Side Hustles – The Great Employment Equalizers

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Taylor Reynolds, courtesy of John Sturgis 3
Taylor Reynolds.  Photo courtesy of John Sturgis.

There is a great new buzzword making the rounds, and it deserves some profile.  The concept is the “side hustle,” outside-of-work activity that keeps people interested while making a bit of extra money.  People who have a good side-hustle have great things to say about it.

Side hustles are jobs that pay you to learn, so consider them “real-world” MBAs as Sam McRoberts refers to them as in this article in Entrepreneur.com. You are likely to learn sales, negotiation, and website design.  Several authors note that you are obliged to learn a lot of time management skills.  There’s nothing quite like being overly-busy with something you love to motivate you to organize your day properly.

Amongst the benefits of side hustles, one of the biggest is figuring out what you want to do with your life.  We have all had day-jobs that weren’t thrilling.  The idea is, name your biggest passion, get out and do it, and explore if that kind of work is really for you.  It’s important for those in early-career who are still trying to find their calling.  One millennial, Samantha Matt, wrote a 2015 blog post in the Huffington Post in which she cuts to the heart.

“Even if you’re not 100 percent happy at your day job, if you’ve got something in the works on the side that you absolutely love, that will ultimately lead to happiness…”

She talks about a number of functional career outcomes but you can tell from her tone that she’s just wildly ambitious and wants a career that is engaging and taking her places.

 “…when I first started out, writing a book was not something that was in the cards. With a side hustle, you learn to always stay hungry and that will get you climbing the career ladder to success faster than you ever imagined.”

Mike Templeman in an article from Forbes describes increased opportunities to network, as the side-hustle opens you up to new a whole community.  There’s nothing like sincere conversations about a labour-of-love to open up connections with a community of peers.  Samantha Matt is doing what she loves, and she doesn’t mind doing the kind of thing that people normally think of as soul-sucking.  She now enjoys chasing the dollar, she is motivated to work extra hours, and she is building her resume as a thrill.  She can network for fun.

Don’t you wish you could have this life?  At work, don’t we all wish that our peers or our employees could also have this kind of motivation?

Templeman describes how the extra energy from his side-hustle gave him more energy in his day job.  His regular workplace “…was a place for me to socialize and push my limits… I started getting promoted because I was putting in extra effort all over the place and my ideas were getting recognized.”  He describes an increased willingness to be creative in the workplace, because he had energy and mojo.

For the uninitiated, intrinsic motivation is that sense of acting on drives that come from inside you… to follow your heart, as it were.  By contrast, society is often prescribing what you ought to do, and those prescriptions can make joy disappear.  The big secret about side hustles is that by disregarding society’s prescriptions you can become more successful.  And that is because you are listening to yourself, driving yourself, and putting in a stronger effort.

It’s a much-needed improvement on the idea that you should “follow your dreams.”  You might have met people who caused themselves great harm by abandoning something secure in favour of a semi-delusional dream.  What is different about the side-hustle, is that you have the option of holding onto the security while making safe experiments with your dream career.  The side hustle gives you permission to fail.

As I described in my review of the McKinsey research on the Gig Economy, the key to gigs is that they are fulfilling if they are voluntary.  Voluntary-ness is more important than the amount of money earned in terms of job satisfaction.  But the money can arise from the higher productivity associated with motivation and courage.

Where does this courage come from?  Some of it comes from developing your own bargaining power.  McRoberts asserts that having a single point of failure is brutal to your career mobility.

“So why is it that most individuals have just one income? A single income means you’re trapped. You have fewer options, you’re in a weaker position to negotiate, and you’re in bad shape if that main-stream income happens to goes [sic] away. Granted, employers typically want it that way, because it puts them in a position of power.”

People are deciding that the expectation of devout loyalty to one employer is a con job.  How can any employee in this crazy world express faith that their current employer will take care of them for years to come?  As employees we need to develop our BATNA, short for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement.  In bargaining theory, a strong BATNA gives you something in your back-pocket that protects you from exploitation and allows you to be calmly brave when you ask for more.  Your bargaining alternative is critical to the game of life in which everything is negotiable.

One last important point comes from Templeman when he notes you still need to check that you’re not breaking any rules with your employer.  So yes, you need to be calculating, and cautious, and shrewd.  Only then can you get on with it and follow your dreams.

Dig Deeper and Discover Employees Are Human

Posted on by Stuart Murray

010-hard-work, by jdxyw [edits]
010-hard-work.  Photo courtesy of jdxyw.
In an earlier post I summarized Josh Bersin’s 2018 forecast of disruptive technologies in HR, which I followed-up with an overview of the leadership styles implied by the technology.  My experience with the technology and analytics is that many of the logical elements of human resources can now be figured out with increased ease.  Or rather, it’s easy if you figured them out last year.  But once we have figured out the numbers, it is the social and qualitative factors that become important.

When describing the analytics Bersin names four different types of data:

  • HRMS data
  • Relationship data
  • Wellbeing data
  • Sentiment data

The relationship data described above is a reference to Organizational Network Analytics (ONA), which uses social network theory to look at the way people interact.  ONA collects data from email traffic, meeting attendance, phone calls, and geographic proximity.  It takes a lot of work to get the data to sing, but we already know some of the implications from pre-existing research on social networks.

Information and opportunities flow through the social networks with partial disregard for rank, department, or a person’s commitment to the institution itself.  Sometimes powerful and important people have good connections… but sometimes they do not, and sometimes there are lesser-known influencers who are the key.

Your new status in a network will be influenced by your ability to consider contradictory opinions, your curiosity about new perspectives, and your connections to people in diverse cliques.  Keeping the channels open will be key to your success.  But the best opportunities are to coordinate the entire network for organizational gain, rather than to rig it to favour one individual (be it yourself or someone else).  Think of this as being like pay equity on steroids; once you measure and publicize how things have been organized, there will be an immediate impetus to re-orient everything towards fairness and performance.

Beyond social networks, sentiment data opens a major opportunity.  Your opportunities for analysis jump dramatically once you ask people their story, their context, their emotions, and how this experience relates to their home life and how they describe themselves as people.  Qualitative data has turned out to the missing puzzle piece that everyone was looking for.  It’s difficult to get to because analysts need the humility to talk to people who aren’t always great at math.  Some of the best insights about the subjective experience comes from journalists, novelists, philosophers, and people in the arts.  You really need to show up at those kinds of dinner parties because when it’s time to design your model or your AI to mimic human behaviour, you need to know what it means to be human in the first place.

Increasingly, people analytics is a velvet-roped line up to board a greyhound bus that takes you to destinations unknown.  When you get off that bus, you will find you are not being led to a four-star hotel or the hip new club.  Rather, you are unloaded at a diner where a long-lost cousin shares old photos, your best friend calls you on your bull, and you re-discover that one small thing that’s truly important to you.  The truth doesn’t feel good because it’s cool, the truth makes you feel right because it helps you become authentic.

The deeper you go into the data, the more you realize that people are vulnerable, complex, and hiding great potential.  They want to talk, and it’s your job to listen.

Technology Can Reverse the Pecking Order

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Photographers expand horizons in 2010 Army Digital Photography Contest 110311. By U.S. Army
Photographers expand horizons in 2010 Army Digital Photography Contest 110311.  Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army.

It’s funny how a small change in technology can disrupt hierarchy.  As new technologies collect better information about employees, it puts management under increased scrutiny.  In my last post I summarized Josh Bersin’s 2018 forecast of disruptive technologies in HR.  While it is interesting to see that there are tools available that allow us to be more effective, there are dramatic implications to the way we work.

After much delay, it appears that the long-awaited labour shortage has finally arrived.  Bersin notes that this will make an appearance as a “war for talent” with recruiting becoming more competitive.  Chatbots are automating parts of the recruitment process, applicant-tracking systems are making things simpler, there is a wider range of tools for assessing candidates, and I would note that it’s possible to use technology to reduce bias (assuming the AI has been taught to not pass forward pre-existing bias).  Many of these technologies have been pioneered already, which means 2018 will be a year of diffusion.

I think there is a social element of this war for talent that warrants more discussion.  That is, when good employees are being fought over they are more likely to ask for pay increases, apply for promotions, and leave their current workplace for something better.  But it can get even more dramatic when employees are bold enough to sign union cards, tell-off their harasser, and speak openly about how to improve management.  These shifts oblige managers to change.  We can’t pretend that everything is normal.  Hiring managers must start treating employees like they are valued, respected, and deserving of growth.  That’s what it looks like amongst managers who are keeping pace.  By contrast, it may suddenly look odd that there are managers who lack this collaborative orientation.

In the discussion of continuous performance management, Bersin references goal-setting and coaching.  We can’t really slip these items into a discussion of performance management without acknowledging that ground-up performance conversations are not yet fully established.  If emerging research recommends that good managers take a coaching approach, what are the implications for managers using a prescriptive approach running off a forced-distribution scorecard?  Simply put, command-and-control managers need to change their style.

For decades, the research has been bubbling just beneath the surface.  The reality is that for employees, true motivation comes from within, and their ability to align personal motivations to their employer’s strategic environment is key.  Engaged employees achieve two-times or three-times the productivity of other employees, and leadership style is a major factor in achieving high engagement.  The new technology is designed to help managers with that leadership style, but there aren’t a lot of apps that will help advance an archaic style.

On the wellbeing side, there is a variety of new tools to monitor cognitive overload and nudge people to exercise, sleep better, and eat better.  We have so overburdened people with meaningless and counter-productive work obligations that we have to reduce workload to improve productivity.  Deloitte has a good model that describes how engagement, productivity, and wellbeing are integrated into a unified concept.  Wellbeing is not really about fruits-and-veggies advocacy any more; it is integrated into peoples’ ability to focus on their best work.

I’m fascinated by the way this trend up-ends the hierarchy.  As a result of the wellbeing imperative, the people who need to “work harder” are management and leadership who are obliged to clarify goals, cultivate a positive work culture, and encourage employees to seek growth opportunities.  Looking back, it seems like a manager-driven culture which obliges employees to follow orders and be happy with their lot in life is hopelessly archaic.

Thankfully, we don’t need to debate the best leadership style because transformational leadership simply out-performs the alternative.  Just wait a few years and the only teams left standing will be the ones that have stayed at the forward edge.  Lucky for us, this collaborative style makes work more fun.

In my next post we will explore how subjective and qualitative information are making technology and analytics whole.

HR Technology – Get Ready For the Big Shake!

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Day 119 - Shake it all about. By JLK_254
Day 119 – Shake it all about. Photo courtesy of JLK_254.

Looking back, it feels like 2017 was a big crazy dog that we watched playing in the water.  That dog has now come out of the water, it’s coming right at you and… get ready for the shake.  There’s never a dull moment in the world of technological disruptions in human resources and workforce analytics.

It’s becoming clear that the disruptions of the near-future will rely increasingly on human resources departments.  Items such as workplace learning, change management, and leadership development are being increasingly flagged by leaders outside of HR as critical to success in their own fields.  Meanwhile, and the ground level looking upward, employees are getting blunt about their expectations for career growth, workforce diversity, and a sense of organizational purpose.  Organizations trying to get on top of these issues without saying “human resources” are running out of euphemisms.

With a new year ahead of us, Josh Bersin of Bersin by Deloitte has published his forecasts for 2018.  In this case Bersin’s forecast is a list of emerging trends in human resources technology, a narrower focus than in the past.  Nonetheless, as everyone grips for emerging technological disruption in a variety of fields, it makes sense for us to consider how technology will disrupt human resources itself.

In my two subsequent posts I will describe how these innovations imply a different workplace culture and  leadership style, and increase the importance of qualitative information and our interpretations of the employee context.  For now, just consider that all work can change, and the people helping workplaces adapt to change are also changing themselves.  HR is just getting a double dose.

At-a-glance, Bersin’s top ten trends are as follows:

  1. A Massive Shift from “Automation” to “Productivity”
  2. Acceleration of HRMS and HCM Cloud Solutions, But Not the Center of Everything
  3. Continuous Performance Management is Here: And You Should Get With It
  4. Feedback, Engagement, and Analytics Tools Reign
  5. Reinvention of Corporate Learning is Here
  6. The Recruiting Market is Thriving With Innovation
  7. The Wellbeing Market is Exploding
  8. People Analytics Matures and Grows
  9. Intelligent Self-Service Tools
  10. Innovation Within HR Itself

For the uninitiated, Human Capital Management (HCM) cloud solutions (#2) is the technology that delivers databases known as human resources management systems (HRMS) on a fee-for-service basis through off-site cloud-based servers.  It’s disruptive because previous systems involved the purchase of an application which was stored on in-house servers alongside the data itself, with everything being owned and modified by the buyer.  Switching to cloud solutions means that you must steward and cultivate data carefully to allow it to dovetail with the rented solution, like a millwright, but with data.  These solutinos allow employers to take full advantage of all configurations in the latest version of the software.  There is far more functionality.  But the increased functionality won’t work unless your data is good and you figure out how to use the new modules.  This change has large implications for human resources, information technology, and daily users of the database.

Prior to now, most People Analytics (#8) was a combination of advanced analytics interpreting data that comes off the core database, plus a bunch of emerging data coming out of engagement analytics (#4).  But now, those two items are just the major platforms.  There are systems that used to be fringe players in HR but are now increasingly critical… and they need their own enabling technology.  Some of the technology hinges on the HRMS, but some of it does not.  For example, workplace learning (#5) and wellbeing initiatives (#7) used to be something that you could operate off an Office suite using a research-based model that followed the best literature in pedagogy or public health.  The best content would be distributed face-to-face, with limited need for software to make the difference.  Now the technology can help out so much more, and tools are becoming available to empower the traditional delivery methods to be more effective, more targeted, and better connected to analytics.

To some extent, everything is being disrupted in a manner that obliges us to think less about the technology itself and more about general productivity (#1).  Those delivering generalist human resources services are also seeing innovations in their own area.  Recruiting (#6) and performance management (#3) are being improved by technology, and a variety of self-service tools (#9) are automating operational tasks such as case management, document management and employee communications.  First we must obsess about the technology to get it to work for us, then we can clear that obstacle and get into new challenges.  Breaking new ground every day will give people in HR a lot of mojo, but only if we keep moving forward.

Bersin brings it all together by noting that it’s not just the purchased solutions that are transforming human resources teams.  In-house HR departments are disrupting themselves (#10), regardless of help from vendors.  Then they ask for help and the vendors themselves are struggling to keep up with clients.  When dealing with complicated case-work and finicky databases, in-house staff sometimes have a home team advantage.

Today’s Awkward is Tomorrow’s Cool

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Prom 1983. By Andrew Kitzmiller
Prom 1983. Photo courtesy of Andrew Kitzmiller.

Basically, 2017 was the year in which all of the adults became anxious and depressed teenagers at a high-school dance, after we just got 51% on a big exam, and our crush sent mixed signals just before they moved away.  The moment of clarity from 2017 was that adults are just as susceptible to adolescent anxiety as the teenagers are.

And workforce analytics is right in there, disrupting the pecking order.

Analytics is a major threat to those who presume their authority and excellence should be based on wins from years gone by.  Therefore, all office politics are up for grabs.  Every job in every sector is under intense change, and at the very least we’ll each have to pick up some new tools and apply them to our current job just to break even.  But it’s far more likely that your job is the subject of a double-or-nothing bet.

Can people change?  Yes, but they have to work at it.  This is an interesting article about malleable personalities.  The idea of a malleable personality is that we can change who we are based on the circumstances, or in a chosen direction of who we want to be.  This idea is newer than most people think.

There has been a shift in psychiatry away from the decades-long theory that our brains are fixed after a certain age.  Instead, our brains are subject to neuroplasticity, in which we are always growing and adapting.  I was first exposed to the concept a decade ago by Dr. Norman Doidge in his 2007 book The Brain That Changes Itself.

Doidge was one of the earliest researchers in the psychiatry of neuroplasticity.  He had a really hard time convincing fixed-mindset people in his own field that people can change.  Major shifts in scientific thinking can take decades within the academic discipline.  Then the researchers need to convince the general public, which takes longer.

So, let’s see how quickly we can pick up a new concept and apply it to our lives, starting now.

The newer research about malleable personalities was about helping teenagers cope with anxiety and depression.  The researchers created a 30-minute video for teens to watch, explaining some new concepts:

“They heard from older youths saying they believe people can change, and from others saying how they’d used belief in our capacity for change (a “growth mindset”) to cope with problems like embarrassment or rejection. The teenagers learned strategies for applying these principles…” (Emphasis added)

The study showed noticeable improvements, relative to a control group, in depression and – lesser so – with anxiety over a nine-month period.  The study looked at both the self-reporting by the teens and the opinions of those teens’ parents.  The researchers were particularly enthusiastic that this brief video is scale-able, can be offered to all teens universally, and can set up kids for a more successful intervention later in their lives.

Adopting a Growth Mindset in a Changing Workplace and Changing World

Although the study is limited to teens in a clinical sample, the findings may be relevant to the general population’s adaptability to change.  Workplaces are in upheaval because of technology and globalization.  Every region is gripped by either unemployment or unaffordable housing.  Inequality and social media are making people increasingly anxious they haven’t made it.  Democracies are vulnerable to demagogues who offer temptations to turn back the clock.

In the workplace, what should we do?

Adopt a growth mindset, change our personalities as we see fit, and give ourselves permission to become two or more different types of people.  Scheme to have a backup plan or a side-hustle.  Put down the smartphone and start reading.  Regard societal upheaval as a topic of exceptional cocktail banter.

Then talk about your feelings, eat a sandwich, and have a nap.

You’ll need the rest.  Because tomorrow is another person.

Failing to Fail is Our Greatest Risk

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Anguish. By Porsche Brosseau
Anguish. Photo courtesy of Porsche Brosseau.

Failure is often imposed upon us, in settings where we didn’t get a fair chance to perform well.  It’s an incorrect word that we cling to when gripped by self-doubt.  Often this failure spurs an adaptability which sets us up for long-term success.  This means that failure is a word that we must take back and own, mid-process during growth.  There are not winners and losers any more, just those who adapt and those who do not.

Adaptability is the new smart.

Every now and then a good consulting firm offers some exceptional free material online.  Today’s find is Academic Impressions from Boulder, Colorado.  Academic Impressions prides themselves on providing “high quality learning opportunities for academic and administrative leaders in higher education.”

The article that caught my attention, Preparing Students to Lose Their Jobs, encourages postsecondary institutions to prepare students to get their next job, then lose that job, then move on to the next one.  The article calls on robust sources to interpret that “The future of work is adapting to change, failure as a norm, and …a longer career arc in which to experience many different and uniquely distinct careers.”  They also endorse the emerging opinion that technology and globalization will rationalize routine efforts, obliging all (employed) humans to focus on empathy.

Theirs is an opinion that adaptability to change will be the core attribute of successful and well-educated adults.  Therefore, learning to be adaptable must be a top priority.  Adaptability requires a variety of attributes that are agnostic to IQ and “the acquisition of predetermined skills”, the old hallmarks of a solid bricks-and-mortar education.

Adapting to Change Via Professional Development and Workforce Analytics

The new attributes required for workplace success are:

  • An agile mindset which relies on empathy, divergent thinking, and an entrepreneurial outlook.
  • Having the social and emotional intelligence “to adapt and thrive in a world that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.” Their critique mirrors Elif Shafak’s TED talk on embracing complexity which also became public in September 2017.
  • Improving the speed at which we try, fail, adapt, and grow upward into the next level of challenge. External factors that drive us to failure or obsolescence will become more common, so avoidance of this change will not help.  Rather, we must learn our way into the next opportunity.  New opportunities abound, so get to them promptly… by moving on.
  • Developing a personal history of having changed context and perspective, either from a change of country as an immigrant, a shift in personal identity, or having adapted to some kind of “failure.” These shifts do not have to be shameful.  They can an important part of a meaningful story that makes us whole.
  • Our negative internal voice – the one that tells us the failure we are experiencing is because we are lacking in some shameful way – needs to be regulated, mitigated and subdued by self-reflection, meditation, and connecting our opinions to concrete evidence.

That last item is music to my ears.  On one hand, we need a general positive attitude and healthy self-image.  On the other hand, a little bit of good data can nourish us and help us overcome ill-conceived notions about our worth.  Logic and emotion come together to make the ultimate hot-and-sour soup, like a comfort food in times of change.  You need to seek new information, let it soak in, and talk yourself through it.  Then product-test your new self image with your friends, to make sure it rings true.  And, no punchline, just go!