Social - What Do We Mean?

Here is the first post in the series taking a look at ‘social’ or ‘connected’ opportunities in organizational life. This first post defines some terms as they apply to the overall theme in order to set the stage going forward. I am especially interested in any thoughts you have on the way these terms are defined here and whether or not it resonates with your ideas about what opportunities the use of social media tools offer us in organizational or community settings.

Let’s start with a brief recap of Systems Thinking which is an excellent framework for thoughts about networks, being connected, how the introduction of a social tool may affect parts of an organization (or the people within) unintentionally or in a different way than first imagined.

Systems Thinking (Systemic Application)

The following excerpt(s) from O’Connor and McDermott (1997) “The Art of Systems Thinking: Essential Skills For Creativity and Problem Solving, is important in ones understanding of organizational culture in the Digital Era.

“Systems thinking is seeing beyond what appear to be isolated and independent incidents to deeper patterns. So you recognize connections between events and are therefore better able to understand and influence them.” (Introduction)

“Interconnecting parts functioning as a whole. Changed if you take away or add more pieces. Its behaviour depends on the total structure. Change the structure and the behaviour changes. (p.3)

“The relationship between the different parts of the system determines how it works, so each part, however small, can affect the behaviour of the whole.
All parts of a system are interdependent, they all interact. How they relate to each other gives them the power to affect the whole system. This suggests an interesting rule for influencing systems, particularly groups: the more connections you have, the more possible influence. Networking brings influence. Indeed, research suggests that successful managers spend four times as much time networking as their less successful colleagues.” (p. 15)

Silos:
Many organizations are set up into departments with some crossover among departments that rely on one another to complete specific tasks. Such departments are generally organized to be efficient by reducing ‘noise’ – not having distractions that are not directly related to the day-to-day activities of the specific responsibilities of the department. However, this can also create Silos in organizations with strong Command/Control features that also have limited communication channels.

Silos can thus reduce efficiencies; further contribute to ineffective communication; does not take into sufficient account how actions (or inactions) affect other parts of the system. This can waste time and resources as the people in one department (silo) will realize more effort to locate expertise or support that is not within their immediate ‘network’. The duplication of effort that also occurs in this set up can create significant frustration over time and leave both employees and customers with a sense that it is difficult to do business in that organization. This leads to a negative impact on collaboration, communication, and cooperation. All of which can lead to a negative effect on morale, engagement and motivation.

Deciding what and how to make changes to an organization that may be feeling those effects of silos depends on what makes sense for the specific business, industry and size of the organization. The following thoughts on Integration, Cross-Functional teams and the concept of “Social” provides some clues to how one may reduce any such concerns.

Integration:
Wikipedia defines Vertical integration as follows, “combines different products or services under one ‘owner’ to satisfy a common need. Horizontal integration-consolidates like companies to monopolize an industry. And Integration as: “The mixing of people or groups previously segregated. An act or instance of combining into an integral whole. “

Cross-Functional: completing a goal or project using members from teams with different purposes and skills. How effective this is in an organization depends on the culture and communication style predominant in the organization.

Social:
Business/Organizational context Also referred to as “Enterprise” by some software/technology retailers. This is a combination of:

(1) Culture- people focused
(2) Organizational Approach- experience driven
(3) Customer Involvement -co-creation and/or engagement
(4) Social technology –social processes that use technology to enhance communication, learning/development/knowledge management and collaboration.

There is some discussion regarding the use of the word ‘social’ as being contrary to business as a productive and efficient orientation and this has given rise to alternate terms being used that encompass the use and effect of social tools; you will see words in various forms such as connected and collaborative that attempt to depict the true value and impact of social tools in organizations.

The next four posts in this series will assume the above is intended as descriptive of the thoughts regarding the opportunities and affect of social tools in organizations. While looking at 'social' from an organizational change perspective over the past five years the gradual shift in the words and terms used has been continuous. In some part, because of the unease with which some business executives view 'social' in a workplace setting, but primarily as the tools and applications have evolved to provide greater opportunities to a wider audience new terminology is needed to be appropriately descriptive.

What do you think? Do you find the many different uses of common words confusing, overwhelming or helpful?

Outsource or Not-What Are The Human Costs?

Outsourcing Has Human and Financial Considerations

Often when I read articles talking about whether or not to outsource support functions in organizations, they focus primarily on financial costs and metrics that refer to customer satisfaction surveys. I have also seen articles that talk about the benefit of outsourcing much of the administrative nature of HR so that HR practitioners can be freed up to focus on strategy. I have worked through HR task outsourcing and IT outsourcing and I am not convinced that those ideas are always as great as they appear to be on paper. There is a human cost in all this outsourcing that business executives would prefer not to discuss in any meaningful way. When mass layoffs occur they often outsource some aspects of that activity to a third party.

Understand the Financial Perspective But…
I understand the value of outsourcing from a financial perspective, but my question lies with whether the ‘on paper’ financial value really does outweigh the value of doing things in-house. Having heard all the arguments for that to date, I still am not entirely sure which is the best answer. But perhaps the “Occupy” movement provides some clues-the loss of community, the loss of jobs, the seemingly unfeeling nature of placing a dollar value on everything and seeing that dollar value as being more important that the humans that are affected. Perhaps the backlash costs provide some clues as to some of the very real costs that are ignored in these decisions.

Humans-Remember Them?
If your job title includes the word human or people in it-isn’t direct interaction a significant part of the deal? And what is lost when we send opportunities for face-to-face interactions out to a third party? Do we gain more than we lose? This is something that is hard to measure and as outsourcing has been around for so long now it would be hard to measure the impact as many people won’t remember what it was like to have a person within the organization to talk to when having problems with benefits or signing online for programs in the organization. Or the value of having a competent IT support person to show up and help with a problem, face-to-face.

Culture, Trust & Communities
Another point to consider is that when we outsource any role to a third party we are also displacing people within our organization, which has a deeply unsettling affect on the culture and the level of trust in the organization. We see so much about ‘engagement’ these days but if you are wondering when your job is going to be outsourced just how engaged do you feel like being? Outsourcing also affects the communities the business operates in and it is not likely that the effect can be measured in financial or statistical terms precisely, but it seems within the realm of reality that it is a significant effect.

Hiring Unemployed People?
I read another one of those discussions about why some companies refuse to consider unemployed people for employment recently-they have been popping up quite a bit since the recent economic meltdown. The argument that people get laid off because they are incompetent or lazy or a troublemaker seems to be the going thinking among some. Yet when we look at the massive numbers of layoffs (we have seen numbers such as 15,000, 30,000, 3,500 etc.) in some organizations it defies logic to believe that an organization could have recruited hired and retained that many problematic employees. That would say a lot more about the executives that laid those people off than it does about the employees. Is it really reasonable to believe that if a company laid off 30,000 people that all 30,000 were as described by those who refuse to consider people who are unemployed? And what about outsourcing-about two years ago a very large local data processing company decided to outsource 80% of the jobs held locally to India. That does not mean those employees were in any way at fault-it meant that the business, which by the way is a multi-billion dollar business, wanted to reduce costs by outsourcing to a country where they could pay far less in wages than they can locally.

Right or Wrong?
I don’t know if there is a right or wrong answer and it is likely one of those “it depends” situations. I do believe it is time we started placing a higher value on humans than we do on dollars. It isn’t necessarily good business to take the “profit as the only goal” strategy when the potential human costs are so high.

Employees Bring Talent

I read a lot of business articles and books, many of them focussed on human resources, organizational behaviour and social networks. One thing that shows up a lot is the references to the low levels of engagement among employees in contrast the the belief that a higher level of engagement is required for companies to have long-term sustainability.

One thing that comes to mind when reading these sources of information is the disconnect between the terminology that is being used and the way people feel about that terminology yet there is little discussion on this topic. Perhaps there is a fear of being too 'politically correct' or of being seen as not focussing on the real issue. Perhaps the terminology is part of the real issue, so I thought I would share some thoughts and see what you think.

Terms that are frequently used in articles, blogs and discussion groups when the topic is human resources are referring to people as assets or talent; and today I saw an article that referred to employees as weapons. When I listen to people discussing how they feel about this use of terminology in reference to employees they most often state that they feel like they are not considered as a whole person but as a thing, not much different than the equipment or building their employer purchases.

People are not assets or talent or weapons. They are human beings who exchange the use of their competencies, skills and abilities for a financial renumeration. A business does not own people, they lease their abilities.

If organizations believe that the people that work for them provide the value that is needed to sustain their business perhaps they might consider that disengagement can start with the way we communicate and can be resolved with the way we communicate.

What do you think? Do you feel the same way about being called assets, talent or weapons as the people I am hearing from?