ItsDevelopmental - content + technology + people

A sporting lesson business won't borrow

Kevin Keegan has left his post of manager at Newcastle United Footbal Club because he was not given responsibility for recruitment to the team and therefore felt he could not manage the team properly.

Sounds very reasonable. Managers are there to build teams and get them working effectively. How one is supposed to do that when someone else is calling the shots on who is being brought into the team is beyond me. And it was beyond Keegan.

Business takes a lot from sporting practice but this is one area I think can be left alone.

Recruitment is key to building effective teams and the team manager must be the one to do it.

Gold stars keep employees motivated

Staff at London-based PR agency Siren PR have hit upon a simple idea to motivate and engage employees - a star system.

It works like this: each time a member of the team feels they have achieved something worthy of a gold star they email their manager who then passes it on to the star adminstrator - the MD's PA. She then passes it on to the MD who decides if the achievement gets a star. If it does, the whole team is notified - the aim is to spread good practice and credit for the employee.

The star is aslo put on a chart on the wall.

At the weekly Friday afternoon office drinks (Nice!) the week's gold star winner gets to choose the type of drinks they like. There is a quarterly prize draw for and the winner - with the most - gold stars gets a prize.

Team members that do not hand in their time sheets on time each week get a star removed.

The system works incredibly well and the entire team is focussed on getting gold stars. Apparently, the system has proven to be far more effective than previously used (and more expensive) reward and recognition policies.

I like this system because . . .

• It is a transparent form of reward/recognition

• It is simple

• It is realtively cheap

• It enables the team to share best practice

• It is fun

• It works both as an incentive (to do good things) and as a disincentive (to hand time sheets in late)

Loving Evil HR lady

Maybe this is the way to do a training blog once I am up and running. An HR blog AND with a sense of humour. How refreshing . . .

This should be an example of what HR professionals could do - actually bring HR alive.

Let's face it, there are some very colourful bits to HR. My friend an HR manager always enjoys the 'your fired' conversations followed by the walk off the premises. Maybe there really is an evil side to HR professionals . . .

HR queries are a sign of tough times

Xpert HR, an online tool for HR professionals, publishes a blog - Employment Intelligence - and once a month the blog lists the top queries Xpert HR receives from users. 

August's top 10 demonstrates the tough times employers are having. The list is dominated by questions on terms and conditions and TUPE - the regulations governeing the transfer of a piece of (or whole) business.

Hmmm, things are going to get bad - what a great time to be thinking of a new career.

The psychology of the newsroom

Like this post on East Sleep Publish on how journalists do and don't get on in the changing print/online environment.

There is a reference to some social psychology - that of Muzafer Sherif, who did some work on how individuals in groups relate to one another - which I think is useful as journalists are having to face up to some fundamental changes.

On both an individual and team level colleagues will be feeling less sure of themeselves and this will impact on how people get on. Add in to the mix the fact that journalists are having to adopt new ways of working and one can see how teams could easily start to fall apart.  

From an editorial management perspective, the whole change process needs to be clearly communicated and aligned to the strategy (so there has to be one), step change needs to be mapped out, skills needs assessed, training/coaching provided. AND journalists have to have the right attitude towards chang - so fears need to aired, addressed.

Shaping editorial strategy

Am delighted that our OD director is keen for me to help with training strategy. My line manager is also prepared for me to give time to it. VERY exciting. More on this soon . . .

Tips and tricks for journalists #1 - RSS readers and news alerts

Held the first of my tips and tricks for journalists sessions last week.

The aim of the session was straightforward - for delegates to set up an RSS reader (Google), to start populating it with feeds and to know how to manage feeds. We also looked at how alerts worked and how to set them up.

It is August so numbers were low (only three) but the session worked well. I invited my colleague Rob Moss to help me as he know RSS readers well.

Rob talked the delagtes through setting up a reader and I sat by the delegates and helped them if they got lost. We were in a software training room so Rob used the big screen to demonstrate.

We achieved the aims of the session and feedback for the session was very positive. Indeed, we had an observer from the training dept with us who went home and set up a reader for herself - she is hooked.

A couple of points of note for me:

• Big screens don't always project your laptop screen as it is displayed - so get there early and work out how to get the projection looking good,

• People have pre-conceived come to a training session with pre-conceived ideas and it is great to tease thesee out so they can be addressed. Two examples from the session - 1) one delegate was not heartened to hear she would need to set up a new username and password as she already had lots of different passwords she kept losing. This was a barrier to using software and online services. So, I suggested either keeping a list of passwords on her desktop or keeping the same one for reader type services. And 2) a delegate found the concept of not deleting messages in the reader slightly alien as she liked to delete messages. Sounds minor but it is the type of concern that could be a barrier to using a reader.

• It feels quite different to sit with delegates and pitch in rather than lead the session. But Rob and I worked well and he enjoyed it.

Managing through a divestment

My company is currently going through a divestment process and as a fairly senior manager I am starting to notice the impact on day-to-day business.

As I have previously mentioned, as an organisation we are going through a lot of change. This means looking at what we do and how we do it - especially as we are under commercial pressure.

The problem is that - due to divestment - the business is being very tightly managed in terms of cost and it seems that anything viewed as strategic ie more than a month away is not being acted on with the usual speed.

The upshot is that managers such as myself need to be very mindful of managing expectations. This is particularly difficult when you are trying to drive through change.

Added to this is a very real sense of expectation around the sale - who will buying us? Will we lose our pension? What about redundancies? Etc.

So, I can't promise much to the team and I can't say what the business will look like in a couple of months' time. Try as we may to keep a business as usual feel it is hard to sustain it, especially when you are trying to drive through change.  

Doing fewer things better

A post by Jeff Jarvis confirms my belief that focussing on a few things and doing them really well is the way to help teams grapple with change.

The context here is the changing media. My team is currently trying to do new things - some we do well, some we don't do so well - as we change as a media provider.

With different people doing different things it can be hard to focus the team on who is doing what - and recognition for successes can be patchy. And failure to be recognised can be disengaging.

Unite the team on one project however and it becomes easier to share the experience and success.

Our coverage (I know, this is not how Jeff Jarvis would have it) from the Institute of Travel and Tourism conference in Cyprus involved the team in producing TV, news, email news alerts, text alerts, live blogging, podcasts and a daily print product.

This was the first time we had done such a thing and it worked well in a) showing the team how we can work online and b) demonstrating what a good job we could do (I mean that).

So, as the media changes we need to focus on the things we can do well - there are lots of ways to automate what we do - aggregation etc. It can be disheartening to work on things that get poor traffic and little recognition.

The upshot for editorial people is that they need to become project managers so that they own an initiiative and see it through to agreed goals.

Journalism summer school opens for business

Had the first session of the Travel Weekly summer school today.

It went really well - I led a session that lasted one hour and in it I outlined the way the media is changing and how this is changing the way journalists work.

The session was between midday and 1pm and I did not provide lunch. Not the best time of day but it worked.

I started the session with a task: two post it notes per delegate and on it they had to write a) how the media is changing and b) the core skills of a journalists that haven't really changed over time.

This got energy levels up and the team thinking about the issues I was due to talk about.

I then lectured for the rest of the time - I had two Powerpoint presentations. One was on how the media is changing, the other on how journalists are changing the way they work.

Although I was lecturing we did stop along the way to discuss points and members of the team did ask questions and throw in their points of view.

I felt we achieved a lot in a short space of time and many of the team told me afterwards that they thought it was a good session. I am pleased we took the time to take a step back from what we do and look at how evertyhing is changing.

During the session I said that I wanted us to start talking about the issues raised when we got back to the office - I did not want to spend a long time discussing them in the session as we only had one hour. In any case the working environment is where change is happening and that is where we need to have this dialogue.

The plan worked: when I returned to the office, two colleagues were discussing how to promote their blogs. One even said she wanted to review the way she worked so her blog was central to her workflow. The penny is dropping!

A key point to come out of it for me was that our journalists want to know how to manage their time and how to deliver content, when and why. 

This is a crucial takeaway for me as I will need to demonstrate how to do this and do it well. There is a desire to do things differently - now we the leaders need to make it happen.

My key message was that many of the journalist's core skills have not changed but the way we use them has and is all the time. Therefore we all need to monitor these changes, understand them, use them and have the right attitude - to explore new ways of working and constantly ask: 'What is the best way of doing this?'

I think today went some way to telling the team:

• We are changing the way we work and team members need to take responsibility for understanding this
• That senior managers understand so much change can be overwhelming
• That open dialogue and sharing information amongst the team is how we have to work from now on
• That we are creating a learning environment - one where it is ok to ask questions and try things out.

Hopefully this will go some way to removing some of the fears and anxieties that surround the changing way we work. We shall see.