VIDEO: Fun with the quantified workplace

The coolest thing you will see on the Internet today, (excepting for cats, bunnies, and 'which superhero would you be' quizzes), comes to us courtesy of the Sid Lee Agency in Paris who have Arduino-powered sensors hooked up throughout their office, and they brought the data together in a single dashboard.(click for a giant version of the dashboard)

The result is a really interesting and clever view into the inner workings of the workplace in real-time.

Check out the video below, (Email and RSS subscribers will need to click through), but better still, just head over to the live dashboard to see the real-time updates.

Pretty neat, right?

And I think the best HR/Talent play in the dashboard is on the lower right, where Sid Lee has a tile showing current number of job openings at the agency. Clicking that tile takes you to the firm's career site, (which, not for nothing, is woefully unappealing to look at compared to the activity dashboard. Come on HR/Recruiting, pay attention to UX would you?)

I totally dig this, and I am not even sure why. It's just cool to look at I suppose. Like cats and bunnies and superhero quizzes.

Have a great Wednesday.

VIDEO: Unconscious Bias at Work

Save this one for the long weekend maybe, as it is about one hour long, (a 45 minute talk, followed by some Q&A), from Google's Director of People Analytics Brian Welle on the subject of Unconscious Bias in the Workplace.

Link the video is here, it is also embedded below (Email and RSS subscribers will need to click through)

From Google's description of the piece, and of unconscious bias more generally:

There is a growing body of research – led by scientists at Google – surrounding unconscious bias and how we can prevent it from negatively impacting our decision making. The goal is to teach ourselves how unconscious bias can affect our perceptions, decisions, and interactions. It is aimed at raising awareness, sparking conversation, and initiating action. We’re hopeful that this will help us to create workplaces that are not only fun and innovative, but allow each of us, no matter our background, to achieve more than we could anywhere else.

I definitely recommend the talk from Google's Welle, as it not only lays out a simple to follow 4-part plan for addressing unconscious bias at work, but as in typical Google fashion, his recommended approaches are all backed and supported by research, many of which are cited in the piece, (and in the accompanying notes).

For me, the part that stood out the most was the research that showed that two identical resumes would be assessed completely differently when the first resume had a 'male' name attached to it, and the second had a 'female' name. Take the names off of the resumes, and suddenly this unconscious bias slips away.

Anyway, take some time this weekend to check out the talk - if you are in the half of the country where it is about -5 degrees outside you are probably not going anywhere and have plenty of time!

Have a great weekend!

REPRISE: Wearable Tech in the Oil Field

Note: The blog is taking some well-deserved rest for the Holidays (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 2014. 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 2014!

The below post first ran back in June and features an amazingly cool two-and-a-half minute video showcasing a real world and real workplace application of wearable technology. Wearables like Google Glass might never catch on as a consumer device, but almost certainly will have a big role in all kinds of work applications. I liked this video so much I used it as an example in two or three talks I did in 2014 and it was almost always met with 'Wows' from the audience. Hope you enjoy it if you have not seen it yet.

Fresh 2015 content resumes next Monday - have a great weekend!

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VIDEO: Wearable Tech in the Oil Field

Quick shot for a busy Friday - if you are at all interested in how, where, and for which type of workplace use cases are likely to be impacted by the introduction of wearable technologies like Google Glass, then check out this short video from Wearable Intelligence, a developer of custom applications for industry that can be deployed on the Glass platform (Email and RSS subscribers will need to click through).

In the video embedded below, we see how custom apps overlaid on the Glass device, allow field workers to access training information, log status reports, verify safety procedures have been followed and more - all while keeping their hands free to actually get their work done.  

Really interesting and definitely cool, right?

Glass and probably eventually other wearable devices are going to become one of the essential tools for the types of field workers that need to simultaneously access and interact with lots of data and content, but also can't have their hands tied up with smartphones or tablets, since they actually have to work with their hands.

It is early days, but as you can see in the video the possibilities are almost endless.

And one more thing, I doubt any Glass-hating types would dare to hassle any of these oil field workers that you see in the video for wearing Glass. The irony in all this? Glass and other wearables might end up developing into a real working person's tool as much as a prop for the snobby elites.

Have a great weekend!

OFF TOPIC: The Collateral Damage of Gangnam Style

You might have caught the news last week that the video Gangnam Style has been viewed so frequently, (2 BILLION plus times), that it actually 'broke' YouTube, whose underlying code had been unable to store and display a video views count above 2,147,483,647.

YouTube subsequently fixed the bug, if it even could be called a bug, and now assures us that it can handle a views count maximum of somewhere north of 9 quintillion.

Let's hope that Gangnam Style, (or Grumpy Cat or Celebrities Reading Mean Tweets or anything else) doesn't ever get too close to breaking YouTube again.

Why?

Because there is a cost of sorts in all this YouTube watching. An opportunity cost really, for all of us. A few months back, before Gangnam Style broke YouTube, the folks at the Economist did some calculations to estimate what else humanity might have been able to accomplish with all the time spent (140M hours at that point), watching Gangnam Style.

Here is the chart from the Economist that will proably make you weep a little bit for humanity:

Amazing.

One Gangnam Style equates to 20 Empire State Buildings, 4 Great Pyramids, and almost 2 new Wikipedias.

That is potentially the kinds of things we could have accomplished had we spent the time watching Gangnam Style in more productive endeavors.

Look, I am not sitting here saying I spend every waking minute in deep study, volunteering for the less fortunate, saving abandoned puppies, or helping elderly folks cross the street.

I waste plenty of time. I do.

But seeing this kind of data does make me pause a little. I know I can do better, and I only contributed 1 measly view to the 2 Billion count for Gangnam Style. 

I know I can do better. Probably you can too.

Have a great weekend!

VIDEO: 56 seconds to drive home the importance of manager engagement

If you have not yet seen the 'Target manager fires up the employees on Black Friday' clip (it made the rounds pretty widely this week), then take literally one minute and check out the short video (embedded below, Email and RSS subscribers will have to click through).

The manager (Note: I could not verify 100% that he actually is the store manager, but from the content itself and the fact that no one else tried to stop him, I am going to assume he is in store leadership in some capacity), from a Target in Maryland, prepared his fellow employees for the start of the Black Friday 'battle' with a speech that echoed the stirring "This is Sparta" speech from the movie 300.

"Whatever comes through those gates, you will stand your ground with a smile on your face. They come here with bargains in their heads and fire in their eyes and we shall give those bargains to them."

Pretty cool stuff, if a little bit goofy. But the short speech illustrates, I think, a fantastic point about one of the topics that can be overly dwelled upon - employee engagement.

You, me, everyone else has written, seen presentations, and talked about employee engagement for years. And thanks to our friends at Gallup, (no comment on whether or not we should care about Gallup, just making a point), we are reminded, annually, that NOTHING WE EVER DO impacts overall engagement levels all that much.

And yet we continue to debate, discuss, even obsess about engagement.

But in all this copious amounts of words and attention paid to engagement we don't seem to think or talk or consider manager engagement all that much. And not managers as just another employee too whose engagement or lack thereof gets tallied up by Gallup or whomever runs your survey.

But manager engagement as it directly impacts, influences, and even helps change engagement levels of their teams - often, as is the case in this Target store, the front line staff that is the last mile in customer experience and satisfaction, well it seems to me we don't think about that much (or enough anyway).

This little one minute pep talk from the Target manager is a great example of the how one person's high engagement has the potential to have a multiplier effect on the team. He may have swung one or two or maybe even ten of the employees to get charged up to perform at a high level, to take care of the customers, and to even get engaged themselves.

Managers have the ability to influence a disproportionate number of staff every day. We should talk about manager engagement as much as we talk about employee engagement I think.

Have a great weekend!