Just Read the Wiki

by Elaine Lees and Elissa Gavette

As the labor market recovers, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports
younger workers will jump to the next one of the 10 to 14 jobs they will hold
between the ages of 18 to 38. Older workers will retire or go on to careers of
their own making, jobs will expand and contract, and workers will be disbursed
geographically and over time zones. Change will happen.

Today's talent will be global, mobile and will take their intangible assets
with them when they walk away. The risk of knowledge and critical skill loss
could lead to organizational incompetence if talent managers don't take steps
to ensure knowledge transfer.

The Problems With Knowledge Management

Current methods to capture or share workplace knowledge are usually focused on
on-boarding programs, mentoring and policy documentation. But the results are
often static, siloed, unorganized, hard to access or reluctantly updated. Enter
social network applications. They have permanently and profoundly changed the
way we communicate and now are on the brink of changing the way we work.

"With 350 million active users on Facebook, time spent on social sites
increasing three times in 2009 alone and one blog posted every six seconds, it
is entirely possible your employees know less about their co-workers than they
do about friends they haven't seen in 10 years," said Bryan LeBlanc, chief
financial officer at Jive Software.

The intimacy of connectivity in a social networked workplace can enable
knowledge sharing by helping employees find experts, put ideas up for debate
and encourage peers and direct reports to participate in innovation and
decision-making processes, all of which promote business speed and agility.

When it comes to learning - especially informal learning - employees are going
to seek out information from the source that offers it the fastest, and that
source may be a mobile device or a Web connection to someone across the globe.

To connect employees, organizations are rolling out new collaboration tools
anchored by document capture. Wikis, blogs, instant messaging and social
networking sites such as Facebook as well as software like SharePoint are
joining more traditional technologies, like e-mail, which Gartner predicts will
go by the wayside for at least 20 percent of workplaces as early as 2014.

On the face of it, knowledge management is relatively simple. Knowledge can be
exchanged through dialogue - connecting - or in written or recorded form -
collecting. Technology must not only capture documents; it should allow for the
social interaction that enhances adult learning. Interaction with experts,
blended learning and discussion forums, as well as references to knowledge
resources, seems to be the ideal mix of learning options.

We have more technology options at our fingertips today than we have ever
before. The newest offerings provided more flexibility in enterprise-sponsore d
social media, options that can augment data storage methods, and they are
evolving fast. But there are problems companies haven't addressed that precede
even the oldest knowledge-sharing technologies.

Connecting Issues: Rise of the Knowledge Market

Perhaps the most difficult issue is employees' natural resistance to working
collaboratively and building the trust associated with sharing. Who hasn't come
across the co-worker who guards, hides, miserly leaks or outright refuses to
share ideas with others? Or the co-workers who are convinced the company's
top-down collaboration strategy is a method to invade their privacy?

Instead of looking at it as just giving away knowledge or monitoring knowledge,
organizations need to create a knowledge market where the people who are best
at their jobs go to solve more complex problems, build up points and increase
their reputations. Yum Brands capitalized on this notion with its social
business software platform iCHING.

In response to users who said, "I just don't have time for iCHING," new tactics
were developed, such as the biweekly e-publication "Top 5 in Five," which
highlights the top five hits on some of the hottest knowledge sharing and
collaboration happening in iCHING. These can be accessed and reviewed in
minutes. Other companies have created participation in their knowledge markets
by incorporating voting mechanisms - thumbs up or thumbs down - or content
download counters, which provide pride of ownership and gratification for
content authors.

Content Issues: Who Needs That Info?

Another problem is that people learn and share knowledge differently. Companies
have multi-generation populations from which they must extract and share
knowledge.

Most social networking takes place immediately. Even experts do not always know
what they know until they are asked, so question-and- answer capabilities are
essential. While this exchange can be captured and filed somewhere, it doesn't
explain when or how to use it for the next user. Real knowledge transfer
happens with a combination of content and context. Content needs to be tied to
an expert, a job function or a department. The latest collaboration software
tools are still grappling with this issue.

The unmanaged use of collaboration tools also can work against knowledge
sharing. When it's good, these tools are collaborative, easy to share and real
time, all of which encourage engagement. When it is bad, it's fragmented.

Currently, Web 2.0 tools tend to be highly distributed in their deployment. Of
the organizations trying to establish collaboration strategies, many are using
wiki-based tools. However, over time, they find wikis are too unstructured for
groups that want to manage files, tasks and team discussions. Some systems try
to blend wikis with other extranet tools, such as file libraries, project
spaces and discussions, but this makes the tools less user friendly, and
there's still the disbursement issue.

IT departments are often caught in the crossfire between the push and pull of
the 2.0 world. If they cater to users who demand collaboration but lack the
internal budgets or knowledge of an overarching social media strategy, they
will recommend using tools outside the enterprise. In doing so, they can run
afoul of corporate marketing, governance and knowledge management intentions.

Talent leaders may find allowing a blend of formal and informal collaborative
workspaces to be an effective strategy. In this scenario, project teams can
work informally while participating in work tasks using less formal social
networks. However, once projects are completed, records and workflows are
uploaded, as are best practices and learning, into a formal, permanent
environment. This requires dedicated manpower, discipline and a culture that
reinforces such practices.

Risk vs. Benefit: A Leap of Faith

Enterprise content management and collaboration can clash as companies try to
strike a balance between control, innovation and the appropriate level of
investments; however, the potential for benefits is helping early adopters find
ways to make it happen.

Webtrends was one of the founders of the Web analytics industry in 1993. Yet,
even this industry pioneer struggled to use this technology internally. Bruce
Kenny, vice president of engineering and hosted operations for Webtrends, said
that leaping into social media on the workforce side of the company wasn't an
easy decision for his executive peers. There was deep unease as they discussed
product confidentiality, brand image and productivity issues. When Kenny
pitched internal collaboration software with features such as blogs, tags,
videos, polls and status updates as a pilot for his group, he knew it was a
risk he would shoulder alone, and if it went badly, it would be "another
engineering initiative gone awry."

Kenny said now he can't imagine working without it. "We still don't have a
formal ROI, but I can tell you we are doing our releases early; there are no
longer walls in knowledge between engineering and sales," he said. "In the two
years we've been using this approach, our agility and speed to make decisions
or adjustments is the fastest I've seen in my career in a tech company. This is
truly a competitive advantage for us."

He said just as it's unnecessary to do an ROI analysis to confirm why an
organization needs a firewall or anti-virus software, in the future,
collaboration software will occupy a similar place in companies.

Strategic Preparation or Organic Development

Companies that launch systems integrating social and formal content management
are not just launching new pieces of technology. Technology is the enabler, not
the solution, and success is dependent on high- and low-tech elements.

As with all pioneering efforts, there are divergent opinions on how to get
there. Some argue that there must be a facilitated process where someone in the
organization defines and prioritizes harvest-worthy topics using the company's
key business objectives to guide those decisions. Facilitated discussions must
be hosted so that knowledge and wisdom is articulated, documented and
synthesized. Ultimately, communication tools are developed to transfer and
initiate reuse of captured information. Others, like Intel's social media
strategist Kelly Ripley Feller, says a grass-roots effort is best, and top-down
approaches are not nearly as effective.

Whether knowledge transfer processes develop organically or via a leadership
directive, it is a bit late to start thinking about capturing knowledge when
employees announce they are leaving. Why not shift with the times and develop a
proactive approach? Talent leaders will need to take responsibility and
accountability if their organizations are serious about adding knowledge
transfer to succession planning efforts. The tools are imperfect, but they are
getting better, and certainly prevention and preparation are better than the
alternative.

Snaptu: Tech Weekly: Wikimedia

This week as the hike in VAT bites into your tech purchases, we look at the economics of technology.

Aleks Krotoski speaks to the head of Wikimedia, Sue Gardener, about how the world's free encyclopedia makes cash, and what effect their goal of…

Click here to read the full story

--
This email was sent to you from Snaptu mobile application.

Snaptu: The best of the savings bonds

New products give top rates to those willing to tie up their cash

A "best-buy" fixed-rate savings bond paying an impressive 4.75% was launched yesterday by Coventry Building Society. However, you need to be happy to tie up your money for a few…

Click here to read the full story

--
This email was sent to you from Snaptu mobile application.

Snaptu: Bank bonuses set to be linked to customer satisfaction

Banking industry seeks new ways to pay senior executives

Banks are embarking on a radical overhaul of the way they pay their senior executives by considering how they can link their bonuses to the way they treat customers and build up capital.

The…

Click here to read the full story

--
This email was sent to you from Snaptu mobile application.

Turning Around HR

by Michael A. Warech

Turnaround situations offer a great opportunity for HR leaders to significantly
impact the organization. They also offer HR executives a great opportunity to
restructure their own function to create thoughtful and aligned human-capital
strategy, and efficient and effective programming and service delivery.

Many well-intentioned CEOs subscribe to the notion that human-capital-
management activities in turnaround situations are adequately handled by finance
staff or business leaders, or believe that these issues, focused primarily on
compliance, should be managed by in-house employment attorneys.

Quickly finding cash and restructuring business operations are undoubtedly
complicated. However, managing the intricacies associated with layoffs,
reorganizations, communications, while motivating employees to do more with
less, preserving productivity and, simultaneously taking to a new strategy is
equally challenging.

One of the most classic of missteps on the part of those in charge is that, when
staring into the abyss of cost reduction, solid human-capital strategy and
related investments are reduced to discretionary items.

Ironically, such short-sighted thinking actually slows down a company's
transition toward organizational solvency. While some business leaders may sneer
about the importance of HR, years of sound management and organizational
research convincingly demonstrates that much of a company's success hinges on
how well it manages change and leverages its human capital.

Turnaround represent a unique opportunity for HR to jump in and flex its
considerable muscle. First, HR can support senior leadership's immediate efforts
to quickly find cash, stabilize the enterprise and begin moving toward solvency.

While senior leadership is focused largely on detailed financial reviews and
negotiations with banks, equity holders and other key stakeholders, HR should be
focused on pressing people-related actions and consequences.

Formulating strategies, plans and processes around the items highlighted below
is a great way for HR to establish credibility early on as a key contributor to
organizational success. Moreover, some of the necessary human-capital- strategy
work directed at the turnaround's most immediate needs can be leveraged for
potential broader HR transformation work to be discussed below.

Contributions to the Turnaround

Here are 12 ways HR leaders can substantively contribute in the early stages of
a turnaround:

1. Provide insight on assembling the 'turnaround team'; ensure representation
from HR and high-performing employees.

2. Help senior leadership determine the business' existing core assets,
including talent and processes that define the brand and provide competitive
advantage; determine future core assets, including processes, capability and
talent essential for mid- and long-term success.

3. Develop and equip management with a robust communication and
change-management plan, including strategic objectives, identified mediums,
change-agent roles, messaging and collateral, schedules, measures of uptake,
etc.

4. Explore areas for saving cash, including eliminating nonessential meetings,
programs and events.

5. Review talent information to ensure meaningful headcount reductions; push for
targeted cuts to eliminate weaker performers and those in non-core areas.

6. Develop a plan and a validated process to identify, select and retain
high-performing and critical talent.

7. Design, develop and present key-employee retention plans/packages to lock in
critical talent.

8. Ensure that survivors' workloads are monitored and their efforts don't go
unappreciated; identify useful short-term reward-and-recognit ion strategies.

9. Engage employees to ensure workforce capacity (sales, service, productivity)
; articulate and reinforce the company's new 'employee experience brand.'

10. Assist in the redesign of organizational structures impacting roles,
responsibilities, spans of control and reporting relationships.

11. Coach senior leadership and management on tactics for effective 'turnaround
leadership' (e.g., developing/maintain ing trust; clarifying and reinforcing the
change vision; establishing a sense of urgency; celebrating short-term wins;
setting a challenging pace; maintaining focus and minimizing competing
distractions; rewarding change agents).

12. Ensure that the broader HR community is well-versed in the talking points of
the turnaround.

In addition to adding value on the most immediate needs, a turnaround presents
HR with a second opportunity - to begin substantively transforming itself in
terms of strategy, programming and service delivery to ensure alignment with the
long-term direction of the renewed company.

The soundest approach to accelerating and completing a successful turnaround is
one that engages employees and leverages its human-capital strategy, programming
and service-delivery systems. For company leadership in the midst of a
turnaround, it should be noted that the chance of success increases to the
extent that some level of corresponding HR transformation is taking place.

Specifically, the human-capital function should be transformed with an eye
toward successfully ushering in the emerging reorganized entity and contributing
to its sustained growth. For corporate leadership, this represents a unique time
for deliberate thought and revitalization, not random cutbacks and wholesale
eliminations of human-capital programs.

Senior leadership will need a strong HR partner to promote the most effective
deployment of the organization' s human-capital resources moving forward. Some
of these people-related activities will include engaging employees to achieve
reworked organizational business objectives; actively promoting effective
communication and change-management programs; redesigning jobs
and organizations; developing strategic-workforce -planning solutions; and
redesigning talent management and total-rewards systems that enable employees to
reach their full potential in the renewed company.

To increase the likelihood that HR transformation positively contributes to a
company's turnaround, senior leadership must communicate a clear and compelling
vision of where the company is heading, its new business strategy and what
people need to do to achieve the new objectives.

Once the business strategy and objectives have been articulated, HR can map out
a supporting human-capital strategy. This human capital strategy will likely
include objectives related to areas such as workforce planning, recruitment,
talent development, employee engagement, cultural transformation and adoption of
new competencies.

Next, HR must align its programs, policies, and platforms with the newly minted
set of human-capital strategic imperatives. This may require revamping or
complete jettisoning of existing programs and/or the creation of new ones. The
key is to deliver human-capital programming that has a positive impact on the
company's bottom-line. Importantly, human-capital analytics should encompass a
set of meaningful measures, derived from the human-capital programming, to
ensure that these efforts are having the desired impact.

Finally, no HR transformation is complete without some reworking of the service
delivery model. HR needs to consider such issues as HR organization design
models (e.g.,centers of excellence, shared services, business partners), process
redesign, HR competency levels, leveraging of technology, vendor
management/outsourc ing and manager-employee self-service, all in pursuit of
optimizing the delivery of the revamped human-capital programming.

Planning for a Transformation of HR

Here are a number of questions HR can ask as it contemplates its transformation
as part of the turnaround.

Strategic questions:

1. Are we focused on what the new company needs to succeed?

2. Do we have the appropriate talent now and are we ready to compete in the
future?

3. Do we have the optimal 'employee-experienc e brand' to retain and attract the
necessary talent?

4. Is HR delivering the appropriate programs to help the new company achieve its
strategic business objectives?

Programmatic questions:

1. Are we able to recognize and reward the right talent in the appropriate way?

2. Do we have appropriate balance between program cost and effectiveness?

3. Do our human-capital programs provide a coherent 'employee-experienc e
brand?'

Operational questions:

1. Is our service-delivery model designed to support the new company?

2. Do our processes achieve best-practice standards in terms of efficiency and
effectiveness?

3. Are we effectively leveraging technology?

Even with thoughtful strategizing and action on the part of senior leadership,
recovery will take place incrementally and without blaring trumpets or a host of
singing angels signalling its arrival. A transformed HR function will most
certainly play a critical role in the successful emergence of the renewed
enterprise.However, this will take time as well as unwavering senior-leadership
supports and deft change-management skills.

In the end, any turnaround situation presents HR with a unique opportunity to
jump in and become the strategic business partner that senior leadership
urgently needs. While these situations are messy, those in HR who get out in
front of and successfully navigate these waters will have a chance to create a
function that can facilitate the recovery of a distressed company and put it on
a solid path of sustained growth. HR can accomplish this through thoughtful and
aligned human-capital strategy, and efficient and effective programming and
service delivery.