Increasing Access to Social Capital

Access to social capital is a sticking point for employees... To increase access, business leaders must first understand who has it—and who doesn’t. Advanced analytics can make it easier than it’s ever been to provide that understanding.

One electronics company, for instance, is using HR, facilities, and operations metadata (calendar invitations, email, HR information systems, and so on) and advanced analytics to map knowledge flows and … [ Read more ]

Authors: Bill Schaninger, Brooke Weddle, John Parsons, Taylor Lauricella | Source: "Network effects: How to rebuild social capital and improve corporate performance" | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

Capture How Your Employees Are Feeling

Acknowledging emotions and understanding how individual factors influence change aversion may be as important as factors inherent to the initiative itself. Yet we find that leaders often miss this critical component. Identify ways to capture how people are feeling and coping before, during, and after a change program. Building the institutional muscle to gain real-time insight into employees’ emotions through pulse checks and manager check-ins … [ Read more ]

Authors: Adriann Negreros, Julia Dhar, Martin Reeves | Source: "How Change Aversion Can Derail a Transformation" | Original Publication: Boston Consulting Group | Subjects: Change Management, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior | Company: Ubiquity Retirement + Savings

Combine Appreciation with Cash Incentives

Google appears to have discovered a way to pay people for being helpful without making it transactional. The company invites employees to nominate colleagues who have been helpful to receive small cash rewards. By making the rewards a product of peer nomination, Google converts a cash payment into a symbol of appreciation. As a result, people are less likely to see the reward as cheapening … [ Read more ]

Authors: Madan Pillutla, Nirmalya Kumar | Source: "Pay for Performance: When Does It Fail?" | Original Publication: Management and Business Review (MBR) | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior | Company: Google

Nominate a designated dissenter

Social influence is particularly potent in group settings, so teams must proactively manage it in meetings. “There’s a fine line between the wisdom of crowds, where groups make better decisions than individuals, and groupthink, where individuals blindly follow a prevailing opinion,” says Jonah Berger. “Someone suggests doing X, and the next person, who might’ve been thinking of Y, will tend to go with X as … [ Read more ]

Author: Jonah Berger | Source: "The Goldilocks Effect and How to Harness Social Influence" | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Give Job Candidates Interview Questions Before the Interview

Before candidates join for the interview round, Peoplism sends a thorough prep guide to sketch out expectations. “We tell the candidate most of the interview questions in advance. While it is a unique approach, I don’t understand why it’s that controversial and why other companies don’t do the same,” says co-founder Liz Kofman-Burns.

There are plenty of behind-the-scenes factors that contribute to someone being a … [ Read more ]

Authors: Amber Madison, Liz Kofman-Burns | Source: "Why Now’s the Perfect Time to Retool Your Hiring Process and Get Creative" | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources | Company: Peoplism

The Premortem Technique
The premortem technique is a sneaky way to get people to do contrarian, devil’s advocate thinking without encountering resistance. If a project goes poorly, there will be a lessons-learned session that looks at what went wrong and why the project failed—like a medical postmortem. Why don’t we do that up front? Before a project starts, we should say, “We’re looking in a crystal ball, and … [ Read more ]

Profit Mapping
A profit map, the core analytical tool of profitability management, displays the profitability and cost structure of every product in every customer in the company. Profit maps show exactly where profit is flowing and where it is lost.

A profit map is not especially difficult to develop, but it is completely different from the information developed for financial reporting. Many finance managers make the … [ Read more ]

Review Profitability Before Expanding Capacity
When faced with the need to expand manufacturing capacity and the inherent investment required, first perform a thorough profitability analysis (a profit map) of each product produced from the capacity-constrained factories (this includes profitable products being sold unprofitably to selected customers). Since many companies have a significant amount of unprofitable business, it is quite possible that stopping the unprofitable sales can free up enough capacity … [ Read more ]

Deploy a Redeployment Pool
Intel monitors changing skill requirements and institutes a redeployment program when it becomes necessary to downsize a business. Under this program, managers effectively lay off people, and the head count of the business unit is moved off the payroll. These excised people enter a redeployment pool under the auspices of human resources. Once in the pool, employees generally have four to six months, and can … [ Read more ]

Fiercest Competitor Workshop
One good way to get at these disruptive designs (innovations) is to do what we at my firm call a "Fiercest Competitor Workshop," which starts with the premise that you have been fired from your old organization but you have access to ample capital and talent. Your task is to design the fiercest competitor that could take the market from your old firm. In my … [ Read more ]