3 Tips Meningkatkan Kinerja Karyawan dengan Social Media

Bagaimana dampak social media and HR terhadap dunia kerja memang patut dicermati oleh praktisi SDM mengingat sebagian besar karyawan mereka adalah generasi muda yang hampir semuanya adalah pengguna aktif social media.

“Bagaimana pun, social media telah banyak mengubah perilaku mereka, sehingga banyak kebijakan perusahaan yang harus diselaraskan dengan perilaku tersebut,” papar Nukman Lutfie, pakar online strategist yang juga founder of PortalHR..

Nukman lantas menjelaskan, social media seperti facebook yang telah menyedot jumlah pengguna terbesar di Indonesia, twitter yang meraih sekitar 20 juta pengguna, belum situs-situs forum, blog dan situs lainnya telah mempengaruhi karyawan sedemikian rupa. 

“Salah satu efeknya adalah semakin terbukanya informasi, baik mengenai diri karyawan sendiri, termasuk informasi penting tentang perusahaan. Sisi positifnya adalah praktisi HRD menjadi lebih mudah mengenali mereka,” katanya.

10 Smart Risks That Every Business Should Seek Out

Being a risk taker in business is not the same as being reckless. Nevertheless, the word “risk” has a negative connotation to most of us, implying danger and possible loss. For true entrepreneurs, risk is viewed as a positive, with its implied challenge to overcome the unknown and hitting the big return.

In fact, risk is an integral part of life, as well as every business, yet so few people learn to manage it properly, or even want to think about it. One way to learn is to understand better how successful entrepreneurs approach risk, and look at actual strategies they use for success.

I found a great summary of key strategies used, with life stories, in a book titled “The Risk Takers,” by Renee and Don Martin. Here is their list, with a little prioritizing and comments of my own:

Talent Shortage or Shortage of Creative Talent Strategies?

A lot of people are blaming the lack of talent on the “shortage of critical skills in the U.S.” I think most of the perceived shortage is based on a shortage of creative talent strategies.

In an era of high unemployment, many, employers expect immediate plug-and-play candidates, new employees who come prepared with the skills and training to be productive immediately upon entering the workplace.

Some employers blame the school systems for not educating students with the critical skills employers need. The employers that blame the lack of resources on the “talent shortage” might look in the mirror and ask, “What have I done lately to create a strategic talent pool for my organization?

Employers need to utilize creative talent strategies to grow their own talent pools. It is up to employers to build a creative talent pipeline.

10 Traits of High Performance Leaders

Achieving high performance in tough times is a serious challenge small business owners face.

The ultimate goal may be extraordinary business performance, but you can still get comfortable and slip into mediocrity.

To obliterate status quo, do you have what it takes to become a high-performance leader? Ten traits characterize the people who do.

Why Your Employees Are Leaving?

One day when I was out getting a coffee, I overheard a man talking on his cellphone.
“We need to be stricter with our hiring practices next year,” he said. “We want to keep them past a year.”

I wanted to turn around and tell him, “Maybe you don’t need to be stricter with your hiring practices. You can bring them in but you’re not keeping them. It could be your corporate culture.”

Is Your Smartphone Making You Less Productive?

Mobile devices have exacerbated an always-on work culture where employees work anytime, anywhere. They've contributed to the blurred distinction between when you're "on the clock" and when you're not. Service industry professionals are especially tethered to these devices.

There's an assumption that using smart devices boosts productivity, since they allow us to work constantly. But, we're also jeopardizing long-term productivity by eliminating predictable time off that ensures balance in our lives. Is the obsession of regularly checking email really helping anyone's bottom line? Are the unrealistic expectations these devices facilitate not setting staff up for burnout?

From my experience, this hyper-connectivity carries a cost to organizational productivity. Many months ago, in my Africa-based startup, my top managers decided to adopt a business engagement process where customers and staff could reach them 24/7.

There was a perception that if a customer or a colleague needed something and couldn't get it immediately, the firm would not be taken seriously. The staff was under intense pressure to be available whenever anyone called — it was simply expected. Six months later, we noticed that customer complaints were actually up, and team morale was down.

So, why were we spoiling dinner time for each other with calls that could have waited until the next business day?

In a forthcoming book, "Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24-7 Habit and Change the Way You Work," Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow provides insights on this fraught relationship with smart devices.

In an experiment that focused on mandating time off for consultants for at least one night per week, she noticed that — over time — their work lives improved, and they were largely more productive.

For the research subjects who followed her policy of disconnecting from work at night, 78% said that they "feel satisfied" with their jobs, compared to the group of people who ignored the policy, where only 49% noted the same sense of satisfaction.

Her results show that we're creating a self-perpetuating perception that working faster is better — even when speed may not be necessary.

The reality is that business processes have been changed by technology. Competition is now global and companies need to act fast to survive. Accordingly, we have institutionalized a system where customers and staff expect everyone to be always-connected.

And with that, 24/7 speed has become a key performance metric. The impetus to examine whether what we do requires 24/7 responsiveness is overlooked. We all work longer and harder, despite the possibility that we could work better. But since everyone is doing it, it's considered acceptable.

But, here's the thing: Business will not collapse if we don't respond to e-mail at 11 PM. Waiting until 9 AM has plenty of benefits that arguably outweigh the benefits of speed, such as giving ourselves an opportunity to think through the problem and provide a better idea that customers will appreciate.

Instead of acquiescing to the knee-jerk reflex of responding to every incoming message, we should put these devices in their place — that is, to serve us, and not the other way around.

Companies need to help employees unplug. (Of course, every business is unique, and must take its own processes into consideration. But for most companies, giving employees predictable time off will not hurt the bottom line.)

In my own firm, when we noticed that always-on was not producing better results, we phased it out of our culture.

A policy was instituted that encouraged everyone to respect time off, and discouraged people from sending unnecessary emails and making distracting calls after hours. It's a system that works if all of the team members commit to it.

Over time, we've seen a more motivated team that comes to work ready for business, and goes home to get rejuvenated. They work smarter, not blindly faster. And morale is higher.

Give it a try in your own company. As a trial, talk to your team and agree to shutdown tonight. I'm confident that you'll all feel the benefits in the morning.

Source

Ndubuisi Ekekwe is a founder of the non-profit African Institution of Technology. He recently edited Nanotechnology and Microelectronics: Global Diffusion, Economics, and Policy.

The Things Customers Can Do Better Than You

Many firms assume that customers can do just one thing of real significance: buy their products and services. It's time to seriously challenge that assumption, as many companies are doing by looking to customers to fuel their growth engines.

Facebook, for example, has close to 1 billion customers who don't pay a cent. Yet the company is receiving valuations of $50 billion and more — despite having just 3,000 or so employees — because of the extremely high-potential, non-purchasing value such customers provide. In a phrase, Facebook and other forward-thinking companies look to their customers to grow their businesses.

This isn't genius at work. In fact, entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, are simply recognizing — and acting upon — entirely obvious realities about customers and their desires and competencies, choosing to leverage these rather than fight against them, as so many firms do. Here are five examples:

Customers know more about each other than you know about them. That's the source of much of the stratospheric value placed on Facebook by investors. Imagine a traditional company that tried to generate the kind of information Facebook generates: real time data on what movies people are watching, where they travel, the books they're reading, the restaurants they've tried.

Facebook dispensed with all the research most companies would have tried to dig up, and instead focused on letting customers provide it. Westlaw, which provides legal research services for law firms, realized that its clients were interested in how they and the markets they serviced stacked up to other firms and markets.

So Westlaw created West PeerMonitor, which aggregates anonymized data on firms' financial and operational performance, collected from participating clients — which turned into a lucrative new business.

Customers are more credible than you are. That means they make better marketers for a firm than agencies or internal employees. SAS Canada, for example, had a serious customer retention issue several years ago — retention rates had declined from the high 90s to the mid 80s and were continuing to drop.

It was terribly frustrating to firm executives, because SAS software was doing an excellent job of keeping up with customer needs. The problem was, customers didn't realize this. A small group within SAS, led by Wally Thiessen, saw that it would be futile for SAS to keep trying to point this out, and instead built a team of 250 customer "champions" to do so.

With support from Thiessen and his team, SAS customer champions established regular events in more than 20 major cities, set the agendas, selected speakers (and made presentations, themselves) and stayed in touch afterwards in online forums and through e-newsletters. Result: retention rates rebounded back up to the high 90s.

Customers are more persuasive than you are. That means they make better sales people. Marc Benioff realized this in the early days of building Salesforce.com. Lacking the multi-million dollar budgets of competitors like Oracle and SAP, he relied instead on face-to-face meetings with prospects and customers in major city markets.

He found, to his surprise, that prospects at such events were much more interested in talking with SFDC customers than with him and his executive team, and found to his delight that 80% of prospects who attended the events wound up becoming customers themselves — an amazing close rate for any offering. And unlike sales people, SFDC's customer sales people didn't require a bit of training.

Customers often understand buyer needs better than you do. One of the great misconceptions still floating around is that customers can't articulate their needs, much less develop ideas for products to satisfy them.

A substantial body of well-established research has shown that many if not most successful innovations are customer-originated. In one compilation of studies of 1193 commercially successful innovations across nine industries by MIT's Eric von Hippel, 737 (60%) came from customers.

Companies who languish with poor success rates for their product development efforts should consider looking outside to customer innovators for this.

Based on such research conducted by von Hippel and others, 3M's Medical-Surgical Markets Division tried a last gasp project in the 1990s to kick-start its consistently poor innovation record. A team was formed to bypass the internal innovation process and search for breakthrough innovations being created by outside "lead users."

When the results were compared with ordinary product development projects at 3M, the differences were dramatic: Lead-user innovations achieved average revenue of $146 million dollars in their fifth year, compared with $18 million for internally generated innovations.

So the message has been clear for years. The remaining big challenge is getting more and more companies to recognize this and to create ways to capture this customer knowledge in their everyday operations.

Prospects in your market would rather affiliate with their peers (your customers) than with you. By nature, most all of us are open to creative new ways to affiliate with our friends and peers — the very foundation on which Facebook was originally built.

Companies are often uncertain about being able to create opportunities to affiliate that customers would embrace— but they can, as long as they avoid making the common mistake that customers want to affiliate with the company. They want to associate with their peers — meaning your customers, not you.

One example of this is Procter & Gamble's BeingGirl community for teen and pre-teen girls, which was formed initially to promote feminine hygiene products because TV and print ads made its young audience uncomfortable. P&G enlisted experts to provide content, which did little to build interest.

After that misstep, P&G created forums so that girls could talk to each other about the issues and challenges of growing into young womanhood. And with that the site took off, with girls from around the world eager to get into the conversation — and with P&G able to market its products more subtly and effectively than before.

Customers are often more apt to trust and be interested in information if it comes from a peer, rather than a company.

So remember, there are many things your customers can do better than you. How are you involving your customers to help grow your business?

Source

Bill Lee is president of the Lee Consulting Group, Executive Director of the Summit on Customer Engagement, and author of The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset (HBR Press, June 2012).