VIDEO: The robot would like a sidebar, please

How do you balance the demands of the modern workforce for flexibility around schedules, locations, and desire to not cut back on that white-knuckle ride on the daily commute, with many organizations desire to foster a collabortive and innovative environment that to many leaders only comes from workers 'physically being together?'

Meet your future colleague Ava 500, or rather, the robot that your future colleagues will be driving around the office or plant or store if the vision of the folks at iRobot and Cisco comes to pass.  Ava 500 combines the mobility and navigation capability from iRobot, with Cisco's teleprescence technology into a robot technology that can be used to teleport anyone in the organization regardless of their physical location to any other location that is equipped with an Ava 500.

Check the video below from iRobot to see Ava in action (Email and RSS subscribers may need to click through)

Pretty nifty, right? And did you catch that little feature with the 'robot' drags a couple of the meeting participants out of the room for a little private time? 

I think the long-term key for these kinds of telepresence robots to actually move past novelty and into more widespread use is that they have to seem less, well robotic, and more natural. They need to be able to move fluidly, be aware of their environment, and maybe have a little personality. 

The workers that teleport into Ava have to come across to their colleagues as close to 'normal' as is possible, and using the high-end Cisco telepresence tech is one way to try and achieve that. No one is going to want to interact with a person piloting an Ava 500 if the video feed resembles a dodgy Google Hangout from someone's dreary basement home office.

One thing the video didn't show, perhaps purposefully, is depict two different Ava 500's interacting with each other. In a way, if using a technology like Ava would be so fantastic for connecting one remote worker with their colleagues, then why not 2 or 3 or 20? 

Maybe the workplace of the future will be one that ends up being largely uninhabited by any people, but rather a fleet of telepresence robots that move from meeting to meeting while different workers take turns teleporting in from all over the world.

What do you think - is the Ava 500 coming soon to a workplace near you?

#HRHappyHour 163 PODCAST - 'Bullying and the Workplace'

This week the HR Happy Hour Show/Podcast is back with a fresh episode recorded earlier this week -'Bullying and the Workplace' with guest Jennifer Hancock. Jennifer is the author of The Bully Vaccine, and a frequent speaker and expert on the increasingly important issue of bullying - both in and out of the workplace. You can follow Jennifer on Twitter as well -@jenthehumanist).

You can listen to the show on the show page here, using the widget player below, and of course on iTunes - just search the podcasts area for 'HR Happy Hour'.

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on BlogTalkRadio

It was a fascinating conversation with Jennifer - bullying has become such an area of focus for parents, schools, and certainly even leaders and HR professionals in the workplace. You'd never guess just how prevalent bullying behaviors have become.

Jennifer shared ideas on how to define and identify bullying, insights behind the root causes of these behaviors, and some specific and relevant ideas about how the victims of bullying can deal with bullies.

Chances are someone you know, maybe even your own child, or a colleague at work is facing these kinds of challenges. Or you are an HR professional that has to make sure your workplace is free from these behaviors. Either way I think you will find some great ideas and tips for how to address these situations from the show.

It was an interesting and enlightening conversation, and I hope you will find it valuable as well.

Also, in June and July Jennifer is offering a 6-hour course titled 'Workplace Bullying for HR Professionals' and you can learn more about that program here.

Thanks to Jennifer for a great conversation. 

NOTE:

Finally, for listeners of the show a quick reminder. For the next little while anyway, co-host Trish McFarlane and I will be doing the HR Happy Hour Shows more as a traditional podcast - recorded in advance, perhaps a little shorter than the live shows were, and hopefully posted to the site every other week. With our schedules and lots of travel on the horizon this year, doing the shows 'live' on Thursday nights has become increasingly challenging. Trish and I hope that by changing how the shows are produced it will allow us the opportunity to continue doing the show/podcast in a way that will work with our schedules as well as our future guests.

Have a great weekend!

What's your workplace's signature scent?

Ever walk into a high-end retail store or a fancy hotel lobby and suddenly feel compelled to think, 'What is that smell?' or ask someone nearby 'Do you smell that?'

It could be that you actually do smell something faint, lurking in the background, and it also could be that what you are smelling is a 'signature scent' that has been purposely released into the building by the owners in order to achieve a specific impact and effect. This olfactory technology, created by companies like ScentAir, allows businesses to add to or augment their customer experience by (in their words), 'connecting on an emotional and memorable level with customers' via the release of specific fragrances into the environment at specific times and for specific purposes.

I would not have heard about this if not for a connection of the ScentAir technology to the sports world - it seems like professional teams like basketball's Brooklyn Nets (a fresh smelling fragrance with citrus notes),  and the NFL's St. Louis Rams (cotton candy) have experimented with pumping in their own custom scents inside their stadiums. ScentAir offers solutions that scale to really large spaces like in these examples, but also smaller, more targeted scent solutions that can be deployed in more intimate business and office environments.

The idea, then, is that since we experience and interact with the world using all of our senses, that organizations can benefit from purposefully leveraging one that is often ignored - the sense of smell, to create more complete and memorable experiences. 

My question is, how about deploying these kinds of scent-delivery mechanisms into internal, or non-customer facing environments? What if you could set up a little personal 'signature scent' for your next all-hands meeting, product review, or even your managerial 1-1 meetings?

Wouldn't we at work also like to be able to also 'connect on an emotional and memorable level' with our colleagues, employees, and bosses? Could a subtle 'vanilla with hints of alder and lime' scent wafting in the air make that next really uncomfortable 'You are getting placed on a performance improvement plan' meeting you have to facilitate more complete?

Probably not. But I bet the vanilla and alder would be an improvement from what you normally smell in those kinds of meetings - 'despair, with hints of loathing and perspiration, and a final note of Copenhagen.'

What's your workplace's signature scent?

Thinking about what no one knows they're missing

A couple of months ago I posted about the continuing advances in driverless vehicle technology, and the implications on work and worker's commutes to the office in an environment where essentially, everyone has a technological chauffeur to ferry them to their job. My point in the piece was, more or less, that driverless vehicle technology would potentially one day add hours of 'productive' time to a commuter's day - taking calls, reading documents, even creating and writing while on the go.  Freed from the task of actually driving the car, the driver becomes a passenger - and gains the benefits from reduced stress, (driverless cars probably won't pass on their road rage to you), and more flexibility. 

Whether you think driverless cars, (and trucks, and eventually even planes), are dangerous, unreliable, or even scary, the truth seems like they are coming - and probably sooner than most of us think. 

Similar could be said for some of the other latest advances in technology. Take Google Glass for example. Just a year or so ago the idea of a wearable, always-on, internet connected, and voice activated computing device seemed pretty far-fetched. Today the initial wave of beta-testers are using the device, developers are building new and purpose-built apps for the platform, and a slew of 'experts' (including me), have offered up advice and opinion about the implications and use of Glass in work and business. I saw another slightly different manifestation of wearable computing this week when my pal Lance Haun rocked a Pebble smartwatch at a recent event.

What do driverless vehicle technology and wearable computing tech like Google Glass have in common?

Probably a few things, but the one element I want to call out is this - they are technology breakthroughs that are not directly responding to some express need or desire on the part of either existing customers or the general public.  They are for the most part - green field, blue ocean, 'insert-your-favorite-hack-expression-for-something-brand-new-here'.

This week I've been at the SilkRoad Connections event - a conference for the company's customers, partners, and some media and analysts.  At the event, keynoter Dan Pink, (famous for the book Drive), offered, almost as an aside from his speech on motivation, what he thought was going to be the most important skill in the future, (paraphrased in my tweet below)

The ability to give people something they did not know they were missing is the core cognitive skill today- per @danielpink #srconnections13

— Steve Boese (@SteveBoese) May 20, 2013

Glass, planes that fly themselves, the next incredible technological or business breakthrough - the common factor will be that none of them will be really based on listening to customers or conducting focus groups.

They will spring from the imagination of innovators and from people savvy enough to 'discover' needs that today don't exist.

It's wonderful and important to spend your day thinking about and helping to solve people's problems. But even there, advances in computing threaten to turn 'problem solving' into a game for the robots and super computers.

If you want to be really memorable and outlast the rest, you have to solve problems that don't even seem to exist and to give people things that they never knew they needed.

Human Resources when there are less humans around

The below chart (or a version of it) has been making the rounds plenty in the last year or so as the American economy rebounds and seemingly continues to strengthen coming out of the financial crisis and ensuing recession of the late aughts.

It shows how despite corporate profits, expressed as a percentage of GDP, continuing to set records, that those record profits have not (taken in aggregate), translated into lots of new jobs, as the labor participation rate shows.

Source - FRED 

As the chart pretty clearly shows, aggregate corporate profits (the red line), after plunging to a low at about the middle of the recession, late 2008, have rebounded considerably, and now are at all-time record levels as a percentage of GDP.

The employment rate however, after taking an equally dramatic fall throughout the entire recession, finally stabilized at a far lower level than pre-recession, and despite, (or some might argue what has been the primary driver of), rising corporate profits is showing no signs of regaining its former levels of around 62%.

Profits are up, way up even, yet corporations are achieving these profits with far fewer workers than before, (and paying them less, generally. We could also factor in wage growth or lack thereof to make that point at well).

There are lots of reasons for this - technological progress, increased automation, continuing reliance on relatively cheaper foreign labor, diminishing influence of labor unions, the aging of the workforce, etc. but the bottom line seems to be an ever-growing bottom line with less and less actual people needed to make that happen.

No doubt if you are one of the workers in the 'right' kind of job, you are probably doing pretty well or are on the way to doing pretty well. But if you are one of the people that might be in a field that has simply figured out to continue to drive profits without as many people, then things could be looking kind of grim.

Where does all this leave you as an HR/Talent pro?

A lot depend on the company/industry you are in. But in aggregate, certainly, when there are less and less 'humans' in the workforce, then corporations will figure out they need less and less Human Resources people to help look after them all. I have talked with a few HR leaders lately that are seeing both the size of their labor forces hold steady and their HR/EE ratios holding an extremely high levels.

Advice?

Make sure you are spending a decent chunk of your time and energy on things that are truly additive - technology that will help employees generate new ideas and innovations, marketing and recruiting strategies that will let you land more than your share of the best talent at the expense of your competitors, and even in an 'addition-by-subtraction' way, elimination of silly rules, policies, or processes that in any way get in the way of employee performance.

And you could spend some time figuring out what kinds of planning, services, training, development, and team building activities that 'resources' like our pal Baxter needs and you might ride this out a little longer.

Have a great weekend!