Michael Specht

Tips for laying off employees in a social media world

Over the weekend Techcrunch posted about the layoffs traking place due to the economic downturn. There are two main themes in the post; first some of the layoffs are clearing out of dead wood and the other being it is hard to keep layoffs a secret when everyone is a publisher.

To the first point. This is not new companies have always used downturns to shed deadwood, not sure why this was even raised by Michael Arrington.

The second point is far more interesting and will have major impacts on employers for years to come. In a world where anyone can publish, and does, how you manage this process is critical.

But in the age of everyone-is-a-publisher it takes just a second after someone is walked out the door for them to post about it on Twitter or their blog, and it spreads from there.

Blog posts, tweets, video content all remain in search engine caches for a very long time, if not forever! Which means if you are thinking of cutting back here are some tips for doing so in a social media world, some of these are just plain common sense.

Do it quickly, ok this is always the case but even more so now. Use the old carpenter’s rule “measure twice, cut once” the last thing you want to people having multiple chances of publishing about the process.
Remember the jobs you are cutting have people in them. Treat them that way.
But also remember humans do not make rational logical decisions based on information given to them. They will instead pattern match with either their own experience, or collective experience expressed as stories. This usually means they will react poorly initially.
Provide employees some advice about being careful if vent online, make sure if they do it will not lead to nasty legal battles down the track.
Expect things to be blogged, tweeted, and generally discussed.
Monitor the internet to see what is being said. Allow people to vent but if needed gently correct the messages if they are blatantly wrong.
Don’t get into a online publishing war over the smallest of things published, sometimes ignoring it is the best option. The more times search engines find a topic the higher they rank it in the results. Also bloggers tend to react quickly and harshly don’t give them additional fuel to write about.
Communicate with the employees who are leaving, but do so honestly and openly, limit the corporate bullsh#t.
Communicate with the employees who are staying, again do so honestly and openly, limit the corporate bullsh#t.
Setup a Facebook alumni group (if you don’t have one), automatically invite all of the employees who are leaving. Remember some will be boomerangs.
Setup an internal wiki to allow the people leaving to document their knowledge in a central location. This way you might collect some of the knowledge that is leaving before it leaves.
Communicate to your customers, suppliers, media, analysts and blogosphere what is going on and why.
Make sure you are not applying double standards with your executive team as this will certainly get people talking.
Make sure the rest of the organisations is also cutting back on expenses. If you keep people flying first class while laying off employees this will also get people talking.
Highlight the other cost cutting measures that the organisation is taking to show layoffs aren’t the only thing.
It is a great time to have the CEO start an blog, this will show them as a real person a factor that should not be overlooked during this period of change.
Finally make sure you pay severance packages fairly and on time.

These are my initial thoughts, have to head off and join the family but chip in with your own while I am gone.

The Cluetrain rides again

Almost 10 years ago Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Rick Levine published a book that was going to change the way we saw the world, The Cluetrain Manifesto.

The basic premise in the book is that markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, and honest, sometimes even direct. Basically you can’t fake it.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to engage in a corporate monotone of mission statements, product strategies and , marketing brochures.

However everything is now changing. People are connecting, and working together. The Internet is enabling these conversations and there is nothing corporations can do to stop it.

With the book are 95 theses that summarise everything into a nice simple message. Yesterday I was re-reading them and wanted to share them with you all. So I created a quick slideshow, enjoy!

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=cluetrain-review-1224198417202965-8&stripped_title=cluetrain-review-presentation

Social media in recruiting

Over the last few months I have had many discussions with people both inside and outside the recruitment industry over how to use all these new “web 2.0” tools for recruiting. Mostly in the context of tapping into the Gen Y market, which is not the right approach, more on that later. While some already get it, I felt it was probably good to lay out some ideas for you all, if this is preaching to the choir sorry come back on the next post.

The first thing to realise is “web 2.0” has been built on a number of fundamental principles, and that to succeed you need to understand them all. The principles are summarised below, however it would take a blog post (or more) on each to fully break them down when it comes to recruiting.

Transparency
Conversation
Wisdom of Crowds
Data is Key
Speed
Reuse
Rich User Experience

With the above principles out of the way, on to social media in recruiting.

Hang on, before that don’t we need a strategy?

Yes!!

Building a social media strategy in to your organisation recruitment strategy is not something that can be done overnight, or by a select few within the organisation. The strategy needs to take into account many different factors, such as organisational history, culture, values, industry, funding, and above all commitment. Just putting a “Share on Facebook” link at the bottom of a job ad IS NOT A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY!! Likewise creating just a Facebook group IS NOT A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY!!These are not the easiest things to work through, in the meantime here some generalised areas where you could apply social media in recruiting:

Sponsor some blogs to help prospective candidates understand what it is like to work at your company, or what the recruitment process is like
Create a Facebook group for your graduate recruits
Having a YouTube channel for videos about your organisation, not just corporate sanctioned ones
Using social networks to source candidates
Use social networks to develop relationships with potential candidates
Have your employees & managers run online career fairs, talk about life in the company, court potential talent using social media
Setup an internal tagging site to allow anyone in the company to “tag” people who might be potential future employees
Teach manager how to use RSS, alerts to find out when people are discussing your company and products, as they could be potential candidates
Publish exit interview answer (personal details removed) on the internal intranet so everyone can see why people are leaving
Embrace the principles of “web 2.0” and rework your end to end recruitment process, ok this is not just social media but it would help with the candidate experience

I could go on and on, however I serious encourage you not to undertake any of these without fully understanding the broader impact of what you are doing. While yes would should start small, but social media has a funny way of getting out of control so if you are not ready for the results you might have some difficult discussions with marketing.

If you want a social media strategy for recruiting give me a call, sorry for the shameless plug but I am getting sick of so called “experts” in social media putting their hand up to help organisations when it comes to recruitment, branding and talent acquisition or retention. Only to have the opportunities being wasted.

HR Technology Best Practice

Over night I received the results from Cedar Crestone’s 2008-2009 HR Technology survey, while I am yet to digest the full report, a quick review of the document and the assocaited press release reveal some interesting facts. Oh, the statistics are mainly North American focused but if history has shown me anything they predict a general trend for Australian organisations.

Some of the interesting points:

Use of administrative applications are obiovusly mature, however the results are showing an initial movement from in?house to software?as-a?service (SaaS) solutions. Now is this driving vendors or are vendors driving this move, not sure.
Talent management applications are very important and that these applications are helping organisations deliver higher financial performance.
The Employee Self Service and Manager Self Service trend is still deliverying value and reducing the size of HR departments and improving transaction cycle times.
Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 is still the arena of early adopters, with the biggest area of usage being recruiting and branding. The survey shows that organisations using these tools had double the sales growth of organisations that did not. This reminds me I really need to push/define my Enterprise 2.0 services more.
A final theme change management is the one key differentiator towards achieving a successful HR technology project. Which is good news as this is another key services of Inspecht.

Some points emerged in the results that I want to cover further.

those taking an integrated talent management approach strongly outpace organizations with a best of breed approach on operating income growth nearly three times (13.1% vs. 4.8%)!

Now it is important to understand the definition of integrated; “If two or more of the talent management applications are from the same vendor as the underlying HR management system, they were designated as having an “integrated” talent management approach.”

This little nugget seems to go directly against previous research reports that we shoud be moving towards a Core HRIS vendor and a Core Talant Management vendor. Could it be ouch for folks like Taleo who are heavily pushing their Unified Talent Management approach? Or one could say the Cedar’s history as an ERP implementation consulting firm might bias the results? I don’t think so.

Why?

Today’s talent management tools from best of breed vendors tend to focus mainly of recruitment, preformance management and sometimes compensations management. What they miss is learning management, which is key for developing one’s internal talent pool. Could this missing link be the key to why organisations who have a fully integrated environment are returning greater financial results?

Another result showed that organisations with comptency management achieved significant sales growth. Comptencies form the core of being able to manage your employees, aka talent. With separate systems it is very hard to have a consistent comptency framework so most organisations either do it very poorly or not at all.

Some further reading and analysis of the full report is in order.

Capitalism & Poverty

Today is blog action day, and the topic is poverty. I was wondering what to write about and decided on the topic below.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been reading The Wal-Mart Effect, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in the globalisation of business. Overall the book is an eye opener to the way one of the largest corporations in the history of mankind operates.

Throughout the book Charles Fishman highlights several examples of where through Wal-Mart’s drive to have the lowest prices all the time is, in my mind, actually causing harm to not just America but countries all over the globe.

An example, health insurance in the state of Georgia as of writing over 10,000 children of Wal-mart employees we enrolled in the state insurance program for poor children who had parents who worked for Wal-Mart. the next highest employer in the state was 734. Now ignoring the size differences Wal-Mart had 1 child for every 4 employees while the next employer was 1 in 22.

There are stories after stories in the book of the impact that this massive company is having on people’s lives not just in America but all over the globe. While the drive to have the lowest prices all the time is smart for business at one level. When you get to the size of Wal-Mart it can have a devastating effect on organisations and people. Dare I say it possibly driving some into poverty, and not just in western countries they could in fact be keeping some people in poverty by pressuring manufactures to keep their prices down.

http://blogactionday.org/js/785c5fab24b471ddee270c2715be19b7b23138b1

Oracle Social CRM Part Two

I started this post yesterday but was interrupted by meetings and personal life, so now back to my discussion with Oracle on their Social CRM offerings.

I said the tools were limited in functionality, but let me explain in more detail. They are NOT limited in functionality within the firewall, but external user generated content is not something that seems to be in the current products. Yes you can use your favourite social network to background check potential customers. I can understand some of the reasons behind this but the options should still have been incorporated.

The products have a nifty looking UI, some of which is modelled on what looks like Apple’s iTunes. For example the Sales Library product allows user to flick through presentations by tag or to search traditionally. If you like a slide drag it to your area, then continue browsing. Once you have all of the slides you want, download and Sales Library creates a brand new powerpoint chart pack based on your selected slides. You now make your own changes and then upload the revised product for others to use. A great tool for building those sales presentations. What is missing is linkages to tools like SlideShare to bring in user generated content.

The linkage with social networking tools of your choice allow you to complete detailed research on your existing and potential customers. for example if you are selling a new eLearning system, go find out which sports team the learning manager supports, what their favourite hobbies are, where they went to school.

The tools have a fantastic integration with the iPhone allowing seamless integration with the CRM products. Which for example if you make a phone call to a CRM contact, automatically updates the CRM from the iPhone handset over the air that the call was made. The CRM tool provides a nice interface showing appointments, tasks and contact all over the air from your CRM on Demand product. Just wait, get lost on your way to see a client, a single click on the CRM contact on your iPhone and you have the Google map appearing showing the location.

A final thought I know more a more companies who are using traditional CRM tools as part of the recruitment process to manage the relationship with candidates. The additions into the Oracle product line make this application even more compelling.

Slight service interruption

Over the last few days service on this site and several of my other sites has been less than perfect, downright poor for some of them. This has been due to several related factors. Firstly the performance of my previous hosting provider MD Webhosting and secondly the unavoidable service interruptions while moving hosting providers. I am now on a VPS environment provided by SliceHost.

I will not go into the details of the issue I had with MD WebHosting, let’s just say I would not recommend them to anyone.

Things should start to settle down as I get everything fully sorted. I appologise to people who have been impacted by these issues.

Self Management & Inspecht Update

The last month to 6 weeks has been very busy, but I have to say I have not made a lot of progress in many different areas. Before we get to the challenges let me review the positive things from the last month.

I started attending Jelly in Melbourne and have met some great folks.
We went to Sydney for Web Directions South 2008.
I spoke at a user group for EmployeeConnect.
Sat on a panel for the NSW KM Forum.
Meet with several people around possible work opportunities.
Helped organise the Melbourne Twitter community’s Talk Like a Pirate Day party & another MTUB meetup.
Helped organise and attended Startup Camp Melbourne.
Started a wild idea of mine Blue Day 2008.
Wrote several blog posts that have focused my thoughts in some new areas.
Read several books on business development and social media.
Attended the AHRI HR Leadership Day.
Begun discussions with some peers on a new project that we can’t talk about at this stage ;-).

Now the challenges.

Being a solo operator for the last 6 months and having spent the 6 months previous working from home full time motivation can be an issue some days. The last month has been full of days like that.
I have not completed a GTD weekly review, at all.
Inbox is no where near zero.
I have not finished several documents and presentations that I set as goals for September.
To be honest I have no billable work between now and the end of the year, which is a concern.
My hosting provider and I have had a falling out meaning I spent most of last week starting to move the dozen or so sites I have onto a brand new dedicated server. While the performance has improved this process is costing me time and money.
I have spent a lot of time writing code on several personal projects that don’t pay any money. While I enjoy the writing of code, you can’t pay the bills with it.

Next steps.

Complete a full weekly review, my major task of today.
Review my value proposition of Inspecht as I have noticed the message is not clear when selling my services.
Update the Inspecht web site with these revised service messages.
Finish the outstanding documents from September.
Focus on my GTD next actions so I don’t get lost again.

Poverty & depression

While today is Blue Day 2008, where the Australian tech & social media community are raising the awareness of depression & anxiety, we need to remember that we still live in a privileged part of the world. Most of us will never experience poverty in the real sense such as the way people in Darfur are at the moment. Unfortunately this does not mean people don’t experience poverty in Australia, in fact people can end up on the poverty line, or even below it, as an outcome of depression.

Remember over 1 million Australia adults and 100,000 youth live with depression each year, on average, 20% of people will experience depression at least once in their life; 1 in 4 females and 1 in 6 males. While experiencing depression many people are unable to function within what we casually call normal society, sometimes they end up without any means of financially support themselves or their family.

The inability to financially support oneself can result in them living in poverty. Not only that, these people can be living next door to you, not a faceless individual in another country. Poverty and depression together can create are terrible cycle with one feeding off the other and can send an otherwise intelligent & well functioning person over the edge.

This leads me to Blog Action Day and Learn About Poverty.

Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.

This year Blog Action Day is focusing on poverty, which brings me to Learn About Poverty a blog where World Vision has brought together their resources for Blog Action Day.

To help generate excitement for Blog Action Day, World Vision and several other Australian organisations are running a competition to encourage more people to post about poverty. So I encourage you all once you have written you post on depression, pull one together for poverty.