Category: People

Fluid Talent and the SWAT team concept

On By amykongsimiIn General, People, UncategorizedLeave a comment

industriesmostdisruptedbydigital

This is an interesting article: The Industries That Are Being Disrupted the Most by Digital.

The idea that you bring in someone in a catalytic role to drive the change, and then hand over to hybrid managers, or emerging new positions, as the organisation matures.

One of the ideas that I had been discussing with ex-colleagues is the concept of a roving SWAT team or individuals, whose job is to look strategically at an organisation and focus on solving specific problems that are diagnosed. One of the KPIs is redundancy – a measure of their success is that new initiatives are sustainable and handed over smoothly to existing or newly appointed teams. Then they are off to solve the next problem.

The advantage of this is that you maximize individual capabilities. We expect employees to be all-rounders and perfect, when that is not the case. Employees who excel at catalytic roles are always on the hunt for the next problem to solve, and don’t necessarily handle routine and the day-to-day grind well. Or they can handle it, but get bored very easily, which makes retention of such top talent difficult. But you also need employees who are good at the day-to-day grind, to keep the business running, who may not be the best visionaries, but they put food on the table.

Having such an approach also reduces strain on teams who are often tasked with dual objectives of keeping the business going and innovating at the same time.

In the new economy, we have to deal with the concept of fluid talent, that increasingly you will have multi-talented employees who have skillsets that allow them to be applied in different contexts that cannot be bound by one title. This is where adaptability and learning agility are most critical in an employee.

If you’ve read all the way here, ask me about employee kites and kite-handlers when we next meet.

Chatbots in HR: Improving the Employee Experience

On By amykongsimiIn AWBP, Chatbot, People2 Comments

chatbotsinhr

After months of trial and error in building my chatbot prototypes, I finally finished my thesis for my master’s in Digital Management from Hyper Island, titled “Chatbots in HR: Improving the Employee Experience.”

What have I found?

  1. There is currently a lot of excitement and hype around chatbots that outstrips what chatbots can actually do right now
  2. Nevertheless, due to this recent surge of interest in chatbots, the developments in the industry are moving at a extremely rapid pace, with different chatbot products being built every day, in different industry sectors. Features and functions are being added and improved on at lightning pace
  3. Based on the testing of the chatbot prototype that I built for this thesis, there is a lot of potential in using chatbots in HR to improve the employee experience.
  4. Chatbots can free up time from the HR team, and in the long run, even help the HR function to move up the value chain
  5. If designed well, HR chatbots can create significant cost savings due to time saved in completing HR tasks (by employees) and answering queries (by HR team)
  6. In addition to providing friendly, instant information for employees, other areas of value-add for chatbots in improving the employee experience could lie in:
    • Helping employees to avoid embarrassment, or maintain their personal reputation, when they need to ask certain types of questions
    • Providing anonymity when employees want to read up on sensitive employee/company policies
  7. The most important issues that need to be resolved to make a customised chatbot for employees is the back-end integration with HR enterprise software as well as clear parameters over employee privacy and data collection. Some enterprise software vendors have partnered chatbot developers to create solutions for their software
  8. However, even without customisation, chatbots can still provide significant value in generic information services
  9. As use of technology increases in HR, HR leaders need to review the skillsets required in their HR team to enable the function to thrive in a new digital age

Read the full thesis here: Chatbots in HR: Improving the Employee Experience

 

Is it fear of failure or the fear of the lack of absolute success?

On By amykongsimiIn Marketing, People1 Comment

Failure_Success

What does it take to make a company more entrepreneurial, more agile?

This is a question that I’ve discussed with colleagues periodically from time to time, and I remember having this discussion with a colleague who has established several start-ups.

Memorable, because start-ups are seen as examples of entrepreneurial spirit, agility and speed at its best, and I was curious to learn the difference between his experience versus my own; someone who has worked predominantly in “traditional” business environments and structures her entire career.

In context of our company culture that espouses entrepreneurship (in fact Publicis Groupe recently announced Publicis90, a global initiative to foster it), we got to talking about how the willingness to fail is a critical element of successful entrepreneurship, because it allows risk-taking and speed in decision-making.

The mantra of “fail fast, fail often” is well known, discussed widely in books, forums, reported endlessly on.

But here, I offer a different viewpoint. In this new world of complexity, failures – and its antonym ‘successes’ – need to be viewed as a scale, in shades of greys.

Where in a past, pre-digital, pre-agile environment, you would deem anything that is not a success a failure (in fact, the first definition of the word “failure” in Merriam-Webster dictionary is “to not succeed”),  new ways of working requires us to re-think what it means to fail and succeed.

As a result of digital, businesses now need to move faster than before to keep ahead of the curve. Companies now aim to get products to the market faster so that they are able to shorten the customer feedback loop and quickly improve on their product, as opposed to developing a perfect product over years and have it fail upon launch because of lack of customer testing and feedback. A good example is how Microsoft releases beta versions of its software, although there are many companies now who do it even faster.

In this context then, what constitutes success and failure? When you get a Minimum Viable Product out in the market, the aim is to learn from customers, which implies that you accept that there might/will be aspects of the product that can be improved. So when the product only performs to 80% of its intended purpose, is it a success or a failure? Or 70%? 60%? 50%?

If you launch a communications or marketing campaign, and it doesn’t perform as well at launch, but with rapid iteration, it steadily improves in performance. Was that a success or a failure?

With products, processes and people in permanent beta now, what does the phrase “fail fast, fail often” really mean?

Coming back to the discussion with my colleague, it got really heated, and I was then asked: “Have you failed before?”

That stopped me in my tracks, and that is what got me thinking about what failure means. I have failed miserably before, although those have been (thankfully) few.

But, have I not succeeded before? Yes, plenty of times. Many projects that I’ve run don’t go as expected, especially when your outcomes are reliant on the decisions of others (whether it be pitching to influencers, media, or in my current job working through a dotted line network across business units).  Does it mean that I fail when things don’t go as expected? It just means I constantly adjust until I get the result I need (or at least as close to) with the resources I have.

What if trumpeting this mantra of “fail fast, fail often” is actually inhibiting entrepreneurship and risk-taking? Which individual, investor or stakeholder wants to fail, and fail often at that? What if we reframed it as “Test fast, learn fast”?

Perhaps if we re-thought how we thought about success and failure, and re-thought how we talked about the elements of entrepreneurship, we might get better results.

As always, my thoughts are in permanent beta, so I welcome your views as well.

Getting to the Heart (and Brain) of the Matter

On By amykongsimiIn Marketing, People2 Comments
Jonathan Briggs introducing Professor Calvert at the beginning of the talk
Jonathan Briggs introducing Professor Calvert at the beginning of the talk

I attended a fascinating neuromarketing talk at Hyper Island by Professor Gemma Calvert, Director for Research & Development at the Institute on Asian Consumer Insight at the Nanyang Technological University.

Neuromarketing is the application of neuroscience to marketing to uncover consumers’ subconscious needs, preferences and biases.

Three things that I found most enlightening that triggered some thoughts relating to my work in Learning & Development:

  1. People don’t do what they say they do
  2. Speed of an emotional response trumps the speed of a rational one
  3. A congruent multi-sensory experience has significantly more impact than one-faceted experience

People don’t do what they say they do.

Some standard marketing research tools may not be effective because of three things we know about people:

  1. They don’t always tell the truth
  2. They don’t think how they feel
  3. They don’t do what they say

In the case of 1. it can happen, particularly in Asia, when we don’t want to embarrass or offend the other party, or admit to a flaw or an undesirable behavior, or it is an uncomfortable or taboo topic that we want to avoid discussing.

Many also don’t think of how they feel. Consumers who are asked about how they feel about – or why they prefer – a product may make up an answer to rationalize an emotionally-led decision. In an agency environment, where everything moves extremely fast, a lot of colleagues move on instinct, especially in people / HR matters. Part of my job requires a lot of understanding of how people work, and I often ask leaders to tell me about what they look for in new hires, why they approach situations in a particular way etc. And I have discovered that quite a few find it hard to articulate their feelings and rationale for their behavior, even though they are extremely successful in their business, because they’ve never consciously thought of it.

Finally, many don’t do what they say, because they make up an answer to rationalize an instinct- or emotion-led decision.

In the area of Talent, this brings to mind the various surveys we do to detect the ‘pulse’ of the workforce: training surveys, engagement surveys, you name it. Employees may be overthinking their responses, or responding because they think that’s they way they should respond. So how accurate is the data we collect, and subsequently how effective and impactful is our talent planning as a result?

During the talk, Professor Calvert also spoke about Implicit Reaction Time tests, which are tests conducted at a speed that bypasses the conscious brain. These can be mobile or web based and are scalable. What if we applied this to our staff engagement surveys to uncover what they really think about the company? I wonder if results would be significantly different.

Speed of an emotional response trumps the speed of a rational one

There are two brain systems that control our behavior. One is Unconscious Emotion, which is very fast, involuntary and associative. The other is Conscious Thinking, which is slow, considered, and rule following.

In managing people, particularly in difficult and conflict situations, facts are important. However, managers often neglect to address the emotion behind it. So they may have addressed the situation, but may not have solved the problem. The team member continues to be unhappy even if the solution is the right one. Knowing that emotion drives our decisions, and that we rationalize them, addressing the emotion might be as equally important as discussing the facts and next steps.

A congruent multi-sensory experience has significantly more impact than one-faceted experience

The brain is built to integrate information coming in from different senses. Receiving sensory information that are complimentary to each other can be significantly more powerful than receiving it only from one source.

An example: Pringles taste 15% fresher and crisper when high frequency sounds were boosted in real time. So the crispness of the packaging enhances perception of crispness and freshness of potato chips.

Extrapolating this to the workplace, perhaps we need to start paying attention to the employee experience. In many companies, systems are not integrated, or are not viewed holistically, so employees do not gain a consistent message or experience in the company. If a company prizes collaboration, is collaborative working integrated into the infrastructure, rewards, and even the way training workshops are run? If a company prizes innovation, how is it encouraged and rewarded? How is innovation reflected in the corporate policies and the business operations, and not just innovation only for its consumers products or services? If a company wants to increase its digital revenues, how should its IT infrastructure change to support it?

How would making these changes impact performance in the workplace?