Are cars no longer fueled by gasoline because they are now fueled by data? Consider how driverless cars, electronic vehicles, and Uber are changing the outlook for the future. And reflect on how the in-vehicle computer has increasingly changed you safety, your comfort, and your ability to manage the vehicle’s maintenance. Gasoline is so last century; today it’s all about the data.
A Financial Review article from July 2017 by Mark Eggleton plays with the idea of data as the fuel of the future. For a century oil ruled our world, influencing geopolitics, urban design, and decisions about where to work and travel. Today, it is data that is significantly changing our world. However, we cannot just obey data on blind faith. We need to look up from the GPS, so to speak, and decide for ourselves if the data we are being fed is relevant and appropriate.
We need to consider data in the context of trust. Take banks for an example. Although banks could do lots of things with our personal financial information, they operate within the context of trust that has built over centuries. Regardless of whether we trust their profit motives in society overall, we do indeed trust that the information they hold will be handled in a responsible and diligent manner. Banking is deeply immersed in a human context, regardless of whether it always seems that way.
I personally think that in workforce analytics, there is a similar concern about trust. We have at our fingertips sensitive information that could be used for good or evil. So let’s ask, are human resources departments actually good? Perhaps we need some time establishing ourselves, to give a better sense that when we’re wrapped up in industrial conflict and individual terminations, that we’re sincerely doing what is expected of us. If we collect accident statistics and attendance lists for mental health workshops, do employees bank on us only using this information to make people well? Have we truly established that the employment equity data we collect will be used exclusively for its intended purpose? When we survey employees on their engagement experience, is the information used to create a better workplace, or are there attempts to punish those who express low motivation? While we closely guard peoples’ confidential pay data, do we have the correct attitude towards employees discussing their pay amongst themselves?
I think it’s high time we subordinate data to the human context. After all, if big data peaks, we are probably into the human economy. If data is going to change the world, we need to ensure it dovetails with our history, the geography, the people and their culture. If we get this wrong, it will be a dystopian science fiction movie come true. That’s kind of what happened with oil. So let’s get it right this time.
(Hat tip to KPMG’s Hugo van Hoogstraten for sharing the original article with me)
Some time has passed, so let’s calmly reflect on the anti-diversity manifesto that got a software engineer fired from Google in August of 2017. James Damore, the author, has to be the unluckiest person on earth. Not only did he lack the genetics and environmental upbringing to be compassionate about the emotions of others (he might be on the autism spectrum), but he also wrongly attributed his career difficulties to the ascent of workplace diversity initiatives.
He delivered his critique via the alt-right media one week prior to the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville. That incident provoked corporate executives, top-ranking generals, and mainstream Republicans to denounce the rally and distance themselves from Donald Trump’s muddled sympathies in the aftermath. Damore and his fans have left no opening for a nuanced discussion about the effects of diversity initiatives on those with developmental disorders, a potentially meaningful topic of debate.
In this article in the New York Times, author Claire Cain Miller proffers a critique of the role of emotional intelligence in the modern world of information technology. It turns out that technology has a massive overlap with social and emotional context.
Emotional Intelligence in Workforce Analytics and Computer Programming
For deep evidence, the article cites 2015 research from David Demming that finds job growth and wage growth are highest among roles that use both math skill and social skills. The idea is that workers “trade tasks” with one another, to allow specialization of talents and improved efficiency when work duties are shuttled back and forth. Those who trade tasks more effectively through the use of social skills are more productive; hence more jobs and higher pay.
This double-barreled skill set is abundantly obvious to those in workforce analytics. We spend half our day figuring out cool formulas and novel discoveries. But the other half of our day is spent interpreting client need, negotiating resource priorities, wordsmithing data definitions, developing interpretations that are suitable to context, and showing compassion while we advance disruption. However, my field is new.
When computer programming was new it was originally considered highly social work. There was an abundance of women working in the field. Through some office-culture twists and turns, things changed. Boys and men who weren’t as clever at the social skills self-selected into programming. It worked out for a lot of people. But there’s a problem; at some point in someone’s career their next chance for a promotion is contingent on social skills. Those who are lacking in this area see their careers stalled.
Examples abound of coding projects with male-dominated teams who lacked context, who missed an important detail about women’s perspectives. Apple’s original health app tracked everything except menstrual cycles, the most-tracked health data point amongst women. Google Plus obliged users to specify their gender and provide a photo, exposing women to harassment.
The Times article also cites research from 2010 by Stanford sociologist Shelley Correll showing that gender stereotypes about skills and performance are a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s not true that women are naturally bad at math, but it is abundantly true that women who are told they are bad at math will under-perform and rate themselves more harshly. The struggle about this stereotype has played out in dramatic ways over the years.
How to Improve Workplace Culture to Ensure Equality for Women
In terms of what to do about this, Correll advises that we: 1) ensure there are no negative gendered beliefs operating in the organization, 2) ensure performance standards are unambiguous and communicated clearly so that sexism does not fill the vacuum, and 3) hold senior management accountable for gender disparities in hiring, retention, and promotion. That third item is metrics-based accountability, which means that business performance, diversity, and workforce analytics are fundamentally entwined.
The times article notes that “one way to develop empathy at companies is by hiring diverse teams, because people bring different perspectives and life experiences.” While we might perceive that equity and inclusion efforts come from an activist base, there is a corporate interest in fostering inclusion. High-performance workplaces need an environment where tasks and diverse views are shuttled back and forth, with ease and good manners.
2012 Marine Corps Trials Day 2. Photo courtesy of DVIDSHUB.
We hear lots about excellence these days. So what are the opportunities for persons with disabilities and disadvantages to drive excellence? It may be that those who are in the throes of disadvantage might not have a fair shot at success. But there are opportunities for everyone to aspire to excellence, through the cultivation of empathy for those who are disadvantaged.
This is a touching article about a doctor who was concerned about his own mother during her disabling illness. The illness was Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder that affects movement. In the Times article, Dr. Sandeep Jauhar is rigged with a device that allows him to personally experience the sensation of his muscles turning to jelly, like those who have Parkinson’s, like his mother.
Why would he do such a thing? Because he always wanted to understand his mother’s perspective during the illness. Devices are also available that replicate the effects of emphysema, psychiatric illness, and nerve disease related to diabetes.
While I haven’t experienced it yet, I have also heard rave reviews about a similar effort called Dark Table. Dark Table is a restaurant in Vancouver where food is served and eaten in a room which is completely dark. The servers are blind or visually impaired, and the guests commit to keeping their gadgets off and eating their meals in the dark. The dark dining experience increases the awareness of other senses such as hearing, touch, and taste. It creates jobs for persons with disabilities. And it also helps people empathize with the perspective of the visually impaired.
Emotional Intelligence in Workplace Conflict
On the human resources side of the fence, it’s possible to develop greater empathy for those we are in conflict with. The nurturing of empathy is important for industrial relations, the professional development of managers, performance conversations, and the general growth of all staff. How do you teach workplace empathy? I have been involved in complex roleplay scenarios called Conflict Theatre. The theatre scenes are designed so that each scenario is integrated into well-developed back stories and emotional perspectives of the actors.
The theatre is presented so as to invite audience members to step into the shoes of an individual actor and attempt to change the course of the conflict. It’s one thing to sit back and observe from and armchair, and develop an opinion about how things should be done. But the real expertise is to understand the full emotional context of each player in a conflict, an understanding which is far more vivid when experienced directly.
Empathizing with diverse perspectives turns out to be a key attribute of those who face conflict with dignity and grace. It takes you beyond the negotiations that resembles bartering for trinkets, and even beyond the interest-based bargaining of those vying for a win-win solution. You have to learn how to understand people as individuals based on their perspective and story, not their category or “type.” This includes understanding their perspective when they struggle with ability, whether it’s professional ability or impairments.
Using Emotional Intelligence to Improve Workplace Culture
The thing I find fascinating about these initiatives is their scientific and cultural back-story. The Parkinson’s device was built in response to well-documented complaints that patients perceive their nurses and doctors lack empathy for their hardships. Blind dining is traced back to Switzerland by a man named Jorge Spielmann, whose concept was imitated in restaurants in London, Paris, and New York. Conflict Theatre in Vancouver comes out David Diamond’s Theatre for Living, which itself comes out of Theatre for the Oppressed, created by Augusto Boal in Brazil in the 1970’s. Theatre for the Oppressed, as you might guess from the name, arises from social critiques and movements to overcome repression, with an intellectual legacy dating well back into the 50’s.
To affect society on the larger scale we need to reach into the emerging science, the social experiments in many countries, and the lessons learned many decades into the past. The knowledge and confidence of those with power and privilege can pale in comparison to the universe of individual experiences. In order to take full advantage of the best information when advancing ourselves in this world, we need humility about how right we truly are, curiosity for knowledge that is new, and sensitivity to the lessons from other cultures and other moments in time. Only then can each of us aspire to excellence.
The wall of plexiglass. Photo courtesy of ebt47563.
Exactly how do you change organizational culture? This is a good HBR article from June 2017 about attempts to change corporate culture from the bottom-up. It’s a story about Dr. Reddy’s, a global pharmaceutical company based in India and led by G.V. Prasad. The authors are Bryan Walker from IDEO and Sarah A. Soule from Stanford Business School.
Dr. Reddy’s process of culture change began with significant ground research to find out what their staff, providers, and investors needed when dealing with customers. They brought their goals down to four simple words that brought it all together: good health can’t wait. Instead of selling the slogan through posters and speeches they chose to demonstrate their purpose through actions. The initiative named projects in packaging, sales, and internal data to advance the new vision. There were some immediate impacts. One scientist broke a number of company rules and produced a new product in 15 days, having prioritized new efforts to match the vision.
The comparison to social movements is important, because movements start with an emotion rather than a call to action. Movements start small, “with a group of passionate enthusiasts who deliver modest wins.” Momentum builds through networks, penetrating power structures and leadership.
There are also “safe havens,” places where activists can behave differently from the dominant culture and discuss their goals. In innovative organizations, research labs are often built as separate mico-organizations that cultivate change as prep-work for the larger organization. This story resonates with me, because disruptive workforce analytics will occasionally fall of deaf ears. The analysis needs to be created in a manner which partially ignores pre-existing agendas or presumptions of how things would normally be done. The decision of whether to apply new ideas might belong within a more formal process, but when experimenting with messy new ideas, to be sequestered is ideal.
Beyond the HBR article two additional models are appropriate to discuss the nature of change.
Innovating Technology and Trends Through Social Networks
The first model is the diffusion of innovations as described by Everett Rogers. In this model, there is a small avant-garde of weirdos who just get into stuff that is new and interesting. That crowd of innovators will not have the full opportunity to make money or make it big. But their new findings diffuse through social networks, based on peoples’ network connections and their readiness to consider new ideas.
There are several hold-outs, such as the laggard crowd who resists change until it is impossible to do so. The biggest difficulty is the early-stage challenge of “Crossing the Chasm” where the new idea has won-over a small crowd of early-adopters who are about 13.5% of the population. The challenge is that sometimes there’s something about the new idea that doesn’t mesh with the next crowd, the early majority. Some examples might be that the new technology has a difficult user interface, or the social trend is incompatible with the conventional lifestyle of those in the burbs.
In my opinion, the classic example of this challenge is the hands-free bluetooth headset that you see people wearing when they’re talking on the phone while walking down the street. The technology has been in public for more than fifteen years and our first instinct is still that we want the caller to get professional help. And that’s even when you’re not also angry at them about a misunderstanding.
Using Social Disobedience Tools to Change Workplace Culture From Within
Another compelling cultural change model is the Spectrum of Allies model from George Lakey of Training for Change. Lakey is highly experienced in training social justice activists in civil disobedience. I attended a couple of workshops with Lakey when I was part of the labour movement, and his spectrum model is eye-opening.
The key diagram is a semi-circle, kind of like a half-order of a large pizza with six or eight slices. The idea is that everyone can be categorized according to their level of enthusiasm for, or resistance to, an agenda or new idea. Then you lay these wedges out in order, with the most supportive categories on the left and the most resistant on the right. Your goal is to shift all of society one wedge to the left. That is, the biggest hold-outs still get your attention, you’re just trying to convince them to become only moderately opposed to your goals. Those in the middle, you can tip towards you slightly. Those who are with you from the start, those are your strongest advocates and you can start giving them more work.
What really holds the model together is that you are shifting the entire social culture towards your way of thinking, resulting in culture change. Everyone is a big deal, everyone receives the attention they deserve. It’s very different from that us-against-them stuff that we’re accustomed to seeing during elections. And it is very different from the notion that the main difference in the key players is their place on the org chart.
What this means for workforce analytics, is that you will require several different vehicles to bring meaningful information into human resource decision-making. While there will be those who are hungry for the information, there will be others who need to simply be sold on the notion that it is not a threat. While innovative findings might be compelling amongst an in-crowd, getting the information through cliques and interests will require bridging links and data translation. You can build new ideas in self-imposed isolation, but at some point you step into public and advance it your ideas through the audience.
But before you step out, please put away your Bluetooth headset.
On average, you can get a new job making eye contact. That’s because the new technology just can’t get this right. While you brace yourself for massive technological disruption, new business models are emerging where your hands and your heart will guide you through the next era of technology and employment.
Dustin McKissen of McKissen + Company wrote an intriguing article in July 2017 about non-degreed workers displaced by technology. The article is blunt: My Father-In-Law Won’t Become a Coder, No Matter What Economists Say. It’s a great critique, because it gets into the problem that technological change is supposed to be good for us “on average,” a concept that only makes sense to economists. If one million old jobs are eliminated, and a million-plus-one new jobs are created, an economist would talk in terms of a net gain of one job. Yay! However, the one million people who lost their jobs don’t see this change as positive, and they are perfectly entitled to speak as humans who have a voice, a home, a family, and a vote.
I endorse McKissen’s view that this human resources topic is highly political. What does the fast-changing world mean to those who are displaced? While the father-in-law is currently fine for work, the company is encouraging sales staff to get their customers to place orders online. Will that man have the same job, or any job, ten years from now? You see, if there is political blowback from those who are adversely affected by this net-positive change, the voice coming from the dis-employed may affect the viability of our economic and political system. McKissen calls for a new ideology, a new “ism,” that bypasses the politics of left vs. right.
Customer Engagement is Connected to Employee Engagement
I personally think the new ideology is starting to become evident. The idea is that business performance is hyper-sensitive to the work of engaged employees delivering meaningful experiences to engaged customers. For lack of a better word, let’s call it “double-engagement.”
Technology is just something that ramps-up productivity of those who advance the double-engagement experience. The use of wearable technology, hand-held computer devices, and links to large databases and artificial intelligence simply empower the front-line worker. The workers do what the technology cannot: make eye contact with customers, express empathy, display a sense of service, and show responsibility for getting the goods into the client or customer’s hands. Profits, investments, and public policy are just along for the ride, and people who are big in those areas need to stop pretending they’re the boss. This new model can be found in other articles, such as here and here.
It’s noteworthy that McKissen’s father-in-law works in the sale of food. Whole Foods was recently bought-out by Amazon; what does that mean for the future of food shopping? It is increasingly apparent that the retail sector is at risk of being savaged by online shopping. Sure, we’ll still be buying food a decade from now. But how will the food get from online order to a front-door delivery?
The Workplace Culture of Customer Engagements
In an article from the New York Times, there was an eye-opening exposé of the life of those who deliver food after the online order. It turns out that new technology is only efficient until the requested groceries make it to the last mile. In “the last mile problem,” tactile and emotional challenges emerge in a very human way.
The bananas must not be refrigerated, almost everything else must be kept cool, there is more than one optimal temperature for cooling, the milk must be stored upright, and apples must not be stored in a confined area with lettuce. Each hour of delay in getting the groceries to the customer eliminates one day of shelf life. The traffic is unpredictable, the parking rules are unpredictable, and there is physical effort to getting the containers from car to front door.
And the carton of eggs must be presented and inspected by the customer. Apparently intact eggs have a do-or-die influence on customer satisfaction. So this satisfaction is micro-managed by a devoted delivery person, in a face-to-face conversation. Double engagement.
The wages are modest, but the tips can be good. Why would someone provide a tip to someone delivering groceries from an online order? Because a worker put some enthusiasm and promptness into helping the customer get what they really wanted. How could you not tip this kind of service? As a customer, the cash rightfully belongs in your own hand, or the person who helped you. Why would your money go to anyone else?
Discomfort of Innocence. Photo by Mohammed Alalawi
Why do you hang out with people like you? Because you have to be friends with your friends’ friends. Society does not give you permission to dislike (or not know) your friends-of-friends. It’s called the forbidden triad. There is a complex quantitative puzzle involving triangles with plus and minus signs, all coded and ready for an elaborate statistical analysis. You can peek at the math in this October 2016 overview of the research by Dustin Stoltz, a PhD candidate at University of Notre Dame.
But back to people. The main problem is cognitive dissonance, that feeling you get when you are obliged to maintain two contradictory opinions at the same time. An example may be that you both love and hate a particular family member, politician, or manager in your workplace. Cognitive dissonance makes you uncomfortable, and you aspire to greater comfort. Therefore, you will choose between contradictory opinions and let one prevail over the other. So, you decide that you like that complex person. If you then meet a third-party who dislikes that person, you have to even-out the triangle. You will be motivated to change the third person’s mind, change your own mind, or just stop hanging out with the third party. If everyone does this, friendships and world views will evolve within cliques that are internally consistent, comfortable, and smug. But that’s not so clever.
That is because social networks are held together by people who choose to maintain contradictory opinions. They foster civil dialogue, cultivate plurality, and agree to disagree. It’s not so much that they are smarter, although that may still be the case. It’s that the exploration of the best information and the most diverse opinions guarantees contradiction. You will find attributes that seem contradictory but not mutually exclusive, such as sensitivity and courage. You will find rival facts, such as the prevailing research on global warming and colder winters in your own locale. And there will be facts that change quickly, such the price of oil or a change of government.
Workforce Analytics and the Workplace Culture of Curiosity and Discomfort
If you place comfort ahead of maximum information, then you have to insulate yourself from contradiction. Yet this can be a big mistake in the modern world. How could you possibly choose a stable mindset when the amount of information is exploding, technology is disrupting everything, and ideas and opinions go round the world in a heartbeat. It’s a wild and crazy world we live in. You must choose discomfort, and reject the allure of smug.
In workforce analytics, there is a great divide between colleagues and clients who are curious about new information and those who are not. It often feels like I exclusively support those hungry for the new, who like the challenge, who want to pick up a few tricks. Yet those who are more settled in their views or slower to change need to be brought along for the ride. That is because at the center of the social network people are obliged to commit to, and support, prevailing views. They tend to agree with one another just like you might do with your own friends. Looking outward to the fringes of the network, you might see a wider variety of irregular opinions, trends, and opportunities. The fringe is full of people who are removed from the network in some way, be it marginal legal status, geographic isolation, exclusion, or just looking different. To bring diverse views from the fringe to the center (and vice-versa) obliges us to maintain contradictory opinions.
The prescription that we must become uncomfortable applies equally to social trends, new technology, and disruptive workforce analytics. In your workplace, you may have had one opinion for a very long time. When you are presented with change or new evidence, it is one thing to simply obey orders or comply with the data. But if you really want to be clever, it is far better to hold onto that moment of discomfort for a while to get a sense of what everyone else is going through. Only then can you talk to diverse people who think and live in different worlds. And only then can you fine-tune new evidence to make it presentable to a broader audience.
If we are to disrupt normal ways of doing things through emerging information, we must stand at the bridge between two worlds, be prepared to disrupt ourselves, and get used to discomfort.
Stuart Murray Speaks 