The next important HR Tech acronym: CALO

You already know all the big HR Tech acronyms - LMS, ATS, HRIS, SaaS, ERP, and on and on.

But the next big HR and workplace technology acronym you should start to become familiar with, as it promises to offer more for individual and organizational productivity and performance than all acronyms that have come before, is probably a new one to you.

CALO

CALO stands for Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes

Just what does that mean? 

Check the below from a piece on HBR titled, 'The Ultimate Productivity Hack Will Be Robot Assistants' :

The underlying technology behind all of the advances in robotic technology mentioned above is Artificial Intelligence (A.I.).  A.I., often referred to as the ability of computers to think like humans, has been a main goal of many computer and cognitive scientists for the last sixty to eighty years. And one of the principle goals of A.I. developers has long been to help humans be more productive.

The largest known A.I. project to date was instigated by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In 2003, DARPA contracted SRI International to lead a reported $200 million, five-year project to build a virtual assistant. The project consisted of up to 500 experts in machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation, human–computer interaction, flexible planning, and behavioral studies who were tasked with building a Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO).

The goal of CALO was to become what the technology industry now calls a ‘cognitive assistant,’ – similar in function to what many of us think of as a personal assistant. This ambitious goal envisioned a software program that learns by ‘observing and learning from the past, acting in the present and anticipating the future.’ CALO would be able to assist its user with organizing and prioritizing information, mediating human communication, resource allocation, task management decisions, and scheduling and prioritizing.

Read some of the goals of CALO again - organizing and prioritizing information, mediating human-human communications, allocation of resources, getting tasks completed, making decisions, etc.

These are all things that you, and everyone in your workforce has to manage every single day.

Unlike an LMS that an employee may have to check in to once a year, an ATS that they never see once they are hired, or an HRIS that they only access once or twice in a career, (if they move or have a 'life event'). 

And don't get me started on the Performance Management system.

But a CALO? A tool or technology that would actually help with organizing and prioritizing information and making decisions?

Your employees would use that tool every single day, and all day long. And if it worked, it would actually help them in their jobs.

I am not (yet) smart enough to know just how these CALO tools will enter the workplace, who will make them, how they will first find a way onto corporate platforms but I suspect that the smartest people working on workplace technologies are already attacking those issues.

And I also suspect these CALO tools will have a much bigger impact and influence on worker performance than all the HR tech acronyms that have come before.

Even 'great' places to work never forget who is in charge, (Hint: It's not you)

By now you've probably heard something about the several year Department of Justice investigation, corresponding civil class action lawsuit, and various reporting surrounding an almost decade-long series of unfair and anti-competitive labor practices alleged to have occurred among Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, and Pixar.

To make a (very) long story short, the DOJ, and the claimants, (a group of people that worked for these companies from around 2005 - 2010), hold that these tech industry titans, with their C-level executives full backing, support, and as many, many emails reveal, the knowledge that what they were doing was likely illegal, colluded via a series of 'non-call' agreements to artificially reduce many currently employed staff the ability to seek opportunities at the other firms in the cartel.

The bare bones of the cartel's structure was pretty simple - Company 'A', say Google, agreed not to cold-call employees from Company 'B', say Apple. Apple, supported from the late Steve Jobs on down, agreed to similar recruiting restrictions in kind. So for many employees at either of the two firms, their ability to fully and freely 'test the market' was constrained by one. If these 'non-call' agreements remained as limited in scope as in the example above, it might not have blown up in the fashion, (DoJ involvement), that is has. But these tech leaders didn't stop at these one-off kinds of reciprocal agreements that we all know are more common than we like to admit.

No, as the original reporting (and legal documents back up) revealed, what seems to have started with Google getting on Steve Jobs' bad side, then extended to involve a series of other, mostly Silicon Valley tech companies, and as a weekend piece on Pando Daily reports, extended even wider than that - allegedly including companies and employees from dozens of companies all over the world.

From the Pando Daily piece:

Confidential internal Google and Apple memos, buried within piles of court dockets and reviewed by PandoDaily, clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees.

Although the Department ultimately decided to focus its attention on just Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm and Pixar, the emails and memos clearly name dozens more companies which, at least as far as Google and Apple executives were concerned, formed part of their wage-fixing cartel.

A closer examination of the paper trail that set up and helped to define and enforce these agreements paints an incredibly unflattering picture of the actions and motivations of the executives involved, particularly revered business leaders and tech rock stars such as Jobs, Google's Eric Schmidt, and the then CEO of Ebay, Meg Whitman. A look at the documents reveals company recruiters being fired on the spot for violating these (likely illegal) deals.

Back when these probably illegal 'non-call' agreements started, Google was on a expansion tear - snapping up talent from wherever it could, driving salary requirements up across the valley in the process. The other companies, naturally, did not like this, and rather than try to compete with Google on a level playing field, at least in the case of Apple, took to issuing threats of 'war', if the talent poaching continued. Google, probably sensing that the compensation acceleration that they themselves were driving must have figured it made more sense to try and play nice in the Valley, appease some of the other powerful industry companies, and maybe use that artificial constraint to keep some more of their own employees from jumping ship to a competitor for more money.

You really should take the time to read the Pando Daily reporting on this case here and here, it helps to paint a different picture of what we normally get from those typical darlings of modern, progressive talent management.

Even these companies, many of them regular winners of various 'Great Places to Work' lists never forget that at some point if employee compensation, (and relative power), shifts too far towards the side of the talent and away from management that they have a problem. Remember that when you read another fawning piece about how miraculous their talent management seem to be.

They might have been, and still might be, 'Great Places to Work' but they didn't get that way by playing nice all the time. And at least some of the time, it seems, they got that way by illegally colluding to reduce the market for the very talent that makes them such a great place to work.

Final thought, it might be easy to laugh this off as a first-world problem. Highly paid workers at these kinds of firms are doing just fine, so what that there were a few 'non-call' agreements going on. They are all making six-figure salaries so what is the harm?

I will give you two reasons:

1. For many tech workers, their careers are turning out to be not that much different that pro athletes - the length of time when their skills are in demand (and their compensation can be the highest), can be extremely short. Just do a search for 'technology ageism' some time. Tech workers have to maximize earnings over a shorter time horizon than the rest of us. Keeping wages artificially lower for them hurts just as much as the rookie scale hurts talented pro football players.

2. If relatively well off, educated, talented, smart, and powerful employees like the ones at the firms that were in this cartel can be taken advantage of and have their wages depressed in this manner, then what does that say for the millions of workers that are not so powerful and advantaged? With union membership and influence at an all-time low, one of the few things that can at least try to protect workers is the free market for their services. If high-tech companies like Apple and Google can change that dynamic at the high-end, what would stop a few firms where you live getting together to do the same on the middle and low end for jobs in retail, service, or in back offices? That does not sound any crazier an idea to me than Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt emailing each other angry messages about cold-calling.

I'm going to stop here, (bless you if you have made it this far), and just say that no matter what accolades that any company receives, we'd all be wise to remember that their are always two kinds of people - people that work in the factory, and people that own the factory.

Have a great week!

From HR Exec: 5 Rules of Thumb on HR Tech

In my most recent 'Inside HR Tech' column for Human Resource Executive Online, I took a look at some general rules of thumb for evaluating HR technologies and HR solution providers.  Here is a little bit of that piece, and you can find the rest of the column as well as subscribe to get the monthly Inside HR Tech column delivered straight to your Inbox.

Here are five ideas and tips on what to look for and think about when evaluating HR technologies to get the most bang for your organization's buck.

The one HR technology-related question I get asked most frequently is some variation of "Which vendors have the best solution for (insert your HR process area)?", or said differently, "Which solutions should I examine for my particular problem or area of need?"

So for anyone who wants my official answer to any form of the question, "Which HR technology solution is the best?" here it is . . . . wait for it . . .  wait for it . . .

The answer, (drumroll, please) is "It depends."

The best solution for a given organization is quite likely different from the best solution for another -- even largely similar -- organization.

Unlike many commodity purchases, the HR or workforce technology that is "right" for one organization is often highly variable and dependent on a number of company specific factors, which usually will be distinct and important enough to make selecting the best software a complex and difficult process.

Since I can’t claim to know the "best" solution for your situation, I can try and help by pointing out a few (five to be exact) rules of thumb that are generally applicable in all HR-technology evaluation and selection processes. Hopefully, these can help you to make your own informed, and unique decision about software.

1. There isn’t a "Yelp for HR technology" . . . yet.

While there are some nascent attempts, (G2 Crowd, TrustRadius), at establishing a large set of Yelp-like crowd-sourced user reviews for enterprise or HR technologies, the truth is that, in general, the HR software market is still a little hazy. Finding reliable, vetted, and unbiased or independent reviews and commentary on most enterprise technologies is as difficult today as it has always been....

You can see the rest of the '5 Rules of Thumb' over on HRE Online, and once again, sign up for a monthly drop of HR tech advice and commentary from me, courtesy of your pals at HRE Online.

Have a great March Madness weekend everyone!

Step up to a glamour job

Spotted on the always fascinating Retronaut site this piece - 1965: "Step up from routine office work into a glamour job" that highlighted a vintage advertisement from that fine, fine institute of higher learning, LaSalle Extension University on the amazing potential career opportunities that awaited those willing and able to learn how to use a wondrous new technology - the Stenotype Machine.

With the Stenotype Machine, and the skills required to translate every spoken word in the English language into a series of 22 weird characters, the ad promises that career minded folks, (and let's be honest here, LaSalle University is aiming this add only towards women), would soon be able to "Sit beside top corporation exectutives at board meetings and big conferences" and "Even cover conventions and courtroom trials!"

The irony about this old ad, pushing the benefits of a new machine that would help someone learn the skill of being able to listen to a conversation or a presentation in real time, and translate the essence or the most important elements of what was being said into a new, concise, constrained, and kind of hard to figure out initially type of language, and do all of that instantly, is that it sounds almost exactly like what I, and lots of other people are doing, when they try and 'live tweet' conferences or events.

But unlike the Stenotype operator that had to capture all of what was being said, the live tweeters only try to grab the most compelling bits of information - those highly tweetable phrases and comments that are meant to reflect the overall content and point of view of the presentation or event, but ultimately fail at doing both, primarily because we simply can't type as fast as the 1965 Stenotype machine operator, and second, because our constraints (140 characters, mainly), only allow for the simplest sound bites to be shared.

But even with all that, there are some remarkable similarities to the pitch back in 1965 for Stenotype operators, "Sit next to big, important people and write down what they say!" and today's live tweeter, a kind of social media created spectator. Just like LaSalle Extension University (Did they have a football team? Go Extenders!), tried to convince women back then that sitting near powerful people was something worthy to aspire towards, I think for lots of folks that are sitting in audiences and trying to capture and crystallize what presenters are saying is the modern equivalent of a kind of reflected importance.

Look, I am not knocking the idea of tweeting from conferences or during some kind of popular media, news, or cultural events. I do it myself. It is kind of fun. Sometimes you actually have something insightful to add to the conversation. Sometimes.

But mostly or at least often it is just 'sitting next to important people and writing down what they say.'

The 1965 version of that doesn't look like all that much fun as we look back. I bet one day we will look back at the 2014 version and say much the same thing.

This weekend's company culture test

I am of (pretty) firm belief you can tell just about everything you need to know about company culture from tracking and analyzing email usage patterns, traffic levels, and response expectations.

Sure, not all organizations, and certainly not all roles in organizations, are overly reliant on email as their primary communications, collaboration, and general project management tool, but for those that are, and I suspect that would include just about everyone reading this post, your email Inbox is largely a proxy for your 'work' in general.

Very few initiatives actually get started without first sending an email to someone.

Progress is communicated and monitored on those tasks in ongoing series of emails.

Organizational structure and power dynamics are reflected in who you are 'allowed' to email, and who will or will not respond.

You overall stress level and relative satisfaction with your job can be extrapolated from the point in time condition of your Inbox.

Finally, you probably leave the office with a warped sense of accomplishment if, at the end of the week, you have successfully triaged all of your incoming messages, sent the necessary replies, and achieved that most elusive of states, so-called 'Inbox Zero'. You pack up shop for the week and head home, (or to Happy Hour).

And that is when my favorite test of company culture begins, what happened to your Inbox from say, 6:00PM on a Friday up until 6:00AM on Monday. (this is what we used to call the "weekend".)

As you enjoy whatever it is you enjoy this weekend, think about these few questions:

Who in your company is (still) sending emails on a Friday night? On Saturday morning? Or on Sunday evening when you are clinging like grim death to your last few precious hours of downtime?

Who is responding to weekend emails? And no, I am not talking about genuine business or customer emergencies, just 'normal' kinds of things. You know, the kinds of things you worry about on Tuesday.

Are your management or senior leaders making a habit of tapping away message after message (always "Sent from my iPad") all weekend long while they are ostensibly watching Jr's soccer game?

Are you checking or at least thinking about checking your work email on Saturday afternoon when, I don't know, you're supposed to have something better to do?

Finally, when you get one of those weekend emails do you respond? Are you expected to? And if you do are you now "at work?"

It's odd for the one piece of workplace technology that we all probably use more than any other, that we think about and really try to understand it's usage so little.

Email is just always there. It is always on. We engage with it constantly.

But we don't ever think about what it might tell us about the organization, the power dynamics, and most importantly, what it can tell us about the culture of an organization.

So, are you on email this weekend or are you off?

Have a great one no matter what you choose!