Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

How to Create an Agile Process

Many organizations pride themselves on having predictable policies and procedures that drive performance and growth. However, given the rate of change in today's business world, sometimes being inflexible can be a problem rather than a solution. Having an agile process can help.

Agile processes are plans that involve advance planning and organization but also allow you to quickly change course if needed. To learn how business owners create agile processes in the real world, I consulted Mary Ellen Slayter, CEO of Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based B2B content marketing agency Rep Cap and Matt Weinberg, president of interactive digital agency Vector Media Group in New York City.

Why Use An Agile Process?

An agile process can be advantageous because it mandates a close consideration of your business goals, but can also be adjusted as you gain more information or as circumstances evolve.

 

“The agile framework forces owners to make decisions quickly and communicate frequently," says Slayter. “The emphasis on testing frees you from best practices so you can pursue the surprising insights that are unique to your business. In the end, the risk is actually lower because you're making fewer big bets."

It's also important to realize what agile is—and what it isn't.

“Just because you're agile doesn't mean you don't have process," Slayter points out. “Agile is not about flying by the seat of your pants—it's dynamically deciding how to deploy your resources to achieve your goals."

For the rest, check out the AMEX OpenForum.

Employee Experience is Not Just for Full-Timers

In the last few years, much emphasis has been placed on designing a strong employee experience that encourages talent activation, engagement, performance, and retention. However, all more organizations move toward experience design, most focus almost exclusively on a full-time, uninterrupted employee experience.

Most HR professionals recognize and support employee transitions such as maternity/paternity leave and FLMA or temporary leaves of absence. Some even encourage sabbaticals and phased retirement.  However, the word transition must be used loosely here, because in most cases, the employee in question just reassigns her work, leaves, and then just shows up again several months later (or, in the case of phased retirement, changes her role without fanfare or much acknowledgement).

If you really want your organization to derive value from these benefits, you must be strategic about designing an experience exclusively for every kind of transition situation or “career intermission.” Here are some questions to ask as you consider how to use each transition to strengthen your relationship with participating employees.

• Maternity/paternity leave: What projects is the employee looking to complete before this very personal event? At what place would she like to see her career when she departs? How can we keep her involved in a stress-free way while she’s off? What specific steps will we take to ensure she’s properly re-onboarded when she returns?
• FLMA/leaves of absence: How can we support him during this difficult time? What resources can we provide to help? How can we strengthen his commitment to the company when the crisis has passed? What specific steps will we take to ensure he’s properly re-onboarded when he returns?

For more where this came from, check out the SilkRoad blog.

Relocation May Soon Be a Thing of the Past

In a research paper, Understanding the Long-Run Decline in Interstate Migration, Greg Kaplan and Sam Schulhofer-Wohl of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis analyzed the secular decline in interstate migration in the United States between the early 90s and the early aughts. They found that while gross flows of people across states are about 10 times larger than net flows, they declined by around 50 percent over the study’s 20 year period.

The latest U.S. Census numbers support this decline. According to Richard Florida at CityLab, just slightly more than one in ten Americans (11.2 percent) moved between 2015 and 2016, almost half the 20.2 percent rate back in 1948, when the Census began tracking American mobility. “Mobility was once the cornerstone of the American Dream, but today Americans move less often than Canadians, and only a bit more than Finns or Danes,” he wrote.

Why Mobility Is Falling: The Research Speaks

It’s arguably easier to move out of state now than it was in the past, so why are fewer Americans doing so?  After looking at microdata on the distribution of earnings and occupations across space, the researchers assigned this fall in migration to a decline in the geographic specificity of occupations, together with an increase in workers’ ability, before moving, to learn about other locations and assess how much they will like living there through information technology and inexpensive travel.

In other words, you don’t necessarily have to relocate to Silicon Valley to work in software development, and if you were thinking about such a move, you might decide through online research that it would be dumb to trade a 10 percent salary increase for a 60 percent increase in living costs. So you stay put, whereas before the Internet you would have had less information available, made the move, and potentially regretted it.

In a related CityLab piece from a few years ago, Plumer speculated that today’s economy actually mandates fewer overall changes in jobs and careers, meaning opportunities to move would simply come up less often. And, he wrote, “in our increasingly specialized labor market, people increasingly sort into the places and jobs that best fit them far earlier in their careers. Those who want to be in finance head to New York while they’re still young, just as those who want to be in film head to L.A.” After a while, it becomes prohibitively expensive to leave that geography, so people stay.

Depending on your professions, a move across state lines could actually negatively impact your career. For example, lawyers and doctors are licensed at the state level and might not want to go through the trouble of getting the necessary credentials in a different state, even if the state in question pays better or is experiencing greater demand. Similarly, a high school teacher who moves out of state after working for many years loses both his seniority and his pension eligibility.

For the rest, check out 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.

Are You Wondering What Employees Are Really Thinking?

Gallup asked nearly 200,000 US employees their opinions on a variety of topics current transforming our workforces, including flextime, agile performance management, and matrixed teaming. Exactly how critical are these developments to weave into our cultures and establish concrete policies around today? The statistics speak for themselves.

Flextime

Gallup defined differentiating benefits and perks as those that a segment of organizations offer, those that most employees say they would change jobs to get, and those that correlate most highly with employee engagement and well-being. The survey respondents cited flextime, which allows employees to have some choice in the time of day they work, as the sole differentiating benefit. Fifty-one percent of employees say they would change jobs for this benefit, while 44 percent say their company offers it.

In conjunction with flextime, remote working is on the rise. In 2012, Gallup data showed that 39 percent of employees worked remotely in some capacity. In 2016, that number grew four percentage points to 43 percent.

Employees whose organization allows them to change their hours, schedules, and location of work as needed have higher levels of engagement and well-being than other employees. They are more likely to strongly agree that a manager who lets them set their own schedule cares about them as a person.

Agile Performance Management

According to the survey, the majority of US employees show up at their job every day without the guidance, incentives and support needed to perform at their best. Only a mere 21 percent strongly agrees that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.

Much of the criticism aimed at performance management focuses on the frequency and quality of performance feedback. Gallup found that only 20 percent of employees strongly agree they have had a conversation with their manager in the last six months about the steps they can take to reach their goals. Only 23 percent of employees strongly agree their manager provides meaningful feedback to them, and 26 percent of employees strongly agree the feedback they receive helps them do better work. Furthermore, only 21 percent of employees strongly agree they have performance metrics that are within their control.

Obviously, upping feedback frequency is an important component of making performance management more effective. But as these results indicate, employees also want to be fairly measured and evaluated and to have a say in their future.

For more from the Gallup survey, head over to 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.

Cross-Company Innovation Addresses the Changing Nature of Work

As a long-time partner of Staples and Xerox, I just traveled to New York City to spend National Small Business Week with the two organizations, learning how they’re helping small business customers and entrepreneurs be more productive with the new multi-function self-serve machines in Staples stores across the country. 

By 2030, more than half of American professionals will no longer go to an office every day.  Getting simple things done, like sending a package or printing a critical document, will not be as easy as making a few clicks and sauntering over to the mailroom. As millions of new small business owners and contract workforce pour into the workforce, they will find out exactly how difficult it is to run every aspect of a business themselves. I’ve been working with Staples and Xerox to ensure that the two businesses are ahead of this trend and ready to offer the assistance that busy professionals, operating out of a home office and via mobile devices, so desperately need.

According to Amy Lang, Vice President of Print Merchandising at Staples, 18 million customers came to Staples stores last year, specifically to use Business Center services like printing. “Sometimes people have time to plan and order online; sometimes they need a document within the hour; sometimes they need help; and sometimes they want to come in and leave quickly without having to talk to anyone,” she said. “Our customers need to do their jobs, which involve thinking and doing as opposed to printing.”

Xerox printers have long been a “staple” of every Staples store’s Business Center, in the past, Xerox would simply send new products to Staples stores for employees to plug in and for customers to use. But Staples realized the value of tapping Xerox in advance to develop a machine that would address the changing needs of its customers.

Here’s what’s fascinating: you don’t usually see two large companies coming together to innovate on a solution that doesn’t yet exist. But that’s exactly what happened. Staples and Xerox combined their understanding of the customer, with Xerox’s constantly improving technology, to transform the Business Center experience from the ground up. “The goal was to design the machine to be intuitive to use for anyone walking up to it for the first time,” said Renee Carter, Vice President of Mid-Products for Xerox.

When Staples and Xerox finished their creation, they sent 3,000 of the new devices to Staples stores. The new MFPs have an interface that looks like a tablet and allows customers to print or scan from the cloud, usb, mobile device, and email. They have bar code readers to enable coupons and credit card readers so that people can pay without going to the counter. The MFPs are also future-proofed, meaning they are pre-configured with additional apps and functions that Staples customers may well demand soon.

Not only are the MFPs fully upgraded, but they save customers a tremendous amount of time and help them achieve productivity and results normally reserved for corporate employees. And THIS is a change that is bound to benefit everyone as the nature of work continues to evolve.

Where France's Power Down Law Came From - And What It Means

The year was 1998. I had just graduated from college and was working as an entry-level account coordinator in a large PR agency in New York City. I worked hard, but my days ended at 6PM when I left the office. Within the next year, though, Ethernet access at home had become a reality. Suddenly, I was expected to be on call for my boss for any and all client needs. I was irate. I felt I did not make enough money for this. I had experienced the freedom of a solidly eight-hour workday, and I wanted that freedom back.

It would never happen. Over the next several years, diffuse working hours would become so pervasive that France – as a country – felt the need to strike back. In this post, we’ll talk about France’s brand new law limiting required employee communication outside of designated work hours. We’ll discuss the particulars, as well as whether or not the policy can be effectively enforced.

Introducing “The Right to Disconnect”

On the first of this year, France’s “right to disconnect” law went into effect. The law obliges organizations with more than 50 employees to initiate “switching off” negotiations with their workforces. The goal of the negotiations is for everyone to agree on employees’ rights to ignore work-related requests outside the boundaries of regular work hours. If employer and employees cannot come to a satisfactory compromise, the organization must publish a charter that explicitly defines employee rights with respect to out-of-hours communication.

The measure was introduced last year by France’s labor minister Myriam El Khomri. According to the Washington Post, El Khomri received the idea from a report by Bruno Mettling, a director general in charge of human resources at telecommunications behemoth Orange. Mettling explained in his report that a “right to disconnect” policy would benefit employers as much as their employees, whom, he said, are likely to suffer psychosocial risks from a ceaseless communication cycle.

Concern for Working Populace Prompted Law

 It’s not an empty claim. As reported in Le Monde and later in the Post, a recent study found than approximately 3.2 million French workers are at risk of “burning out,” defined as a combination of physical exhaustion and emotional anxiety.

According to an article in the Guardian, a study published by French research group Eleas showed that more than a third of French workers used their devices to do work out-of-hours every day. About 60 percent of workers were in favor of regulation to clarify their rights.

Another study out of the University of British Columbia found that participants who were assigned to check their email only three times a day were less stressed than those who could check their emails continuously. And Colorado State University found that even the anticipatory stress of expecting after-hours emails might have a negative effect on employee well-being.

Although France is known for its “official” 35-hour workweek, for many firms it’s in name only. Many French employees continue working remotely long after they leave for the day. In fact, now that France has a record-high unemployment rate of nearly 11 percent, the 35-hour workweek law has been called into question.

The “right to disconnect” law was part of a larger set of labor laws introduced in France last spring. The set was designed to combat some of the unintended negative consequences of the 35-hour workweek. One companion proposal, according to the Telegraph, would give companies the right to renegotiate longer hours and to pay less in overtime to employees who stay longer. Another proposal would make it easier for firms to hire and fire employees. The “right to disconnect” legislation was the only one of the proposed laws that did not generate widespread protests and strikes in France.

France is actually not the first nation to enact such a law. In 2014, Germany’s labor ministry passed legislation banning managers from calling or emailing their staff outside of work hours except in an emergency. You can immediately spot the loopholes in that one. What constitutes an emergency, especially when you have a Type-A boss?

Nevertheless, according to the BBC, the law prompted several German companies to reduce the burden of overwork. Car manufacturer Volkswagen blocked all emails to employees’ Blackberries after-hours, while competitor Daimler said it would delete email received by employees while they are on vacation.

For the rest of the piece, check out QuickBase's Fast Track blog.

The True Relationship Between Flexwork and Productivity

According to a recent survey conducted by WorldatWork and FlexJobs, over 80 percent of American organizations have implemented some type of flexible work arrangement. Shockingly, though, only three percent of those same organizations are measuring whether flextime actually makes people more productive and more likely to positively contribute to the bottom line.

This leads us to ask the critical question: “is flexwork worth it?”

Over the last three years, multiple pieces of research have offered clues to the answer. First, let’s look at the lay of the land. The WorldatWork/FlexJobs study provided a good framework for what flexwork actually looks like in American organizations today. First, 64 percent of companies described their flex programs as informal, with no written policy, and 44 percent of organizations said they do not feature or market flexible work options as an employee benefit.

Sixty-seven percent of respondents reported that managers can offer flexibility at their own discretion, and 41 percent of respondents said that access to flexible work is not widespread. The top three flexibility programs across all types of organizations are telework on an ad-hoc basis, flextime, and part-time schedules. So, flexwork comes in all shapes and sizes and is not an equal-opportunity benefit.

Some organizations are more amenable to flexwork than others, and some reasons may be how efficient and automated work processes are, if workers have the tools available to them to better collaborate remotely, and if processes are optimized or not.

For much more detail on this burning issue, check out the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

 

Essential Leadership for the Future of Work

At this year's SilkRoad Connections conference, keynote speaker Cheryl Cran challenged our attendees to upgrade their leadership operating systems to meet future work requirements. How can we change how we think, do, and share?

Twenty-First Century Changes and Challenges

The future of work will be about saying goodbye to blaming, bureaucracy, and bad leadership. Gen X, Gen Y, and Zoomers (baby boomers who refuse to age and retire) will work together to create an environment of shared leadership, freedom of expression, creativity, inspiration, and fun. And work will look very different. By 2020, 90 percent of employees will stay on the job three years or less, 50 percent will work remotely, and a majority will be independent contractors. Given these changes, the person who can embrace flexibility will have the most power.

Cran asked attendees about their top challenges related to HR and the future of work. Not surprisingly, they cited recruitment, retention, and skill development. We are fighting for talent globally and many twenty-first century skills such as creativity and agile leadership are sorely lacking. These skills are not natural and we have to teach them.

HR’s top three opportunities, according to Cran’s survey, are partnering, having a strategic advantage in the organization, and leading change. The biggest challenges, on the other hand, are transitioning to a fully digital andsocial mindset and mobile friendliness. In recent years, HR has made progress using dashboard analytics to get a real-time view of people and processes, and leveraging robotics to automate basic tasks, but there is still work to be done.

Cran pointed out the differences between the work environment of the past and that of the future. In the 1990s, for example, business was autocratic, centralized, task-focused, and based on the single perspective of the leader. But today and in the years to come, work will be shared, values-based, virtual, creative and revolutionary, and based on multiple perspectives.