Why Social Media is a Great Way to Do Organisational Change in Cross Cultural Change Scenarios

 

By now, everyone who has studied communication in any form is aware of the 55/38/7 rule of communication – your communication is 55% body language, 38% your tone of voice, and only 7% words.

While there is caution in the use of these numbers without qualification, it cannot be denied that a large part of our communication is non verbal.
 

The complexity of Cross Cultural Change Management

I have often observed that in closed eye experiments where we listen to Oriental and Western tones, the Oriental tone typically appears sing song and the Western tone appears aggressive to the non Westerner. What this means in plainspeak is that the interpretation of the tone is very dependent on our cultural context.

Likewise for body language. Challenges of cross cultural interactions based on interpretation of body language are well documented. For instance, Tibetans greet each other by sticking their tongue out. That is the gesture used by most of us to tease.
 

And it gets better…

To make things more interesting, the figure of 93% applies most to the expression of emotions. In plainspeak, that means that team members are most likely to be misunderstood by other cultures when they are trying to communicate their deepest part – emotions.

So, why do I feel that social media, which ordinarily seeks to make communication more complex, will in fact be an advantage in cross cultural change management?

Watch this space to find out. 

Why Social Media is a Great Way to Do Organisational Change in Cross Cultural Change Scenarios- II

 The last post spoke about the challenges in cross cultural communication.

When doing change management, we take the normal change management challenges (resistance to change, high or low context culture, personality types and motivations, et al.) and apply a multification factor to that. Ergo, it’s a complex thing.

So why is social media likely to facilitate change, especially in a cross cultural scenario.

This post lists 5 reasons why Social Media is a great Change Management tool for cross cultural groups (even if they are not co-located)
 

Words

When put this way, it appears obvious. 93% of communication about emotions happens non verbally. It is more likely to be misunderstood across cultures. So we take that away and replace it with words. Only words. With that, we have taken away factors that cause over 90% ambiguity.

The communication is not “rich” but it’s unambiguous to a large degree.
 

ONLY positive feedback

Ever noticed that no social media platform has a dislike button? If you don’t like something, you either take the trouble to write a negative comment, or you keep quiet. When you take the trouble to write, you also have to “explain” your criticism. But liking is free. This may appear to be a small thing, but it’s a big factor in reducing negativity in teams, especially teams that are not co-located.
 

Written Communication

The thing with written communication is that even in the most informal avatar, it has to be structured, at the very least. Writing forces the brain to think and place sentences in a logical order. This means that when we share ideas, they have gone through one round of internal sanity check – not always possible in oral communication.
 

“At your convenience” communication

While “at your convenience” is a standard benefit of social media, across time zones, it becomes a key differentiator. A person might post a question, and within 24 hours, colleagues from across the world will have had a chance to look at it and respond, within their work day. This way, we can engage teams from all over the world on the same thread of discussion.

When doing change management, sometimes, the difference in release times becomes a bone of contention. This way, everyone can be onboarded on the same thread.

For instance, when should we plan solution validation with key end users? In an email world, the email will be sent to Change Management leads in all countries, answers compiled, and an excel sheet prepared at the corporate office. Using Social media, everyone’s answers will be visible to everyone else, everyone can see when someone is planning a session and will automatically propose dates to avoid a clash. Everyone can see the direction of travel and pick up dates that are congruent with that direction. Then, the specialist can travel to and cover all locations in a single leg.
 

Time to get used to each other

How many friends do you have on Facebook, whom you knew only slightly in the real world, and have got to know better since you saw their posts, political opinion, pics with kids? I have a lot of them.

That’s the beauty of social media – blogs, discussion threads, yammer, et al. You get to really know people – slowly, by and by.

Perhaps this is the best part of using Social Media for cross cultural change – the engagement doesn’t have to end with the project. You can stay in touch, and build a network of change managers who can help in more than one project or program. Over time, this group will get to trust each other and also create cross location cohesion. In a multi country environment, cross country cohesion at all levels is very necessary.

Conclusion: Can one go wrong in using Social media as a Change Management tool? Oh yes! The benefits up here are not automatic. Like all tools, success is a function of the user’s skill and the tool’s inherent excellence. Have fun using social media at work!

What Makes a Work Place Women Friendly?

 This morning, on a whim, I decided to check the best places for women to work in India (and what makes them so special).

The plan was to follow that up with a random poll among my women colleagues and friends – “what makes a great workplace for you”, and see if the answers to the poll are congruent with what the rating agencies think is a great place to work for women.

But at Step 1 of the secondary research, we hit an important roadblock, hence this post.

Here are some of the things that make a unique workplace:

• Flexi time
• Long sabatticals for “family reasons”
• Child care on campus
   

Whoa!! These are not female specific benefits. Anyone with family responsibilities will need these. Childcare is needed not just for female employees – our male employees can be parents too. In some case, single parents for short or long durations. Likewise for flexi time and handling family emergencies.

At this point, one whistled. This was a serious case of discrimination *against* the men. In making these great perks for women, we quite simply underplayed or denied their importance to men while the fact is that more and more fathers are actively engaged parents today.

At home, both parents take time to work and look after the family, yet only the mothers are considered candidates for child care and flexi time. What about fathers that may want to use these options? Will their team peers think of them as being “less capable”?

This is a serious perception issue. For both genders and for organisations. It is a fact that our male employees are participating more at home. But we are simply denying that reality at work. And denying them the privileges that come naturally for women employees.

Suppose HR changed “women friendly” to “parent friendly” initiatives? And “women friendly” to “work life balance” for flexi time and sabbatical?

While we are at it, I would like to ask the men *and* women – what makes a great place to work? I bet flexi time will be up there on the list.

The Importance of KTB in RTB, GTB and TTB

 

As IT organisations grapple with budget allocations and portfolio assessments and redesigning the service portfolio to stay relevant in the digital era, they probably feel underequipped and over worked. Perhaps rightfully so.

The weekend ruminations were on helping CIOs deal with the portfolio management conundrum. Of all the ideas that floated, one stood out.

While we talk about RTB, GTB and TTB, and try to use allocations in these areas, perhaps it is time to invest in a crucial component. IMHO, this component is a key input in determining the IT Service portfolio of an organisation and yet one that receives very little attention.

Ladies and Gentlemen, presenting – KTB – Know The Business. Most IT organisations have dedicated staff whose only job is to monitor the latest IT trends in their industry and to map usage to their own organisations. They may be called by any name – Business Analysts, Functional Consultants, Center of Excellence et al. Sometimes, key employees do it as part of their regular JD.

But few, if any, invest in staying updated in whats happening in business trends around the world, and not just the IT trends in that industry. Better still, we do not normally find the IT folks very conversant with the details of how the business is actually run. Consequently, we have a situation where we are trying to decide the IT needs of a business but we do not know what that business is.

Endpoint: CIOs must invest budgetary dollars in ensuring that the entire team, or at least the portfolio management/ budgeting team is aware of how the business is run, and how it will change over the next 2-3 years (not just in IT).  KTB should be a part(albeit a small part) of the Portfolio Management budget.

Assigning the KTB Dollars for Maximum Value

 

In the previous post, we spoke about assigning dollars to ensuring that the IT team understands the business.

Which starts the next question – where should these dollars go for maximum impact.

This answer is based entirely on my experience as a non business person trying to make sense of the business. My knowledge of industries is limited to IT, Consulting and Energy. This may not apply to some industries, or may have to be modified to suit your specific need, but its a good starting point.

Tier 1: The Grassroots: Assign a set of people who do actual delivery and support work for day to day IT ops, to go and see the grassroots part of the business – the factory, the drill, the delivery projects, the warehouse et al. How do people really work. This internal perspective is very important because it will create the empathy that support people must have for their customers.

Tier 2: The Decisions: Next, assign a group of people to work directly with the middle layer to understand the answers to 2 questions:

1. By what process are decisions taken in that department?

2. What are the variables that impact decision making?

Once we know how decisions are taken and what impacts those decisions, we know the movers for our customers and will be able to respect their constraints better. The other thing I have observed is that when I know the variables for my customer, I am able to work with them to generate the most out of our positive variables, while minimising the impact of the negative variables. But not knowing their variables puts our team in a blind spot from where we argue our respective positions, without much benefit to either party.

Tier 3: This is expected. The Center of Excellence or the Benchmarking team should also allocate time to understand how the business itself is changing. This team will interact internally and externally both, participate in industry conferences and not just IT conferences, preferably with a colleague from the relevant unit.

What are your thoughts? As the CIO, would you invest in your team knowing the business? How would you go about it?

Where Gamification Comes From – The Impact of Millennials in the Workplace

 The Background

This morning, I was at a workshop for parents at my child’s school. We were taught how to make spellings fun for our children. The class was very interesting, with activities and games to help children learn spelling.

At one point, the trainer said, “Our children have a very low span of attention. And this generation does not believe in work. So it is our duty to make learning fun for them. They will learn, but we must make it interesting and ..fun!  Our parents just asked us to learn spelling, and we did. But that’s not how this generation works.”

If the reality of the millennials had never hit me, it did now. The teacher was right – this is a generation that has grown up without the concept of “work”. If its not fun, if its not engaging enough, they wont do it. Suddenly, it is someone else’s job to make the workplace “engaging” and to keep them interested. Remember that famous quote ? The world owes you  NOTHING.? Apparently, the millennials skipped that one in their entire education.

Having said that, the generation is brilliant.. they are capable of creative destruction.. and reconstruction – probably more than any generation before them has been.  They have a very supportive social structure – more than any other generation has had since the Victorian age, at the very least.

The Problem Statement

So, how do we get them to contribute to the grinding mill called “normal work” . How do we get them to understand the concept of “work” ?

The Immediate Solution

Perhaps this explains the ever growing trend of “gamification” of everything. Today, we reward the smallest things – there are “tasks” and “quests” and “points (or eggs or coins or gems) to be won, then reused within the game for higher levels, more advanced digital tools and so on. I would like to make special mention of things like office Vibe, which rewards proof of collaborative behavior, healthy living, et al. There are a lot of other apps, websites and even custom developed tools that do the same.

The generation coming after them is not any different. Increasingly, “Work” becomes a dirty word.

As practitioners, we face a unique problem because of that..

The Problem created by the immediate solution

The colleagues who are not millennials, wonder why the new generation is so “pampered” , while they come and do an honest day’s job and are not rewarded as much as, or on par with their work contribution.

Cause Analysis

As I see it, these different generations derive gratification from different stimuli. As workplace practitioners, we try and provide these stimuli.

For the non millennials, the primary source of gratification is, by and large, how much and how well their work is done, the money they get for it, and the recognition they get for it. The output and the recognition for that output. Also, elements of discipline like being on time, communicating according to protocol et al. Make

For the millennials, gratification comes from “fun”, “enjoyment” and “being engaged”. Having control over their calendars, working out of anywhere, and getting recognised for output alone.

(Of course, these are sweeping generalisations being used to simplify and present the problem we are dealing with in this post. )

So, structurally, both groups are getting what gives them gratification.

The problem comes when we try to create an environment that rewards *both* these behaviors at the same time and also when people try to compare their contribution: reward ratio with that of the other groups.

Solving for the root problem

So, the problem is not just that the 2 generations view the idea of “work” very differently. It is also not that organisations are not willing to provide what they need to create a stimulating and engaging workplace experience.

The real problem arises because:

A. We pretend that we are treating all employees the same: We cannot. Because they are not the same. We are giving each one what they need – broadly. If one gets flexi time , it is because they need flexi time. if the other gets higher fixed bonus, it is not because we penalise flexi time and reward adherence to fixed time. It means that money is not the only kind of reward we give. Money is only one type of gratification. Flexi time and shorts at work is another. When we create this myth of equal treatment for all employees, we are also perpetrating the myth that basically, all employees are the same, they need the same things.

Solving for Perpetrating the Myth:  

To solve for this myth, we need to acknowledge that all employees are different and may need different things. Being different does not make them “flippant” or “undisciplined” or millennials”old fashioned” or “stuffy”. We don’t need to label anyone who is different from us. Labeling happens when acceptance is missing. And acceptance has to start with the employer. Acknowledge differences. Stop the “Everyone gets the same treatment” myth. Acknowledge that policies are differential, but the basis of differentiation is the need of that employee group.

B. People compare with each other.

Solving for Comparisons at workplace

Comparisons happen, mostly in linear reward structures – ones based mostly on money as the reward.

Suppose we were to initiate a multi factor rewards environment, where people could pick the things that work for them – flexi time, informal dressing, tele presence, travel, et al. Each element has a cost to company, and it is published.

Endpoint

We are dealing with multiple age groups at the workplace. We keep thinking of ways to make them work together. This is not THE answer. There cannot be one “THE” answer. But the more we work in this area, the more answers we are likely to have.

Visualisation: That crucial element for Agile in ERP

Once upon a time, we wanted to use Test Driven Development (TDD) on a small ERP delivery project. This would reduce documentation by 70% and lead to a time saving of upto 40%. We were very excited.

We ran the familiarisation workshops. Explained how the method will be different – to the customer and to our own development teams. Got everyone’s concurrence. And then we started with a small project in pilot.

 

Except, it didn't take off. But that experience taught me something really important about adoption of Agile in ERP projects. The missing link was simply this – because ERP (even small ERP deliveries) are huge, we were not able to visualise the end product. That is why we could not start with Test Driven Development.

 

Once we had the Root Cause Analysis, it was relatively easy. For the next application, I sat and visualised the ENTIRE application – all user types, with all their screens, and behavior of each button.

 

We didn’t have the luxury of standard screens that most ERP customers have – they know the standard screen buttons available to them and know what they look like. We had to visualise the entire application from scratch.

But here is the important thing – once the wireframing was done, it was much easier to do Test Cases. We simply knew what to expect!

 

So here’s the recommendation – when we try to do TDD, especially on non traditional areas like ERP, spend some time and expense on a soft skills trainer – and do a visualisation, wireframing workshop. For the business owner and users. If they can visualise what they want, the rest of the exercise becomes much easier. Today, I find Visualisation to be a really powerful element in application design.

 

And visualisation is a specialised skill. Usually, it needs to be learnt.