Interesting approaches to talent management this week

Posted by adi on Jun 19, 2009 in Work

There have been some interesting approaches taken to managing talent this week.  Firstly BA announced that they wanted staff to perform up to 1 months work for free.  The plan was designed to avoid redundancies whilst helping the company weather the financial storm.  It predictably created a lot of controversy as clearly ceo Willie Walsh can afford such an action a lot more easily than some of his lower paid staff.

Then this morning BT announced that they will be loaning out staff to competitors for a short period to help reduce their wage bill whilst retaining staff over the longer term.

Certainly interesting to see how companies are dealing with this crisis.

Tags: British Airways, British Telecom, BT, Business, Willie Walsh

A happier house hunting experience

Posted by adi on Apr 4, 2009 in Play

I blogged recently about the shoddy time I had looking for a place to buy in London. After a bit of thinking I’m contemplating buying a place back on the Island as an affordable investment property, continuing to rent in London (in a nicer place) and seeing how things look in a few years.

Anyway, with this plan in mind I had a look around a new place on trip down to see a friend for his birthday. The experience was a world apart from my last estate agent one. They called up a few hours before the appointment to make sure we were still on for the viewing. The girl then turned up on time and spent close to an hour showing me around the place and fielding various questions.

As a result it seems likely that I may go down this route and invest on the Island. Some lessons to be learnt there for Haart estate agents.

Tags: Estate agent, house, Property

The most incompetent estate agents in the world?

Posted by adi on Mar 28, 2009 in Play

I’ve been looking into buying a place here in London recently, with the prices falling and the interest rates making saving practically pointless and all, it seems like a good time.  So I’ve been doing some searching on the various property websites out there, found a few that look ok, nice enough areas, within budget and so on.  One in particular I clicked on the ‘contact estate agent’ tab, filled in my details and checked to arrange a viewing.

I had left both email and mobile number so figured that the agent would then be in touch to arrange a time.  A few days passed and no sign of the estate agents.  It got towards a week of silence so I decided to call them up.  Got through to a girl at their office and she wasn’t aware of any web based contact (groan), but she’d get an agent to call me to fix something up.  A few more days of silence so I called again, same thing, but at least this time someone called back within the hour and we arranged a viewing.

We’re in a seriously depressed market right now, if the media are to be believed there aren’t many buyers out there so I’d have guessed estate agents would be falling over themselves to ’service’ potential buyers like myself, so the difficulty I had getting a viewing was not a good sign, but alas I had one, so that was something.

Unfortunately a booked viewing was not the same as an actual viewing.  Yesterday was the day of this much anticipated viewing, so I cycled down to the place in plenty of time and got there a comfortable 10/15 minutes ahead of time.  It wasn’t the nicest of days to be hanging about but patiently I did so.  2 o’clock came and went with no sign of anyone from the estate agent.  At quarter past I rung them up to see what was going on.  They had no record of the viewing but would get one of the sales staff to call me to sort things out.

Some twenty minutes passed and still nothing, so I called for a second time, and this time the girl on the phone promised that she would come out herself, give her 10 minutes and she’ll be there.  I waited at the property until 10 to 3, around half an hour after this phone call, before deciding to call it quits and give up on this property.

It turned out that the pictures on the website had glossed over certain things that put me off the property in question, but even if they hadn’t, the antics of the estate agents certainly would have done.

Step forward Haart Estate Agents, you were absolutely bloody awful.

Tags: Estate agent, haart, London, Property, Real Estate

Is Twitter becoming the new Wikipedia?

Posted by adi on Mar 26, 2009 in Work

Twitter has recently been gaining prominence in the Google search listings and has this week modified its title tags to improve further the search performance of members tweets and profiles.

Wikipedia has a tremendous reputation for dominating the search listings due to the outstanding architecture and wealth of user generated content.  Twitter obviously has plenty of user generated content, and now seems to be working on the search friendly architecture.

Is Twitter becoming the new Wikipedia?

Tags: Google, Search Engines, Social Networking, Twitter, User-generated content, wikipedia

Skittles on the Intranet

Posted by adi on Mar 8, 2009 in Default

Skittles made a bit of a splash in the media world recently with a relaunch of their homepage that essentially created an overlay for their various web properties, starting with a Twitter page displaying all tweets mentioning the Skittles brand name.  You could also check out their Flickr photo gallery or their Facebook fan page.

Nice enough idea, but I suspect it will enjoy its five minutes of online fame before falling by the wayside.  However, imagine such an approach is used internally on the corporate Intranet.  The single great feature of the so called web 2.0 applications is that it puts you in touch with customers as never before.  The problem generally is that those customer voices are generally only heard by the web savvy people within a company.  The overwhelming consensus still seems to regard Twitter as an oddity that will have nothing of use for them.

Blammo, this would shoot that down instantly.  The modern marketing credo puts the customer at the very heart of everything the company does, it’s not just enough for marketing folks to care about the customer, it’s something that each and every employee should care about.  But unless you’re customer facing it’s often difficult to know what your customers are doing, what problems they’re having and generally how they’re finding your products.  Now that can change.

The Skittles website will probably fade into obscurity within weeks, if it hasn’t already done so, but by jove it doesn’t half offer up a great opportunity for how to put social media into the faces of each and every person in your company.

Tags: Brand, Facebook, Flickr, Marketing, Skittles, Twitter

How often do you do something for its own sake?

Posted by adi on Mar 5, 2009 in Default

So often we do things for the money we gain or the prestige, but how often do you do something purely for its own sake?

Study for instance is often undertaken with the aim of earning a qualification or meeting new people. But how often do people learn purely for the sake of learning?

I think motivation is greater and longer lasting when we do something purely for its own sake. Is it however something we do often enough?

Tags: learning, Motivation, purpose

Leadership through story telling

Posted by adi on Mar 4, 2009 in Work

As regular readers of the blog will know I’m a fan of story telling in a wide range of contexts and I’ve been reading about how they can be used in a leadership context, especially when you’re trying to convince sceptics or change opinion.  The suggestion comes from Stephen Denning, a Stanford Business School professor.  He suggests that story telling in a leadership context should take three forms.

1. Gaining Attention

Your first story should aim to get the attention of your audience.  Negative stories often work well in this context but in general your story should be one of the following:

• Personalized
• Evoking an emotional response
• From a trustworthy source
• Concise

2. Eliciting desire for a different future

This is where positive stories come into their own because you get to tell how the future can be better.  At this stage listeners are usually bombarded with analysis and review of various options.  Denning suggests that these should be ignored in favour of a story.  It doesn’t have to be a big ol’ epic of a story, just one that elicits a positive response from the kind of change you’re hoping to evoke.

3. Reinforcing with reasons

What the change will be, the story of how the change will be implemented, the story of why the change will work.  All of these occur in the final section.

The basic jist being that decisions are more often made emotionally than rationally, so use stories to appeal to the heart rather than the head.

Tags: Leadership, management, Stanford Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business

Who are your business rivals?

Posted by adi on Mar 3, 2009 in Work

In sport competitive rivalry is a great aid to urging us on to bigger and better things but in business we don’t really have that.  We have rivalry on a company level but the notion of a company is often abstract and removed from our daily activities.

With tools such as LinkedIn now becoming popular though it is possible for you to identify your personal rival within these companies and compete against them, providing you with that spur, that incentive to push just a little bit harder, to try new things and to be bold in your pursuit of success.

Having that competitive urge is vital to ensure your company has momentum and the customer focus to achieve excellence.  So who is your business rival?

Are Internet firewalls an indictment of recruitment choices?

Posted by adi on Mar 2, 2009 in Work

Many companies seem to employ firewalls to prevent employees browsing particular websites during work hours.  The usual suspects are traditionally barred, sites such as Facebook and Myspace, but also it seems that the likes of YouTube, Twitter and iTunes enter into the crosshairs.

With social marketing now an essential part of the online marketing mix it seems insane to prevent access to sites such as these.  YouTube for instance is the 2nd most popular search engine now and is absolutely essential for online marketing.

Surely if your recruitment process is up to the job then your organisation is employing people of fine standard that can be trusted to behave appropriately, so why the walled garden?

Are affiliate schemes only for mediocre companies?

Posted by adi on Mar 1, 2009 in Default

I was thinking today about how word of mouth spreads and people share positive experiences about companies.  I don’t mean simply recalling a job done properly but a tale of exceptional customer service, a proper fan boy moment.  And it struck me that when you’re in that position you don’t need or demand any kind of bounty for sharing this news, you’re happy to do so because of the benefit it will bring your friend.

Twitter for instance has spread via word of mouth because of the value inherent in its service.  It didn’t need to pay people to talk about them, they were happy to do so because of the value it gave them and the value it could give their friends.  I could say exactly the same about Facebook or YouTube or Google.  Even Amazon now pay significantly less than other retailers in affiliate bounty yet still demand loyalty because of the service they provide.

So are affiliate schemes merely the attempts by the mediocre to buy into some of this word of mouth marketing?  Would their money not be better spent on creating a service that truly excited people to the extent that they will actively promote them without recourse to financial incentives?

Tags: Customer service, Online Communities, Word of mouth