Uld social media revolutionise the performance appraisal process? It’s 1950, you’re walking down your office corridor to the filing room, you see two people in a meeting room, a manager and an employee; there’s an appraisal going on. Now fast forward, it’s 2012 and you’re on a video conference call, two people in a meeting room catch your eye; there’s an appraisal going on. The workplace today has changed beyond recognition; new technology is continuously bringing efficiencies to our way of working. However, one thing remains constant - the performance appraisal process. Let's be fair though, there have been a few notable advancements in performance appraisals since the 1950's. The first variations came with the introduction of Management by Objective (MBO) later referred to as Management by Results (MBR). The 1980's saw a move towards competency based evaluation. Now, consider Generation Y for a moment, will they be content to wait for their annual or bi-annual review to find out how they're doing?
Jenny Hill, director, Training Hand. The Best Path to Success is Your Own - Gianpiero Petriglieri. By Gianpiero Petriglieri | 9:00 AM May 11, 2012 If you’re wondering what to do next in your career, you’re hardly alone. The debate about where and how we may best feed our hunger for mastery, service, prestige, approval, safety, achievement — whatever we’re after — is fiercer than ever. Do you go after, or hold on to, a corporate job or strike out on your own? Daniel Gulati and Lucy Kellaway recently offered contrasting views. There is less need to join prominent institutions today to demonstrate our worth, argued Gulati, an entrepreneur, here on HBR.
Social networks offer more accurate ways to signal our ability and potential to add value. That is a crazy thought, rebutted Kellaway from her column in the Financial Times, where she has worked for a quarter of a century. Take these two New York Times essays, arguing that young Americans are too complacent to hit the road to find work, and have the passionless and eager-to-please attitude of salespeople.
Here is my view. Just How Powerful Are You? - Nilofer Merchant. When you write online, no one checks to see if you have a journalism degree before they start to read. If you experience an earthquake and want to report on its danger or safety, no one asks your credentials before you report to Ushahidi. And if you were interested a creating a new company, you can simply initiate the idea and get funding through Kickstarter or Indie GoGo. The gateways of power have changed.
Or have they? When I look around, I see a culture that honors being prepared, doing the right things to get ahead, and achieving more and more, starting with our education — we need to go to the right high school to get into the right college, to get the right job after college. Our culture also honors fancy titles and brand affiliations, as visibly celebrated by the first question most Westerners ask on meeting someone new: “And who are you?”
It’s as if knowing one’s title and affiliation will let you know if a person’s ideas are even worth considering. So, which is it? The New Science of Building Great Teams. Artwork: Andy Gilmore, Chromatic, 2010, digital drawing If you were looking for teams to rig for success, a call center would be a good place to start. The skills required for call center work are easy to identify and hire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy to monitor. Just about every aspect of team performance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved, customer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT, the golden standard of call center efficiency). And the list goes on. Why, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call center have such trouble figuring out why some of his teams got excellent results, while other, seemingly similar, teams struggled?
Indeed, none of the metrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the performance gaps. The truth is quite the opposite. Looking for the “It Factor” When we set out to document the behavior of teams that “click,” we noticed we could sense a buzz in a team even if we didn’t understand what the members were talking about. Measure Your Team's Success - Video. The Speculist » Blog Archive » In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop.
Phil and I ended last week’s FastForward Radio show discussing how higher education will change in the coming years. My conclusion: Universities Will Become Coffee Shops We’re faced with an education bubble. Tuition and other costs associated with a college education have been outpacing inflation for decades. It’s a trend that simply cannot continue. It has continued, so far, because the demand for education has proven to be somewhat inelastic. But what’s the advantage of a good job if the salary difference between that job and a non-college-level job is lost servicing student debt? At the same time several universities with world renown branding have begun offering online courses for free. Imagine a personnel manager at a mid-sized industrial corporation in Kansas who’s looking for a candidate with a particular set of knowledge.
Let’s say all other things between the candidates are equal. Phil thought this sounded like college as a giant coffee shop. Offices Become Coffee Shops… Again. A Co-creation Primer - Stefan Stern. Everyone says they are in favor of open innovation and co-creation. We have all heard about the wisdom of crowds, bringing the outside in, and have bought the t-shirt which states that “none of us is as smart as all of us.” But what is co-creation, really, and how do you do it right?
Co-creation involves working on new product and service ideas together with the customers who are going (you hope) to buy them. It turns “market research” into a far more dynamic and creative process. (The term co-creation was of course popularized by CK Prahalad.) It’s easy for the C-suite to sign up to co-creation. But very often it goes against the grain of how they built their careers in the first place. I had a great conversation about co-creation recently with the people at Sense Worldwide, a London consultancy.
“When you need to transform a brand or product, you can’t just do the same things better,” Brown said. They have established some co-creation Do’s and Don’ts. Do’s first: Co-creation don’ts. This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business. Time to grow up: The future of work is adult — Online Collaboration. Connected, location-independent, autonomous, global, piecemeal: There are plenty of adjectives that have previously been employed to describe the future of work, but the author of a book on the topic is throwing another contender into the ring — adult. Lynda Gratton is a London Business School professor and the author of The Shift: The Future of Work Is Already Here, which offers tips to help those after long-term employability weather the many changes under way in the way we construct our careers.
Recently, she took to Forbes to expand her ideas, offering a new framework to understand the sometimes-bewildering changes going on around us. The fundamental shift, she writes, is from a “Parent to Child relationship at work, to a more balanced Adult to Adult” relationship. She cautions that “whilst there are great aspects to being an Adult at work — it also . . . brings with it responsibilities and commitments.”
It’s an intriguing concept, but what does it mean in practice? Are You an Adult at Work? How I Became My Own Mentor in a Freelance Economy - News. In our weekly Hustlin' series, we go beyond the pitying articles about recession-era youth and illuminate ways our generation is coping. The last few years may have been a rude awakening, but we're surviving. Here's how. At 32 years old, I’ve never had a real job. Or more accurately, I’ve had a shitload of them, just never one at a time. I’ve never had a desk where I was expected to be sitting during work hours, never had a chat by the water cooler (does that really happen?).
And no, I’m not a trust fund kid whose parents have been secretly slipping cash into my checking account all these years. Of course, not all of my peers have been so lucky to “choose” the freelance lifestyle—sometimes more accurately described as underemployed. The fact is, freelance is becoming the new 9-to-5, whether we want it to or not. Early on, I realized this kind of "contingent" work was not going to come with an instruction manual, nor with any one-stop-shop mentor.