0  

Overdoing HR Analytics – Is Automation A Boon or Bust?

No doubt, the explosion in business automation software has been a boon to HR departments. Certain business processes have become significantly easier (managing headcount, labor costs, turnover rates, demographics). Business software is also providing us with reams of actionable HR data that was previously unattainable. So what could go wrong?

You can send a whole department down a rabbit hole of data-mining if you don’t have a strategy and a framework for understanding, and acting upon, that data. If you don’t know precisely what you’re looking for, you’re not likely to find it. What began as efficiency measures have now become a drag.

Analysis Paralysis

HR departments and entire business units are collecting terabytes of data on employees’ behavior and performance. But overdoing it with analytics can lead to ‘analysis paralysis’. How do you find that sweet spot with HR analytics and use it to maximum advantage?

“I think the main area where companies overdo analytics is when a large number of individual metrics are created without an overarching framework for why these particular metrics matter,” says John Hausknecht, Associate Professor of Human Resource Studies at Cornell University’s ILR School.

“A stronger approach moves beyond individual metrics and gets into understanding linkages among multiple factors. It shows what HR data, specifically, predict performance, or better yet, can show that changes in certain HR policies or practices actually cause business performance to increase.”

“Most HR issues cannot be reduced to a single number, so it makes sense to think about building (and testing with data) more sophisticated models that capture the causes and consequences of whatever it is we’re interested in understanding. Once that work is done, we can have greater confidence in why we’re tracking and trying to influence certain metrics.”

  0  

3 Simple Truths for CEOs from Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook

At the second “fireside” chat at Dreamforce 2013, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was actually left speechless and blushing by a few statements from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg as she covered topics from aggression in the workplace to gender bias and even a tip for improving your sex life (hint for the men, do more laundry).

The top takeaways from the evening:

Girls Aren’t Bossy, They Just Have Executive Leadership Skills

“When a boy leads, we don’t call him bossy because he is expected to lead. When a little girl does it, she is called bossy and told from an early age that she is not meant to lead.” – Sheryl Sandberg

From an early age, professional ambition is expected of men, but is often thought of as optional, or even negatively for women. “She is so ambitious” isn’t exactly seen as a compliment in most countries. The same “ambitious” behaviors from men are often labeled “aggressive” when coming from women.

More Women Leaders Makes You as a CEO Look Better

Studies show that more diversity leads to more innovation and productivity. If as a CEO, you are willing to talk about and address gender bias directly and work better with 50% of the population, it’s a huge advantage for everyone in your company.

“I want to have more women leaders at Salesforce and have more balance between my men and women leaders. It’s selfish because I know it will create a better company and that reflects on me.” – Marc Benioff

Women May be the Answer to World Peace

If we had more women at the political tables around the world, who knows how different the decisions would be. Benioff asked Sandberg if she thought the world would be more peaceful if women were in charge. Her answer: “I say let’s try it. It couldn’t get any worse!”

Despite friendly encouragement from Benioff, Sandberg denies any desire to run for president. She says despite it being a landmark milestone, having a female president in the US won’t erase the major issues. “We need to see [women] represented in all parts of leadership, in corporations and government” before we start to see a real change.

“Real change will come when powerful women are less of an exception.” – Sheryl Sandberg

  0  

5 Key Strategies for Innovation from Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer

Despite a late arrival and an interruption of protestors, Marissa Mayer and Marc Benioff’s “fireside” chat keynote at Dreamforce 2013 was what the crowd was looking for, an insight into the innovative changes Mayer has led at Yahoo. Among the major topics were Yahoo’s focus on simplicity across design, leadership, and prioritization.

“You don’t get to design the products, but you can design the organization.” – Mayer

You can’t design for global if you haven’t gone and visited the places around the world

If you are designing for the global market, you better hop on a plane and experience your target market first hand. If you haven’t seen how someone uses their phone or laptop in Japan, Italy, or India, then you don’t understand it. Getting the real pulse and vibe of digital in a country is impossible without a first hand experience.

Design products for the simplicity of 98% of users’ needs

Your products may be able to perform 1,001 different tasks, but what solves the main pain point for your customers should be front and center. Think about the Xerox machine. It may collate, staple, scan, fax, and even email things for you, but what do you want it to do? Copy things. And that is what the giant green button is for. Design your products around the giant green button.

What is really usable is not always useful

While designing for simplicity and beauty should be a top priority (just take a look at the weather app), don’t get carried away with it. At the core, your products need to be useful and provide value to your customers in a simple way.

A good executive plays defense, not offense

“The team is on offense, they’re going to move the ball. Your job is to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to run in this direction,’ and clear a path, get the obstacles, the process, the bureaucracy, the nay-sayers out of the way and help people run as fast as they can.” As a good CEO, it is your job to clear obstacles out of the way to empower your team to work on the issues that they see are most important.

Prioritization is the secret to success

Make your priorities clear from the very start and stick to them. If you make a to do list every day in prioritized order and you never get to the bottom of that list, you should feel successful. It seems counterintuitive, but if you finished the entire list each day, then you just spent a significant portion of your day on unimportant tasks.

With two more days of sessions and keynotes, including Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg, keep an eye out for more news and strategies from Dreamforce 2013 on innovation, growth, talent, and leadership from eCornell.

  0  

10 Strategies for Automation and Inbound from Marketo and Moz

Still struggling with the how-tos of marketing automation and inbound marketing? You’re not alone and Jon Miller, VP of Marketing and Co-found of Marketo, and Rand Fishkin, CEO of Moz broke down 10 simple strategies to keep on your radar moving forward.

1. The way buyers buy has changed forever due to Digital Abundance

The way you market and sell must change as well. Digital buyers today have more access to information today than they have ever had before. They can get instant access to details, comparisons, and pricing. Social is a way to share and compare.

2. The right content > more content

For many sites, just a few very high value pieces a year is enough to achieve remarkable results. One of Moz.com’s single resources, The Algo Change, has earned more traffic than the 50+ surround posts combined.

3. Data yields smarter social sharing

Analyze when your followers are online and engaging with you most (Suggested Moz tool: followerwonk) Sharing your resources more than once may feel inauthentic, but you need to hit your readers when they are actually reading.

4. If you’re going to do video, do it right

Just like any written content, your videos should be targeted to the keywords and topics your customers are searching for most. Learn their pain points and deliver the solutions with high quality video that has an interesting cover photo. Transcripts of your videos are also a gold mine for SEO and accessibility.

5. Google+ is like cheating at SEO

Did you know that Google features posts from your Google+ circles on the first page of your search results? Growing your Google+ network may be even easier than traditional SEO methods for getting on the first page of results.

6. Use different tactics for different stages

Your customer doesn’t always want a free white paper. Or a webinar. Or a free trial. They want those things when they are in different stages of buying readiness along your funnel. Early stage buyers will be more interested in social media posts and YouTube videos where those closer to buying will be more interested in tools and free trials.

7. Be like a stock picker – don’t put all your marketing into one program

It’s not all about buying the hottest Pay-Per-Click ads any more. Sponsored emails, webinars, trade shows (even virtual trade shows!), content syndication, sponsorship, display ads, and blog articles all pull in their own targets. Analyze what works best for you, but keep your resources spread out.

8. Sales people don’t want names, they want “win ready” leads

If your sales team just wanted millions of leads every month, they could just look them up in the white pages. Lead nurturing and scoring your leads to qualify them into different stages of readiness will make you the hero of your sales team.

9. The key to relevance is behavioral targeting

If someone downloads your white paper on social media, don’t send them a load of emails on google analytics. Send your emails in smaller, more targeted content chunks to increase engagement.

10. Use analytics to turn marketing from a cost center into a revenue driver

Use your metrics to set and justify budgets for each level of the funnel. If you know your conversion percentages, you should know how much each lead cost to acquire, and therefore, how much you should spend to create X number of leads to start with.

  0  

The Key to Growth? Collaboration from all Levels

You want growth? You want productivity? You want talent retention? You need to collaborate in communication. There is nothing more fragile than lack of trust because of a lack of communication. Lose the trust and quality of a project can go down the tubes.

Wendy Lea, CEO of Get Satisfaction presented on Weaving Collaboration into the Fabric of your Company this morning and there couldn’t have been more people nodding their heads in agreement throughout the room, hanging on her every word. She touched on the three major stages of communication and how to work you way up.

1. Competitive

In competitive communication, your needs are in conflict, your influence is minimal, your communication exists in tactics and ploys, and your trust is unproven.

Your employees make demands, withhold information, or give you misleading information in a competitive environment where they feel they have to fight to get a word in (and where it may not be listened to any way). And being a control freak only tells your employees that you don’t trust them to do the job you hired them for.

It’s just not sustainable today.

2. Cooperative

In cooperative communication, your needs are compatible, your influence is a quid pro quo, your communication is moving into a demand/concession with rationale, and trust is shared.

Your employees are not mind readers. Be honest about your expectations and you will see they are more honest about their own.

Be explicit with your rationale.

3. Collaborative

Your needs are interdependent, your influence is maximalist, communication is a creative, problem solving is a joint decision, and trust is explicit.

The golden spot of productivity, engagement, and satisfaction on all sides. Being completely interdependent with the needs of everyone in your company sounds like a big and impossible challenge, but really getting to know the personal and professional goals of your employees on a regular basis is critical in today’s modern organization. And a annual performance reviews are going to cut it. People don’t want you to be efficient with them, they want you to be effective.

Authenticity is critical.

The Takeaway

Collaboration is not a state of being, and certainly not a straight and easy path to success, but a multidimensional path where the gravitational pull is always down. There is no easy fix by simply installing Chatter, having a monthly happy hour, or handing out the company slogan on a t-shirt. It takes work. But surprisingly, less time than cleaning up after the mess of not collaborating. And as a leader, it is up to you to demonstrate that collaboration is your number one priority.

It’s not about what you do to or for your employees that matters, it’s what you do with them.

  0  

Megatrends for Sales Organizations: Customer Behaviors are Shifting

Hugo Sarrazin, Senior Partner, and Lareina Yee, Partner, at McKinsey broke down the major trends for sales organizations today and beyond and the major story was that customer behaviors are shifting and you need to as well. They are more sophisticated, they know more what they want, and they want to have more authentic communication. Download free the executive summary of Sales Growth: Five Prove Strategies from the World’s Sales Leaders.

By 2020, there will be.more than 50 billion connected devices.

75% of Millennials use social media.

3 Major Shifts in Customer Behavior

1. Know Me Before I Meet You

Your customers already expect you to do your homework before you talk to them: know their education, their interests, their skills, and the trends that they are looking at. How? 74% of B2B decision makers use LinkedIn to research their customers before the very first call.

Make your first meeting feel like the fifth.

2. I Already Know All About Your Product

The funnel paradigm has changed and is quickly disappearing. Embrace the new customer decision journey. More customers each day are researching your product prior to engaging with a sales rep. Use social media to find the sentiment and identify the trigger points that deliver a better user experience that moves to sales.

3. I Want Consistent Multichannel 24/7

Customers use an average of 6 channels for prospecting and are frustrated when they are presented with inconsistent experiences across those channels. The companies that have the competitive edge ensure that their brand and value propositions are always in the right place at the right time.

To read more about McKinsey’s principles for growth, download free the executive summary of Sales Growth: Five Prove Strategies from the World’s Sales Leaders.

  0  

Our Favorite Reads of the Week: Casinos, German, Company Campfires, & Startups

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking engaged employees are the same as satisfied employees. Engaged employees are significantly more dedicated and emotionally connected to their work, their coworkers, and the organization’s overall goals. This week, we found a plethora of content on employee engagement. and I’ve gathered some of the latest and greatest resources from industry top performers: Forbes, Inc, Rosetta Stone, and more.

Caesars Entertainment Uses Employee Engagement to Inspire Customer Loyalty

Caesars casino finds that customer loyalty and satisfaction is directly linked to Caesars employees’ level of participation in sustainable activities at work.

“Companies wishing to take their social and environmental efforts to the next level often view consumer engagement as the holy grail of corporate sustainability efforts. But the best way to engage our customers in our sustainability journey is by engaging our most valuable asset: our employees.”

How Communication Can Improve Employee Engagement

Language education giant Rosetta Stone provides some clear advice on employee engagement: Talk to your employees. Seemingly simple yet not as commonly followed.

“Employees need to know how the organization is doing. They need to know how they fit into the big picture. They need to know how their efforts influence the overall outcome in terms of business results…A culture of open and honest communication needs to start at the top. Only then can you foster employee engagement for years to come.”

How the Best Places to Work are Nailing Employee Engagement

7 spot on strategies for fostering a culture of engaged employees with examples from the industry’s most successful organizations.

“Having the right engagement practices powered by understanding the drivers most meaningful to employees can work towards creating a more motivated and high-performing workforce. Committing to an intentional culture that’s open, transparent, and enables employees to thrive is important for retaining top performers. Whether it’s participating in community events, celebrating coworkers or fostering more open communication, organizations that build a culture where employee involvement matters can nail employee engagement and create a great place to work.”

How to Hang Onto Your Best & Brightest

Think like a startup entrepreneur! You may be putting a lot of time and energy into recruiting top talent, but how about keeping them on board?

“Start by deciding exactly who you need to retain. Be honest. Some people are more valuable to your company than others, so focus on the things that are important to them. Employees won’t stay because of the size of the paycheck. They’ll stay because they feel they are recognized, engaged, challenged, and part of a team.”

  0  

What Really Drives Employee Engagement? Getting a Handle on Causes And Effects, For Starters

Passion, commitment, job satisfaction, positivity, drive, connection to the company—all sentiments that explain or define employee engagement. When you start to look at employee engagement seriously*, you’ll find rather quickly that it’s easy to confuse cause and effect. Making the distinction between driver and outcome is instrumental in developing a strategy around engagement, especially when it comes to measuring it.

For example, would you say that one’s tendency to help others around them is a driver or an outcome of employee engagement? Is a commitment to customer service a driver or outcome? What about good communication among employees?

Cornell University’s Chris Collins explains the importance of making these distinctions and why they’re so important to identify.

Note: We pick up the discussion here at 2:05, so click to the beginning of the video for a better grasp on the ways that we’ve historically defined engagement.

*Here are 4 tips to increase engagement and set your team on a course for growth and prosperity.

  0  

Employee Engagement: Four Tips for Team Growth

Sustaining high growth can take a lot out of your team. Without specific strategies to engage employees on an ongoing basis, you will not be able to achieve your long-term goals. At eCornell, we are committed to finding and supporting those ideas that work, and the proof is in our nearly ten years of double-digit revenue growth with low employee turnover.

1. Be Open

This one is simple; the more people know, the more they can contribute to results. We have no closed-door offices. We hold bi-weekly all-hands company meetings where information from across all functional areas is shared. I share company financials (good or bad) on a monthly basis at our company meetings.

2. Be Connected

About one-third of our company works from home, and many more travel or telecommute part time. This provides a lot of flexibility for people to balance work and life. We’ve turned this potential challenge into an opportunity by investing in keeping people connected. We probably hold dozens of desktop video meetings throughout the day. Everyone can share goals, accomplishments, news, customer complaints, testimonials, and resolutions on Chatter by Salesforce, our internal messaging system. And of course, we live and die by Google Chat. We’ve had employees comment that they sometimes feel more connected when traveling than when in the office.

3. Be Celebrating

I learned long ago two important things: (1) you can never over-celebrate team and individual accomplishments and (2) there are way better people in our company than me to figure out how to do that. We announce all sales wins on Chatter, we celebrate major project milestones, and find ways to accomplish major life events for employees. To make this happen, we have our B.E.E.R team (Building Employee Engagement and Recognition team) that plan major company events through the year so the employees from across the company are deciding when and how to launch an event to help us blow off some steam.

4. Always Be Learning

Dozens of our employees have earned a Cornell Certificate through our employee learning program; so yes, we use our own product! But sometimes, we need to go above and beyond. We encourage all of our managers to set learning goals for each team member so that we are bringing new ideas and skills into the company all the time.

  0  

Is There a Perfect Social Media Policy for your Organization?

Most businesses today are using social networking websites including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to connect with customers, staff, partners, and potential employees—and to nurture innovation and communication within and beyond the walls of the company.

The legal challenges of social media in the workplace

However, the explosion of these new communications channels brings a wealth of compliance and legal challenges. For instance, companies in financial services, life sciences, and healthcare need to ensure that electronic communications of all types– email, instant messages, text messages, and yes, social media – are appropriately retained, produced and supervised, according to the regulations that govern their industries.

Whether answering the call of compliance obligations or the need to preserve and produce your company’s social media content for e-discovery purposes (in case of potential litigation), can you be confident your organization has taken the steps to manage social media’s associated risks? Or are you better off prohibiting the use of social media altogether?

Social media strategy: allow or prohibit?

A recent survey that examined the social media policies and practices of compliance professionals in financial services (one of the most highly-regulated industries) raises some interesting points for any company considering governing social media or prohibiting it. The survey showed that

respondents who indicated they allow and govern social media use within their organization are nearly twice as confident in their ability to meet their compliance obligations compared to those that prohibit its use outright.

What causes this difference in confidence?

So you think your employees are compliant? Prove it.

Those that prohibit social media want to limit exposure to risk. But these firms still must be able to illustrate their prohibition is actually being followed by employees, especially when auditors or industry regulators ask and look for communications records. Proving that is a challenge, especially if non-approved social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are adopted by employees for personal and business communication.

Without clear social media policies and enforcement, compliance teams in regulated industries have a difficult task when attempting to control social media use.

If you can’t beat them, join them

The reality is that employees are going to use social media, in some form, in the workplace. Instead of banning social media, smart companies accept it as a valid form of corporate communication, and put a policy in place to govern appropriate social media use. Those who allow employees to use these channels likely have developed and rolled out usage and governance policies and procedures that help them feel more informed and in control of where and how communications happen. Familiarity with the channels can also play into greater confidence.

What’s the solution for using social media in your organization?

Companies on the cutting edge of compliance also often use a social media archiving solution to capture, supervise, review and produce social media records. This type of solution makes it as painless as possible to find and show all of your company social media conversations when needed.

Find more information about social media compliance trends in the Smarsh 2013 Electronic Communications Compliance Survey Report.

 

By Ken Anderson, Vice President of Marketing, Smarsh