How to think about the employee experience from a customer experience point of view
  • 3 primary components of the employee experience
  • Errors in how we’re pursuing engagement (and how to fix them)
  • Specific ways to elevate the fundamental value you offer employees
  • And lots more...

This is going to be a fun, and pretty lively conversation with some (hopefully) good ideas you can use in your own organization to begin to create the kinds of 'wow' experiences that marketers strive to create for their customers.

You can register for the FREE webinar, Changing the Conversation in 2016: Moving from Employee Engagement to Employee Experience on Feb. 23 at 1PM EST by clicking HERE.

Hope you can join us tomorrow!

PODCAST - #HRHappyHour 193 - Humanizing Data

HR Happy Hour 193 - Humanizing Data

Recorded Thursday October 23, 2014

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Guest: Paul Hebert

This time on the HR Happy Hour Show, Steve and Trish welcomed long time show friend and expert on influence and recognition, Paul Hebert back to the HR Happy Hour Show.

Paul is the Vice President of Solution Design at Symbolist, one of the first to create a blog for the incentive and reward industry – called “Incentive Intelligence” – now hosted here at Symbolist. In addition, Paul writes for one of the top Human Resources blogs – Fistful of Talent, is a founding member of the Editorial Advisory Board at the HRExaminer.

On the show. Paul, Trish, and Steve talked about the importance of the human element in things like employee engagement, recognition, and motivation strategies in organizations. While we are talking A LOT in HR about data these days, it is really critical that we don't lose sight of the human element in our organizations.

You can listen to the show on the show page here, or using the widget player below. And you can find and subscribe to the HR Happy Hour Show on iTunes or on your favorite podcast playing app. Just search for 'HR Happy Hour'. 

Check Out Business Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Steve Boese Trish McFarlane on BlogTalkRadio

This was a really fun show and many thanks to Paul for joining us and to Symbolist for sponsoring the upcoming HRevolution event. 

REPRISE: On the display of the spoils of victory

Note: The blog is taking some well-deserved rest for the next two weeks (that is code for I am pretty much out of decent ideas, and I doubt most folks are spending their holidays reading blogs anyway), and will be re-running some of best, or at least most interesting posts from 2013. Maybe you missed these the first time around or maybe you didn't really miss them, but either way they are presented for your consideration. Thanks to everyone who stopped by in 2013!

Spending a couple of hours combing through the 2013 archives to find the ones to re-run these last two weeks made something incredibly clear to me - I was obsessed with robots. So for the last REPRISE post I had to find something that was not about automation or scary robots or our increasingly frightening future. The below post was one that I liked a lot, and it was NOT ABOUT ROBOTS. This was a look at where and how we choose to display things like trophies or awards says about us, our workplaces, and what we value. The piece originally ran in September 2013.

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On the display of the spolis of victory

Last night I attended the back to school open house and curriculum review event held at the middle school that my son attends. It was altogether an interesting and well-run event, the school is one of the finest in all of New York State, the teachers were energetic and engaged, and the administrators are committed to high academic standards and to creating an environment of respect, inclusion, and student success.

Actually in the several years my son has attended schools in this district I have been continually impressed with the quality of instruction and the emphasis on achievement.  And by that I mean academic achievement. Sure, the school has all the requisite sports teams that most other schools do, but I never get the feeling that the sports teams are all that important, and certainly not nearly as important to the overall school and local community as they can be in other parts of the country.

The tour around the school progressed and at a point late in the program we reached a large, windowless  classroom located sort of in the way, way back of the school that is the home to for lack of a better term, the 'gifted' or 'extra special' classes. You know the kinds of classes where students that are doing well in their regular courses get to extend and stretch into new and different kinds of assignments and activities. Some of the projects the kids take on involve exploring in greater detail aspects of their more formal course work, while others are completely new endeavors like movie making or creating school and community service projects.

One of the activities associated with this 'extra' instruction class is the classic Academic Challenge Competition, that I remember from back in the day as the 'College Bowl'.  You know, this was the contest that pits teams of students against other schools in a Jeopardy! like setting to see which schools team has the most, (and fastest), knowledge of math, science, history, geography, and so on. As the teacher was describing the Academic Challenge team and telling us parents about how the team competes in various competitions, she remarked how our school's team had been pretty successful over the years, winning or placing in many top-level competitions. 

As evidence of this success, she pointed to a large shelf on one side of the long room that was the home of two or three rows of similarly sized and shaped trophies, and said something like 'And you can see a few of the trophies our teams have won over the years over there."

I thought, as I looked at the dozen or so trophies that were won for academic successes and were being kept in a room way in the far back corner of the school, that it was kind of funny that even in a school not known for and all that focused on sports that the similar prizes won for winning the odd volleyball or lacrosse or soccer title over the years were prominently displayed in a custom and large glass covered trophy case in the school's lobby, within the sight lines of everyone entering the school.

I suppose it matters, at least some, how we present, display, and commemorate our successes. 

Note: That is it for REPRISE WEEK(s), thanks for checking out some of these older posts and I will be back with fresh, juicy content next week. I hope you have a fantastic 2014!

Star employees and the assignment of credit

As loyal readers know, I am all about the fashion and as such, am a subscriber and regular reader of GQ Magazine. 

In the most recent GQ, buried in an interview with journalist and TV personality Keith Olbermann, who as you might know has kind of a checkered career past and has burned lots of bridges with many of his former employers, like CNN, MSNBC, and ESPN, was an interesting take from KO on how star employees interpret and assign the credit for their success.

Here is the take from Olbermann:

So I don't think there are huge divergences between my personality and what they see on TV. And I think that's why I have been gainfully employed doing this. I'll always deliver what an employer wants. At some point they decide the result is more trouble than they want, or they convince themselves that they have created all this success that I created for them. As in my last prominent employer at NBC, which they're learning that perhaps they were wrong about that.

Olbermann has had lots of success, and been a star or high performer (who eventually flamed out) at every stop along the way. But it would be a mistake to only focus on the flame-outs and not on the psyche of the star performer that Olbermann speaks to so candidly.

Look at that part of the quote again - At some point they decide the result is more trouble than they want, or they convince themselves that they have created all this success that I created for them.

While from the outside, anyone looking at Olbermann's career arc would tend to focus on the 'He is more trouble than he is worth' argument, stars like KO usually see it from the latter point of view - that they themselves are driving success, not the company.

I think the quote provides a really useful reminder for any leader or manager or organization that is grappling with one of those similar 'It is worth keeping this guy/gal around?' kinds of conundrums.

Star performers can be prickly. They can demand a lot. They want to be paid more than your salary range says is permissible. Like Olbermann, they can be a real pain in the a$$.

But before you decide to simply cut them loose and be done with their ego and BS, make sure you ask yourself who is really responsible for their success, and if indeed, it is repeatable or transferable.

It's ok to let the star walk if they want too much, or they become too impossible to work with, but be ready to explain to someone in an expensive suit how the drop-off in organizational performance was worth it.

Have a great weekend!