HRTechEurope – A Review

My review of the morning session at HRTechEurope London spring warm up.

This week I was in London as a guest blogger at HRTechEurope’s spring warm up event. I wasn’t able to stay long so sadly I missed William Tincup (though we did catch up for a quick chat which was lovely) and Jason Averbrook – both of whom were speaking in the afternoon. I like these guys and in my experience they offer something different, provocation with rigour and intellect to back it up.

First up in the morning was Adrian Furnham who I confess I didn’t recognise at first as his profile picture was taken several hair cuts ago. I’d heard lots of good things about Adrian and was keen to hear him speak, his subject was:

HR Technology – Quantifying The Appetite For Social & Technological Change Inside Your Organisation.

I got rather lost in Adrian’s talk – he had a good sense of humour, ‘guru is the word used by journalists who can’t spell charlatan’ got a big laugh, but I felt that a ton of tired slides and a few well placed jokes covered up the sense for me that Adrian wasn’t really taking us anywhere. Since 2007, Adrian has been ranked in HR Magazine’s top 20 most influential list, and I think a potential problem with influence is it relies to some extent on consistency, which is an enemy of creativity and innovation.

So what did he talk about? These photos show Adrian positioned HR with his good news/bad news openers. These statements, both the good and bad, felt like opinions with nothing much to back them up and for me, the bad news stuff didn’t really hit the mark. 

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Adrian said that HR reacts to change, doesn’t instigate it, and he said that HR doesn’t network well. These are sweeping generalisations and based on my experience I don’t agree. Listening to the huge buzz in the breaks at the conference I’d say HR networks really well.

Adrian shared with us some reasons why HR Managers never become CEOs

Why HR Managers Never Become CEOsNever huh? Well I guess at least that stops any more aspiring HR people aiming for the top, according to this guy you’re never gonna make it folks. Seriously though – absolutes are rarely the answer and the way this stuff was presented closed down the debate rather than opening it up. And as Adrian continues to bombard us with slides, he asks, ‘Do you teach leadership by PowerPoint? Not often.’ I agree – so why are you inflicting a bazillion slides on us?

As time went on, Adrian clicked through big chunks of the presentation without commentary and when I spoke with others in the break, we felt that the bulk of this deck was something Adrian uses regularly, with just a few tweaks to suit. When I come to a conference I want to feel like I’m getting something new – and this talk just didn’t have that feeling. Overall I thought Adrian’s session was funny, he threw out some interesting challenges clouded with too much generalisation, and it feels like he needs fresh material, or failing that, at least tidy up and put away the stuff that isn’t going to be used on the day.

Mark Martin was up next speaking about:

WAKE UP!! Your next train is about to leave!

Mark spent a good deal of his time slagging off HR, and I felt he was provocative for the sake of it. I love to be provoked, but for it to work there has to be some substance behind the edge, and I couldn’t detect any.

Mark said ‘Why are we so inexact in HR? No other function would get away with that.’ I don’t understand – people are inexact, thank goodness! Work and life are inexact, that’s what makes them fun. Deal with it. And when was the last time you saw a sales forecast predicted with 100% accuracy? And have you never seen a finance department adjust a budget?

Going Down the Toilet

Mark said we don’t want happy people at work because that is ‘not strategic’. He told us that most executives he works with, ‘aren’t strategic’. He said, ‘people care about purpose and relationships, businesses don’t.’ He told us ‘If you have your cake and eat it, you run out of cake.’ I really don’t get where he was coming from, though he was right about the cake.

The last session I heard was delivered by Neil Lewis from Nationwide.

Implementing an HR Systems Transformation to Underpin a People & HRSS Strategy

Not the most exciting title I’ve ever read, but as a customer of Nationwide I was keen to see how Neil linked the employee and customer experience. Sure enough he was straight on to the importance of these two things before getting in to some of the how.

Neil told a story about his birthday and the well respected tradition of bringing cake to the office. He decided to bake cake instead of bring in some from the shop, and while I think about it, baking cake is a way you can have more cake and eat it, we should let Mark know about this. Neil’s point was about how he gained some of the baking knowledge he needed through Youtube and from there he linked into how Nationwide has become much more open to how technology can help employees access stuff they need directly, learn in ways they want to, and give better service.

Neil talked about steps involving: compliance (well they are a financial services company), reducing complexity, removing risk and manual process, and needing the culture to make it work. Neil spoke about the time stuff takes, removing half the customisation from their systems to make them simpler, took around five years. I appreciated his acknowledgement that patience is required, and the implication that tech is not the speedily delivered silver bullet, at least not always.

Neil’s talk was far too pitchy – he mentioned his tech supplier far too often, and in a short video he showed they got another bunch of namechecks. Come on vendors and speakers, you must know by now we hate that stuff, right?! Get the namecheck in and then tell us your story.

Something I really liked was the observation that better conversations among colleagues led to better service for customers. That’s inexact, unmeasurable and hugely valuable. Pitching notwithstanding, Neil’s session was far and away the most helpful and interesting one I saw.

The spaces in between

I mentioned earlier that I wasn’t around for William’s talk. That didn’t stop us getting checked out by the Storm Trooper security guards. I also referenced the buzz and conversation that went on in the breaks. Too often I see the exhibition as something people dart through nervously, keen to avoid eye contact for fear of being sold to. Not here. Maybe this was in part due to the high quality swag on offer – but there was conversation and interaction in abundance here. 10/10.

Taking everything into account, I had a useful fun morning. I subsequently heard that the afternoon picked up more pace and that William and Jason’s sessions were energetic and worthwhile. As more post event blogs emerge I will link to them from here.

Update:

I shared this post over on Facebook and received this additional comment from another conference attendee:

That’s a fair review of the first two speakers Doug, although I would be a bit harsher on the Mark Martin talk. Overtly aggressive (deliberate provocation to HR) and full of his own belief, meant that some of the ‘anti hr showboating’ distracted the audience from some valid points. HR does need to be challenged, HR tech vendors need to be challenged, but trying to piss them both off isn’t the best approach in my book!

I Have A Dream

Towards the end of last year my Dad asked me what he thought I might try and do with the business in 2012. I told him ‘I want to work in America’. ‘How you gonna make that happen son?’ he asked. ‘I dunno yet’ I replied, ‘I just will’.

I turned on my radar and courtesy of Mike VanderVort I spotted an opportunity to submit a pitch to speak at the Florida State HR Conference. I also recalled a brief Facebook exchange with William Tincup about guitars and America, and I had a quick exchange with Steve Browne about maybe doing something down Ohio way. Then Dad died and things went a bit off track for a while. In due course I made my pitch to Florida, thought a little more about what William had said and kept in touch with Steve.

Florida didn’t happen this time. I’ve no idea why – I asked for feedback and got a rather bland ‘Dear John’ type reply. I’ll maybe have another try next year. Ohio is gonna happen and as you all know I’m really excited about that. And other US plans are forming as I write (watch this space).

So what?

Well I could have burned a pile of money and time coming up with a strategic plan on how to do cool stuff in America, and I’m glad I didn’t. I can’t predict the future so at the time of planning I couldn’t have known Dad was going to die, I couldn’t have known that a timely exchange between Steve and I would have developed further. I couldn’t have known a whole bunch of stuff. But if I had invested in a plan, I’d have felt the need to stick with it and justify the time and money invested. Strategic planning drives convergent, fixed thinking. Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant write beautifully about this in their book Humanize which I recommend if you want to go deeper into the pointlessness of strategic planning (and many other interesting things too).

Me? I just had a goal, an ambition. My response to Dad was honest, I had no idea how I would achieve the goal, I just knew it was achievable and if I wanted it bad enough it would happen.

Set Goals. Have Ambitions. Do Stuff. Be Agile.

Follow your dreams. Life is too short for strategic planning.

With thanks to Sukh Pabial, David Goddin and Jonathan Wilson for a provocative conversation on Twitter that got me to writing this.

Sharing and Growing – A Social Framework

A social framework

So there I was, goofing around on Facebook back at the end of January, when this intriguing picture caught my eye. It’s called ‘a social framework‘ and it was being shared by sharer par excellence, William Tincup.

William used it to frame a talk he gave at The Workforce Institute about where he spends time on social, doing what, why…etc. Thereafter William stuck it on Facebook. Now I like to make my talks about the conversation – I usually just use a few photos and images on screen to provoke discussion and trigger a few thoughts in my head and I really like the way William has framed a discussion on one slide here. I was keen to learn more about what William meant by ‘promotion, 30 days’ so I got in touch and William fed back:

Doug – think of it this way… Gen 1 – it was enough to just be smart, Gen 2 – one had to be smart AND create thoughtful content, Gen 3 – assume Gen 1 and Gen 2 AND promote the heck out of stuff… so, most people create content and promote it once or twice… IMHO, that’s not enough… I suggest a promotion schedule that is more like 30 to 1… for example, create a thoughtful blog post and promote it (differently) for 30 days… rather than just once, twice or three times… or so goes the thought process…

I’ve been thinking about sharing and growing for a while. I enjoy writing this blog and I work hard at it and though still modest, the traffic volumes are picking up (hey I busted through the 4,000 visits mark last month – thanks folks). I tweet my blog posts once or twice when I write them, sometimes stick ’em on Facebook and LinkedIn too if relevant.

And I’ve played around with taking my game to where bigger audiences are. I mean – if my content is good enough, hell I don’t have to just host it here. My Waltzing Matilda collaboration with @democracyfail garnered over 10,000 hits at Human Capital League last year, compared with 800 direct hits on youtube and 134 on here. Clearly waaaaay more than I could manage by being too parochial and expecting folks to come by here all the time. So I guess I’m saying, get over yourself. If your stuff is good, find ways to get it out there as well as just leaving it on your own front doorstep.

I’m intrigued by William’s ‘3o day’ plan so I’m having a play at combining that with the ‘go to where the crowd is’ technique I’ve just illustrated. I’m using the recent report I wrote on Social Media in HR as the content for the experiment. It’s very early days, so far I’ve used this blog, and Scribd to host it. HRZone picked up on it and invited me to run it over that their place too, where it snuck into the top ten most read 😉 It’s on the CIPD Facebook page and Michael Carty will soon be providing a link from XpertHR. Thanks in advance.

So far this experiment has yielded a seven fold increase in hits to this report (comparing direct hits to here against those I can track elsewhere). I’m pretty happy with the return on investment so far.

I intend to move on and reframe the report for my customer service audience too. After all – what chance has a company of being social outside if it can’t get social inside? It will be interesting to see how this part of the experiment evolves and I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, huge thanks to William for encouraging me to look into sharing and growing anew. And to all of you I’d ask, what works for you? How do you share and grow ideas? I’d love to hear what you think.