Don't talk to me, don't even look at me - I'm busy over here

Slapping on a pair of headphones or earbuds while you are work, especially in open plan offices, in order to help yourself to focus on your work, and probably more importantly, to send a 'do not bug me right now' signal to your co-workers has been a pretty common element of work for some time now.

But what do you do when simply putting on headphones is not enough of a barrier between you and pesky co-workers, their questions, their comings and goings, and other kinds of interruptions or distractions? You could simply accede to your true nature and quit your job and take up permanent hermit status? But let's say you don't want to go that extreme, and simply want to find a way to have a little bit more privacy, focus, and send an even more aggressive 'do not bother me' message to the office?

Enter the 'FocusCap' which has been described as a kind of 'horse blinder for people'. The idea of the Focus Cap is create a 'moble, distraction-proof fortress' so that a worker can 'fully concentrate on high demanding cognitive tasks'. That sounds pretty good to me. I may even need one of those here at HR Happy Hour HQ.

Check out the videobelow, (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through).

Pretty wild, right?

Are office distractions, and the challenges that are presented by the lack of personal space and lack of privacy that modern, open plan offices generate really driving workers to try and build little personal cocoons to carve out some space and peace among the chaos? Maybe so. I have not worked in an open plan setting for quite some time, but I am pretty sure I would not enjoy it all that much. Maybe with a pair of headphones on and a pair of these horse blinders for people I could make it seem like I was in my own spacious (and private) office, or sitting on the sofa in my PJs. 

And for the record, I have no relationship at all with the makers of the FocusCap. But I do think it is cool.

Have a great week!

Automated narratives

We are soon going to reach, if we haven't yet, 'Peak Artificial Intelligence' I think.

There have been a million examples of 'AI will replace XYZ' or 'AI for 'Insert your favorite process here'' pieces and developments in the last couple of years, and if you and your organization is not at least thinking about incorporating AI into your business processes, well, the conventional thinking goes, you are going to be left behind. I suppose time will tell on that. I think the adage (was it from Bill Gates?), that we tend to overestimate the impact of new technology in the short term, and underestimate its impact in the long term probably applies to AI as well. AI is definitely coming to a business process near you, it is just a little unclear how long it will be and how much impact it will have on your organization, people, and business.

But one fairly common theme in all the talk about AI (and automation more generally), is that it will effect and potentially replace more mundane, repetitive, rules-heavy, and precisely defined processes and roles (at least initially), while leaving creative, nuanced, complex, and more sophisticated processes and roles to the humans, (at least for now). Robots are going to take the wareghouse jobs and maybe some/most of the cashier jobs, but 'creative' types like marketers and advertising folks for example would be largely safe from automation. While Watson can win ay Jeopardy! and Google can build a machine to win at Go, no AI can come up with say, one of the amazing ads we just saw on the Super Bowl. Right?

But wait...

Check out this excerpt from a piece on Ad Week - 'Coca-Cola Wants to Use AI Bots to Create Its Ads'

Coca-Cola is one of the most beloved brands in the world and is known for creating some of the best work in the advertising industry. But can an AI bot replace a creative? Mariano Bosaz, the brand’s global senior digital director, wants to find out.

“Content creation is something that we have been doing for a very long time—we brief creative agencies and then they come up with stories that they audio visualize and then we have 30 seconds or maybe longer,” Bosaz said. “In content, what I want to start experimenting with is automated narratives.”

In theory, Bosaz thinks AI could be used by his team for everything from creating music for ads, writing scripts, posting a spot on social media and buying media. “That’s a long-term vision,” he said. “I don’t know if we can do it 100 percent with robots yet—maybe one day—but bots is the first expression of where that is going.

It is one thing when a manufacturing executive states that he or she wants to automate some or most aspects of a manufacturing or assembly process and reduce levels of human employment in favor of technology - we are coming to expect that robots and tech and AI are simply inevitably going to do those jobs in the future.

But it is kind of a different thing entirely to hear a 'creative' executive from one of the world's largest companies and most recognized brands to openly discuss how technology like AI can and probably will begin to take over some or even most parts of a highly creative, expressive process like developing advertising content. We don't, or at least I don't, like to think of these kinds of tasks and jobs as ones that could also fall into the category of 'We are better off having a robot do that'. I mean, (trying) to be creative is mostly how I make a living. Emphasize the 'trying' part.

'Automated narratives', for some reason that term stuck out for me when I read the Ad Week piece. Hmm. Probably need to think about that a little longer.

But while I am pondering, I will end with the disclaimer that this post, (and so far, all the posts on this blog), was 100% produced by a person. Although some days I wish I had access to a blog-writing 'bot.

Have a great day!

Please don't follow this email advice

I don't know why I still keep the Inc. site in my feed reader, (remember feed readers?), because about 80% of the articles are inane '5 Ways to Crush XYZ process' or 'Celebrity ABC in one sentence gave us a master class in leadership'. Awful. 

So it was with a kind of hate read perspective that I clicked through my Feedly link to this latest gem from Inc. - A study of 386 million emails says this is a perfect time to send an email'. As I mentioned, I clicked ready to hate the piece, and hate it I did.

Here are the four pieces of Email advice which drive increases in email open and reply rates that Inc. gleaned from a study of 386 million emails sent by the provider Yeswar. I will list each of the four, and because you demand no less, provide my thoughts one by one.

1. Open with a short, direct informal greeting. 'Hey' seems to work best

SMB - Short and informal seems fine to me. But I don't like 'Hey' unless it is with someone you have a fairly deep work history with. I know this is quibbling, but can we go with 'Hi' instead? And never, ever lead with 'Greetings'.

2. End with gratitude. The three word phrase 'Thanks in advance' had the highest response rate.

SMB - I am pretty sure 'Thanks' would do. I actually prefer the slightly more formal 'Thank you' as it also feels more personal at the same time. And the 'Advance' part also feels a little like you are trying to guilt me into doing something - responding, taking some action, etc. Again, I know I am quibbling here. But it is my blog, so so there.

3. Save your important emails for the weekend, if possible, when there is less competition 

SMB - Now you have gone and done it Inc. You have ticked me off. Your advice to get more attention and get noticed is to pile in to the days when most folks are taking a sanity break from the incessant demands of email. Sure, the data may tell you this is the right thing to do in order to get a few percentage points increase in open rates, but is that worth infringing on most people's days off? Does anyone really want to read even more email on the weekend?

4. If you can swing it, send emails between 6AM and 7AM, or else around 8PM

SMB - Assuming they still mean to send said emails on thw weekend, to me, it doesn't really matter what time on the weekend you hit 'send'. For most folks, weekend emails are just going to accumulate into a mass of 'unread' stuff that you have to wade through on Monday morning, (or I suppose, on Sunday night, if this data can be trusted). 

A few year ago someone advised me to send 'important' work-related emails, at least to people who are tough to get to respond to messages, on Sunday nights, for the same kinds of reasons that were pointed out in the Inc. piece. While the advice, at least according to this data, might be good, I didn't follow it back then, and I am not following it now. 

I just don't want to be the person who hits you up with an email.at 7PM on a Sunday night, a time where for most of us we are taking a little break, spending time with friends or family, working on our own projects, or even just zoning out with some Netflix. I just don't want to assume that my message is valuable enough to infringe upon 'your' time. Your Executive Time even.

Ok, that's it, I am out. Time to have a look at the unread email that came in over the weekend. I will admit to not checking it over the weekend. Take that, Inc.

Have a great week!

New tech won't just replace workers, it will track them even more closely

I won't do another run at the 'Robots are going to take all the jobs' gimmick today, there is plenty of that you can find pretty much everyday and everywhere. No, today I want to highlight two examples, from different perspectives and contexts, about how tech will not just replace some/most/all jobs one day, but along the way tech will continue to provide ways for employers to track/monitor/coach/guide/punish/reward employees even more closely.

Example 1 - from our pals at Amazon (the most interesting company in the world) - Amazon could make a bracelet that tracks worker's movements and buzzes them if they move in the wrong direction.

From the piece on Business Insider:

Amazon may be looking to improve its workers' efficiency in new ways.

As was spotted by Geekwire, the company was just awarded a patent for a device that would attach to its warehouse workers' wrists and track their movements using ultrasonic waves. In conjunction with a receiver unit, those ultrasonic waves could track where the worker's hand is in real time and guide it to pick out items, then pack them in boxes.

If the worker's hand moves in the wrong direction, for example, a slight vibration in the wrist would let them know.

The idea is to help reduce the time that Amazon warehouse workers spend looking for items, sorting through boxes and shelves, with the idea of helping them be more efficient at selecting the necessary items for a given order. But as the BI piece points out as well, this kind of technology could also be used to measure employee performance and improvement (or regression) down to the micro-level - the gesture.

I had a summer job working in a perishable food distribution center a hundred years ago, and we were measured (back then), on one metric - how close we came each day to completing our orders in the estimated amount of time allotted for them. So if a given order was meant to be completed in 30 minutes, and it took me 40 minutes to actually turn in the order to the shipping dock, then I would be at 67% (10 minutes overage on a 30 minute order). Each week we had to be a certain percentage rate, (I think it was 85%) in order to stay in good standing. Too many weeks below 85% and you'd eventually get canned.

Back then we thought that was a harsh, 'Big Brother' type monitoring system. But at least it did allow for some slack, for having a bad shift or two, and for a little bit of gamesmanship. It didn't take too long to find the gaps and wiggle room in the system, and find ways to beat it. And since we were provided a real-time update on our percent completion rate after every order, you could also determine come Friday just how much you had to hustle (or slide), in order to maintain the 85% for the week. Looking back on it now, it seems pretty reasonable overall, to both the company and the workers. But if we thought aggregated performance measurement and targets were 'Big Brother' back in the day, I can't imagine what we (or anyone), would think about performance monitoring and measurement at the gesture level. Wild.

Example 2 - From the world of sports, taken from an analysis of NBA player John Wall, and his case for being included on the NBA All-Star team this season. Here's ESPN's Zach Lowe providing a bit of data about Wall's performance this season:

Wall is shooting 42 percent, his lowest mark since he was a rookie, and he just hasn't played with enough vigor on either end of the floor. One measure of that: He has spent 76.57 percent of floor time either standing still or walking, the largest such share among all rotation players, according to tracking data from Second Spectrum.

Ball-dominant stars need to conserve energy. Some guys shift from walking to turbo mode without spending much time in between.

But regardless: Wall should not be freaking last. He too often stands around when he doesn't have the ball, or when a shot is the air and he might be able to help on the glass. He switches constantly on defense to avoid chasing his guy around picks.

That professional athletes have their performance measured and monitored to a greater degree than most other professions is not that surprising - after all metrics and statistics like points scored, rebounds, and assists have been a part of NBA box scores for decades. But what is new('ish) is the technology advances in both video capture and motion analysis that provide data on every step that an NBA player takes during a game. So now instead of just looking at how many points a player scored in a game, and judging his effectiveness based on a combination of things we can count, (like point), and an 'eye test' judgement of their effort level and hustle, NBA teams now can analyze and examine exactly what a player did every second he was on the court.

Look again at the statistic mentioned above - Wall has been walking or standing exactly 76.57% of the time he has been on court this season. His activity is being measured to hundredths of a percent for crying out loud. Can you imagine working in a job where your management had access to your effort down to that level? Every second you are supposed to be at work? Also wild.

These two examples (and I am sure there are lots more), point out that the impact of new technology on work and workplaces is not limited to total or direct replacement of workers and human roles. Technology also has the effect (or at least can have the effect) or driving ever closer measurement and control over workers and work performance. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing - organizations and workers have to be able to understand their work, how to improve, and companies need to continue to get more efficient in order to compete. But, there needs to also be consideration of the balance between measurement, control, and workers' ability to exist as people, in a setting that may not be replacing them, can be seen as de-humanizing them. And until the robots are ready, your organization still needs these people.

Have a great weekend!

Creating a more human relationship with technology

I have been thinking and writing about the early and potential future impact of voice-enabled digital assistant technologies (like Amazon's Alexa, Google Home, and others), pretty often in 2018, so much so that I had pretty much decided to lay off the topic for a bit, as it was getting kind of repetitive.

But as keeps happening, over the weekend I read a really interesting article from the Think With Google team sharing some survey results on how people are using and perhaps more interestingly, feeling about their interactions, usage, and relationship with these digital assistants and platforms. There are two really interesting data points from the survey I wanted to share, as they both reveal something interesting and important as HR tech providers and HR practitioners and end users consider the development and application of voice enabled/driven assistants in workplace tech.

One: People who own voice activated technologies like the Echo and the Google Home are quickly incorporating them into their daily lives and routines:

 

Why that matters: Driving user adoption of workplace technologies has always been a challenge for technology developers and implementation teams. But these voice activated digital assistants are showing that new tech that is easy to access, provides value quickly and clearly, and provides a kind of fun and engaging experience while also providing value, will be readily adopted by most people.

Two - The nature of the voice interface and activation is making the relationship between users and technology much more personal, even human. 

 

Why that matters -  It seems like the nature of how these digital assistants are created, how we interact with them, (more or less conversationally), how they have names (Alexa, Siri), and how they even have some level of personality (ask Alexa to tell you a joke, or tell her 'I'm sorry' sometime), and the technology seems to become more a part of our overall way of experiencing the world, and not a separate thing or tool we have to learn how to use. The technology and capability continues to blend into the world and into the other kinds of tools and tech we use all the time - cars, thermostats, appliances, and computers. In the workplace, we need to start to think about making our HR and workplace tools and technologies ones that are just 'there' - embedded in other workplace systems, active in workplace settings like conference rooms, and accessible at all times with a simple voice command.

I continue to find the entire voice activated / digital assistant space incredibly interesting. Hope you do as well. 

The next project to work on is getting an HR Happy Hour Podcast skill/update on Alexa!