Harrison Withers

Author: Harrison Withers (page 3 of 6)

Bersin IMPACT 2013 – Day 1

To keep up with the Bersin IMPACT conference in real time, follow Media 1der Harrison Withers on Twitter at @harrisonwithers.

Here’s a summary of yesterday’s session, courtesy of Harrison’s twitter feed, in reverse chronological order. Make sure you take a look at his photos too!

From bootcamp, Bersin seeing a lot of interest in abandoning performance ratings. I bet trend grows this year. #impacthr

Well there’s nothing to lose And there’s nothing to prove And I’m dancing with myself -Billy Idol #impacthr :)

Good to see maturity come up, but it’s more than learning. Comes into play on many other dimensions in HR and Return on People. #impacthr

Bersin by Deloitte playbooks releasing this week and look very promising. #impacthr

What use social media for membership interaction? That’ll never work (Insights Boot Camp) #impacthr

Love the hotel, seriously slow elevators. #impacthr

Concentrating on the “Predict and Plan for Agility” track. Looking forward to hearing from eBay, Lowe’s, Pfizer, and Adobe #impacthr

Calm before the data storm? Off to registration at Bersin Impact. #impacthr pic.twitter.com/VceHbHVm6B

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Wondering what the Return On People formula is for beach time, I know it’s there somewhere. #impacthr pic.twitter.com/HCZtOonTui

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Live tweeting this week from Bersin-by-Deloitte Impact HR conference. My spin and the best thinking from people I respect. Tune in #impacthr

Fort Lauderdale by night on the eve of the Bersin Impact conference. 50mm, f1.7, ISO100, 30 second shutter. #impacthr pic.twitter.com/MzdEIgNyAk

Measure Twice, Cut Once

April 3, 2013 / Harrison Withers / 2 Comments

Cigar box guitar

My biggest hobby outside of work is building musical instruments. I don’t have a woodworking or lutherie background. In fact, I’ve never taken a single class on either, and my dad is more shade tree mechanic than wood worker. So my instruments are generally pretty primitive.

I started building instruments out of cigar boxes. The practice of building instruments out of found objects is nothing new, in fact there is a long history of improvising to create something that you couldn’t afford for less than the cost to acquire that item. If you don’t have anything good to work from, then use what you have and improvise.

While this is a rewarding hobby for me, and it keeps me sharp in a lot of areas in my business life, my HR clients are not dealing with “found objects”. They don’t need to, and can’t afford to improvise on their talent to meet the needs of their companies. They are more mature at the practice of HR than a proverbial cigar box guitar.

The thing about learning slowly through experience alone is that while it takes a while, the journey is fairly rewarding. But the costs to get the experience are astronomical. Part of that cost is time, some of it is materials, tools have been a major expense, and some of it is lost to mistakes made.
As my skills have improved, the instruments I build take more time,
and the cost of materials I used have escalated rapidly.

Maple guitar

Measure twice, cut once is an over-used cliché, especially when we are talking about ruining a 99 cent 2×4 that is part of the unseen interior hidden by drywall. But when I’m using a $100 set of spalted curly maple (as seen in the picture to the right), that over-used cliché suddenly means something. I measure multiple times from multiple directions because there are real consequences if I make a mistake. But it’s more than the cost of wood. That piece of wood directly determines how the instrument sounds, how it plays, and how attractive the end result is. It also determines, if I choose to sell it, how much I can sell that finished instrument for.

Companies spend more on their people than any other expense on the balance sheet, yet too many of them treat people like a 99 cent 2×4 and not like a beautiful set of unique one-of-a-kind wood that directly affects their profitability. That’s not to say that they treat those employees poorly, it’s that they fail to measure, let alone twice, what the real value of that person to the organization really is.

This is also more than a “cut” metaphor; this isn’t about “staff reduction” as much as it’s about being smart about how people are applied to the end result.

I want to build better guitars. If you want a better HR function, measurement that means something
needs to be part of your approach. You will never improve without it.

Why Measure HR?

March 20, 2013 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

Think about this for a second. Are you measuring HR? What are the measurements you are tracking?

If you aren’t measuring HR, why would you want to start?

Many companies are trying to track employee satisfaction with HR services or transactions. Even more are capturing volumes of services. Those are excellent measures if you are trying to diagnose efficiency of a specific function or process for targeted improvement, but do you send those numbers to your boss? Do those numbers reach the C-suite?

The brutal truth is that the only reason you would ever send volume or satisfaction numbers up the line is to justify your own existence, to “prove” you are doing work of value. The problem with that approach is that it is very transparent in an “emperor has no clothes” sort of way. If you are fighting to justify yourself, it casts a shadow of doubt on your numbers. It does nothing to show the value HR brings to the business. It doesn’t matter how insightful your take on the numbers is, the business has no reason to trust you.

If you are going to measure HR, and you really should, you need to pick metrics that speak directly to the function of the business. Or at bare minimum, ones that can be directly correlated to a business measure. An employee being happy with a process is valuable to that process, but the business wants to know if that happiness made the company more profitable.

If you’re measuring the wrong things for the wrong reasons, stop. You are part of the problem by adding costs (labor) to something that undermines your credibility and at the end of the day isn’t helping your company be better.

3 Things Your Center of Excellence Isn’t

January 10, 2013 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

Centers of Excellence (COE) are the hottest thing since Corporate Universities, and as a result you can’t dig any more than three layers into most organizations before running into one. As a concept they are fantastic – it makes sense to gather your best resources around an area of expertise to provide guidance around a stalled or lacking business target.

However, some organizations misinterpret or stretch the COE definition and then wonder why they aren’t seeing the benefits that they expected. While there is a wide range of valuable activities a COE can engage in, there are a few things that a COE is not and cannot be if it hopes to remain effective.

There is no such thing as a one-person COE. When you have one person who is more competent than anyone else in your organization in a given area of practice, that person is a Subject Matter Expert. A COE is a group of people who bring together different viewpoints and can analyze an issue in a more complete way than an individual. A true COE is composed of people who have strengths that complement one another and are therefore able to meet the needs of a focus area from a higher level perspective.
A COE is not a call center. A group of people performing similar functions can be called a center, but the excellence part only comes if the majority of that group’s time is spent improving the process or skill that the center is responsible for. Simply calling a functional area a COE without competence dedicated to improvement will not result in that center delivering returns above its volume capability.
Not every problem needs a COE. Some problems can be fixed by making and supporting change. Problems that benefit from a COE are constantly evolving, complex and require intervention over a longer period of time. But nothing says a COE has to exist forever. If the area has met its goals or new goals have taken precedence, there is no reason it has to remain part of your organizational landscape.

Like most things in business, we have to constantly re-evaluate the approaches we take to solve problems and be very clear about the results we expect. In terms of the creation of a COE, make sure your efforts are contributing to the context or environment you are trying to address.

Applying this to the performance grid, your COE should directly focus on two left uppermost boxes and to a certain extent the incentives and consequences. When your COE crosses the line and becomes about individual skill, capability, or motivation (as the three examples above), it will probably miss the mark.

Making The Shift From Knowing To Doing – Thoughts From Learning 2012

October 24, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

My post-conference perspectives are always interpretations on the themes of the conference rather than a blow by blow recap of the things I went to and what I learned. This post will be no different. For a comprehensive back channel digest, I recommend David Kelly’s (@LnDDave) curated digest.

There was plenty of talk at this year’s conference that continues to reflect the themes of retention, gaming, “fun” learning, and engagement. There was also a continued emphasis on video, and informal production of small learnings and those enabled through corporate implementations of social communities. Around the edges, in the visible fringes, there are grumblings about transformation of not just the learning function, but also the organizations, systems and processes, the root cause of the need for training.

When we look at why we need training, when we flip it on its head and focus on outcomes, it becomes clear that the emphasis of evaluation needs to be on “doing” and much less on “knowing.” Leaders should place value on measurements of behavior and performance above whether employees simply know the correct procedure or the preferred interpretation of policy.

If you don’t act and interact in accordance with what you learned, why does it matter if you remember the training? Retention can’t be the goal and certainly isn’t a good measure of effectiveness. Validating my perspective on the shift to performance, there were several sessions on performance consulting and both a keynote highlight and joint session with ISPI.

I did appreciate the continued conversation around story telling- not because I think it helps with retention of knowledge, but because stories make learning situational and provide the context needed for when to apply knowledge so that it equates to performance. General Colin Powell (Ret.) displayed this in his keynote by stringing numerous and memorable stories spanning his entire career. These stories make General Powell a must see public speaker if you are given the opportunity.

I want to continue the dialogue about the evolution of the training professional into performance-centered consulting, where resources are curated, designs are user-centered, and results are measured in actions.

Root Causation: 4 Steps To Finding The Truth In A Story

September 28, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

I am currently waist deep in a broad ranged process transformation effort with a very recognizable brand, and this company has the most passionate staff I have ever encountered. We are in the beginning of a diagnosis phase in our methodology, and we are asking for stories about processes to identify where the process in place falls short.

I never want a diagnosis session to turn into an airing of grievances, but people tend to make their stories personal. A few times during our diagnostic processes, the passion of the people involved combined with the personal nature of their stories has led to tales of processes gone awry. A challenge in consulting is to pull the root cause out of a story without allowing the truth to be obscured by embellishment.

I follow these basic steps when I evaluate stories:

Assess Risk – Sometimes the risk of something out of ordinary is low enough and the risk it represents is small enough that you just have to let it go. Bad things happen. Sometimes process can prevent it, but what is the cost to the organization vs. the risk it represents?
Determine Repeatability - If this risk is great enough, did it happen more than once? Do the conditions still exist that it could still happen again? If so, you’re going to have to dig a little deeper.
Identify Measures – If it can happen again, how will you know when and how often it happens? This is especially difficult in something that you want to measure in terms of cost avoidance, since the measure is the lack of an occurrence.
Find the Triggers – Most people tell stories in a linear way from beginning to end. Look at the story and try to find what went wrong first. If you can identify and address the initial trigger, then subsequent triggers may be irrelevant. A good way to get someone to self identify triggers is to ask them “what would you do differently?” If someone remembers a story vividly, chances are he or she has spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to prevent the problem from happening.

Sometimes a story is just a story, but stories can also be parables that tell exactly what we need to know and what to do about it. An expert will be able to find the truth in the tale.

Chicken Pox and Change Management

September 4, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

Chicken Pox Change Management

Recently the Media 1 team went through a performance consulting refresh with Judith Hale, author of the Performance Consultants Fieldbook, and other titles related to performance centered consulting.

During one of our sessions, Judy referenced “learning by disease.” What she was referring to was the sometimes common practice of “exposing” employees to new process in hopes that they would “catch the disease” and learn the new process. This of course reminded me of my childhood when it was not an uncommon practice to expose a child to another child with chicken pox especially if that chicken pox outbreak coincided with a time that there wasn’t school or a family vacation planned. Disclaimer: I remember clearly missing school, so I do not think my mother planned my chicken pox.

This is such a clear metaphor for unmanaged and unmitigated change, not only in learning, but for any process change (and one I fear one we are all guilty of from time to time). However, I’m not so sure that all concerns come from the same place. All too often, we are so concerned that our people don’t catch the disease that we tend to forget that chicken pox – in whatever way it’s contracted – makes the person infected with it pretty miserable.

We should be less concerned about exposure to the disease and more concerned about the effects of it. The “change by the exposure” method only addresses the environment for change, It doesn’t take into account whether the individual has the skill or capability (except in rare cases, you only can get chicken pox once, and I hear they have vaccines now), and it certainly doesn’t address the way you would want to transmit change (no school or family vacation). And most importantly, why would your employee ever want to catch it (motive)?

Unless our goal is to fail (Ebola anyone?), we need to design and use better models than the world’s worst epidemics. Hopefully this metaphor will help you recognize where this model is being used in your organization, and help you manage change with performance in mind, as opposed to hoping for successful exposure.

4 Distinctions from the SPTech Conference: Branding, User Acceptance, Maturity, and User Experience

July 27, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

I was very fortunate to be asked to speak at BZ Media’s SPTech Conference in Boston this week. My talk was “Way Beyond Portals: SharePoint as the User eXperience Platform (UXP)” where I explored the concept of utilizing SharePoint as an underlying technology for enterprise driven user experience based systems.

While there was a lot of talk at the conference about technical topics related to SharePoint, there were also quite a few sessions on branding, user acceptance, and maturity. Unfortunately, there was also a lot of chatter that seemed to confuse the topics. It got me thinking about the distinctions between branding, user acceptance, as well as maturity and how those things contribute and factor into user experience.

Branding – I have never experienced a business application that was relevant because it was branded, but I have experienced many applications that fail because they failed to attract enough attention to be relevant. “Don’t put lipstick on a pig” was an analogy I heard mentioned, but I would argue that the only time you should build a pig is if your end goal is bacon, and if that is the case, bacon is a better brand than the pig. The distinction here is that branding is not something you decide whether or not you need, it’s a requirement. There are varying levels of effort that go into branding, but it’s just not optional.
User Acceptance – There are two components to user acceptance, position and value. Branding fits on the positioning side of the equation while value determines how “sticky” the application is. There are many sites that are positioned well in terms of both branding and purpose, and pass initial acceptance, but over time fail to show sustained value. Information sites tend to fall into this position. I think that there is a place for information sites, but we need to make intelligent design decisions on how “sticky” we want those sites to be. If we want sustained acceptance we need to design in value that exceeds knowing something to include a connection to real work.
Maturity – As the architect of the SharePoint Maturity Model, Sadie Van Buren is the pre-eminent expert on defining maturity for SharePoint installations. While branding is a component or indicator of a mature model, a branded site is not necessarily a mature site. While user acceptance is not a named component of the maturity model, it’s hard to imagine a mature application of technology where acceptance was not achieved. I think the real power of the maturity model is as an indicator of the willingness to leverage technology for real business purposes (value). Highly mature installations show both intuitive user experience and a clear business-based purpose.
User Experience – Defining user experience as the culmination of the acceptance of a process and the ability perform a value-based behavior, it’s easy to see how important branding, user acceptance, and maturity are to user experience. It’s impossible to have a successful user experience if the design of that experience fails in any regard. User experience isn’t just a branding exercise; it also involves the performance-based design that demonstrates sustained value and maturity.

Clearly there are valuable distinctions between these topics but they are all critical components of successful technology implementations whether they are SharePoint sites or applications, and all deserve an effort in our design processes. As I continue to think and write about user experience it occurs to me that best user experience may not be a “positive” one. While we certainly don’t want to create negative experiences, if our experiences are truly intuitive and functional they are transparent in and of themselves. Positive and negative are only relative to prior experience. But I will write more on that some other time.

3 Impressions from the mLearn Conference

July 6, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

It’s been two full weeks since I returned from the eLearning Guild’s mLearn Conference in San Jose. I had hoped to have this blog post out within two days, but I suppose we all struggle with things that we “need” to do taking precedence over the things that we “want” to do.

As usual, I’m going to give you my interpretations from the conference rather than a blow by blow. For another perspective, check out Brian Dusablon’s recap here.

1. “Anything but a course”

This was actually a quote from thought leader and friend Clark Quinn from his keynote. The theoretical talk on the conference floor was that mobile was not about pushing courses onto phones, yet there was a trade show full of folks pushing tools for converting and authoring courses for use on phones and a line of people waiting to hear how it’s done. Mobiles devices have real advantages and the explosion in growth is undeniable, but a course-based strategy just isn’t what your users are ultimately looking for. Your users want their mobile device to help complete the objectives of real and meaningful work. They want to use their mobile device to DO THINGS that align with their personal goals for their job, not the goals of the training department. When we understand and embrace this truth, “anything but a course” will only ring more true.

2. Tablets and phones are different animals

I’ve said it in the past, and I’ll say it again, tablets serve user needs in different ways than smartphones and deserve to be designed differently. Adaptive CSS and various authoring tools are doing a great job of helping us make sure that content looks good on both but a tablet isn’t a giant phone and a phone isn’t just a little tablet. While they have similar features and sometimes the same operating system, one makes calls and the other doesn’t. One is really good for taking pictures, the other not so much. One can fit a lot of information on a screen, the other you can fit in your pocket. You get the idea. In an age where BYOT (bring your own technology) is happening whether you want it to or not, your users will tell you how, when, and what type of device they want. It’s our job to listen and make sure the things that we design meet their needs. One caveat though, bring your own doesn’t mean any device ever made under the sun. I see a lot of people spending money supporting platforms that were dominant at one time, but don’t seem to have much of a future. You can put constraints on BYOT…

3. BJ Fogg is a very smart man

Stanford-based psychologist, BJ Fogg is a brand new favorite for me and he deserves a look by you, too. He’s doing some really interesting studies and experiments on what he calls building “tiny habits”, and he is showing some amazing results creating systems for behavior change. This is stuff you can use right now. Check out his website and make sure you do some reading on his Behavior Grid.

Your Social Media Policy Is Useless

June 14, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

Last week Heather Bussing from HR Examiner published the best article I’ve read yet on Social Media Policies. I’m not going to recap the points she made because the article does a really good job of that all on its own. You really should go read it; however, my favorite line in the article is:

“Do you have a telephone policy? Do you control what employees say in email?”

When you take “new” technology out of the picture and you apply the standard to technology that is so ubiquitous that it is transparent, the ridiculous level just goes through the roof. The cold hard truth is that social media is not a passing fad and will become as transparent as the telephone to the way that we do our jobs.

Social media policies are just another example of focusing on the wrong things like measuring the consumption of learning rather than performance improvement. If you really need rules to reinforce good common sense, have the rule prohibit stupidity and forget the rule prohibiting how you share it.

You know what else besides social media isn’t a fad? Mobile.

But instead of having a mobile computing policy, most companies just seem to make sure there isn’t any way to do real work on our tiny transformative devices. But that is another topic for another post.

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