Engagement – Page 22 – The Consulting Artist

Stop Doing Dumb Things – In Pictures

At around 5.30 am on Wednesday morning I woke up and prepared to head off to Stop Doing Dumb Things – the unconference. Today was to be a rare, and for many a first chance, for HR and customer service professionals to come together and help strengthen the links between the employee and customer experience.

In my sleepy state I burned the toast to a frazzle so with my first dumb thing out of the way I headed off into the dark on an empty stomach. Thankfully when I arrived in Vauxhall The Madeira Café was open and I had double egg on toast with bacon. It was delicious.

There’s already loads of content from the event online and I want to say a huge thank you to Martin Couzins for capturing so many pictures, words, interviews and songs and getting them online so quickly. Leonie, one of our guests, talked about different learning styles and how different people communicate in different ways. One size does not fit all. There will be more content and feedback to follow over the next days and weeks, for now I wanted to share with you one learning style, the artwork that Tim Casswell and his team created for us on the day. I’ve included the briefest of descriptions below each picture and you can listen to Tim’s interpretation of this here

This first picture is about setting the scene for the day, gathering people’s expectations.

SDDT Frame Two — Distilling words and scribbles and ideas as the day began to emerge

We ran a World Café to help set the day up. Many ideas and thoughts and feelings were expressed. We’re here to try something different. Fear and trust and freedom to express and a whole bunch of other things caught our eyes, hearts and minds.

SDDT Frame Three — Feedback from more detailed conversations

After the World Café people split up and talked about things in more detail. Communication, Value and measurement, Fear and trust, What and why of engagement, What can I do?

After lunch we spoke about, what works? We could and maybe should have teed this up in the run in to the event. By that I mean just asked guests to think about when and where they’ve seen good stuff going on. The importance of lunching together, to bond and share ideas came up and whenever possible, the importance of face to face dialogue. And when not possible, try skype, or video. And when not possible try the telephone. Use email as a last resort. We struggled to get lots of examples – I think we need to review and come back to this and gently develop it further.

This last picture was drawn rapidly at the end of the day. Subjects were suggested and Tim put them together in the moment. Some instant reflections on a challenging, useful, enjoyable and emotional day.

Huge thanks to everyone who encouraged, supported, attended, co-created and tweeted the day along. I feel so fortunate and sincerely humbled and motivated to know you.

There will be more to follow including feedback from guests, and more content summaries. For now – any observations and thoughts based on what you see here would as always be appreciated.

Innovation Incongruence

It’s no secret that I don’t have a lot of time for Vance Kearney. He comes across as a really poor listener and I don’t think his arrogance serves him, his colleagues or his customers well. And in the interest of balance it seems I’m in a minority if his fourth placing in HR Magazine’s influential list is anything to go by.

I and others have previously challenged him in response to two articles on HR Magazine. The first where Kearney seems to want to bury his head in the sand and ignore reality and the second where he just seemed to make no sense on engagement being quoted as follows, “I like employees to be engaged and motivated. I like them to be dead and not dead. I don’t think anyone’s ever tested it. There is a lack of rigour around the subject.” The written challenges made to Mr Kearney which he never responded to are now gone. When HR Magazine changed owners recently they tell me that a switch from two servers to one meant they lost all their article comments and discussions. Oops!

So when I learned that Vance Kearney was in a panel discussion at the CIPD conference I ummed and ahhed and decided to give it a miss. He and I rub each other up the wrong way and I had plenty of much more enjoyable stuff to see and do. I kept an eye on the emerging Twitter feed and learned that he chose to insult one of the delegates (disagreement is the food of life, but calling a conference attendee an arsehole is going too far for me). The tweeter may have misheard but something unpleasant was certainly uttered as you can see here over at Jon Ingham’s blog.

In September this year when I spotted Jon had tweeted Vance Kearney had been booked to attend the most recent ConnectingHR unconference I confess I was worried. I don’t care how influential Kearney is I don’t think his rude, arrogant approach sits well in a community focussed set up. For whatever reason he never showed and I for one am very pleased he didn’t.

Kearney also said “No significant innovation has ever come by asking a customer what they want – they will have no concept until you present it to them”. If you Google Oracle Customer Innovation you can see that Oracle were running customer innovation days as recently as last month. Perhaps Kearney should tell the rest of his colleagues they’re just wasting their time and money, or maybe he could just cuss at them instead – I guess that at least is quicker.

I and doubtless many others have spent years innovating with customers. When I worked at BT we innovated with customers on communications and product solutions to meet their needs, joint sustainability innovation to improve supply chain standards, and plenty of other things too. And more recently we (that’s me and my customers, and their customers) invest time innovating and experimenting with better ways of working together. Sure they don’t all succeed but hey – that’s the point of innovation ain’t it? And of course we innovate without customers sometimes too.

Ask, listen, innovate, execute and repeat. It’s a simple enough process and the ask at the start, yes the bit that Kearney dismisses, is a great place to begin as far as I, and seemingly Kearney’s employers are concerned.

Social workplace – Nokia style

Earlier today I provided a summary of Neil Morrison’s talk on social media in the workplace. Neil was teamed up with Matthew Hanwell, HR and community Director for Nokia, and what follows is a summary of what Matthew had to say.

The good old days: Remember when telephones were introduced to the workplace? How about email? and the internet? Yep – folks were fearful of all of them too – and now we couldn’t work without them. Matthew recalls joining Nokia 14 years ago and you needed manager approval to have an internet browser installed on your PC!

What’s it for?: Why does Nokia suport the use of social tools in the workplace? Because they promote openness, participation, interaction and engagement. We learned of one employee dissing the new CEO’s strategy via Nokia social tools. That employee is still working there and once criticism is out in the open you can deal with it.

Feedback: Matthew spoke a lot about colleagues being able to vote, rate and review each other’s content. That sounds like a great idea – immediate peer recognition and feedback is cool.

Social Dialogue: The HR team were persuaded to open a channel where all things raised by employees would have a response within 24 hours. This service became hugely popular attracting 100k hits per month.

Values: The Nokia values were posted up – this caught my eye ‘Assume the best intentions of others’. Love it!

Tweet meet: Senior management meetings get tweeted so now the conversation has moved from ‘what did you lot discuss?’ to ‘how can I help with…?’ Sounds like a good way to speed things up.

Questions from the floor:

Negative sentiment: someone asked Matthew how do you deal with the negative stuff that some staff post. Quick as a flash the reply came ‘it’s so much better to have it all on display – every one can engage and agree, disagree – we have dialogue together – as well as just at the water cooler’.

More negative sentiment: How do you see social media fitting in with Nokia’s well documented financial problems? Simple – together we have more dialogue, openness and transparency. That seems to be helping us improve things more quickly again.

Toilets (again): What is the return on investment from your social media? ‘Why does no one ever ask what’s the ROI on toilets? They impact productivity too y’know!’

Matthew also focussed a lot more on tools that Nokia have developed to promote the use of social media. I chose not to focus on these because I felt the principles offered you more insight. The tools are just that – tools.