Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

When Considering Employee Experience, Don't Forget About Culture

I recently presented a webinar, Employee as Consumer: Building a Differentiated Experience Through the Lifecycle, with HR Daily Advisor and SilkRoad.  We talked about the consumerization of HR, the creation of a meaningful employee experience throughout the lifecycle, and how design thinking, talent activation, and employer branding play into it.

At the end of the session, Jennifer asked: How do you create an experience that’s meaningful and impactful for different cultures? This is an excellent question, and both global and non-global organizations are becoming more interconnected with every passing year. But according to recent McKinsey research, only half of executives in global companies think they are effective at tailoring candidate and employee communications for different geographies.

The first step, of course, is to recognize that you can’t offer a one-size-fits-all experience to candidates and employees across the globe, even ones who are in the same demographic or perform the same role. You should seek to understand even the most subtle factors that drive engagement and motivation in other cultures. For instance, consulting firm Seven Step used Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory to tease out country-specific essentials. These include:

• China: This culture views titles within the workplace as extremely important. Given this focus on status, companies should integrate distinctions such as awards and competitive rankings in their experiences. In China, individualism is low and language is viewed as a unifying agent. Flexibility with language translation enhances the experience while positioning the organization as a true member of the community.

• Central Europe: This culture is more risk-averse and ambiguity is viewed negatively. Job seekers and employees prefer to weigh the facts of an opportunity rather than taking a chance. Experiences in Central Europe should be content heavy, focusing on the explicit details of roles and responsibilities.

• Latin America: This collectivist culture encourages one to think of the group before himself. Organizations should ensure that experiences incorporate the use of “we” instead of a company name. Also, Latin Americans think of their careers within the context of their industry, not their company. Therefore, experiences should portray how every role is aligns with larger industry goals and achievements.

For more on Jennifer's question, check out the SilkRoad blog.

How Connectional Intelligence Drives Innovation

The brainchild of leading business strategists and researchers Erica Dhawan and Saj-Nicole Joni, Connectional Intelligence (CxQ) was coined in 2015 in their book: Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence.

CxQ is a concept that combines traditional and emotional intelligence with the power of connection (via social media, mobile devices and networks). With it people can “quickly, efficiently and creatively enlist supporters, drive innovation, develop strategies and implement solutions to big problems”.  

One example of CxQ in action can be found at the American Transplant Foundation (ATF). It uses an ecosystem of business-built web-based applications to coordinate programs and quickly launch initiatives that bring different communities together—from donors and patients to service providers and community partners. The ATF’s growing Mentorship Program is one such initiative. It matches those in need with past recipients who help them navigate the legal, medical, and emotional complexities of receiving a transplant.  

“It’s wonderful when we can connect the dots and give people a second chance at life,” says Anastasia Darwish, the Executive Director of the American Transplant Foundation.

How You Can Boost Your CxQ to Help You and Your Company Thrive

Find yourself among the different types of individuals highlighted below and learn how you can your raise you CxQ quotient to drive greater success for yourself and your organization.

Dreamers—Dreamers are the heart center of the connectional intelligence universe. They are always engaging with the future, and imagining the possibilities and what might be next. If you’re a Dreamer, increase your CxQ by sharing your ideas with different communities and networks. Keep putting yourself in places where you can see life through their eyes.

Adventurers—Adventurers are people who seek new experiences, uncharted territory and novel undertakings. They reject labels, boxes or constraints of any kind, and accept risk as part of the adventure. Use your mastered skills to get out of the box and up your CxQ. Start with what you know well and think about how you can use it to build and test new ideas.

Seekers—Seekers are people who ask the big questions that move thoughts to action. Considering all options before acting, they pursue knowledge and cultivate the insight to improve life for themselves and others. If you are seeker striving for greater CxQ, keep asking the question: “what if the accepted wisdom/same old assumptions are not true?

Inspired Leaders—Inspired leaders help team members build an architecture to achieve ambitious goals and use their influence to make a difference in people’s lives. They take risks and assume responsibility for the group’s risks. Raise your CxQ by breaking or reversing rules or processes that hold progress back. Encourage collaboration between teams and communities. Promote an environment that fails forward and fast, knowing that taking chances and learning lessons is the path to agility, innovation, and success.

Advocates—Advocates are motivated to act on behalf of others. Advocates are automatically engaged when they see a way to make a difference and bring about change. As an advocate, what issue would you like to see resolved? Elevate your CxQ by picking a cause that matters to you and focus on what it means to the people you want to serve.

For more from Erica and Saj-nicole, head over to the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Does Flexwork Decrease Productivity?

In the interest of productivity, some organizations have a predetermined scheduling policy, requiring that tasks be completed in a particular order. For example, we’ve talked about citizen development a lot on the Fast Track, and low code application development may indeed be one of those situations where a specific, sequential process has been implemented.

But in today’s work environment, professionals increasingly have more freedom over their time. Pursuing the noble goal of loosening their reins, employers are allowing their people to follow a prescribed schedule or choose to deviate, completing tasks in a different order at their own discretion.

Thanks to technology advances and the rise of virtual work, it’s easier than ever for employers to grant this sort of independence, and there’s no doubt that workers value it. But a new study from Harvard Business School found that, unfortunately, deviating from an organization’s prescribed task schedule tends to erode productivity – even among the most experienced workers.

In an article soon to be published in the Management Science Journal, researchers Ibanez, Clark, Huckman and Staats detailed their study, which asked about the drivers leading workers to deviate from employer’s task scheduling policy, and about the performance implications of doing so.

Using data from 2.4 million diagnoses derived from a large outsourced radiological services firm that staffed doctors whose jobs involved sequentially reading and diagnosing X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, and ultrasounds, the researchers found that doctors prioritize similar tasks and those tasks they expect to complete faster. But do these strategies impact their productivity?

For more on this fascinating issue, check out the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

How to Prevent Organizational Drag

In their new book, TIME | TALENT | ENERGY: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team’s Productive Power, Bain & Company partner Michael Mankins and his co-author Eric Garton identify the specific causes of organizational drag – otherwise known as the collection of institutional factors that slow things down, decrease output and performance, and drain people’s energy.

The book claims that the average company loses more than 25 percent of its productive power to organizational drag. This is often an inevitable complication of companies getting larger and instituting more processes and procedures. According to Harvard Business Review, organizational drag costs the economy more than $3 trillion each year in lost output.

As Mankins told writer Stephanie Vozza at Fast Company, the most common processes relate to expense management. “At most companies, there are spending limits and audits, and employees are tracked,” he says. “At Netflix, however, there is no expense policy. The only policy is, ‘Act in the best interest of Netflix.’ The company is telling employees, ‘We assume you are not here to rip off the company, and we’re not going to put in place processes that consume human capital, waste time, and zap energy.’ They tell employees to assume their best judgment, and they can be more productive if they’re not held back.”

This, Mankins claims, is why companies like Netflix are 40 percent more productive and have profit margins that are 30 to 50 percent higher than industry averages. Apparently, most organizations start off with roughly the same number of high performers, but organizations with less drag produce far more every day – and the difference compounds every year.

One secret of companies with less organizational drag involves putting a majority of star performers on mission-critical projects that are essential to the business. Another relates to the development of inspiring leaders. As Mankins says in the Fast Company piece, Dell recognized the productivity difference between inspired and average teams. “Sales teams led by an inspiring leader are 6 percent more productive than those that have an average leader. If you extrapolate that 6 percent it accounts for an extra $1 billion in annual revenue.”

For more on organizational drag, check out the full post on the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Agile Businesses Are Successful Businesses

Everyone has heard the fable about the tortoise and the hare. Conventional wisdom says that slow and steady wins the race. A strategy may not be perfect, but if one executes it patiently and consistently, it may outperform better initiatives that don’t get the benefit of time.

However, in today’s rapidly changing business world, an agile business is a successful business. So how do you reconcile these two truths? How do you know when the best thing for the project  is to change the plan, and how can you execute and communicate changes without destroying team motivation and momentum?

Business Agility Insight #1: Create and Challenge Assumptions

Any major strategic initiative should involve the upfront establishment of goals, milestones, and success metrics. But, as Tim Berry pointed out in his article for the Small Business Administration website, assumptions should also be considered in your initial planning. “Tracking your results, you want to be able to compare them to what you had planned or expected to see,” he said.

“Get your team members together once a month to review your plan and its results. “Take a hard look at your underlying assumptions and assess whether or not they’ve changed. If they have, there’s no virtue whatsoever in sticking to the plan you built on top of them.”

Berry suggested you look at the difference between what you planned and what actually happened. Some results will be better than planned, and some will be worse. “For each key difference you discover, and all of them combined, use your best judgment to determine whether the differences were caused by false expectations or unexpected good or bad execution.”

“Also, consider external and internal factors that may have influenced the results. Maybe your expectations were too conservative, or too optimistic. In that case, you revise your plan,” he said.

Common sense, remarked Berry, is critical.  Although the project may be close to your heart, you want to remain pragmatic: for example, asking yourself if you were you wrong about the whole thing, or just about the timing? You also want to consider if something else has occurred in the market to change your assumptions.

In any case, said Berry, maybe you discover that you and your team have executed better than expected, or results were better than expected. “Hooray. Stick to the plan. It’s working,” he advised. “And maybe you discover that your execution was wrong, poor, or flawed. If that’s the case, change the plan.”

For more business agility insights, check out the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Better Office Seating Arrangements Increase Productivity

In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, Jason Corsello and Dylan Minor described the results of a new study, which suggested that who an employee sits next to affects how they perform — and that grouping the right types of coworkers together can improve productivity and work quality.

The study was built upon the concept of “spatial management,” or the pursuit of how to best physically locate workers within an organization. Cornerstone analyzed the data of more than 2,000 employees over a two-year period provided by a large technology company with locations in the U.S. and Europe. This data included worker performance on three key metrics: productivity, or the average length of time it took a worker to complete a task; effectiveness, or the average daily rate at which a worker needed to refer a task to a different worker to solve; and quality, or the client’s satisfaction with the task.

For each employee on each of these three metrics, the researchers calculated what they called “spillover,” or a measure of the performance of the employee’s surrounding peers. The HBR article used this example: assume a worker has three coworkers: one sits next to her, one sits 25 feet away, and another sits 50 feet away. The researchers looked at the performance of the three coworkers along with their distance from the worker, and through data modeling measured the average spillover of co-worker performance on the worker.

They also divided employees into three types of workers: productive, generalist, and quality. Productive workers are very productive but lack in quality, while quality workers produce superior quality but lack in productivity. Generalists are average on both dimensions.

Birds of a Feather Shouldn’t Flock Together

The results indicated that neighbors have a significant impact on an employee’s performance, and it can be either positive or negative. So naturally, the study asked the question: what types of workers should be seated together? The results confirmed that matching productive and quality workers together and matching generalists separately generates up to 15 percent of increased organizational performance.

However, seating two productive workers together did not significantly increase their productivity — nor did placing quality workers together increase their work quality. And since generalists were average in both categories, they were less affected by spillover effects from either side. So, in a nutshell, symbiotic relationships are created from pairing those with opposite strengths. It turns out that those strong on one dimension are not very affected by spillover on that dimension. But, they are very sensitive to spillover on their weak dimension.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

When Designing an Employee Experience, Are You Factoring in Culture?

I recently presented a webinar, Employee as Consumer: Building a Differentiated Experience Through the Lifecycle, with SilkRoad and HR Daily Advisor.  We talked about the consumerization of HR, the creation of a meaningful employee experience throughout the lifecycle, and how design thinking, talent activation, and employer branding play into it.

At the end of the session, Jennifer asked: How do you create an experience that’s meaningful and impactful for different cultures? This is an excellent question, and both global and non-global organizations are becoming more interconnected with every passing year. But according to recent McKinsey research, only half of executives in global companies think they are effective at tailoring candidate and employee communications for different geographies.

The first step, of course, is to recognize that you can’t offer a one-size-fits-all experience to candidates and employees across the globe, even ones who are in the same demographic or perform the same role. You should seek to understand even the most subtle factors that drive engagement and motivation in other cultures. For instance, consulting firm Seven Step used Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory to tease out country-specific essentials. These include:

• China: This culture views titles within the workplace as extremely important. Given this focus on status, companies should integrate distinctions such as awards and competitive rankings in their experiences. In China, individualism is low and language is viewed as a unifying agent. Flexibility with language translation enhances the experience while positioning the organization as a true member of the community.

• Central Europe: This culture is more risk-averse and ambiguity is viewed negatively. Job seekers and employees prefer to weigh the facts of an opportunity rather than taking a chance. Experiences in Central Europe should be content heavy, focusing on the explicit details of roles and responsibilities.

For more on Jennifer's question, head over to the SilkRoad blog.

Open Offices: The Jury Has Returned

I’ve never liked open offices. Never. I remember the first time my CEO announced that we’d all be giving up our private offices. A part of me felt like I was about to lose my home. The next step? Goodbye cubicles. Now, we all sat together like one big, happy family, and any illusion that you could have a confidential conversation or crash on a deadline without interruption was shattered. I wonder sometimes if the open office trend was partially responsible for my decision to strike out on my own. Growing up, I’d never shared a bedroom with a sibling, and I couldn’t get used to sharing now.

My last open office experience was several years ago, and the trend hasn’t slowed down any. According to the International Facility Management Association in a piece in the Washington Post, about 70 percent of U.S. offices have no or low partitions. As with many trends, Silicon Valley has led this charge. Google, Yahoo, and eBay have had open offices for years, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg even hired famed architect Frank Gehry to design the largest open floor plan in the world for 3,000 of his engineers.

Open Offices Have Been Studied in Earnest

It’s not unusual for companies in more traditional companies to follow what the tech giants are doing, even if it doesn’t appear to make sense. But at some point, you hope reason will win out. The academic community and the media have certainly done their best. Lindsey Kaufman, the author of the Post piece, cited a  2013 study, which found that many workers in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead to poorer work performance. About 50 percent of the survey respondents housed in open offices were perturbed by the lack of sound privacy, and more than 30 percent by the lack of visual privacy.

Do open offices have any benefits? Proponents often talk up how easy it is to interact with colleagues in any open office. This study showed the opposite to be true. Professionals with private offices were actually the least likely to identify their ability to communicate with colleagues as an issue.

Fine, that’s just one study. But then, Maria Konnikova, author of the book Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, published a sort of expose on the open office in the New Yorker. She cited the following results:

Open Office Literature Review by Matthew Davis

More than 100 independent studies showed that open offices have their advantages. Employees apparently feel more in tune with the organization, with a better grip on the company’s vision and values, when they work in an open office. Open offices were also believed to be more innovative. However, Davis’ review also illustrated that open offices caused productivity, attention, and job satisfaction declines. Employees experienced poorer concentration and motivation and greater stress than their counterparts in standard office environments.

Large Scale Open Office Research by David Craig 

At global consultancy DEGW in Montreal, professor David Craig surveyed 38,000 professionals and found that more frequent interruptions had a negative impact on productivity. If the employee was more senior, this effect was worse. Craig also found that a sense of privacy and control increase individual performance, whereas open offices remove that control and lead to feelings of helplessness.

Danish Study on Open Offices and Health by Jan Pejtersen

In their study of 2,400 professionals, Pejtersen and his colleagues found that as the number of people working in a single room increased, the number of employees who took sick leave increased as well. Workers in two-person offices took an average of 50 percent more sick leave than those in single offices, while those who worked in totally open offices took an average of 62 percent more.

Cornell Noise Study by Evans and Johnson

According to Evans and Johnson’s research, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine – otherwise known as adrenaline. They also found that people in noisy office environments made fewer ergonomic adjustments than they would in private, causing greater physical discomfort. Finally, open office subjects also solved fewer create puzzles than those working in a quiet, closed environment.

What about standing desks? To find out more about the legitimacy of this trend, visit the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

What Does Digital Transformation Mean to You?

Digital transformation is a transformation because it affects everyone within the organization from the c-suite on down. But at this point in time, is it more of a theory – something that organizations aspire to – or a reality? A group of recent studies provide insight into the degree to which non-IT employees desire and are helping to move the needle.

Age Discrepancies Are Real

To start, Capgemini Consulting conducted a 2016 joint research study with the MIT Center for Digital Business. The partners interviewed over 150 executives across a broad range of industry sectors and geographies. Not surprisingly, the research found that younger workers today have greater familiarity with digital tools and ways of working than their more tenured counterparts.

The Capgemini consulting executives highlighted a growing gap between older and younger workers in their expectations and work habits around technology. Where older employees face a learning curve, millennial workers are often underwhelmed by the digital tools available to them.

One executive commented: “these people coming into the company, mid 20s, late 20s, even early 30s, they do everything electronically.  They say:  ‘Come on, I know the company is over 100 years old, but our information and IT capabilities don’t have to match the age of the company!’”

Along the same lines, according to the Dell Future Workforce Study, which was conducted in 2016 by Penn Schoen Berland, nearly half of American millennials (42 percent) said they’d likely quit a job if workplace tech didn’t meet their standards – nearly 4X as many as baby boomers (14 percent). Eighty-one percent of millennials reported the technology available influences their decision to take a new position compared to 53 percent of baby boomers.

Sixty-two percent of millennials said remote teams and better communication technology will make face to face communication obsolete compared to 48 percent of Gen X-ers and 32 percent of baby boomers. And nearly 3 in 4 American millennials (72 percent) said it’s likely they will be working in a smart office using the Internet of Things in the next five years – compared to 52 percent of Gen X-ers and 35 percent of baby boomers. Finally, 68 percent of millennial workers anticipated using AR/VR products in their professional life (compared to 55 percent of Gen X-ers and 42 percent of baby boomers), and 70 percent of millennial workers agreed that their jobs could be made easier with the assistance of AI (compared to 49 percent of Gen X-ers and 34 percent of baby boomers).

Adoption Remains A Barrier

Some of the executives Capgemini Consulting and MIT interviewed reported success in using platforms such as enterprise social networks or collaboration tools, but others highlighted challenges. Given the investment made in these systems, lack of adoption is a serious concern. One respondent stated: “We’ve spent an awful lot of money on technology, but I still see people working in the old way.”

On the user side, executives reported a lack of understanding and unclear business value as major issues. A leader in the food service industry explained: “I think people are apprehensive about new technologies. They don’t understand them and there is a fear of the unknown. They don’t fully understand how they’re going to drive business outcomes.”

Many of Capgemini’s respondents recognized that new digital tools, automation of business processes, and an increasing role of data in decision-making can increase transparency in an organization. But, as conversations move online and information is more freely available, they also witnessed resistance from management employees.

Managers may view these trends as a threat to their autonomy or influence. Explaining sales managers’ reactions to the introduction of a real-time reporting platform, one Capgemini executive commented: “That kind of transparency, they’re not used to, so there’s an initial push back.”

For the rest of the post, head over to the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Disruption 101: How to Ignite Change in Your Company

As a general rule, human beings fear change and will often fight to maintain the status quo. If there are individuals within your organization who are either not interested or downright hostile toward a focus on disruptive scenarios, there are several steps you can take to bring them into the fold.

Open a dialogue

Before you attempt to persuade colleagues to jump right into a specific initiative, provide a safe space to discuss disruption in general. Organizational change consultant David Hofstetter suggested posing questions such as: Where and how could disruption impact your business? How will your skills and those of your employees be impacted? Are you embracing change, shying away from it, or ignoring it? What are your competitors doing that you are not? What the newest trends in your industry?

Attend forward-thinking industry events

The sessions and conversations you and your colleagues will have at conferences centered on innovation will take your thinking to another level. Encourage your colleagues and employees to see for themselves what disruption means and what it can do for growth and profit. Appropriate events may vary by industry, but some good ones are Tech Crunch Disrupt, World Business Forum, and Fortune Growth Summit.

Hire an outsider

Sometimes, an internal person can repeat the same message dozens of times, but no one really hears it until it comes from the mouth of an external consultant who is perceived as an expert. When it comes to embracing disruption, you might make greater headway by bringing on a single or team of advisers who can offer an objective picture of your organization’s status compared to the larger market, and can provide direction and next steps.

Conduct periodic market disruptor analyses

Often, disruptive innovations (<<interview with Guy Kawasaki) are considered far away, irrelevant, and optional. There is no better way to make a case to in-denial executives than to regularly monitor and explain how disruptive competitors are threatening your business TODAY. “As the barriers to entry in businesses get lower and easier, competitors and new ways of doing things will appear fast and more often,” said Hofstetter.

Change your tone to one of urgency

As I mentioned before, human beings prefer to support existing ways of doing things. For this reason, companies tend to be conservative, reactive, and focused on immediate business fires rather than the ones that threaten to burn from miles away. Use the data from your market disruptor analyses to connect the dots for your leaders – why is disruptive change something that requires attention this instant? Speaking in terms of lost profit or customers is more likely to resonate with some leaders than “we should really try this new thing.”

Fight the temptation to be insular

While being laser focused on your own daily operations is more comfortable, putting on blinders is dangerous in a business world that changes rapidly. Therefore, you should make sure that your company has a pipeline to receive guidance from a variety of sources. For instance, an advisory council that taps people in different roles in different fields will provide a fresh perspective that is impossible to get otherwise. When it comes to understanding where your market is going, often you can take cues from other industries that are a year or two ahead of yours.

For more where this came from, check out the QuickBase Fast Track blog.