Responsibility In A Crisis

We’re all over the recession articles. And I’ve tried to avoid the doomsday-type articles predicting doom or gloom. The recession’s here. We all know it. And we understand what the consequences are. But I’d like to pause a sec from all this banter to tackle the problem of how businesses approach the issue of social responsibility and economic crisis.

To do this, I’m going to highlight an example. Recently, LinkMe let go of their Queensland state manager, and their general sales manager as well as a number of other sales staff. In the case of the former, this was after only three months after having been employed. This is not a solitary example. I’ve written previously of MyCareer’s heinous decision to move their Melbourne staff to the Sydney office. (MyCareer – Take It Or Leave It.)

From a purely economic perspective, it makes little sense to knee-jerk your way through the recession; cutting lifelines of employees in order to stay afloat. In all cycles, boom follows bust. When it comes to rehiring, the costs involved in getting a bunch of people onboard to a do a job you had people doing previously, makes no sense.

But if a business is going to run with profit and loss as its only indication of success, what it creates will leave only a dint on the world’s duco. And if those dints keep popping up, soon the world will begin to resemble a beat up old piece of junk at the scrap metal yard.

Here’s what I reckon’s going on. Companies talk quite a bit about being ethical. How many times have you inquired about the culture of a company and been told it’s “family-friendly” or “casual and relaxed”, only to discover that you are sneered at when you come to work an hour or so late because you went to your kid’s Father’s Day breakfast at school? Examples like the LinkedIn LinkMe one demonstrate that there is little awareness within companies of how their behaviour impacts on the lives of individuals. Surely it was foreseeable that, three months down the track, their services of a Queensland state manager would no longer be required. Surely. Who made the decision to hire them? It was irresponsible of LinkMe to hire someone under these conditions, knowing well enough that it would not be a long-standing proposition.

But perhaps something else is at play here. Perhaps a recession climate acts as an excuse for companies to let go of people en masse, with minimal outcry from the public. “In an economic downturn”, they tout, “we must do what is necessary to remain a viable business. This means cutting costs.” A good excuse, or reasonable economic sense?

You decide.

Organisational Wikis – Build Your Knowledge Base

Okay. So we’ve all grown up watching Dr Phil and Oprah. We all, therefore, are well-versed in the importance of communication; both within a interpersonal relationships and within larger-scale relationships such as that between employers and employees.

Plainly, if we don’t talk to one another, problems don’t get solved, highs and lows aren’t shared and individuals feel isolated. On an interpersonal level, this results in crazy-nuts divorce rates. On an organisational level, it results in wasted resources and high staff turnover.

I promised you a few articles on the outcomes of the HR Futures conference and will dedicate the next few blogs to fulfilling this promise. One of the most fascinating points arising from discussions at the conference concerned organisational Wikis. For example: Bearing Point’s Mike2.0 I’ve worked within big companies. I understand the culture of wanting to guard information from employees. Marketing and HR can be protective about how much information they like to be released. For this reason, the concept of having an internal wiki, where staff can blog and interact on forums, adding information to the knowledge base over time, is terrifying. Companies regard it as a threat to cohesion.

It’s kinda a form of censorship, isn’t it? But we all know, suppression of viewpoints, the gagging of folks with bereavement or complaint about a community – it simply doesn’t work.

The use of the wiki within a company can have benefits. Internal communication is enhanced in a cost-effective and time-effective manner:

• A new employee to a company can post a blog introducing themselves, and current employees can welcome them. This is how community is built.

• General information about company direction can be enhanced. This is an extension of the open-door policy championed by many forward-thinking CEOs. However, it is much more time-effective than having a literal open door.

• Where groups within an organisation are working on projects, all members can be kept abreast of developments, thereby making the need to constantly email and CC everything redundant.

• People external to the oragnisation can make contributions to knowledge and projects, thus enhancing extra-organisational links and relationships.

• A well-used wiki can allow people to work from home. The advantages of this are enormous for work-life balance and for cost-cutting.

As a society, we need to shrug off this constant need to be right, to protect incoming and outgoing information. One of the main problems with how organisations manage staff concerns the way communication takes place. It is often seeped in censorship and riotously funny officespeak. Wikis allow for an open and honest discussion within a society. The discussion may go places that are uncomfortable. Information exchanged may not always be “correct”, but this is most certainly offset by the enhanced relationships between people and the speed and efficiency of relaying messages through this approach.

Friday Funny – Twitter Whore

Reminds me of a day in the life of @mspecht on Twitter…

HR Futures Conference Take-outs

My wife, she’s always saying how much she loves a good wedding. Once an invite comes in the mail, she gets excited and speaks of nothing else until the day of the event. And then after; after she wants to debrief about it…how did I like the bridal dress, what about the food, wasn’t the food just delish. All that. Me? I’m not big into weddings.

But I love a good conference.

Last week I attended Michael Specht’s HR Futures conference. The event was a one-day intensive get together, with a focus on directions for HR and recruitment. Industry experts like Thomas Shaw from Recruitment Directory, spoke about Web 2.0 in recruitment. It was great to get together with some of these folks, many of whom were nothing more than blogs on a screen before I had the chance to meet them.

Anyway, just as my wife likes to debrief about her weddings, I like to break it down about conferences. (I promise, what follows will not include an assessment of anyone’s outfits!)

1. Social media in recruiting is on the radar: the take-home story on this is that most folks acknowledge the social media form of recruiting is the way into the future

2. Enterprise Wikis will form the future of content collaboration within an organisation

3. Blogs/comments should be seen as a vehicle for discussion for an organisation not something to fear. The term “social proof” was kicked around a bit by me. This describes validation from sources outside an organisation. I’m not keen on the word “proof” now. It denotes something definitive. I prefer the term “social-evidence”.

4. Job boards have some work to do to be part of the social recruiting platform.

In all, a good show, with heaps of blog-fodder. Stay tuned as I unravel, in blogs to come, some of the predictions about future directions in recruitment.

Postjobsonce – Or Not At All

Tough times at Adlogic’s postjobsonce.com.au as hundreds of RCSA’s clients are stuck with no job posting system today. Why you might ask? Perhaps someone forgot to pay their hosting bill?

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