You're not the best you'll ever be...

...so don't worry! Make mistakes, fail at things, learn. Whether you've been in business (which I guess translates to alive) for 2 months or 2 decades you're still not the finished article. This could seem scary I guess (when's the peak coming??) but I find it liberating. Fear of failure on the other hand is a horrible, debilitating thing. So don't worry. You're not done yet. Keep on trucking.

About me

I was in the process of writing a post for the blog today and was referencing some psychological profiling that I had done last year. The company paid for all of us to be psychometrically tested using the PeopleMapper test, provided by ASE, in an effort to better understand how we like to work, what gets us out of bed in the morning and who had tendencies towards work-related homicide. (That last bit is a joke).

Going over my results today I thought it would be quite fun to publish them here for all to see. That way everyone will get to know me better and be able to pass judgement more thouroughly about what a pain in the neck I am, with reliable evidence to back it up. Personally I think the results pretty much have me pegged.

I'm still a little agnostic about these sorts of tests (there's a lot of them out there that seem to be dubious pseudo-science) but overall I think that well structured, established psychometric tests can really help paint a good picture of someone.

Anyway, having uploaded the results to Google Docs (meaning it's accessible to everyone rather than being stuck as a Word document just on my PC) here is the link. Have a nosey and I'd love to hear if people who know me think it seems accurate. (To those that don't know me, is this more or less likely to make you want to change that situation??)

Wear it Pink

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month and today (Oct 26th) is the Breast Cancer Campaign's annual 'wear it pink' day. So I'm currently sat here in a 'wear it pink' t-shirt, drinking some pink sugary stuff, eating pink sweets and looking at a sea of pink colleagues all around me. We try and raise some money for this good cause every year by doing raffles, a quiz and selling pink cakes, sweets etc. All great fun and the charity bit gives everyone a nice warm, fuzzy feeling.

My mum was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, so it's one of those charities I'm inclined to be a bit selfish about. It's funny how when it hits you directly you're far more likely to see the benefit of raising the money. My mum is fine fortunately; she had some great doctors and nurses and a good surgeon that helped her through it all. It could come back though so it makes you eager that plenty of money still goes into finding the cure for this horrible illness. Plus, depending on the genetics involved (my mum is having some genetic tests in a few weeks, science never ceases to amaze me) my sister, aunties and female cousins could all be in the high risk category. So I have a vested interest in organisations like the Breast Cancer Campaign doing well.

Charity is probably the most rewarding thing anyone can do though. The feeling of knowing you've helped someone (even someone totally remote from you who you'll never likely meet) is completely unique. If you haven't put your social hat on for a while I recommend giving it a go today. It's not too late to join in with 'wear it pink'. Or maybe there's a cause close to your heart. Whatever it is, invest a bit of time and a bit of money in it and I guarantee it'll be the most satisfying thing you do this weekend/week/month etc.

CRM

I'm looking for a good CRM solution for Omni at the minute. Nothing too fancy, just need to better track prospective clients, manage marketing that we do and maybe sync up contacts, meetings in the diary etc. Doesn't need the bells and whistles. Amazing how many different offerings there are. Even with a good idea of what you want it's easy to get 'sold' by the shiny toys out there.

Anyone reads this and has experience with or knowledge of the market, then do let me know.

When bad employees go bad...

The following landed in my feed reader today from Kris Dunn's HR Capitalist blog. In this post he details an occasion when an employee at a previous company took it to the absolute extremes to land a couple of extra days off. From the post:

Human nature exists, and HR pros get to the see the downside in employee relations issues that involve anger, ambition, lust, lies, etc. But faking funeral programs to get a couple of extra days off? That's taking your game to the next level.

This is a pretty remarkable story and it makes you wonder about the very nature of people. It also reads like a pretty damning indictment of employees generally. When you get those real ball-breaking bosses (or HR people) who claim that every aspect of an employees work life must be monitored (think banning websites, monitoring email usage, micro-managing to targets etc) this is what they base their defences on. They believe that if you give an employee a proverbial inch they'll take a mile. If you let them on Facebook then they'll do nothing but that all day and productivity will plummet. If you don't require a doctor's note for illness then all of a sudden people will be off to the quacks every week like clockwork. If you let them decide their own schedule then they'll slack off, only work when they absolutely can't avoid it and will happily see your profits drop for their own self interest.

My issue with this take on 'management' and 'employee relations' is that in every way shape and form it's complete crap. The employee skiving off to go to a 'funeral' every couple of month is clearly not the right person to employ. Firing him was the right way to go. But does no one ask why it got to that position? How on earth did it get to a point where he was so unhappy in his job that he needed to fake family deaths to avoid another 8 hours of it once a month? Why did no-one notice that this guy was seriously miserable and demotivated before? How was his regular absenteeism the first warning sign?

Now I'm probably getting a bit too much into the specifics of this one case. For all I know the organisation had been trying for ages to get him engaged and in reality he was just a total jerk. So let's talk in more general terms.

As I've said numerous times, employee engagement should be the number one priority issue for HR and management. If your staff hate you, your company and their jobs, you should be fired immediately. It's no use blaming the employees, or the economic environment, or the bad weather. The buck stops with you. It is your job to get those guys engaged and get them flying. If you can't do it because they're a miserable and belligerent so-and-so then the best plan is to get rid of them (I'll not mention that perhaps you should be fired for hiring the wrong person in the first place, that is a rant for another day). Fire them quickly and fairly and move on. If however they could, would and should be engaged, happy and productive but for your dumb policies/poor working environment/lack of training/dearth of management capabilities/general ignorance/crappy attitude/unrealistic targets/badly planned business (delete as appropriate) then it's your ass on the line, to quote my American friends from the telly.

If you think this is massively unfair and miss the days when you could just shout at people and they'd do exactly what you said for the length of time you specified, then tough. Think this is all wishy-washy liberal nonsense and that these people who abuse your good nature (i.e. the fact you gave them a job in the first place) are just unreasonable swine? Read this.

When it comes down to it, the future of business is predicated on employees not consumers. I will rant on and on about customer experience, making sure you're telling the right story, being remarkable and so on. But if you do all of that yet still treat your employees like children then you are in for a rough ride. Be as remarkable to your employees as you are to your customers though (in fact even more remarkable) and you will see your successes grow exponentially. Happy people are productive people. Productive people who keep getting happier are your superstars.

So next time someone seems to be disengaged address the root cause, not the individual. If you're hiring the right people in the first place there is nothing to stop every single one of them becoming a superstar employee for you. Nothing that is, except you.

Rewards Revisited

Read this post today from the always interesting Incentive Intelligence blog. Just thought I'd flag it up as it ties in quite nicely with a post of mine from a couple of weeks ago about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

I agree with Paul on this one; as I've said previously the non-cash incentives are important but it is vital that you don't forget about the other side of things. Paul surmises it best:

The real answer is - cash and non-cash are both critical in creating an engaged audience. Neither is better. Neither is worse.

Traditionally organisations have been better at the cash part, making sure that salaries are in line with the market and so on, paying bonuses in times of plenty. So I see why the focus is (rightly) on the non-cash, intrinsic side of things. As with everything in life though it is about getting a good balance. Anyone with an interest in hiring and keeping superstars needs to have both sides of their brain working these days, otherwise they just won't be able to keep up.

What makes you go 'Ewww!'?

10 minutes to kill? Take this test from the BBC Science and Nature department on their site: What disgusts you?

Some other interesting tests to do there too. Apparently my brain is about 50-50 male to female in ratio...

Pucker up

Call it coincidence, call it serendipity, but there I was trying to think of a quick post to put together on a Friday before going home from work and I only went and stumbled across an article about something that Ollie, Luci, Craig and I were talking about only yesterday! The issue is the always embarrassing, potential social faux pas that is the new greeting methods for the more continental faction of the UK business community...

Here's the story, courtesy of the ever entertaining and informative BBC site. One cheek or two?

Manchester blog awards

Went to the Manchester blog awards last night at Matt & Phreds as a guest of Jane and Nathan at Smith & Smith; thanks for the invite guys, I had a blast!

I didn’t really know what to expect beforehand, having been to plenty of awards events but never a blogging function before. All the surprises were pleasant ones though, which is always good. If you get chance to go to a blogging event in the future I can give the idea a thumbs up.

The people speaking were, for the most part, great. There was a slightly downbeat 20 minutes or so where an author (who also blogs) read from her new book (can't remember her name sorry, it might have been Elizabeth somebody). The reading was fine but the choice of material could have been better; she read the first chapter which introduces a child character whose mother has just died. It was fairly depressing stuff (and not at all my type of literature) but fortunately it didn’t take the shine off the evening overall. I have to say though (because it feels dishonest not to give full disclosure) that without wanting to be churlish, her writing perhaps proves that there’s a book (or 3) living in everyone.

The best performance of the night for me came from this chap. His name is Chris Killen and he read excerpts from a novel he wrote in the form of a blog post a day for 100 days. If you’ve got some spare time I highly recommend reading it; what I’ve read so far is funny and delightful. He won the category he was in, best writing on a blog and deservedly so I’d say. (Details of other winners can be found here.)

The event was in association with the Manchester Literature Festival, so there was a real literary bent to the evening. That was one of the pleasant surprises actually. The crowd was a real mix and everyone seemed to have a good time.

It made me think about blogging more generally overall. Many of the blogs on show were all very much ‘traditional’, in the sense that they represent online journals. People were pouring their life into their blogs and letting others feel their joy, pain etc (like this blog and this one). All very Belle du Jour. Given that the majority of blogs I enjoy regularly are more like comment or opinion blogs, written by experts in a certain field, it was a refreshing change. In fact when I first heard about blogging that was how I heard it described – an online journal, a sort of public ‘dear diary’. This seemed like a novel idea to me at the time, although didn’t really hold any appeal (I didn’t fancy the idea of detailing my sex life or job dilemmas online in all honesty but to those that do, whatever floats your boat). It was only when I found Hugh and gapingvoid, which led me to Seth and Guy and so on, that I began to see the potential of this medium for me personally. Nice to look at the other side of things too though.

The night was a great one and all credit to the organisers, bloggers, judges etc. I'd happily go back next year, or indeed to similar events. It's great to see that there's real talent knocking around in the Manchester blog scene. Long may it prosper.

Happy workplaces - rated by Revyr

The Chief Happiness Officer today links to a new service called Revyr which has a nice little premise at the core of it’s offering. Essentially it allows employees to rate their workplaces based on 10 key factors. Then potential employees can go to the site and find out what a place is really like to work at before they even commit to applying for a job, never mind attending an interview.

Alex has a nice interview with Jake Taylor of Revyr that’s definitely worth a read. I’ve signed up to the site to try and get on the beta testing list too so I’ll post more as I get more detail for you.

As an initial comment though, I think it’s a fantastic idea. Ollie and I were just talking about it and were absolutely gutted that we hadn’t thought of it first in all honesty! The simplicity factor is really appealing; who wouldn’t want to know what a company is really like before applying for a job there? Without knowing loads about the different factors though I’d say additionally they seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to define what a ‘good’ workplace looks like, and that’s to be applauded. Had it just been based around pay, perks and parking spaces then it would have been a lot poorer for it. Including things like Corporate Social Responsibility and Autonomy really makes this work for me.

Commenting on this service, Paul over at Incentive Intelligence moots that a service like this could really impact on HR people. As he suggests:

All you HR folks out there now have to worry about your "product" (read company) just like all those marketing and product development folks do when they launch a new product/service. Marketing is now an HR function (or has been but not to the degree it will become.)

I agree entirely on this one. With some proper metrics in place it is totally feasible to imagine people ranking and scoring potential employers and focussing on landing a job only at those who have ‘4 star’ or above rating, for example. With citizen-created content growing in popularity and reliability these days it was only a matter of time before that extended to the working world. All of a sudden you need your employees to be evangelists for the organisation. So if someone wants a job in software development in Birmingham, they go to the site, they check out all the different companies with those types of positions then read the reviews, as if they were picking a seafood restaurant in Birmingham. If your employees aren’t evangelists and perhaps rate things a little on the low side then that software developer is going to look elsewhere for her next move. Scary stuff if you’re not big on employee engagement and happiness at the moment…

This is really positive to my mind. The more that companies are pushed to improve their employees’ experiences the better. Plus, this isn’t just a stick-to-beat-the-big-companies-with situation; the carrot for employers is that as they improve their working practices and environment they’ll improve their ability to hire top talent. All of a sudden the competitor down the street who pays the big bucks but burns people out doesn’t have the advantage.

It’s early days for Revyr obviously, but I really hope it works out well for them. I’ll be keeping a close eye and my fingers crossed.

ChangeThis.com

Rather than spend any of your time today reading something that I've written I instead insist that you go read the collective works of many a smarter person than me. ChangeThis is the brainchild of, among others, Seth Godin and the numerous talented manifesto authors that submit their material have done a great job in covering virtually any topic you can think of from Guerilla Marketing to web design to talent management. Contributors include Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid, Guy Kawasaki and even Seth himself.

Brilliant idea, wonderfully executed. If you have the time, lose yourself in a few of these and you will be a far smarter person for it. Feeling particularly smart? Submit your own manifesto for public appraisal and consumption!

If you like Change This then spread the word, it's how the good ideas stick around.

Intrinsic versus Extrinsic

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the topic of intrinsic motivation vs extrinsic motivation at work. I’ve found some particularly interesting blogs recently about the topic, particularly Incentive Intelligence and The HR Capitalist, both of which I’d recommend highly to go into your feed reader (more on that below).

My take on it (briefly though as it is a subject I can talk about at length) is that it seems obvious to say that intrinsic motivation, (i.e. your staff naturally want to work for the organisation because they like it, feel it aligns with their values etc) is the best type of motivation. Extrinsic, (i.e. salaries, bonuses, perks etc) is clearly the more fleeting option. It goes without saying that anybody who is only motivated to work for you by monetary rewards can quite easily, one would imagine, be poached by your competitors and their higher basic salary.

Yet in some ways this, I feel, is used as an excuse not to reward people well for the work they do. Just because you have managed to engender a culture where people work for you loyally and diligently because they agree with the companies mission for example and indeed they would even work for you for less than they could make elsewhere because of this intrinsic motivation, doesn’t mean you should pay them less! Indeed perhaps even you should pay them more! Intrinsic motivation is a rare thing indeed and at all costs you should aim to keep those individuals who have it. A bit of extrinsic motivation on top therefore may well do no harm at all.

Rewarding your star performers and creating an environment where people feel valued and well-compensated for the work they do seems, in the popular American parlance, a ‘no-brainer’. Yet I see countless organisations (particularly in recruitment but in no way limited to that sector) who feel that their employees are trying to 'screw them' for more and more money. I know managers who hate the idea of regular appraisals and performance reviews because they think it gives people the chance to ask for a pay rise!

When it comes to it I try and encourage people to apply this methodology: if a star performer at your company feels that she deserves a pay rise, she does. People inherently (particularly those star performers that are loyal to the organisation) aren’t in work to rip their employers off; if they value the job they do, their colleagues and the organisation as a whole they will act decently, honestly and fairly in all matters, monetary or otherwise. So strive to engender that intrinsic motivation. Make people proud to work for you and keen to see the organisation prosper. But don’t forget about the money too.


[Note: if you’re not reading the blogs you like through a feed reader I’d highly recommend it. I use Google Reader and wouldn’t change now, just to avoid the hassle of moving all my feeds really. I understand that Bloglines have recently added some nice new features though, so might be worth checking out too if you’re shopping around.]

One per child

I was going to write a different post to this today. But then I saw a link on Seth's blog about this project to get a laptop to every child in the developing world. It's inspiring and simple (as the best ideas often are). Individuals should definitely get involved. Businesses even more so. What's $200 (about £100) to your organisation? In fact what's $2000?

Talk to your boss today. Give children the gift of knowledge and the chances they'd be missing otherwise.

Here we go again...

Well that was some hiatus! I’m going to call it a blogging sabbatical because that sounds better I reckon. Whatever the case we’re back up and running so I’m going to try get back to posting here a few times a week at least.

As a brief update on what’s happened in the last 3 months: we’ve moved offices, I’ve changed jobs, we’ve hired 4 new people, re-hired 1 and 2 people have left. So you’ve not missed much.

I’ll start filling in some of the blanks over the coming days and weeks, as well as telling you all about the exciting new things that we’re doing at the moment. There’ll be some big announcements, some (hopefully) informative content, some (undoubtedly) controversial content and plenty for everyone to chew the fat over.

All in all, good to be back.