Weaving your Work Web

While I generally find seminars and classroom training programs a drab affair, I recently attended a 3 day training program where a few concepts were implementable. The trainer spoke about the complexity of the informal organization and how important it is to build your own network inside as well as outside your organization.

While this might sound obvious, its easier said than done. And the more difficult part is to track and understand how big and strong your network is. Adapted from “How to Manage” by Jo Owen, there are certain role definitions for each member in your network. Classify your contacts as follws:

Informers – Sources of vital information, trends and developments. They know what is going on, so you ought to have as many as possible.

Connectors – Open doors and connect you to others. These are people who know people. These may come from your business as well as social network.

Sponsors – People with power and influence and can be relied upon for support when required. Essential for leverage.

Promoters – are your supporters and increase your visibility by advertising your strengths

Advisors – provide guidance and feedback on your development plans (both business as well as personal).

Experts – People with specialist expertise to complement your own and can provide argument in your own area. These can also be useful when you need to get buy in from groups with a specialist background different from yours.

The classification is not as easy as I thought it was and found that there was a lot of overlap in terms of one person falling in more than one classification. However, try and keep away from one person appearing more than once.

Use the following circle to understand your own web network. This will give you an idea of who are the people you hang out with and where all you need to develop in terms of making a more intricate web of people.

We will need 3 different colored pens :

- Put your name in the centre of the circle
- Use a red line for someone who is not very critical in your web ending with the name of the person
- Use an amber line for someone who is critical to your web ending with the name of the person
- Use a green line for someone who is extremely critical to your web ending with the name of the person
- The length of the line denotes the strength of the relation you share. A name close to the circle denotes a close relation.

Once you are through with this exercise, your web might look something like this. I have omitted the names for clarity and put an initial as an example:

This gives us a clear idea of the following:

- The uniqueness of our network and the areas where we need our network to develop
- Which are the relationships that we need to work upon and are essential for our long term success
- The relationships that we take for granted and understand their criticality in our success.

Your network can be reviewed every 6 months and updated to see what progress you have made in developing your own work-wide web.

For me, my first insight was that I hardly had anyone in the Advisors box. And I have started to work on developing some of them for myself. And I also made a few calls to rejig my old boys’ network…:D

How the Work Ethic has evolved!

The concepts of ‘work’ and ‘job’ have undergone a sea change over the past few years. Our parents’ generation believed in the ‘One life one job’ concept and we see numerous cases from that generation where they have spent their entire lives in one organization.

The work ethic has evolved over the years and the concepts at the workplace have also changed. The ‘Pentium’ kids (those born with a computer at hand all the time) are most comfortable with communication and digitized mediums and have very different concepts relating to the age-old definitions:

Loyalty – While our Parents generation believed in spending one life in one job, the Millennials are most comfortable with their own development and look at constant and accelerated growth for themselves. This is the reason we see a lot of resumes these days with an average of 1.5-2 yrs per job. Organizations are also waking up to this fact and are realizing the value of employees who can contribute well over a period of 2-3 years.

Respect – Our Parents grew up with the concept of respecting seniors at the workplace because of their age and the fact that a senior might have a spent a decade more than them working in the organization. Gen Y, on the other hand, has a practical approach towards the concept of respect, They respect you if they feel the need to. Respect at the workplace is earned by your actions rather than the number of grey hair that you have.

Communication – Our parents grew up in the age where there was no Internet, no mobile phones, no ‘Google’, etc. The Pentium kids take all these things for granted and resources such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other networking mediums are available 24X7.

Work Timings – The conventional work timings of 9 to 6 which existed a few years back have also seen major changes. There has been a blurring of lines between working at office, working from home, working on the move, and so on.

Networking – With resources like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc, gaining momentum, the way we network has also revolutionalized. While networking was restricted to office parties for the previous generation, this has turned into a 24X7 activity with ‘always available’ tools gaining ground.

The greatest challenge for the HR department lies in the fact that the expectations of these two sets of employees have to be brought together. The top management team has typically been brought up on the previous generation values but they. in turn, have to manage the millennial employees with a different set of expectations. The HR team has to ensure that both sets of employees are educated about this. It has to be clearly communicated to both sets that different people may have different styles of working. No one style is really wrong. One has to maximize productivity by trying to make the best out of both and breed creativity rather than contempt.

Facebook and Twitter – Should they be blocked in office !

A vociferous NO!!

There are numerous times when we see the page shown below (or something similar telling us that its against organizational policy) in our offices when we try to login to Facebook, Twitter or any of the other social networking websites.

The traditional arguments supporting the blocking of these pages have been:


i) Employees will waste time on these rather than doing actual work – My take on this is that employees are an innovative lot. If they HAVE to waste time, they will find numerous ways to do it. The analogy to this could be that you do not provide telephones at workstations because employees might call up their friends during the day and waste time!!!


ii) Employees might leak confidential information – First of all, employees are not stupid and they understand that this will not be taken lightly by senior management. So they will be extra careful. And if you really have an employee doing this deliberately, then he really has no business being part of the organization in the first place.


Even if organizations keep banning these websites, smart-phones are an obvious option that the employee has to access them 24x7. Smart-phones have penetrated deep into the Millennial and the Gen Y population and are no more restricted to the corporate boys, as signified by the new Vodafone-Blackberry ad.


From the business point of view, I will take the example of 2 types of organizations to push my case for NOT banning social networking websites and how these could help in the long run:

• Service based Organizations – It is critical that these types of organizations keep an open ear to what is being said about them in the marketplace. And Facebook is the biggest marketplace in the world today. Last heard, if Facebook was a country, it would be the 3rd biggest in the world. So that’s the size we are talking about. Consumers who thrive on sharing information are on the rise and they do not hesitate to put real time feedback on Twitter for ex.,
• “Having Cappuccino at XYZ Coffe Place..the service sucks!
• “The new XYZ mobile service rocks!....Just had a smooth conversation in a lift 3 levels below the ground floor ”

One can imagine the kind of impact these simple tweets can have on the group of people listening to this conversation on the web.

• Sales based Organizations – With social networking websites garnering huge membership figures, it is essential that the conversations in these maintain a positive note. Any negative discord has to be handled quickly and efficiently. These websites have taken word-of-mouth publicity to levels never ever imagined a few years back.
  
  
  
  
  
  Just imagine if a marketer was listening to the natural conversation above…

And users consider this publicity GENUINE, simply because it is coming from people they know and it is taking natural conversations onto the cyber space. Apart from the genuineness, marketers can use these to increase visibility as well as get on-the-spot feedback on what people think about new schemes/ launches / products, etc.


In effect, what I am trying to say is that these websites can actually add value to the business. And my belief is that the HR function’s role is complete only when it can help in adding value to the business.


So we need to come out of the old mindset and start exposing employees and our marketers to this ongoing revolution and modify our policies to accept these changes. The insightful Dilbert sums up my discussion: